Top #leaders use this framework to be more #productive | SHARP Framework with Angus Ridgway

Multitasking is zero tasking. You're flipping between tasks and the more of these plates that you're spinning in the air, the higher the percentage of time that's spent in flipping time rather than spinning time. And so what we need to do is, from a productivity point of view, is get back to proper monotask.

What separates people who flourish from those who flounder despite having the same job, the same degrees and the same resume? Finding the answer to that question and helping others flourish is what led Angus Ridgeway to partner with Tal Bin chahar after a 20 plus career at McKinsey to start potential Life at Potential Life. Angus, Tal and their team has been helping organizations for over 15 years activate the fullest potential of their leaders using the Sharp framework, a powerful system backed by neuroscience and positive psychology. In this episode, Angus shares what why busyness is a trap and how to become time rich instead. How great leaders manage energy, not time, by mastering micro mezzo and macro recoveries. Why positive authenticity is the key to high trust teams and why most leaders get it wrong. Angus believes flourishing isn't reserved for a few. It's a choice, a practice and a competitive advantage. Stick around to hear the one elevator story that explains the power of reframing one of the key interventions in Sharp and how it might change how you lead under pressure. Let's dive in. So lovely to see you, dear Angus, thank you for joining us on Happiness Squad and sharing just your wisdom from your years of doing this unbelievable work around flourishing.

Delighted to be here. If I could help in any way, I'm always up for that. So I'm really looking forward to, to today's session.

You know, I want to start Angus first actually with a little bit of an origin story. Right. You spent over two decades like me, I was at McKinsey for two years, you know, 20 years. You were close to 20 years at McKinsey. You led leadership development for thousands of partners. What inspired you to leave and co found potential life? Like what was the driving force behind that?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I've spent some time thinking about, you know, what were the triggers. And I actually think it started on day one at McKinsey. So it wasn't so much a leaving after 20 years, but the inspiration started right on day one. And I had this sort of experience in my very early years in the firm. So like everybody, I was in my mid-20s and I was looking around at my fellow colleagues and I immediately saw a rather strange phenomenon which was some people seem to be on fire. Now, I'm not a psychologist, so I get to use words like on fire and by on fire. They looked like they knew where they were going, they seemed to be dripping with energy and had good relationships with everybody. And yet others were struggling to keep their head above the water. And that was very visible.

Yeah. Yep.

And you can say, well, doesn't that exist everywhere? And the answer is yes. But there's something very specific about our environments at McKinsey. There are other environments like this too. And that what's specific is it's very normative in the sense that you have a large organization comprised of 25, 26 year olds that came from the very same small selection of top schools and the best grades from those top schools. And they're doing the same job, the same role wherever you are in the world with the same pace of progression.

Yes.

So it's like an incredible laboratory of sameness, you know, despite maybe some claims to the contrary, I think for sure. So in a world of utter sameness, you had this separation. Very, very. And so I found this to be incredible. Now, initially I was interested in this for purely selfish reasons. I thought, well, maybe if I know what some of these folks are doing, totally, maybe I will be more successful. But it started out as a curiosity that then became a hobby and a passion. And that was the sort of the real genesis of all of this. And then what happened was I met with my co founder who, unlike me, is a scientist, a psychologist, Dr. Tal Ben Shah. And he was able to put the proper words and proper structure around all of these observations. And is when we got together, we thought, well, there's things happening in the world, maybe we can do something. So that was the. And I can obviously talk a bit more about that, but that was the.

Genesis story, you know, I love that. And it's such. It so resonates with my own experience. Right. At the firm. Absolutely. There are these, you know, in fact, I would even say I think there are. I found these three camps. Right. Not two. I think there were these camp. There were this clearly people who were flourishing. I mean, as you said, they were on fire. They always had energy, they had multiple things that they had active. They were going on and they just seemed to kind of surf the waves. Right. And then there were groups, I would say about 20, 30% who, you know, they were drowning in a swimming pool. Like, forget about big waves. I mean, this, that. Right. I mean, they were just struggling with it. And then there was this middle. And I think that was actually And I think this is true for so many consulting firms, investment banks, private equity, venture capital. You know, this middle 60% Angus that I also found that was just busy. Right. How are you? I'm busy.

