GA 457 | Leading with Care with Bob DeKoch and Phil Clampitt

The leader's job is to bring people together. And the leader may have, well, an opinion on what ought to be done, but the best solutions, and the richness of the solutions comes from the team spontaneously generating the ideas that can be brought forward and reinforced and improved on so that you come out with an answer that is better than any one of those ideas.

Today I'm excited to welcome Bob decook and Phil Clampett to the show. Now, Bob and Phil co authored a book called Leading with Care in a Tough World in the. The subtitle is Beyond Servant Leadership. And so what we do is we, we sort of walk through some of the key concepts of the book. One of the ones that I had never heard of that was very interesting is, is this concept that they, they, they coined toxic positivity. And so we, we dive into what this whole thing of, of toxic positivity is and some really interesting stuff. We then get into, you know, different, different aspects of, of leadership, such as the importance of being able to embrace uncertainty. In fact, they open up the book by talking about this whole idea of uncertainty. And then we talk a lot about how many of the things that they're talking about have strong parallels to Lean. And so I think everyone's going to enjoy this one. I know I had a good time talking to Bob and Phil. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 457. Again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 457. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Bob and Phil, how are you guys? Welcome to the show.

Well, we're glad to be here, Ron. We're fine and anxious to talk with you.

All right, all right. Well, good stuff. So before we have you guys introduce one another, how about we start with a quote? Do one of you have a quote that you'd like to share?

Well, this is Phil Clampett and probably one of my favorite quotes from my favorite physicist besides my father, who was a Nobel prize winning physicist, was Richard Feynman. And he said the first principle is you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool. And so we tried to take good hard look at leadership and servant leadership and see if we were fooling ourselves in any way. So that's one of my favorite quotes and it's in the book and pretty much guided a lot of our philosophy and discussion.

Nice, I like that. Well, so you guys have written a book Leading with Care in a Tough World. So I'm excited to jump into that and hear hear all the good things that you guys are talking about then. But before we get into that, how about you guys tell us a little bit about yourselves. Tell us about your background, how you got into this line of work and then, and then what you're up to. Up to these days. So Bob, do you want to let me go first?

Sure, sure, I'll go first. Phil and I have been working together and have been partners in various writing initiatives for nearly 30 years. We met each other, I was running a manufacturing business and my career has taken me through manufacturing management into construction and real estate development. And I've worked my way through various leadership and executive roles over my career. I have a consulting business also on the side. But our passion is writing about leadership and practicing and researching and helping others become better leaders. And Phil and I have had a great relationship. This is the third book we've written together and the capstone so far and we're very excited about its possibilities and impact on the market.

Great, great Phil.

And my background is, I'm academic. I teach at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. My specialty is organizational communication and information SC and have the opportunity to work on numerous research projects and then as a consultant with Bob and a bunch of other companies like Nokia and PepsiCo and others on communication related issues. So we try to bring all that expertise together and Bob and I have slightly different. What's great about the way Bob and I work together is that we're both passionate about the same issues but we're bringing slightly different lenses to look at it the same issue. I think that's what creates the kind of unique partnership.

Oh, that's so good. It reminds me my two business partners, Kevin Meyer and John Miller, we, I feel like the success of our companies because the three of us are so different, you know, and we all bring different talents. So I think that's so good to find someone else that is aligned with you. But you come at it from slightly different ways. So that's great. That's great. All right, well, so guys, the, the subtitle of your book is Servant Leadership or sorry is Beyond Servant Leadership. Beyond Service Leaders. So what do you mean by beyond Servant Leadership? I mean Servant leadership is, has been in the sort of business acumen for, for many, many years and I suppose many of our listeners are, are familiar with that concept. So what do you mean by beyond?

