We have all been there as leaders, struggling to deal with a team member’s disruptive behavior or a group culture that needs to change.
How do we transform the situation into something that will stick and allow for a more successful business?
Dr. Barry Borgerson is a former executive turned transformational coach. Since leaving the helm of multinational corporations, he has made it his mission to discover the root cause of change resistance and has created a model that empowers leaders to make systemic, reliable transformations in behavior habits and team cultures. His insights into the automatic mode of the human mind are crucial to leaders getting the most from their teams and avoiding common leadership mistakes. He joins us for this episode to talk about:
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Common disruptive behaviors and the first step that must happen before change can occur
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How to facilitate change through a proper performance review
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How to close the knowing/doing gap in order to initiate necessary cultural changes
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And much more
Barry is a wealth of knowledge in a very critical but difficult area of leadership. Don’t miss this one!
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Barry Borgerson: Discomfort, in some form is what normally blocks us from taking needed actions.
Voiceover: You’re listening to the Vibrant Leadership podcast with leadership speaker and consultant Nicole Greer.
Nicole Greer: Welcome to the Vibrant Leadership podcast. My name is Nicole Greer, and they call me the Vibrant Coach. And today I am here with a fellow coach, a transformation coach, a culture coach, Dr. Barry Borgerson. He is a former executive who has successfully led multinational businesses. When he learned how difficult it is to transform errant behaviors on his leadership team and make necessary culture changes, he decided to figure out the root cause of these barriers. That’s a good idea. Let’s get to the root.
And he has created a generalized model of the automatic mode of the human mind. Let me say that again, he has created a generalized model of the automatic mode of the human mind. We’re gonna find out more about that. And that that empowers him and others to make systemic reliable transformations to behavior habits and business cultures. Oh, my goodness, we need you to help us so bad.This stuff is happening out there, isn’t it? Barry?
Barry: Yes, it is indeed.
Nicole: Yeah, yeah. Well, my first question for you is it is for everybody. I’m collecting definitions of leadership. So what is your definition of leadership?
Barry: Okay, well, I’m going to give you a different one than you’re used to. I mean, the typical one is managing things. And you lead people, right? That’s a that’s a common one. There’s a couple of other ways people look at if you just allow me a couple of minutes on this topic. One is people talk about management science, and the art of leadership. So why is one considered science and the other art? Because it’s not really science, not really art. But there’s a, there’s a big distinction there. And it goes back to another distinction that business people frequently make, and that’s between hard success factors, and soft success factors, right. So we have these distinctions we make. Now I make the distinction in a slightly different way. And get down to that fundamentals of the mind.
Again, we we operate in two distinct modes. We have a thinking mode, where we process stories, we talk to each other, we have thought streams, we haven’t we acquire knowledge by listening by reading. And then we have an automatic mode, that we don’t control that well. In that you find that there’s behaviors and behaviors, things that we don’t do, that we should do. The generic name is procrastination, but you know, people don’t do things. Then there’s the other side of the automatic behaviors that are and these are part of leadership now too. So we’re getting into the automatic part is disruptive behaviors. People that have behaviors, aggression, intimidation, micromanaging. So there’s, there’s also and then the other part, there’s several parts to the automatic mode.
But the other part of it is a culture. It’s this contextualizing framework that we call worldviews paradigms. In business, we typically call it culture. So my distinction between management and leadership is management are those things, when we’re getting things done, that our thinking abilities can do. And the leadership are those things we do automatically. So we can learn management, from reading books, from listening to lectures. We have to be trained. Some people are natural leaders, they have some of these abilities. But usually not all of them, we have to be trained to be effective leaders, because we have to change transform that automatic part of us that we don’t have easy access to. So sorry, that’s a long answer. But it but it gives my distinction between management and leadership.
Nicole: Okay, I love your long answer. I like and I like a fresh perspective. So that’s fantastic. Okay, well, you said that the automatic mode is where the transforming takes place. Did I get that right? Okay. All right. So how do I transform? I love the word you use my disruptive behaviors, because I might have like a little blind spot, right? Like, I don’t know, I’m even doing this. I just do it, is what I’m hearing, right?
Barry: That’s most common. Most people do have blind spots. In fact, not only do they not notice they do it, if someone tells them they’re doing it, they don’t believe it. They deny it. So it’s, it’s so yeah, so how do we do that? Well, first thing we normally do is we do a multi rater survey. Right? So we do a 360 degree survey. And so you know one of those things that we, in automatic contextualizing. I told you, we talked about it as cultures, we talk about it as worldviews. Well, we also have a self image, that’s that same part of the mind. So we’re certain about our self image, when you do a 360 degree survey, boss, peers, subordinates, maybe some other people. And I’ve done many, many of these people get shocked that their self image as they fill out the same form is so different than other people.