Yeah. What a killer response. Yeah. So many times I heard people say, I'm busy. How are you doing? I'm busy.

Right. I'm busy, busy. Right. I'm always running busy. Like, just like, you know, constantly moving. But, you know, if you ask them, are you alive? People be like, what does that mean? Right. And the thing so that I think, and I find that is such a massive loss in organizations like ours that we've been at.

Yeah. And I think this phenomenon of generalized busyness is very dangerous because when you actually look at the kind of things you need to do to be successful in professional services, you have to do things today that will lead to success in the future. Of course. But those things are never urgent, despite being important. So if you're busy, you'll never do them. You know, think of that networking lunch. All those many networking lunches you have with clients, former clients, of course you don't have to do it. There's no immediate payoff. But those people who find the time to do those types of things in five years time have a whole bunch of people calling back because you've been building out your network.

That's right.

And when you're suffering from generalized busyness at the margin, you'll never find the time to do this. So I really like this idea of the time rich as opposed to time poor professional. And it's got nothing to do with the sort of how overloaded you are. Time richness is some kind of internal compass. We can generate our own time richness. It's a way, a way of going about your days. And when you're time rich, then you will find the time to do those things that are important but also not urgent because you've got space for that.

Yep. I love that notion of time rich. So all of this work, you know, translated at the core of a lot. I read your book, I think the Joy of Leadership that you and Tal co authored. I love Tal's work. And you created a framework called Sharp.

Yeah.

Talk to us a little bit about Sharp and all of the five elements that comprise Sharp.

Yeah, Very happy to. And I think perhaps even before talking about Sharp, maybe we need to talk about why Sharp. Why something like Sharp. And this is back in 2011, so, you know, already 13, 14 years ago. And we had this very strong belief talent, myself at that Time it was a little bit perhaps ahead of the wave that the world of work is going to shift and become something else.

Which year Was this, Angus?

2011.

This was definitely ahead of itself, my dear friend. Yeah, yeah.

I mean today we don't debate it anymore, but back then it was a little bit weird. And we had this framework about the tightly coupled or the loosely coupled organization. You may remember Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, when they got divorced, they talked about this conscious uncoupling. And there's a way of talking about this because for many decades organizations were tightly coupled structures. And by tightly coupled that meant we took the time to codify what the structure is supposed to do so we can provide clarity to people and stability over time so people can just basically get on with their job. And that was considered to be a worthwhile venture so that we can offer this stability to our employees. And that was the essence of organization. And then we sensed that with technology, with globalization, the accelerating pace of change, we were not going to have enough time to define a tightly coupled organization. So we're going to have to learn to live consciously with an uncoupled organization or a more loose organization. And this has many implications. One implication is that once the genie is out of the bottle and we're in the loosely coupled world world, there's no going back.

Yes.

And many organizations today are heading down the wrong path because they're trying to tightly couple an organization. But we, it's not the we're now living in a loosely coupled world. There's no going back. So instead of trying to force tightness on an organization, what it need to be celebrate looseness. And for the human being, it has a fundamental implication. And what it means for the human being is that we as people in the organization need to decide for ourselves what we do with this space that's been given to us. Because in a loosely coupled world, we have space we can hide if we want to, we can just do the minimum, just do the job. And because it's loosely coupled, nobody's really going to notice that much. Or we can make a discretionary choice to put much more in, to find our sense of worth, our sense of purpose, to use our strengths, to give lots more time and energy. And our belief, Tal and myself, was that with this transition to the loosely coupled world, it would become a differentiator for organizations. If you have an organization full of on fire people, because they are choose, those on fire people are choosing to occupy with their own discretionary time, energy, the Space. And so we said, well, we better start to define what it means to be on fire as we transition towards this loosely coupled world. And really that was the why of the sharp framework, which I obviously can now talk about. But I think it's important just to re anchor that because even today sometimes when I'm meeting with clients, I just flash up this very simple chart with tightly coupled and loosely coupled. And sometimes I think it's, it's almost embarrassing to talk about it today. I mean, everybody surely knows this, right? And then I realized we spend an hour talking about it with the client because actually it's not that obvious to everybody.