Yeah, so great question. And the, the positioning of the book was this kind of idea of beyond servant leadership. When Greenleaf wrote The original essay back in the 70s, you know, he talked about how, and that was on, on the heels of a lot of leadership philosophies that had a lot to do with command and control. And so his, his, his point was, let's look at leaders as servants to the people and to get them engaged by serving them and helping them with their challenges and helping them along the way. And we prescribe to all of that. We think that all of that is very important in terms of service of people, but it's not quite enough. And that's the beyond part. The leaders also have to be attentive to and be very focused on the outcomes of the organization, whether it's a profit or non profit or some organization or political organization. The outcomes, the results are also important. And the results and the people have to blend together in a way that one reinforces the other. So it's not just the idea of serving people for whatever they would like to do. It's serving people and servicing the outcomes and objectives of the organization. The mission so that you can deliver those objectives by getting the people tremendously engaged in the business of the business. And that's what we mean by beyond servant leadership. It's both together. Neither one of them alone is the whole story.

Yeah, I like it. I like it. Well, you know, within the lean world we know one of our passions is the whole concept of respect for people. It's one pillars of the so called Toyota house kind of thing, you know, the lean house, if you will, and the other one being continuous improvement. And I like to say that as important as respect for people is, and it's extremely important, it's critical, without it, you'll more likely fail. If you don't have a continuous improvement going along with it, you're also going to fail. Right. So you need them both. So it's a, it's a good balance. There's a dichotomy there, I suppose.

Right. I think, I think the, the dichotomy is that I think sometimes leaders either forget or aren't as well balanced in the two. They focus all on the people or all on the numbers and the results. And both of those things alone cause either disengagement with the results or disengagement to the people. And that's a big deal. That's the problem that we're trying to focus on in this book.

Yeah, well, even it reminds me of, I can't remember who said it, it's in all of our old training material back in the day. But talking about the whole idea of results though and the importance of balancing is if all you did was focus on your and nothing else. It's like driving, driving a car, looking in the rear view mirror. Like eventually you're going to run into something right. So you have to look forward as well and focus on those processes and the, the key things, the key performance actions as my friend Billy Terrell likes to talk about and you take care of the actions, the key performance indicators are going to take care of themselves. So sounds like you guys are basically saying the same thing there and a pretty well aligned. So that's, that's really good. What about. I know that something that you talk about in the book is how how effective leaders, good leaders try to pair a set of core beliefs along with some fundamental skills. Can you talk about maybe the difference or how those things, beliefs and skills and how they've got to work together to be effective?

Yeah, we think that's critical. In fact, another perspective on reason why we named it Beyond Servant Leadership is because we noticed two particular problems. One would be a leader would like kind of have the sentiments and the ideas of what good leadership was about, such as continuous improvement, but not know how to do it. So you have those employees or leaders that were oftentimes there was a disconnect between what they believed and how they do it. So that's the practice. On the other hand, I've noticed in the world that I live in a little bit a lot, which is the academic world, we have people who are saying all the right things and even practicing some of the things that a good leader should do, like asking questions. But underneath it all, they didn't really believe in the process. So they would ask for input because that's what you're supposed to do to solve problems, but they would never act on it. So you'd have full collaboration and you'd have to of faux engagement on the part of people. And so to me it's figuring out what those core beliefs are that undergird all of the skill sets that not all, but many of the skill sets that you need as a great leader. And so in order to for example, to be a good leader you have to practice effective communication, but you also have to believe in embracing uncertainty, that you don't have all the answers. And if you don't believe that you're not going to be able to communicate very well and deal with the rear view mirror problem that you just talked about and make sure you're looking forward as well as looking backward at the same time.

So how does a leader come to belief?