So first thing you do when you’re going to get someone that has overbearing behaviors, is you get them to acknowledge it, which isn’t easy, because they believe they’re different than those around them believe they are. And then there’s a process as we get into those later, how do you then get them to change those behaviors. And that’s a, that’s a process that we use very, very specific. And, you know, I have a theory I call two selfs theory. And the two selfs comes from the thinking mode. So acts like our thinking self in the automatic mode, like our automatic or auto self. And so there’s a set of techniques to transform the auto self. Whether it’s a behavior or a culture element. You know, or an attitude or an implicit bias. We know how to change those.
Nicole: Well, that sounds fantastic. But you know, before we get into the techniques, and more about the auto self, you said there’s overbearing behavior. So that sounded like one real fun bucket of things people do. Are there, are there other groups like overbearing, and this and this.
Barry: There’s two main kinds. People that do things they shouldn’t do. So those would be errors of commission if you like. Micromanaging, intimidating, you know, bullying, aggression, those are things that are on the errors of commission. On the errors of omission, people don’t do things consistently that they need to do. That’s on the other side of it. So they you know, and even you know, so they won’t get an assignment done because it’s uncomfortable for them. They don’t like part of it. It bores them. People won’t speak up in meetings because they’re afraid of embarrassing themselves.
They’re afraid of you know, making a mistake in front of their boss. And leaders have a barrier. So some leaders are overly aggressive. Other ones have this barrier, they don’t do effective performance reviews. And they’ve so the generic name is procrastination and people make up all kinds of excuses why they don’t lose things they need to do, but I see many leaders fail to do effective performance reviews and I’m sure you have.
Nicole: You’re preaching my language right now, Barry because I think there’s there I don’t know what it is. I think it’s really a lack of courage. Yeah, yeah to sit down with your employee and say you know this this is what’s going on with your performance and here’s the things that need to get done and it’s here and I need it to be here and and it’s really a helping conversation or should be a helping conversation. So people are either scared of it because they think they’re being mean or something because they’re asking people to bring their performance up here.
Or as you said, this person might be overbearing or bullying in that conversation you know. I don’t want to be like the boss that gave me a performance review one time and he was so mean to me. There’s a way to do it right. What is the way to do a performance review correctly? I know that’s a huge question, but what does a transformed leader do it in a performance review? How do they frame it and what characteristics?
Barry: Give a robust review. So and focus not just on the problems. You praise all the things the person is doing well. So you go through, you’re doing this well, this well, and this well. You’ve got a few things that we need to bring to a higher level and then you you give to them. And you know if there’s absolutely no room for aggression there you know and you’re helping people. Now the reason people don’t do it, it’s really interesting. The reason I’ll give a lot of people is I don’t want to I can’t stand to make them uncomfortable. You know, work is hard enough. They’re working hard, they’re already uncomfortable. I don’t want to make them more uncomfortable. But the real reason they don’t do it is it makes them uncomfortable to do it. They can’t bring themselves to say it. So discomfort in some form is what normally blocks us from taking needed actions.
Nicole: Yeah, and you know, it’s that old thing that the you know, the magic happens outside the comfort zone, right. And so we’re not gonna have any magical revelations with anybody unless we get a little uncomfortable, right? There’s an there’s an another author out there her name is Lori Beth Jones. I talk about her quite often because a lot of her work has really impacted me. And she talks about you have to move people into the creative tension zone. You know, people have to have the tension between, here’s where it’s at, here’s what it could be. And that tension, you know, like a rubber band eventually brings things together. So I mean, it’s tension on purpose. It’s going to be a little bit of discomfort.
Barry: And you know, there’s a cliche about that. No pain, no gain, right?
Nicole: Right. Exactly.
Barry: Yeah. So one of one of the techniques I use on that is, if people don’t do things they need to do it’s because they’re uncomfortable. So I use the path of what I call the path of least discomfort. I make it more uncomfortable not to take the facts than it is to do it. So you do that not by screaming, not by getting nasty. By saying you get a commitment? Are you going to, for instance, on a performance review, are you going to do it? Yes. Then they come back. Well, this came up and that came up, well, what did you think was gonna come up when you committed to doing it? And you just go through a process to make not doing it uncomfortable, and since it’s discomfort that’s blocking them, if it gets more uncomfortable not to do it, they’ll just go do it. And you do that never need to be aggressive? Don’t ever, you just simply get them to commit and ask them why they’re not meeting their commitments? And a few open questions and it creates discomfort for them.
Nicole: Yeah, so don’t miss what Barry just said. You know, he said, to do an effective performance review, definitely go through the good things that they’re doing, highlight those, and then help them see the higher level that they could perform at, and make the process of improving themselves.
Barry: Yeah, yeah, yeah, make, make it more uncomfortable not to do it than it is to do it.
Nicole: Right. I love that.
Barry: Feelings are always involved in transformational change. You were just saying it in a slightly different way. But that’s right. And you know, you referenced another, another person you work with. It’s it’s, you know, transformation isn’t about knowledge. It’s about getting feelings involved.
