Tricia Naddaff Leadership in a VUCA World

Hi Tricia, how are you?

I'm great, CB, how are you?

I'm awesome. So I'm so excited to interview you for our MECO TV, which is for master-level executive coaches and corporate stakeholders to hear from experts in the leadership and coaching space. And I'm especially happy because you own your own organization. You are CEO and president, and it's a female-owned organization that's been around for eons. And I'm always so excited to support female-owned organizations. So thanks, CB.

That's a great place to start.

Thank you. So your organization is Management Research Group, aka MRG.

That's correct.

Tell us what you have created in our space.

So we're— we've been around for 35 years. MRG was originally founded by clinical— sounds actually like the beginning of a joke— a clinical psychologist, an IO psychologist, and an organizational development specialist. And their work was about how do we help individuals get a deeper sense of self-awareness so that they can continue to grow and hopefully grow with more intention and at an accelerated pace. And so their pathway to that was through assessments. So how do we help people understand themselves through assessments? And that's evolved over the years. We have role-specific assessments in the leadership space, in the sales and business development space, and in the customer service space. And we also have assessments that are used when the coaching goes deeper. We have assessments on motivation. We have assessments on life architecture and how people are feeling about their quality of life. So coaching, as you know, has become a very rich part of organizational development and individual development journeys. And so we are, I think, very committed to supporting the deep work that gets done at both an individual and a team level with our assessments and with our research.

Well, I have to tell you, I was just on the phone with a person who— a PhD, uh, who coaches at Wharton. And I was bragging about my interview with you and I said, oh, I'm going to be interviewing a person from MRG. You might not know the company. And he said, seriously, CB? I'm from Wharton. I know MRG. Well, that totally shut me up.

That's good. We actually do a fair amount of work in the higher education space and in the executive ed space. So that's very nice to hear. Thank you for sharing.

Yes, it's great. And of course, I'm certified in your LEA, which I love.

Thank you for that. It's a, it's a great, it's a great tool. And I think at a time where I think there might be a little bit more promoting of a right way to lead. At the same time, while we're trying to encourage diversity inclusion and a global approach to our thinking at work, I'm proud that our assessment is not pigeonholing people and it is actually helping people open up their understanding of themselves in the leadership role. So thank you.

Well, I am— I was very excited about it because at the time I became certified, I thought, God, this This is going to tell me how awful I am as a person. And that's the fear.

That's the fear, right? Particularly when it's a multi-rater assessment. Great. Not only is it going to reflect back to me about my comments something I don't want to hear, but I'm now asking bosses, peers, direct reports, constituents. And I want to know, and I don't want to know. So I hope you had the experience that other people have, is that it's an unfolding and a door opening, not a— scolding and erading. Yes, yes.

Well, I think it's particularly vulnerable for people of minority races because we are just not used to that kind of feedback. Most of the feedback that we get is critical, and you feel bad as a result. And so after I was exposed to yours, I said, oh my God, this is a good thing. I feel good. Yeah, I learned a lot.

Good, good. That's what we hope. We hope people come out with a sense that they've been respected, that they've been honored, and that there is an opening, a discovery of self. In a way, it sounds funny because we walk around with ourselves all the time, but we are in a very fast-paced, chaotic world where information is coming at us left and right. The pace is crazy, and it's not just in the work. People are experiencing it in their home life as well. So if we can get folks to pause for a minute and make space for self-reflection in a way that they feel valued and respected, they'll do deeper work. They will explore who they are, and they'll take more time, and they'll— they will be able to be more intentional and more focused about how they want to move forward. That, that's what we hope we're supporting.

And it did that for me. I was very excited. At the same time, I was exposed to MBTI, and so I got hit from both sides. Yes, right.

There is, you know, I think assessments have been around, as you know, for quite a while, and every once in a while I encounter somebody who you can tell they've been through the assessment onslaught. Cognitive assessments and personality and values and motivation And leadership, and there's that deer-in-the-headlights look of, I think I need a break from self-awareness. I totally get that.

Well, I'll tell you what, it moved me from being an outplacement person to an executive coach. So I am very grateful, and I've had some wonderful experiences, and certainly my clients have benefited. So kudos to you guys.

Thank you. Thanks for that, CB. And yes, I'm going to endorse that move as well for you.

Thank you. So now you talked just a moment ago about the onslaught of our society.

Yes.

And I think there's a new term.