Well, that's one of the most intriguing questions we've been asked in talking about this book. And I think there are a couple of ways you do it. One is experience. If you've had experience, you're not getting the results for something you think, you know, with a practice that you think maybe you need. It's time to go back and reflect on whether or not you have the core belief to support it. Which goes back to the quotation that you asked me for spontaneously. Don't fool yourself that just because you are practicing something you end up you have the underlying belief. And the second one I would say is I think great leaders coach other leaders. And I think the coaching that people do encourages people to do that. And Bob is fabulous at doing this when he's coaching other executives and other leaders to encourage that kind of self reflection that comes back and say, you know, at my core, do I really believe in these things that I need to make this work as a leader? And so beliefs in general have come from experience and reflection and frankly, coaching from other people.

I like it. So there's a term that you guys have introduced and I being 100% transparent, I'd never heard of it. Toxic positivity. What is toxic positivity and how does that come into a leadership position?

Well, I'll tell you, it came from actually interviewing employees. And it goes back to exactly what you just talked about, about the disconnect between a belief and a practice. And I can name, I won't name, but I can name five employees in the last month. I know that resigned from their organizations in nice jobs because of toxic positivity. What they had are supervisors who would nod their head and say, that's very nice. Thank you for sharing and thank you for doing these types of things. And everything was positive. But they would never solve the underlying problems in the workplace. So they didn't really have a continuous improvement mindset for the workplace and they wouldn't help address the concerns or problems. So they had this kind of nice exterior where everything, where they put a happy face on everything, but they didn't solve the problem. So they really didn't have the underlying belief that goes with it, which is continuous improvement, continuous learning through that, which is one of the beliefs that we espouse that every good leader has to have.

I think that there's a tendency, especially in, I'll say, in the US Organizations that it's easy to talk about the things that are going well to get back to your emphasis on lean and continuous improvement. As you know, it's also important to talk about the things that aren't going well. And toxic positivity is a tendency to focus only on the things that are going well and not be transparent and not make it okay to say, we've got problems here, we've got problems here. How are we going to solve those? I mean, in lean terms, great lean organizations are those that identify problems faster and faster all the time and work to solve them quickly and get better and better at that. And in order to solve problems, you got to identify them and not put them under the rug. So focusing only on the positives puts them under the rug. And that's what we call toxic positivity.

Why do you think leaders who exemplify toxic positivity, why do you think they do it?

Well, I think they're uncomfortable talking about things that are wrong. I don't think it's an easy conversation for team members or leaders in many cases to talk about things that are wrong or it's not safe. They don't feel safe to talk about things that are wrong.

The leader doesn't feel safe.

The leader doesn't feel safe, nor do the employees. The team members feel safe. And in our book, we talk about a responsibility, a subtle responsibility of leaders, teams to call out the silent voices, to call out the people who aren't talking, to try to draw out those points of view that may be different and may be hard to talk about, but they need to be talked about, need to be brought out to get the full range of ideas towards solving a problem. And in order for people to do that, the leader has got to make the environment safe to do it, even to the point of saying, this is safe, you're not. No repercussions. We want to hear what's on your mind. Let's get it out on the tables so we can discuss it.

I'll give you a specific example that happened, that I'll obscure the names in this case, but I was told by an administrator once before, I spoke to a group of donors at the university and the board, and one of the administrators said, phil, I know you like to talk about continuous improvement, but don't talk about anything wrong. Just say good stuff. And I looked at him, I said, well, that's the way I do things, you know, I said, you know, I know. But anyway, I said, I went in front of the group and I said, look, we have a lot of good things going on at the university, a lot of good things going on in our department. Here they are. But here's our challenge, and we're dealing with that. And every one of those people on the board and every one of those. The people that were from the business community looked at me afterwards and came up and shook my hand. He said, you're the only one who talked about really continuous improvement, really talked about taking problems and realizing that you could admit that there are some problems without undermining your total credibility. And I think that is one of the things that underlies a lot of the toxic positivity is we think that everything has to be perfect or you don't have credibility. My view is just the opposite. Bob's. My view is everything doesn't have to be perfect. What has to be perfect is your process for solving those through a continuous improvement mindset, through our continuous learning process, through embracing uncertainty, which are those core beliefs that we talk about.