Nicole: Absolutely, absolutely. I love that. Okay, so we talked about overbearing behaviors. And then you also said so there’s the errors of commission and omission. On your website, I read your website, you have a lovely website, everybody go to his website, it is when you give, give them the website real quick.
Barry: 2 selfs. That’s the numeral 2 s e l f s.com.
Nicole: Okay. And on there, he has some success stories. And I thought that these were excellent little examples of the work that you do in transforming people’s leadership style and culture change. One, you talked about moderating a leader’s excesses. Moderating the leaders excesses. So will you talk a little bit about excesses that leaders have and how they need to like wake up? Because like, as you say, if you don’t do this 360 feedback and even if you do do it, they they have a blind spot, and they’re in denial that they have excesses. But what are the some of the excesses leaders have that you’ve worked with? And so that we can all see them? Maybe we could turn the mirror inward? See if we’ve got them?
Barry: Right. Well, one of my favorite example I have is a delightful CEO I worked with and, and he was super bright. Everybody agrees he was right, almost all the time. But he bullied people. And you know, so I mean, that’s an excess, isn’t it? Right? You’re, you’re and hge put people down, and he would chew him out and publicly humiliate them. And so his HR person found me and said, you know, can you I got this guy, he’s had two coaches. He’s chewed him up, you know, can you take a crack at him? And I said, that’s what I do, I change behaviors. And so I went in there and worked with him to get him to realize it. Now, it’s in an article I just wrote. It may not be at the website.
An article I just wrote, where what I did with him, which is interesting, I generally change automatic behaviors directly. I make the old behavior become uncomfortable, and the new substitute behavior become comfortable. And you do that over and over again. In his case, I kept trying to ask him, why he was bullying people. Didn’t know why, I made a mistake. And then as I asked him a question quite a few times, I got him to finally articulate what it was that was causing him to do it. And he said, it’s because they deserve it. Wait a minute, they deserve it? Well, I pay them a lot of money and they shouldn’t make mistakes. So then what we’re working on now is an attitude change, which is the contextual side like the culture side. It’s that automatic conceptualization.
And so again, I asked them a lot of open questions. And the question is went along the line, okay, how likely are you to get candid feedback if you’re chewing people out and they’re afraid of you? How likely are you know in what way are they going to get better? Tell me, tell me, in what way are they going to get better if you don’t coach them, but you scream at them? You know, in what way are you going to meet your grand goals and he’s what he’s got these goals, you know, if you keep if people are afraid to give you the kind of feedback you need.
And after just asking a bunch of these questions and watching him squirm, he finally decided that his attitude was wrong. That they don’t deserve it. And that’s counterproductive and it’s relieving his angst, but it’s not helping him lead. It’s counterproductive to leading. And he you know, over a period of time, he changed. In fact, the interesting thing about him, he actually got to the point of calling what he was doing coaching them, and he was. So he was trying to help them get better instead of chewing them out.
Nicole: I love that. So that is definitely transformation when you can get somebody to change their attitude.
Barry: And those things. You know, I typically have long engagements, typically a year, I’ll work with people. Because you can get visible improvements quickly. And I always do that when I get into a new client. But to have them endure after you leave, to have them, make sure they stay there. It takes a repetition, repetition, repetition. And his stayed. I mean, he even, you know, he went on and is very successful did a very, very good job. I typically check in a year or two later to see how people are doing after I’ve stopped.
Sometimes I do a follow up 360 to see how they did. You know just to verify that, that this is what it looked like at first and this is what it looks like later. So yeah, so that’s an example of an excess. I mean, he just really was over the top and just bullying people. He wasn’t even so much aware of it. They usually aren’t. He just thought, you know, they were messing up. And he was holding him accountable he thought.
Nicole: You’re just straightening things out, Barry. You gotta straighten him out. He was in a kink. Yeah. Okay, well, I also like this one, because I can tell you this is alive and well. You know, it’s alive and well, that a lot of leaders fail because they are so worried about being liked.
Barry: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Nicole: So will you talk a little bit about that, because that might have just made a little twinge, in somebody’s heart, like oh my gosh, that’s me. So and they have this need for approval all the time. Okay, so tell me how you work with somebody? What does the person listening right now need to know about your being liked.
Barry: Well this particular one that you saw, I won’t say a name, of course, I never say the names of clients, but but he was on staff, to the chief operating officer of a large corporation. And he had the most pleasing personality, he still does. I still know him. He’s, he has a very, and he got along with everybody. But he could get stuff done because his boss is aggressive. And, and so if people didn’t follow his polite way of doing it, she’d come down and keep hammering, frankly. So he wanted to get into line management. And he couldn’t, because he just couldn’t, he couldn’t confront people. And, you know, he said, well, you know, I can’t get aggressive. And I just thought, you know, I don’t want you to be aggressive. There’s no room for aggression, but you’ve got to be assertive.