Yes, there is. Well, actually, it's not that new. It's called VUCA, and I think people have probably— many people probably heard of it. It actually came from the military in the 1990s. Been adopted in the organizational community probably over the last 5 to 10 years, depending upon where you are. And it's an acronym, and it stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And initially, the military, the US military, was using it to describe the new environment they had to embrace in order to have a different approach to to the military work, that enemies and threats and allies, it was all a changing landscape and becoming much more uncertain and complex, and they had to figure out how to navigate that. It has been adopted in our workplaces, I think, because in our own ways we're experiencing the same thing. Things are changing rapidly, unusual competitors come into the space, The pace of work has increased dramatically. Organizations are adding products and adding different ways of working. It's just become increasingly complex for organizations.

So how does that show up in the leadership of an organization specifically?

That's a great, great question, CB. So I think we're entering an important new age for leadership. We have historically talked about the individual leader as if the single leader is capable of developing all that we want him or her to do to be a successful leader. But unfortunately, if you look at the evolution of leadership over the last 3 decades, we have consistently asked more and more of leaders. You know, we started out with management and in a pretty simple structure, help these 8 direct reports do their work.

I'm going to stop you right there.

Yeah.

What is the difference between leadership and management?

Okay, so that's a good question. We navigated that for about a decade between the late '80s and the late '90s, and I think there's variation in that, but the basic idea is that the management, they are— oh, you can So you can think of them as overlapping circles, that the management component is about mastering the execution of the work. So it is traditionally where we came from. It will be things like we used to do communication training and delegation training and feedback. It is about getting a group of people to go through a process to accomplish the work. So we can think of it as the implementation core. that lives within the leadership space. Leadership is expanded our understanding of what we want these individuals to do by saying, that's great, but we want you to be highly engaged cognitively. We want you to think strategically. We want you to expand your professional expertise. We want you to be innovative. That's been a big thing over the last 15 years. And we want you to inspire people and bring people along. So, and we want you to build employee engagement, and we want you to build team engagement, and we want you not only to get things done, but we want you to find new ways of accomplishing more with less resources. So you can think of management as the inner circle, get it done, and then leadership as a broad circle that sits around that, that is about engaging the minds and hearts of the people around you. And even that has gotten more complex. We, you know, do more with less. We used to say develop people effectively. Now we say you have to be a good coach. And now we say you have to build employee engagement. We used to say get results done. You had specific goals. We have ratcheted up the goals and we have taken away some of your resources. And oh, by the way, as organizations have flattened, we've increased the amount of individual contributor responsibility you have as part of your role. So your role has now been split in half. And we just keep adding. In all these decades, we have not taken anything away.

Mm-hmm.

And so I think the shift that we need to see in leadership, but we haven't seen it yet, CB, to your question, is we need to help leaders understand that no longer can they as an individual expect to master all of the competencies we are asking of leaders And in fact, we need to help them learn how to pull in thinking partners, how to pull in collaborators, and how to be one for others, how to be a collaborator for somebody else, how to be a thinking partner for somebody else. We need to balance the idea of the individual leader with the collective leadership. And if we don't do that, we're not going to achieve what we are setting out to achieve. But we also— and we're seeing this now— we're setting up a situation where individual leaders feel incompetent because they look at all the things that they're asked for and they know they can't do it all, but they think it's them. They, they are not talking about it being unrealistic expectations. They're talking about their own personal deficits, and that's going to slowly erode the confidence and the energy of the organization.

I just received a book in the mail from an author that I'm going to be interviewing. And his— the name of the book is Chief Leadership Officer, which I thought was very interesting. And as I was mentioning to you before we started, I have little time to read books these days because all of my reading is done on my computer.

Yes.

And I read— started to read one chapter where he talks about the movement from Chief Executive Officer to Chief Leadership Officer. And I thought, what the heck is this guy talking about, right? McCarthy is his name. And, and first he starts talking about watch what you say. And I'm thinking, okay, now he's got me at hello. Let me see what he has to say.

Yes.

And the first thing he talked about was the definition of management and how it's an archaic term Which means that you are less than the other person. It's a derogatory term that came out of the past that would sort of imply the, the, uh, the person who's bossing you around. That shocked me right there.

Yeah.

And then, uh, he was being interviewed by somebody and, and he was trying to say something positive about being a chief executive officer, and this is what he said, I take care of my people. Well, the person who was interviewing him said, your people?

Yeah.

What does that mean? And so the shift began between being a chief executive officer to a chief learning officer just by Understanding what do you mean by saying your people. Yes.