Yeah, I love it. Reminds me of, you know, sort of old Toyota saying, no problem is a problem. People are going to say, hey, how's everything going? Everything's great. Everything's great. You know, it's like, well, surely not everything's great. You know, something surely can be. Be better.

Right.

What toxic positivity is.

Yeah. And I think in true lean organizations, problems are celebrated. Yeah, problems are celebrated. And it's okay. You. You're in. You're expected to bring up the problems.

Yep.

And. And they're expected to be received in a way that they can be spun around and acted upon in constructive ways.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. So at the beginning of your book, guys, you talk about the importance of embracing uncertainty. So I'm curious, why did you decide to start there?

Well, first of all, we dedicated a whole book. Our first book that we wrote together was entitled Embracing Uncertainty, the Essence of Leadership. And we studied this concept of uncertainty and the tendency for people to want to stamp out uncertainty. And we started in this book that way because we believe it's fundamental to one of the core beliefs a leader has to have. And the basic principle here is that the leader's job is not to have all the answers. The leader's job is to bring people together. And the leader may have, well, an opinion on what ought to be done, but the best solutions and the best, the richness of the solutions comes from the team spontaneously generating the ideas that can be brought forward and reinforced and improved on so that you come out with an answer that is better than any one of those ideas. And in order for the leader to handle that conversation, he or she has to get past the idea that there is only one answer or they only have the right answer. And the uncertainty that starts to develop in a conversation like that with multiple ideas is rich, but it takes a mindset and a belief that you have to tolerate that diverse set of opinions in order to get them out and move forward from there. So that's why we started the book with that. Because there's, in a very simple way, you got to be. You got to be cautious of having the smartest person in the room give you the answer to the question. Yeah. Because it's probably not the answer.

Yeah. I like to say that the biggest waste of time is when people come together and they debate on who's got the right answer. I said, I think the better use of our time is to debate which experiment are we going to try first to see what we learn, you know, and yeah, but humility and all these things are easy to talk about. Sometimes they're harder to. To practice.

Right. Well, there's another chapter in the book in the core belief section about values and the importance of values. And you mentioned humility. Humility is one of those core beliefs, those core values that underpins the idea of embracing uncertainty. Because you have to have a humble point of view about your own knowledge in order to move forward and learn.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Phil, I'm curious. Something just kind of popped in my mind. So you work obviously at a university. So you're working with younger people and teaching them, I assume, is that. Are you still actively teaching?

Absolutely.

Yeah. So I have teenagers and some college age students as well. And my daughter's actually up closer to you than she is to me. She's in Ohio, up in Steubenville at Franciscan University over there. So I'm curious, how do you teach these kind of principles to young people who. I mean, let's shoot straight. They don't have any real work. Work experience it. Right. And so we can say all these things, but how do you get this instilled into this into these young people so that when they do go into the world, they've got a head start?

Well, I think it goes back to. There are several things, actually. I'm writing about this because I have to. Somebody nominated me for an award and I have to write about my teaching philosophy, how to. How to highlight that. I'm actually writing about the very question you're asking. And so I point out that one of the keys is that you create experiences for students, young students, that allow them to try out these Ideas and test them. So you build that kind of mentality into them. A second thing that I do is from a very practical standpoint is I have exercises in class. So in real time they're getting coaching on how they're doing and they're doing self improvement. So many of the teaching that goes on today is check the list, jump through this hoop, etc. And I'm less concerned about how well they do on the quiz than I am with why they got something wrong, how we can correct it, what their thoughts are. So a third thing I do sometimes is in a classroom as I not sometimes I do it every day. We start every day off with meet the critic or meet the CEO. And so I have them, right, I have them answer a tough question from that they might get from a person like Bob. He would now he wouldn't say it in a tough way, of course. He would just be very nice about it and not too toxic nice though, right?

Not too toxic, not toxically nice.