And I said, if you’re trying to be liked, you’re not going to move people. And I said, what your goal has to be is to be respected, not to be liked. And if people respect you, even if you’re calling him to task, even if you’re correcting him, even if you’re pushing them harder than they want to be pushed, they’re probably like you. But that can’t be your goal. And he went on to be in a very effective line manager, he’s running quite a big organization now very successfully. So he, you know, he did well, and he did well to get into coaching because he was a smart guy and great personality. But just not willing to get past his own discomfort of wanting everybody to like him to be an effective leader.
Nicole: Yeah, because we all know, the side effects of being a liked leader is you end up doing a lot of the work yourself. And, and a lot of the ugly work, like you said earlier, what you don’t like, yeah.
Barry: Yeah. You do the work other people don’t do because they don’t like it, then you end up doing it. Right.
Nicole: That’s right. And then you find yourself exhausted and having a heart attack. I mean, it’s not a good outcome. Okay. All right. The other one I loved on there is that you talked about the inability to lead effectively. So first of all, my question for you is, what skills or talents or thinking in this case do I need to have to lead effectively? Do you have like a list of things that can help people see that?
Barry: Yeah, yes, yes, I do. There’s there’s several aspects to and again, all of them are on the automatic part of the human activities. One is you need to motivate people. And so you need interpersonal skills. And you know, I’ve seen you some videos of you on your platform speaking and you do that you motivate people. You have good platform skills. You have to have good interpersonal skills to be able to motivate people. And skills, those skills, people, there’s lots of people that train those skills. And if you don’t have them, naturally. You need to be able to develop people.
So you need in part of that giving good, honest performance reviews, giving feedback on a regular basis, encouraging them, correcting them, and, and you have to be able to change behaviors. So you have to be able to, you know, if you’ve got somebody who’s behaving poorly, you have to be able to change their behavior. And a big thing about leaving now it’s getting more and more important, you have to be able to recognize your culture is going to have to change, and you have to change the culture. And that is something that most leaders come up very short on these days.
Nicole: I couldn’t agree more. But keep going on your list. And then what maybe we’ll jump over to culture for a minute, because I’d love to talk about that too.
Barry: Well, those those are the big things. Develop people, coach people, change, you know, be able to help them change their behaviors, do culture changes, and, and, and have motivational skills. Those are the key leadership things and the ones we work on most, you gave a good example someone who doesn’t get things done. Those people normally don’t rise very high. You know, I mean, people have passive personalities, the people that rise up are often aggressive. And that gets them you know, they get selected for that sometimes. They gets selected into management, because they have these aggressive personalities, they go get things done. Well, if you go up the management ranks, pretty soon everybody’s aggressive. And you’re not getting things done. You’re butting heads. Yeah.
So in the higher level, it’s a C suite. In the high level executives, typically we have overbearing behaviors. We have people that are just you know, fighting, attacking, aggressive, intimidating. Duplicity. Duplicity is the hardest things to coach where they lie, because if they lie, if what they’re doing is lying, they’re gonna lie to the coach. And so that doesn’t usually work very well. You might, you might expect this to be the case, I don’t know. The class of people who were the most duplicitous, are salespeople. Yes, they’re kind of used to talking their way around things pretty well. But aggressive, we get aggressive people. I gave you the one example of a CEO but I had a lot of aggressive, some super, so hyper, super aggressive.
I mean, we’re all having face to face with them, and the guy standing up screaming at me. Screaming, and I’m saying, you know, if you’re a transformation coach, you have to train yourself to stay calm during aggression. And I’m sitting there, calmly saying do you realize, you’re standing up screaming at me, and you know, he didn’t, he just was doing it. And then he sat back down again. And then 20 minutes later of screaming at me again. I calmly say, you realize, you’re screaming at me again. So if you, this is the sort of Barry’s maxim of coaching, if you go to coach somebody, because they’re overly aggressive. And a lot of the clients that companies put in have that characteristic, they’re gonna get aggressive with you. Because you make them uncomfortable.
When you make them uncomfortable, they slash out at you. So talk about something I don’t mention much. What are the characteristics of a good transformation coach, besides all the skills you need, and the techniques. You need to train yourself to get out of the fight or flight, which is what we normally do. One, you want to hang up on them, or walk out if you’re in the room with them or two scream back. You can’t do that, if you’re a coach. You can learn to deal with it calmly. And I certainly have, but you still feel it.
Nicole: 100% Yeah, I mean, if a client is coaching with me, and they get aggressive, you know, I realized that they that they are in fight or flight mode, right? He’s fighting, screaming at you know, and so there’s zero emotional intelligence going on right there. And the coach has to be ultimately emotional intelligence. And so if, if we think about leaders, and you know, they’re having their performance reviews, or they’re trying to do whatever, fix something in the culture, ultimately, we cannot be like an animal. Fight or flight.