You know, it's that, that point about management being an archaic term. I think, I think it's an interesting point because I think the question is, I think where we're shifting is shifting from the idea that you're managing people, the idea that you're managing process. You're actually Your role is to come up with a process that helps people have the information they need, have access to the resources they need, be clear around what success looks like. So I do think that's an important shift. I wouldn't— I don't have that same overall visceral reaction to management when I think of it as It's a complex system. And so some managerial expertise around the process is valuable. I completely get, and I think we're going to see this as younger people come into the workplace, this idea of oversight, this idea of, well, quite frankly, superiority.

Yes.

That's going to get us in trouble.

It's parental. It's parental.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that although if you look at the neuroscience, I know you know some of this as well. As human beings, we are really drawn to status. So, but, and we're also drawn to relational connections. So I think we will find that we have these dynamic tensions that we have to help people manage. Again, why I think coaching is so good, because it lets us go into the uniqueness of where the person feels the tension. But that tension between— It feels good for me to have this status. And yet I want to be in this positive relationship state. So how do we navigate hierarchy through that? I think that's a— you have posed a provocative question to me, CB.

I think so. And I'll tell you what, I'm fortunate to be in a position now of seeing and listening to how the millennials are behaving. And status does not seem to get their motivation going at all. It's all about what have you accomplished, what can you contribute, and do I want to be part of what you're contributing?

Well, it's— we've just done some research on looking at the difference between generation and age. So because we've been around for 35 years, we have people who are in multiple generations at the same age. So Get the baby boomers at 35, get the Gen Xs at 35, get— so we're able to look. And if you look at generation, you see a lot of differences, both in motivation and in leadership behavior. But if you look at different generations when they're at the same age, a lot of those differences go away. It's not that there aren't differences. There are still generational differences.

Yeah.

But the personal and professional maturation along with the societal evolution, I maybe have a partner, I maybe decide to have children, potentially have a mortgage, you know, there is a shifting that happens motivationally and behaviorally. So, you know, we at MRG, we have these mixed feelings about being as we are in the generational conversation because it's more complex than just generation.

Yes.

I do think you're right. I do think there's a level of idealism that is really helpful right now because I think people who quite frankly have been slugging it out in the organizational world for a while benefit from that infusion of energy and optimism and idealism. The energy that comes from being able to see a future that's different, I think, is really valuable right now.

So let's go back to the VUCA society. What does success look like for the leader who has learned to navigate?

So that's— we just completed some research in this space, and we've looked at 7,000 leaders over the past 3 years.

Wow.

And we've— it's a global study, so multiple countries, multiple levels, functions. So we're really trying to answer that question that you're posing is, how are leaders behaving who do well in this environment? And we also asked the question because we like to look at both ends, what's happening to leaders who are really seen as failing in this?

That was going to be my next question.

Yes, so we have, we have that, we have that doing well and we have that derailing in the space. So it's the leaders who are doing well in this space. We see several things happening. They are much more cognitively engaged. So they are innovative. They are more strategic. They are— they continue to develop their professional area or areas of expertise. So they, they keep their mind highly engaged. But they are also much more connected to people. So they have that mind-heart thing going on. They, they are more consensual, they're more empathetic, they're more cooperative. So you can see that the investment is equally intense in both keeping the mind engaged and keeping the engagement with people. They also tend to be much—

Wait, now I need to ask you. Okay.

All right, go, go, go.

Now you've got me going.

All right, and I'm going too. So between the two of us.

So we were talking about assessments before. I mentioned Myers-Briggs.

Yes.

I am an INTJ.

Yes.

Which is the higher population for CEOs in America.

Yes.

We don't do emotion well. Does that leave us out in terms of managing in this new society?

No, you know, it's such a great question. Matt Lieberman, the social cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, and he wrote a great book called Social. It's, it's a— it looks at how are— how do our brains work when we are thinking about ourselves and also thinking about others. He asked us to support him on some research looking at leaders who were very relational focused but not so results-focused, and looking at leaders who are very results-focused but not so relationship-focused. And then, of course, the holy grail, right, looking at leaders who are both. And what we looked at, about 61,000 leaders in Anglo countries, and it was really interesting findings. We found that leaders who were high on relational but not so high on getting results had a lot of— were seen as very competent in a lot of ways. You could see why organizations really wanted them. But the same for the flip side. The leaders who were very results-focused but not very relational had a lot of competencies. You could see why organizations would want them. Hey, the holy grail, right? The number of leaders in this group of 61,000 who were high on both, in the top third for both of those— in both of those domains. Less than 1%, 0.77%.

Wow.