Right.

And then I'd say, all right, how would you rate your answer? 0 to 10. And sometimes they underestimate, sometimes they overestimate. And then we say, well, what could make it better? And it's at, in real time building a continuous improvement mindset. So I think we can give them those experiences. I think we have to get away from a kind of a checklist mentality, jumping through the hoops, and really have almost a Socratic dialogue with everybody on a one on one basis. And I do that throughout the semester.

No, that's wonderful. Those young folks are lucky to have you because I don't think that's happening everywhere. Unfortunately it's not. Yeah, yeah, so that's great. So last question I have for you guys. I know that in the book you also, you stress the importance of, of leading with care. So we've talked about a lot of things, toxic positivity and lots of other different things. But what is leading with care mean to you guys?

Well, leading with care means that you have a long term developmental focus on the people that you're working with. It's not, you know, what did you do for me yesterday? It's not the short term objectives, those are important, but a long term interest in them, in developing them and in helping them think through their career path. It's kind of solution motivated idea so that you're trying to help them find solutions, remove barriers and see that the barriers that they have are maybe not quite the barriers that they actually are experiencing and through conversation and coaching. And it's more of a proactive look at how people can perform and behave in their jobs and as opposed to a reactive look to say, well I've observed you do this and you should have done this. It's more of a development, long term, proactive coaching style. It's a sense that you really care about, you have their back, you're there to help them. And when we say the most important question we ask is how can I help you? That's not to do their work for them, it's to help see how they can do their work in a way that they might not have seen it before. So we think that the word care is a much more extensive concept, much deeper concept than the word servant, for example.

And I can add to that when I was first applying, to give you an example of what I think Bob and I both screwed up resonated around when I was first applying for jobs as a professor, young professor. I'd go out and they'd say why do you want to be a professor? And they'd say, I'd say well, because I love ideas and I love people and I love connecting the two. And you know, every place I went they were offering me jobs are all being knowing. And so yeah, that's really cool. But I just, I've re looked at that over time and I realized that I had something wrong. I should have said and I believe today first you connect with people, then you connect those people to cool ideas. And so if there's leading with care is really about how do you connect with people where they're at and then develop them to, in my case, helping them understand some core ideas. In Bob's case it may be helping the organization achieve a particular objective but objectives. But I think that's the spirit of shift that we tried to capture in the book and try to highlight. And it's a subtle shift in one ways but in another way it's very, very profound because the results are profound and the outcomes that occur are profound. Because to go back to the first question you asked, one of the first questions asked, we don't know what other people can achieve once you believe in them. That's the uncertainty. That's why we embrace uncertainty because you never know what they can achieve. I don't know as a leader and they don't even sometimes know as the employee.

Yeah, so I lied. I have the one follow up question. Something just popped in my mind. So have you guys looked into many any of the, you know, these, all these, there's different words for Them and depending on what book you read, but essentially different temperaments, you know, of people and so personality, if you will. So like one of my daughters is I think technically called like a sanguine. So she's really happy and likes to talk all the time and is the life of the party. And then I have another child who's more melancholic, you know, just kind of just easygoing and gets very annoyed with her sanguine sister from time to time. Right. Because they just, they talk at different, almost different tune, if you will. And sometimes I see that even in the workplace with just different personalities, people sometimes clash with one another. Have you looked into that from a leadership perspective?

Are you asking how, how a leader would interact with those differences?

It doesn't have to be leaders, it could just be co workers working with one another and we, you know, we just communicate differently. And, you know, I'm happy, I like to talk a lot and you might be more low key and you get annoyed that I talk a lot. Right. So like, how do we meet each other where we're at when we're all so different?