We’ve got to be the adult in the room, the mature person in the room that can tame this steady energy, right. And like you said, everything is emotions right. Absolutely. Fantastic. All right. So let me just repeat what you said. Because I think people like to hear it again, make sure they got it. So the inability to lead means that you probably not motivating people, probably not developing people, not coaching them, not correcting behaviors, and not recognizing that there needs to be a culture change.
Barry: Right and knowing how to do it, right.
Nicole: Okay, so let’s go down the culture, the culture path for a moment. So let’s start with this, Barry. What is your definition of a culture?
Barry: Okay? A culture is a shared belief in the mission, the strategy, the values of a company. And this in this for, in the business universe, there’s external cultures do. So it’s a shared a shared belief, a shared certainty, if you like, and it exists not in thoughts, not just in thoughts, and sometimes not even in thoughts. It exists in the automatic part of the mind, that conceptualizing part of the mind. So it appears to people, it’s what I call certainty illusion, it’s a certainty, it’s a certainty. To them, a culture element is a certainty. And that certainty, and the way these contextualized frameworks get set up in cultures, attitudes, paradigms, if you like worldviews, it’s repetition. Repetition, and feelings. If you repeat something enough times with feelings, it just becomes part of a reality. Not part of a, not part of something you think, something that you totally believe is true. And so in, you see it everywhere. In our particular context here, in business, what happens, you get a model, and it works, that feels good. You try it again. It works, it feels good.
Pretty soon it becomes a reality. That isn’t a way of doing things, it is the way of doing things. It’s we’re certain of it. And that works fine. For a while. And then in today’s world with the business environment changing very, very rapidly, little by little by little, the environment changes to where you need a new business model a new strategy. But no, why do I need that? I’m certain I’m right. I mean, it’s been working for a long time. I know I’m right. And that’s why companies fail. So how do you recognize when your certainty, your belief is no longer aligned with either facts in the world, or in our case with your success needs? That’s very hard to do.
Nicole: So let’s say I recognize that I that I need to change the culture because what I think one of the things is was like, Well, how do you recognize the culture needs to change? Well, I would think like, you’re sad, you’re mad, you know, that the P&L is not singing, like it used to. Whatever it is, if there’s some kind of there’s there should be lots of triggers that tell you maybe a culture shift, you know, you have a lot of turnover, you can’t hire good talent, you know, whatever. Whatever the obstacle is you’re facing, that’s probably pointing directly at a part of your culture that needs attention and intention, right? Okay. So let’s say, well, Barry, let me share this with you.
For those of you listening, go out and Google, I can’t remember the name of the article, but it was a Google $30,000 or stay at home. $30,000 or stay at home. So Barry, there’s this research firm that did a survey and said, if you were given 30,000 extra dollars in your annual salary, but you have to come back to work, you have to get up, get in your car, drive to work, work all day, go home in your car, and repeat we’ll give you 30,000 extra dollars. Otherwise, you keep the same salary, and you just stay home. And Barry, the vast majority of people said, I just want to stay home.
And so I was like what? I want $30,000. Now, I mean, that just might be difference in personalities or priorities or whatever. But that is that is like the trend out there. There was an NPR article as well about it, they called it the great resignation, that people are just quitting, and they’re like, I’m not gonna do this anymore. So that if that if that’s affecting your company, then you need a culture change. So how would Barry help a leader figure out how to navigate that stuff, I mean that kind of stuff? This is real. This is happening.
Barry: Yeah, that’s real. So here’s how, let me say it in general terms, and we can get specific. In general terms, people in the culture, it’s just, it’s a belief, and it’s hard to challenge it. It’s just people don’t understand why you challenge it. So there’s two levels to trying to change your culture. The first one is to get them to understand that their belief about their business, some aspect of their business is no longer correct. It’s no longer serving their success needs. And that’s hard to do because people have no interest in challenging their own beliefs. And so there’s some techniques for that. Then the next next aspect is, once you say, okay, I got it, I want to change, changing is uncomfortable.
So you start to say, okay, I’m going to change it, then you start to change it and you say, well, maybe not. Because changing it because it’s it’s buried in that automatic part of the mind. Whether we’re changing behaviors or cultures, it’s an uncomfortable process. That’s why it takes a lot, a lot of repetitions. So I’ll give you a give you a mantra, people can use to start checking on their cultures. And that’s believe, but verify, okay? And that’s, it’s okay to believe your culture is right. But you’ve got to verify periodically. Now that’s just for people who are old enough to know that sort of a take off on Ronald Reagan’s trust but verify that he used with the Russians when he was president.