And so then we thought, well, no, this research is being too constrained around the parameters. So how about just people who are in the top half for both of those domains? 5.6%. And when we, when we talked to Matt about that, he said that was what he expected. And the reason he expected affected it was he taught us that there were 2 different neural networks in the brain, one that's engaged when we're thinking about people, we're thinking about us in relationship to people, and we're thinking about people, and another neural network that's engaged when we are thinking about non-people-related things, or the people are more ancillary. And he described them as a neural seesaw, that when one is very active, the other goes quiet. And it— so it works like this. And he said most people— we don't know what, if it's nature or nurture, and we'll probably, like everything else, it's some combination— have a preference to use one neural network more frequently than the other.

Mm-hmm.

The challenge we have is, while we know now from neuroscience we can build up these neural networks, we also know it takes practice. Practice, practice, practice, reinforcement, reinforcement, reinforcement. We need to be helping people understand the stretch that we're actually asking people to do by developing, in this case, within the body of their less dominant neural network. So to your question, we have people who are focused on results and in the INTJ world also cognitively engaged. but not as people engaged, well, we know where your dominant neural network is. There's 2 things, right? You and I have been in this development world for a long time. We won't say how long, but a long time.

No.

And so we know that even with developmental support, coaching, training, an environment that supports development, It is very hard for people to grow new skills and sustain the new skills in their embryonic phase and really change. And as people are more distracted, more overworked, more stressed, we default to the more comfortable, habitual ways of engaging. And so one, I think we have to be very— I think much more realistic. in what is actually required for the significant changes that we sometimes ask of people. But I think too, it's also a case being made for this idea of, well, is it best for you to develop to be much more empathetic and consensual and cooperative? Although I have to say, as a side note, CB, I find you all 3.

Thank you.

You know, is it better for you to have a partner? Right? Is there a colleague or a valued member of your team or somebody more senior in the organization that you pull in as a partner when you— because you've become a good diagnostician, you know that it's needed because chaos is afoot and people are hurting and they need to be heard and they need to be seen. So can we partner together to do this work?

I think that's—

you need to be learning how to have those conversations and then how to partner to make that happen. I think you illustrated a perfect example of where we become unrealistic as these expectations increase. Mm-hmm.

Yes.

It's hard work because it— there is— there's even more to this. These people are better communicators. So, but watch this, they also tend to be more restrained. So they are somehow have figured out this threading the needle of being transparent but reserved. And you can understand in a VUCA world when people are feeling chaos, that restraint brings a sense of calm, but you have to be transparent enough so that people trust you. That's not an easy combination.

That is very difficult, very difficult.

So somehow as the leader, You have to transcend the chaos so that you can bring people through it. That's not easy either. So I think— Bring out—

and where do you find somebody to help you transcend that chaos? Because the energy has to go someplace.

Yes. So I think this is where the growth in the mindfulness training is going to help us. And sometimes I know people are edgy about the term mindfulness. Let's just call it—

Oh, I'm raising my hand. INTJ. It's too touchy-feely for me.

Yeah, I know. So let's call it present-minded awareness.

Yeah, that's the same thing.

Present-minded awareness. So, and that is present-minded awareness about myself. So how do I learn to watch my own Emotional shift. How do I learn early signals of when my brain is going to enter into the spin? How do I recognize early signals when my emotions are starting to override my ability? How do I also become present-mindedly aware of what's happening around me? So can I see the signs early? Can I read the signs in my people that they're starting to be less focused? And productive and feeling less safe and doing— making more mistakes, taking longer to make decisions. So this present-minded awareness is both training yourself to do it internally and training yourself to be a better observer and diagnostician externally. I think that's important work. The ability to see it and the choices you make about how to handle it are 2 separate things. So I don't think anybody who wants to really grow as a leader gets to opt out of being a better observer and diagnostician of self and others. But I think we can create some variations about how people respond to what they observe, whether it's by themselves or their own particular style, or they bring somebody else in, or they engage the team collectively, or they engage the team one-on-one. There are options, but it has to start with the ability to understand self and other and the situation in a more effective way than I think we are offering people in terms of skill sets right now.

How does the organization itself help the leader to become self-aware and to be present?

I think actually we've made a fair amount of progress. progress in that space. I think we have still a long way to go, but I started in this industry when assessments were the scary black box. And, you know, in many cases you went to a psychologist who was offsite, and the mainstreaming of assessments— and there's so many good ones out there— has really, I think, helped people see themselves through a deeper, clearer lens than they can I think we are— again, how long have we been talking about being effective giving feedback? And still, as human beings, we're not very good at that. But we are— I like this movement that's happening away from the annual performance appraisal, which I have never heard anybody in the 30 years I've been in this industry say, I love our performance appraisal system. We're moving away from that to more regular ongoing conversations. So as we get better at sharing with each other, I observe this about you, in a courageous but compassionate way, people are going to get better at understanding themselves through that lens as well. So I think continuing the work of how we create good feedback conversations. But here's the biggest thing, I think, CB. Organizations have to create a sense of safety.