Well, I think the last word you use, different, is the key to that. And it is an element of, you know, the, the whole diversity issue, because it's not only diversity on, on the basis of race and sex and persuasion and everything else, it's diversity on the, from the point of view of thought and style and personality. And as individuals, we need to learn to have a deeper respect for the differences and to give people running around room to allow them to be themselves to a point where you understand what they're saying and you listen, but also to have them respect your difference. And I think that when all parties can respect each other's differences, then whether you start to start to describe the diversity as a function of whatever classes you want to describe them as is irrelevant. Everybody's different and the richness of their ideas and their thoughts and the allowances you need to make for people to be different have to be understood and respected and that's whether you're a leader or whether you're a member of the team.

Yeah.

So if I could follow up on that. I think one of the things that you see a lot in the workplace and I've used in the classroom as well, is like a personality profile and using that as a template, which is what Bob, I think what you're asking in part, and so you have Myers, Briggs, you have a bunch of those different tools and some of which I've taught and I find that what students do, and same thing with employees, they oftentimes use that as good intellectual scaffolding. To begin to look at the issue of differences, like Bob did. Sometimes, though, I actually had one person say to me, I'm such and such. My employees are such and such. I can't change. They can't change. We'll never communicate. And that's precisely the wrong way to use it. And so you have to be a little careful about that. So what I move to is we talk about it in the book. As a matter of fact, we're called instruction Management. So every employee or every team member writes up an instruction manual of how they prefer to be communicated with, whether it's like you said, penguin and I forgot what the other one was.

Or sanguine. Sanguine is one. You know, and then, yeah.

Whatever they call them, they're all different, depending on the tool. And, you know, I like to communicate this way, you like to communicate that way. Let's break those down on the instruction manual, and then we'll figure out how to manage those differences as Bob was talking about, which go even deeper than personality, all the personality tests and things like that, which in a deeper way, because we're like, Myers Briggs has 16 personality types. Well, there are far more than 16 types of personalities, but it's a good place to start.

Yeah, I remember you mentioned that fire B, I think, is that the one that they give sailors, that they go down in a submarine with one another for like six months. And I think they all take something similar to that, because I got to understand who's who down here as we get ready to go into the water for six months. Yeah, good stuff.

Yeah, it's interplay. Personal relationship orientation. And it, you know, deals with. It's kind of a different take on Myers Briggs. It was actually pre Myers Briggs, as I think.

Yeah.

But I like to use multiple ones because no one is telling the truth. And psychology or my psychology friends in the psychology department think of it, you know, a little skeptical about some of these things, and rightly so.

Yeah. The one I remember, I can't remember which one it was, but one of the things that popped out I'll never forget is that I want to be invited to your party, guys. The party that you have. I want to be invited, but I'm probably not going to come, so I don't know what that means.

That is viral, B. That's classic viral.

Yeah. Yeah.

Good stuff. Good stuff. So everybody invite me to your party.

All right.

Well, hey, guys. This has been really fun. I've really enjoyed having you come on, say the name of your, of your book again and tell people how they can get their hands on it.

Sure. It's the book is called Leading with Care in a Tough Beyond Servant Leadership. There's a book website called leadingwithcare.net. it's a great website. Talks about the book, talks about us, has some video material, some background training materials. Some of these podcasts are on their articles and so forth. So leadingwithcare.net would be a good resource. To start. There's an order button, order buttons on the front page where they can order from all the major book platforms, so.

Got it, got it. And are you guys on social media, LinkedIn, anything like that if folks want to connect with you personally?

LinkedIn.

Yeah, LinkedIn. And yeah, that's probably the best way. LinkedIn.

Phil, you're probably on like Snapchat with all the kids, right? You know.

Well, I actually teach a course in social media strategy and I've stayed away from some of these things because I teach a course in social media.

That's right, exactly.

Not on Tick Tock.

Okay, okay, okay. All right, well, we'll put all the links in the show notes so everybody can go to GembaPodcast.com this is episode four. So guys, thanks for coming on. This has been a lot of fun and keep up the great work.

Thank you, Ryan, Great to be with you.

Thank you, Ron.

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