But and so it says, it’s okay to bully. And many times, oftentimes your beliefs are quite right. But you need to verify and you don’t verify it by asserting it, you verify it by looking at facts. So back to what you were saying, are you losing sales? Are you are you not able to hire people? Are people leaving or people going home and staying home? So you’ve got to start looking at facts. Like I just did it with somebody, I’m, I’m coaching right now. I gave him an assignment, go home and tick, some belief you have any belief at all, and then challenge it. Learn to challenge it? And he did and what do you know, he came back and said, it’s very painful, but I think I have a belief that was wrong. It wasn’t even part of business. It was something else. But but it was something you know, that was something like a conspiracy theory. He kind of bought into it. He’s oh, that’s that’s not. That’s not right, is it?
So the seminal work on culture work, worldviews. The word paradigm came from a guy named Thomas Kuhn 60 years ago, who wrote the structure of scientific revolutions. And he wrote it in terms of how you get a new, fundamentally new science worldview paradigm in this case, okay. And he gave us the clue that he just did it on science. My theory, as I call them auto context is automatic conceptual frameworks. He focused just on science, and he never tried to put it into the mind. But he had a brilliant idea. He said, the key to needing meaning is the accumulation of anomalies. Okay, in other words, it’s the accumulation of non fitting facts. So what you do is, you’re in a business, you know, one of my favorite examples is Blockbuster, you know. But you know, you’re making lots of money, you got the storefronts. You’re doing well, and all sudden, Netflix comes along with a streaming service.
So, okay, we know we’re right. You know, we’ve, it’s been working okay, but yeah, okay, how much business are you losing now, you know. When you start looking at the facts, you know, well, the technology is going to go away. No, it’s not, it’s gonna get cheaper. And so you get people to start checking for anomalies, and the accumulation of anomalies, and you look for non fitting factors, your, with your belief, and it’s hard to do, but you can train people to do it. And, and you can get them into a process of doing it. And when they look for anomalies in their cultures, things that are failing, things that aren’t working, you know. Sales I used to get in, they’re not getting, you know. People taking business away from them, they used to win. And you start accumulating that.
And then you got to say, okay, what is fundamental in our belief system here, that’s causing us not to be able to change it, you know, I call it the innovation deathtrap. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a it’s a deathtrap, because that’s, and that’s why mature companies fail. They’re just so certain they’re right, and startups come and replace them. And, you know, they could, they could change. They often have the innovation internally. They often know, exactly, they have the capability but they just see, especially senior managers don’t want to change. And they have the power, right?
Nicole: Right. And you know, that like what you’re saying, too, is I’m also thinking, you know, the startup comes and eats your lunch, but you also had very deep pockets for a while. If you had gotten on with it sooner, if you had hold on, let me see, believed but verify. Right, you had done at earlier on. You could use the deep pockets, you still had to get the innovation, you needed to eat their lunch.
Barry: Exactly right. Nicole, that’s exactly it. They’ve got the money to fame to fund the change. And instead of hanging on to that business, use it to fund the fund the changes. You’ve got a cash flow, they wait till the cash flow runs out, then they try to do it and there’s no way to fund it. Exactly.
Nicole: Let me make sure I got this right. So we have to recognize that the culture needs to change and so probably something is making you. This is my very fancy language, Barry, making you sad or mad. You know, I don’t like my sales, I’m mad that this is happening, whatever. You look at that a little closer, you can still believe you’re okay, but verify with the facts. And then you said something I don’t have an interest in changing my beliefs. I thought that was really really good. Yeah, he said most leaders don’t have an interest in changing their beliefs. Alright, so I just think I just wrote that down. I think that’s because I think that is absolutely true.
Because you know what they do sometimes, Barry, is they’ll bring in a consultant like you or I or bring in a coach like you and I, and they know they need help. And then we tell them, this needs to change. And then they don’t want to, they’re like, I don’t believe you’re right. Let me find another consultant that confirms I’m correct. What am I doing there, right? So I think that was a great line. And then so here’s the mantra, I’m going to repeat it again, everybody. Believe but verify. Everybody get a sticky note out right now. Make a sticky note, stick it on your monitor, and have that be your mantra. Okay, so people believe but verify. And then they try to find accumulate non fitting facts. I thought that was fantastic, too.
Barry: Yeah, yeah. And you’re borrowing from Kuhns work a long time ago. Anomalies, the accumulation of anomalies. Anomalies just being a word for non fitting facts. Right? So sometimes it’s not, yeah, well, it’s facts. Sometimes we’re not trying to see it doesn’t align with real facts of the world. And we have that problem a lot now. But does it align with my success needs. There is, it may not be a fact that someone is eating my lunch, but but, you know, I mean, it’s gonna happen, but it’s not my success needs.
My success needs are I’ve got to change my culture. And people don’t, you know, again, it’s a certainty. I model, again, it’s a certainty illusion. We all have certainty illusions. We have this illusion, something is absolutely right. And that’s a mental construct. And it does it sometimes it aligns with the world outside of our minds. Oftentimes it doesn’t. And in this world of rapid, rapid change, most of those certainties become non functional after a while.