Mm-hmm.

I feel like I'm going to be punished or I'm at risk or I feel threatened. If there is a lot of anger or bad behavior or cold behavior or you— people can feel that things are going on but there's not clear communication, so it increases the level of uncertainty. People are not— it takes a sense of vulnerability to be willing to be open to increase your self-awareness. People can't open up and be vulnerable when they're in a threatened— when they're in a threat state and when the environment doesn't feel safe. So I think at a macro level, we need to be creating healthy, safe organizational contexts. At a more specific level, we need to be continuing to use the tools and developing the tools we have to help people get Good individual insight.

I absolutely agree with you. Here's, here's the $24,000 question. How do you create that when we have seen an onslaught of bullying, sexual harassment? I mean, it's like we have come 100 feet and we're going back 300 feet.

Yes. Well, I actually— I hope this is not me trying to deal with these complex issues by being overly optimistic, but I actually think all of those things were happening. They were just underground. I think where we are right now is I don't think more is happening. I think we know more.

Mm-hmm.

And because we know more, There is both a societal and an individual and an organizational response happening in waves, and it's not happening in the same places, you know, in the same way in all these places. But we are— we are starting to crack open and understand what's under the floorboards and what's behind the curtains. And that's— As overwhelming as it can feel and as shocking as it can feel. It's the only way to actually deal with it is to bring this behavior into the light so we can actually see it and understand it in order to create a solution for it. So I think it's happening societally, you know, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Time's Up. We have— there are movements afoot that are trying to address it. And because they are societal issues, not just organizational issues, it will be a long time before we see, I think, the systemic changes we want to see. But we have to engage.

You know, you have a good point. I like to say, because I'm a graduate of the New School, and so we were taught that the answer is the beginning of the question.

Oh, I love that.

Thank you.

I own it. Answer is the beginning of the question.

Yes, I trademarked it, and it's because it really represented my education at the New School. We were taught to constantly ask, not just be happy with an answer.

Yes.

And it wasn't in a contentious manner. It was really sort of based upon the 5 Whys of TQM. Yep. To get you to the truth. And if with what's going on with sexual harassment and all the Black Lives Matter, if we don't ask the questions, we'll never get to solution.

Absolutely. And if we try to go to, you know, solutions too quickly where we are oversimplifying, and that's, I think, That's, I think, the biggest risk I'm seeing in organizations is conceptually, I think people understand the complexity of organizational life, the complexity of trying to be a successful professional, the complexity of trying to be a successful leader. However, we're still— we're nodding to that complexity conceptually, but our solutions are still event-based.

Yes.

We go very quickly to solution. We want the silver bullet. So of course, you know, in our industry, there's the next book, the next movement, the next thing that's going to answer all of our ills and the miracle will occur. And that's really not the way it's going to happen. We have to be strong enough and committed enough.

Yeah.

to stick with the discovery process and then to understand that the work, the work of an organizational life is an organizational lifetime-long work. The work of an individual leader, leadership development is a career-long commitment to your development. And if we understand that, then it will be a part of the way we live organizational life. We're not there yet.

You know, you're so, so on target. I'm going to end with asking you one challenging question, and then I'm going to look forward to your speaking at the MECO Leadership Conference in May.

Yes, I'm really looking forward to it.

May 21st to May 23rd in Estes Park, Colorado. Before we close, I'd like for you to define the word Oh, that's a beautiful question.

I'm not sure I'll do it justice, but we work a lot. You can't see my whiteboard, but on my whiteboard are the words wisdom, courage, and compassion. And since for many people around the world the Easter holiday is coming up, I guess I would call it in part our organizational holy I love it. For us in that space, compassion is— it starts with empathy, so the ability to truly be connected to what is happening, whether it's in your empathy for yourself or empathy for another. It goes beyond empathy in that you want to do something that nourishes the being, right? You want to take action. You want to enact something that improves or honors or respects or nourishes. So I think it starts with the ability to put yourself in the other person's shoes and relinquish the judgment. And the completion of that experience is, and how do I serve you? And we ask that of ourselves, and we ask that when we are in connection with each other.

I think that's so important, and I think, you know, this series is to help stakeholders in developing their leaders, and I think that the things that we've discussed today certainly gives them a foothold into that path. Thank you so much.

CB, my pleasure. I'm really looking forward to seeing you in Colorado. I'm Very much looking forward to participating in the conference.

So thank you, Tricia. Bye for now.

Bye for now, CB.