Well, it resonates a lot with me and it's so aligned with kind of, you know, where we are going with this. You know, I just use slightly different language, but I love loosely coupled and tightly coupled. When you started talking about it, Angus and Tal, I think it was a little bit like, well, we're moving towards loosely coupled versus tightly. And yeah know, leaders might say, well, maybe I don't want to move into loosely coupled. Right. Like, like you are seeing it with the, with the COVID now with back to office. Right? No, I don't want to be loosely. I want you in the office because I don't trust if you are at home that you're working. Right. But what do you do when people are at office? Not present. They're just present, but they're not working. How do you solve for that? I think that's the, the core of what you're talking about. Loose and tight couple has nothing to do with where you are. That's right, located and where you're working. And what I think as I reflect on that is, you know, I use this talk crap all the time. I actually feel we don't actually have a choice as leaders to accelerate the transition to loosely coupled because the, the volatility, the uncertainty, the complexity in the world is exponentially rising. And unless we fundamentally figure out a way to shift leadership, make every person in the organization care as much, be on tune with what's happening, to be willing to make changes, we are going to be too slow. And you know, the only thing that happens to slow organizations is they die either a fast or a slow death. But death is what comes.

Yes, I agree and I think this is maybe surprisingly for the two of us, but I believe this is a very real conversation to be had because the, the CEO response of when confronted with this situation, I'm going to enact the control response is still very real. Yes, and yet the control response is a false response. It's not a response. There's no path there. And so we have to help people work through and go beyond the control response and move towards something new and better, which is, let's celebrate looseness. And then it takes you down the path, okay, how do we then help our people? And then you're, then you're in business. But in order to do that properly, you have to overcome and abandon the control response. And I think that's not yet everybody's.

Really doing that and it is incredibly hard. Right, Angus? I'm reflecting a little bit on all of my learnings around adult development theory for from Harvard and Keegan's work. And Leahy was right. This notion that only 20% of the people are at a stage of development to be self authored, to be more creative versus reactive. And the reactive structures are control, comply, protect. And so fundamentally, it's also a call that you've been making now for almost 14 years, is for leaders to actually vertically develop, to learn what is keeping you stuck in control and consciously choose to shift away from that into, you know, internally that then now allows you to get comfortable with loose coupling. Because I don't think it's a choice. I don't think it's a real choice. I think we can live in this tightly coupled, controlled, feeling the stress of the world on our shoulders, or we can flourish, you know, move in the world with ease and help our people become the best version of themselves.

Absolutely right. Yeah. And maybe we'll do this podcast again in 5 years or 10 years time and we will celebrate the fact that the world has moved to a new place and we don't need to talk about relinquishing the control response. But as of today, we're still very.

We still are very much in it. We're very much in it.

Yeah.

So let's talk about sharp, because I think that's a very practical way and I love it, you know, a very practical way for us to shift people and make them come alive on fire through really practical things that they can start to integrate into how they work.

Yeah. So let's talk. So sharp is. So Tal and I, we spent a year at the very beginning of our collaboration as humble integrators of a body of research that goes back 25 years at least into what does it mean to flourish. And there are many different sources of research in this field and we wanted to create something that was obviously represents the evidence and the science, but most importantly is actionable. And easy to touch and use so that anybody can look at this thing. Say that makes sense to me. I get it. So sharp. S, H, A, R, P. Five letters. Five domains that represent most of the variants of what you see when you see flourishing people. And so we can just talk about them and maybe I'll try together we can talk about them in a way that talks about how should we be thinking about this? Because it's not that some of these ideas people haven't seen before, but it's rather we've a lot of us are still falling into traps relating to these.

I love that. And maybe we can take each element, go into that one step at a time. So at the end of our conversation people have like, oh yeah, I get it and I love it. Let's make it actionable for them. Here's this thing you can do right after to make it real for you.