Nicole: Alright, so a certainty illusion, which is a construct in my mind, I’m certain it’s true. But yeah, and I, Nicole would call that a blind spot. Can’t see it, right? Well, you keep repeating this little phrase, but this doesn’t align with my success needs. I bet you, I bet you leaders don’t know they have success needs. You know, how do I determine my success needs? I mean, that’s a very interesting little phrase you’re using. My success needs?
Barry: Yeah. Well, you in a public company, success needs are to keep making profits and growing quarter to quarter, but are they going to continue to be successful successful. In fact, that’s another key thing we can talk about. The whole idea of continuous success, I think is a huge mistake. In this today, today’s in our digital world, you know, rapid change, you know, as a fourth industrial revolution just, you know, crashes over us, we need to think in terms and get executives, leaders to think in terms of a series of repeated successes, where you have to change your culture, to revitalize your company to the new realities of the changing environment you live in, you work in.
So it’s technology, but you know, recently has come up because of the pandemic, it’s going to come up for a lot of companies because of climate change. Global competition is rising. So you get this business environment is changing. And the idea that you’ve got a formula and your belief system that my culture is right, that will continue to be successful. Well, look at all the companies that fail, there’s pretty good, pretty good evidence that’s not happening. But you need to think in terms of a series of repeated successes, rather than continuous success. There is no formula for continuous success.
Nicole: All right, well, what’s the formula for repeated success?
Barry: Okay, and that’s recognizing you have to periodically change your culture and there’s techniques. Well, probably don’t want to get into that. But again, I, I help companies do that, you know. You get a retreat, and you go in there and you figure out ways to tease out the belief system, the cultural elements, and then you get a way to challenge them, and you work on it. And you need to do that, probably annually. Every company needs to have an annual culture reconstruction retreat. Where, you know, we have these strategy retreats, and you go out there, the think he saw stuff, you know, the stuff that we can think about and articulate, everybody knows how to do that. It’s those cultural items that are difficult, and you’ve got to challenge it.
So you got to challenge your beliefs in there. And, you know, my goal in coaching is to work myself out of it out of an engagement. So I don’t just go in and do that for them. I go in and do that for him once or twice, but teach them to do it. So they can do it themselves. Because they have to do that ongoing, you have to have, you have to have in your culture, one of the fundamentals of your culture has to become, you need to keep changing your culture. And most companies don’t have that. Most companies de facto have a culture. We’re winning, and we’re gonna keep winning this way.
Nicole: Yeah. So I love that. So this is what Barry just said. So make sure you heard this, is that he said, one of the fundamentals, is that you keep changing your culture.
Barry: Yes, yes.
Nicole: Okay.
Barry: That is a reality, that is a reality in our current times, and it’s just gonna get worse.
Nicole: Okay. Alright. But you can get better at it, you just call Barry, and he”ll come help you. And you’ll go to a retreat, where you will challenge your belief systems and you and what he called it was an annual culture reconstruction. Like that’s now part of your strategic planning, right?
Barry: Yeah, yeah. Right. And you have to assume you’re going to reconstruct part of your culture. Now, now, if you go away, and you challenge all of your assumptions in in that one period, nothing changed, you don’t have to change change it. But that’s not going to be the case. There’s normally be something you want to change. But if you do it annually, I guarantee you, if you’re doing it every year, very often you’re going to be identifying, and then you have processes to make sure it works. Because even when you identify the culture change, you know, there’s, I’m sure you know that for working with companies, there’s resistance all over a company, because it’s in the culture. It’s a shared belief. We don’t need to change this.
Nicole: Right, right. Absolutely. Okay, so one last question about culture, because you keep repeating the word change. You need to change, you need to change, you need change. So there’s a ton of change theories change processes out there. So do you have like a change process or a change theory that you use with companies? I mean, I’ve heard challenge your belief systems, probably one part of it, but are there other things that you do that help people actually change culture? What would you give advice on that about?
Barry: Yeah, well, again, again, I’ll go, I’ll go back to the instilling not not just as a thought now, but as instilling as a belief, you know, that you, you have to keep challenging your beliefs or belief, believe but verify. And then what you do is, once you once you get people together, and you identify the culture changes, then you have to put a process in place. You know, first of all, you need a strong leader to take ownership. And then as you get the strong leader, to take ownership, you have to work with them on some processes for how you get each individual to challenge their own assumptions.
And we don’t do enough of that in business. And we, you know, there’s an interesting book by Klaus Schwab, who’s the perennial founder of the World Economic Forum, and he wrote a book, The Fourth Industrial Eevolution, and in there, he talks about all the technologies. But he talks about fundamental problems leaders have and you know, for his perch that’s off the World Economic Forum, he’s got good insights. And he talks about, you know, leaders can’t, they can’t make the kinds of changes they need to make, they’ve got social models. They’ve got these things in there that are keeping them from changing, and they need to learn to do it.