Yeah. So let's start with strengths. Most people have heard that it's, it's a good idea to play to our strengths. We may have been given a book or even done a training session on this well intentioned people trying to help us. That's very good. But there's a problem. There's a problem. Very few people are really using their strengths. And there's a reason for this. And that reason is conditioning. We've been conditioned, starting, all of us starting a very young age, usually starting at school, when it comes to grades or at work, when we get those feedback conversations, we've been conditioned to implicitly believe that the way to progress in life is to fix our weaknesses. Now here's the thing. It is a good idea to fix your weaknesses. So we shouldn't stop doing that. But what's happened is while we're looking at all this weakness stuff, it's as though our strengths antennae never really grew. If I ask an audience of maybe a hundred people to shout out, tell me what your top three development needs, your weaknesses are. People know what they are. They'll shout out stuff and maybe even be able to tell you they've got a development plan and so on. But you should then take the same audience and say, tell me each of you what your top three character strengths are and how you're living your life with those strengths front and center. What do you get? You get deathly silence.

Yep.

People aren't even the start of this journey. So that's the sort of challenge. It's not a cognitive awareness thing. It's actually starting the journey by overcoming this realization that it's it's not about fixing your weaknesses. The prize, however, is huge because when we're playing to our strengths, we feel closer to this kind of what I'm supposed to be doing, better version of myself. This is like, this is the, the, the version of me that I, I'm the best version of me. We've become more self confident and when we're more self confident, we become more creative, looking around corners, seeing things. And so there's a real special place to go there for us as individuals when we're playing to our strengths. Not even to mention what it means in terms of teamwork. And I often say to people that when it comes to team, if you have a cast of characters that call themselves a team, if they're not consciously asking themselves how are we complementing each other because we're aware of our different strengths, then you're not a team. You're just a herd chasing in the same direction. And I use the metaphor of children playing football or soccer. If you take six year old kids playing soccer anywhere in the world, in the us, in Nigeria, Canada and in England, six year old soccer looks the same.

Yes.

You have this sort of herd of kids chasing after the ball around the park. Each kid hoping to have a few seconds of glory with the ball at their feet until another kid grabs a ball and they, they then have their few seconds of glory. This is six year old football. Then think about nine year old football. All of a sudden it looks different. They've, they've worked something out. You know, the kid who's got the big hands. It works better when that one's in the goal and the one with the long legs is running down the wing and the one that's just got that nick, that knack for putting the ball in the back of the net, that's a striker. So these kids have noticed through trial and error, playing, playing, playing, that when we allow ourselves to acknowledge how we're different to each other and then complement each other, becomes a team. I actually think it's the definition of team. So when I'm talking to executive teams and I say, so which one are you then? You the six year olds or you the nine year olds? Like, oh, no, no, we're, we're a team. We're not. Okay, so what conversations have you had about how you compliment each other? Because, oh, we haven't really talked about, I'm sorry you're hurt. You're six year old, you haven't even. But it's at that level we need to be having the conversation on strengths. And most people are still at first base.

So yeah, you know, we have you like this, Angus. So I am, in three weeks I'm going to be with 200 people of US ski and snowboard, the national governing body here in the US they really oversee the sport all the way from young kindergarteners. First time getting up on the slopes in Colorado. They started three. I literally saw this child who was on skis, can't even walk, but he was going down. So all the way from there to the US Olympic Team usa and we're literally doing an exercise on strengths. And they've never done it to your point. And we're literally going to use strengths and we are going to have their team leaders share and discuss strengths, how they use it and how can they use even more Because I'm with you, I think it is such an important element that people don't think about. Right. And I remember I benefited, frankly. I was I think a young associate or maybe an EM or ap. I don't know where I was. But you were definitely probably one of those forces at the firm that drove the shift. Angus. I remember when I started it was obviously we have our assessment framework, but somewhere along the way, four, six years into the firm, we shifted to a strength based feedback. Yeah, right. And something tells me, and you'll confirm or disconfirm that you were probably one of the hands who actually helped make that a reality.

Very much so, Very much so. But also aware that it's. There's an institutional challenge to actually enact this. You know, there's a lot I think we're in the position of, with our good intentions, trying to thrust this upon an organization, which is maybe a necessary starting point. But I don't think it's a quite same thing as being bringing about large scale cultural change.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, and I personally know how much I benefited from it.

Yeah.

Because all of a sudden rather than. And friends, for those who are listening, you're like, what is that? So literally I remember the day when all of a sudden we started the conversations differently in our performance evaluations. We have them every six months. Every person in the firm, you know, has somebody who's actually having a discussion with them, with other eight or ten senior leaders around, how do we help them develop to become the best version of themselves? And we always talk about what are their spikes. We have six different areas, from problem solving to client relationships to knowledge to entrepreneurship. And we always talk about what is their source of sparkle, what are their spikes? And you can't have more than two. You can, but I think then you haven't done the work to really find what they're really good at. Because yeah, there are some who are really great at everything. I've benefited from some of those, but those are far and few in between. Yeah, but when we use those as a way to then say, okay, what opportunities will help them progress, you know, all of a sudden they come alive. Right. Look, for me, entrepreneurship and client relationships were my strengths. Right. Those were things that I was really good at. So go do that. Right.

Yeah. I mean, let me tell you the story of a guy called Angus. I was and still am somebody who lacks attention to detail and tends not to follow through with things and persevere. That's not a very good cocktail. Right. You seriously think somebody with those characteristics can be successful? I could have spent my life trying to fix for those weaknesses, hoping that somehow this would create a path to success. But in reality I would be a sort of partially redeemed person who's not very good at attention to detail and doesn't really like to follow through. I'm not sure that this would be a path to anything particularly noteworthy. It turns out however, that I am creative and I'm a communicator. So if you build a life around creativity and communication, you can really forge a path for yourself.

Absolutely.

And this is what has happened today. Now of course still have to do some dealing with the other stuff and that's solvable, but trying to build some kind of identity around the person who's struggling to follow through and keeps making mistakes on their spelling mistakes on the website because I don't really have much attention detail. You're never going to win by trying to be one of those people. So we really have to find what that magic is. And one, one exercise that I think is very interesting is to get other people who know you well to talk about you things called the best self stories. You ask five people who know you, will know you well to just write a short paragraph describing a time when they saw you at your best. You get these five paragraphs back, which is already just an enjoyable thing to have of course for our, maybe for our vanity reasons, but the methods to the madnesses. Those five people don't know each other, but they do know you. They're likely to describe the same types of things and so you can see the common threads pull those threads out. Which is interesting from a sort of analytical point of view, but also it's interesting from a legitimization point of view. If everybody else is saying this about me, then it must be true after all. So these little techniques to help people get clear closer can be incredibly powerful to break through that made that mindset.

Shift in terms of embracing strengths reflected best self.

Right.

An exercise. I love that one. Let's talk about health, which is the second dimension of sharp.

Yeah. Health has to do with the fact that we're all so exhausted, stressed, stressed out. And I think the coming back to what's the angle we need to be taking to move forward on this is we tend to view stress as a bad thing. The number of books you see on airport bookshop shelves talking about reducing stress and so on reducing burnout is huge, but flawed because stress isn't in of itself definitionally bad for us. We actually need stress. We need some stress. We need the right type of stress, of course. And so on and so forth. I wouldn't be getting out in bed in the morning if I didn't have some stress.

Absolutely.