Well, that’s the thinking part of it, you know, we have this massive knowing doing gap. So people can look at that and know they have to do it, but doing it. So how do you get companies to fundamentally embrace change, culture change, behavior changes too. But behavior changes. typically, in leadership, you’ll do that once at it will last. Culture changes, that doesn’t work. You’ve got to keep doing it, because the disruptions in the environment are accelerating. And if we don’t make that transfer, the company’s the leaders that don’t make that change, are going to lose.
So one of the things that I focus on is creating transformational leaders and transformational businesses. Now the difference between those two, one is you get individuals to know how to do transformations. Behavior, but culture changes. The other one is you get a, you get it in the culture, that you have to transform your culture so that it survives leadership changes. Change becomes part of culture change becomes part of the culture and it survives, leadership changes.
Nicole: I love that. Okay. So what he just said was that culture change becomes part of the culture.
Barry: Yes.
Nicole: That’s where the rubber meets the road, right, Barry?
Barry: That’s right. And that’s not there for most companies now and that has to happen in today’s environment.
Nicole: Right, it’s like steady as she goes, instead of stop, challenge, what do we believe? We believe the right way.
Barry: The old saw, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Well, it’s gonna be broken very, very often now and you better start learning to fix it.
Nicole: That’s right. That’s right. And I also loved what you said about there is a ginormous I don’t think you said ginormous, but ginormous gap between knowing and doing. I couldn’t agree with that more. And you know, what I think is missing. Dare I say this, between knowing and doing? Is this character trait of willingness?
Barry: Yes. Yes. A slogan in so many videos and I agree with that. Yes. And courage. You can talk about courage too, that’s right.
Nicole: That’s right. I mean, I know this needs to be done, but I don’t have the willingness to do it. And you can change the word willingness for discipline, or you can change the word to, like, locus of control. You know, use the psychology kind of term or something. They’re like, I, I am not doing it. So really, the buck stops with the leader every time and I love what you said, you’ve got to be a trans, transformational leader to have a transformation culture.
Barry: Yeah, the future belongs to transformational leaders. Those are the ones that are going to outperform their peers, they’re going to be the ones that have a competitive advantage over other ones. And the transformational leaders are going to be the ones that succeed through a series of repeated successes, not through continuous success. Love through any formula that provides continuous success.
Nicole: I love it. Oh, that’s a really great place to stop. I have one more question. Okay, here’s my last question. So there’s some guy or gal listening to this podcast right now, Barry going, I gotta figure this out. I got to be that transformational leader. So give us one piece of advice. I like to call it it’s the N in my coaching methodology, next right step. Like this seems really big, Barry, having a yearly meeting and hiring coaches and all this stuff. It seems really big. Give me one next right step for that special listener who just wants to start. What do I do to start?
Barry: I’ll give I’ll give it back to you the one I gave you before. Learn to believe but verify. If you can do that, you’re gonna have a leg up on other people because most people can’t do that. And again, that’s the annoying part I’m saying and they’ll say yes, I’ll do that. Learning to do it is going to take a lot of practice because it’s not easy. But if you start getting that in your mind, that’s the secret sauce for the success in the future for leaders and for a lot of other people. If you start practicing that, go find something that you believe that’s not you know, super crucial to you. Something you think you believe.
Find two or three of them and then go look for anomalies. Try to verify it. Does it work? Let you’re thinking self, your thinking abilities actually analyze it and then you’ll get some discomfort if you’re finding anomalies won’t you? You’ll start saying oh, I know it’s true, I believe it but all these facts are coming in. And then you go through that and you find out what the process is like if you practice that way to believe but verify. And then if you can’t verify you found too many anomalies now you’ve got to start working on changing your belief. In our case, we’re talking about cultures. Belief in your culture.
Nicole: That’s fantastic. Gosh, Barry, it has been fantastic to be with you. Thank you so much again for bringing your time and your energy to the Vibrant Leadership podcast. Here’s how you can get a hold of Barry everybody. He can be found at www.2selfs se l f s.com. And Barry, will you let them know where they can find you on social media?
Barry: Yeah, the one find me on LinkedIn. And it’s very, very easy. Just put in Barry Borgerson and I’m the only one on LinkedIn.
Nicole: Okay, and so we spell Borgerson and let me just spell it for you. b o r g e r s o n. Thank you so much, Barry. It’s been a delight. We I’ve got, look, I’ve got three pages of notes. I hope you at home, have three pages of notes, and we talk to you really soon. Thanks Barry so much.
Barry: Thank you so much, Nicole, for helping me out and for all the great questions. I really appreciate it.
Voiceover: Ready to up your leadership game? Bring Nicole Greer to speak to your leadership team, conference or organization to help them with her unique SHINE method to increase clarity, accountability, energy and results. Email speaking@vibrantculture.com and be sure to check out Nicole’s TEDx talk at vibrantculture.com/TEDTalk.