So demonizing stress as an entirely bad thing is just taking us down the wrong path. What we need to be doing is looking at something else. And this is our recovery and being intentional about recovery from stress. And when I say intentional I actually mean structured about about this and the thought that I really like this about this is this idea of your return on your freshness and this idea that is nonlinear. So a small investment in your freshness leads to a non linear uplift in terms of what you bring to the table. You know, I remember when in my, in my McKinsey days I used to have a client that was two hour flight away. And so on Friday morning I would take take the 7am flight which mean I was awake at you know, 4:30 in the morning to get to the airport. And we all know that story. And I'd walk through the door of the CEO's office at 5 to 9, we'd have our Friday morning meeting. I did this for years. It was perfectly fine. I didn't know any better. And then something changed in my life circumstances and I started arriving the evening before at this client premises and just seeing the team for a bit, going to bed, waking up fresh. I was a completely different person. I was daring, challenging the client, seeing patterns, joining the dots. It was a totally different conversation. What I wasn't doing is just kind of going through the bullet points on the agenda which I would have been doing previously. Then I realized wow, what a. First of all what an incredibly non linear change and secondly what a tiny Investment. If only I'd known. Now of course there are other trade offs. Being one more night away from home and all that kind of stuff needs to be worked through. Know that. But just being aware of the power of this and potential life, we, we talk about horizons of recovery. Micro, mezzo, macro, micro is all the little sneaky little things that happen to you during the day that mean that by the end of the day instead of being maybe 70% fresh, you're 10% fresh. The snarky little comment from your boss that just drains the energy from your body. And maybe you have that four or five times during the day and by the time you get home you don't remember anything but you just feel completely drained. That's the micro recovery. And we can be intentional about navigating this. Then there's mezzo recovery. This is week in, week out, healthy, light habits that really contribute massively. Obviously things that we're aware of, nutrition, sleep, exercise. And then there's macro recovery, which you might equate to vacation. But it's really not about vacation. This is hitting the reset button once in a taj once in a while and really taking a fresh look around and thinking about where am I going, what am I doing? And being intentional about our recovery. Thinking about this in terms of the non linearity and the three horizons can take us down a completely different path. And understanding that we have the agency here, it's up to us. It's our job to be fresh. It's not the world's job to stop making us stressed.

In fact, can I flip it on its head, Angus? Which is, as leaders, I think it absolutely is our responsibility to make sure our people are fresh and we are helping them, you know, build habits. I'm going to share a couple of anecdotes around this, couple of examples where I've seen this and I've seen some organizations do this really well and some pieces that we've been able to integrate. Right. So when we run rewire, we often ask people to do three, what you call micro recoveries. I say between eight to 12, find five minutes where you're going to unplug and you're just gonna go out or if you just sit, get a cup of coffee, don't be on your phone, right. 15 minute between 8 to 12, 15 minute between 1 to 5 and give yourself a little bit of a longer break at lunch, maybe do 10 minutes, 15 minutes, maybe you have food outside and you go for a little walk. Amazing. For glucose. I've really Gotten very attuned to my glucose patterns and movement with my body. I wear a CGM and how it drops. Right. But like what we notice is exactly what you said, Angus. If people just take 20 minutes in a 10 hour day, they support 30, 40% more energy at the end of the day than before. And they're like, how is that possible? Because if you look at the research From Microsoft, after 90 minutes we are just accumulating stress. But if we build in that micro recovery, we really, really improve. Right. So I mean that really resonates. And there is so much research on this.

Oh yes, it's been researched and it's, and it's been published. So people, one of the challenges with the health stress recovery topic is we're talking with words that everybody has already heard of. It's not like nobody hasn't heard that this good to get a good night's sleep and so on and so forth. Where people need to understand is one of responsibility.

Yes.

It's up to you to be fresh because of the opportunity of this return on freshness. It's not the world's fault that you are stressed out. So it's on you 100%. Yeah. And so I think that's, that's where we need to take this conversation. There's nobody else to blame. Nobody's coming.

Yeah. And you know, I, and I think about this, right. It's an individual responsibility and I really think it's the leader's responsibility. And here's the reason why.

Yeah, I agree.

Would you be okay if you, let's say you run a fleet of trucks. Are you okay if your trucks are only 40% efficient?

Yeah.

Every day or they start at 80% but by the time half of the day comes around, they're at 40%. You would never accept that. But because, right. Humans don't walk around with this meter of how full are you? How fresh are you?

Yeah, I really agree on this. And I, in my earlier life, I did a lot of work in grocery stores or supermarkets and my job was to interview the store manager. So we'd be in the back of a store interview, and then at the end of the interview, the manager would escort me out of the store. And this is quite a long walk. You know, some of These stores have 100 employees. And I noticed two types of store. There were stores where the manager was an absolute giver of energy. And as he or she escorted me through the store, tapping people on the back, noticing that somebody come back from illness, somebody else going on vacation, and you had a hundred pairs of eyes looking up and lighting up as you walked through the store. I never realized that this was anything particular until I also met another type of store who, as they escorted me out, all they were thinking is, my next meeting starts in 90 seconds ago to get this guy out as fast as possible. So we charged the store, and you had a hundred pairs of items.