Contextual Intelligence and Leadership: Matt Kutz

This is the Chris Project, where we discuss mental wellness, self-awareness, and mindset with entrepreneurs and experts. Set your perceived ideas and biases aside and let's go on our journey for yourself, for your family, for the world.

Welcome to another episode of The Chris Project. I am your host, Christian Brim. Joining me today, Matt Kootz of MK Leadership. Welcome to the show, Matt.

Thanks, Christian. Really appreciate it.

I did pronounce that right.

You did. Yes, you did. Okay.

I was second-guessing myself. I do that all the time. In any case, give, give the listeners the abbreviated version of who you are and how you came here.

Yeah, so the abbreviated version is my day job is a professor. So it's— that's what I do during the day. I still am a professor, love it, been doing it for almost 30 years now, teaching a variety of different topics. My actual area of training is sports medicine or athletic training. And recently— recently, I mean the last 8 to 9 years or so— I ventured into the entrepreneurial space of kind of developing my own version of corporate training and leadership coaching. And so that's where I'm at now, about to take another big step. My wife actually just resigned her position at her job to help me full-time, you know, take this business to the next level as best as we can. So there's the short, short, short version. The full version is a 3-beer story.

Yeah, well, I asked for the short version so I can, you know, then go back and pick. So, okay. You said athletic training. Is that like physical or psychological? So I'm thinking PT, like physical training, like manipulating joints and muscles, or is it more psychology?

No, physical. It's physical. So athletic trainer is the person— you could best identify us on any sports event or venue when somebody gets injured on the field and you see the person run out onto the field. They usually— the commentators and the sportscasters and stuff will say, oh, the the sports medicine team or the physicians or doctors are running out on the field. No, that's the athletic trainer. And then they do a quick evaluation assessment and determine if they need to go on to see a physician or not. Or the concussion protocols everybody talks about when they're watching an NFL game, those are all governed by athletic trainers and administered by them and things like that. So yeah, it's very much the physical rehabilitation, diagnosis and evaluation of injuries, eval, and then rehabbing those injuries, return to play decisions, things like that?

I hope that it has progressed from my experience, you know, 35+ years ago in high school where our trainer, his answer was one of two things, tape it or ice it.

I got that, tape it or ice it. I wore a t-shirt in college when I was training 20 years ago that said, "Just ice it." It has progressed dramatically. And that's actually a fantastic question. I'm glad you asked because it has, progressed, uh, it just exponentially, just because now you have to even have a master's degree in athletic training. You can't even— you, you can't do it if you don't have a master's degree and a state license credential. You're licensed by the state. Same thing a physician, a nurse, a chiropractor, an osteopath would have to do. And then also a national certification, all of those things. Yeah, it's advanced dramatically. In fact, we no longer actually even preach just ice it anymore. Research has come out. It's good advice. It is. You can never hurt something by icing it. That's actually true. But it's not as helpful as we once thought. So that is another thing. But yeah, no, it has grown substantially.

So what's the distinction, just from my own understanding, between athletic training and, say, physical therapy?

So the emergency management care, that's, that's the big difference. Um, another matter of fact, I happen to be the president, incoming president, of the World Federation of Athletic Training and Therapy. And, um, and, and all around the rest of the world, they would call what we do very similar to either athletic therapy or, uh, sport physiotherapy. Now, physiotherapy is a different discipline, uh, entirely, but it's, it's a cousin too. So we're kind of cousins in that space. And, and so, yeah, it's similar to that. The difference would be we do a little bit more, a lot more of the emergency management care at the beginning where physiotherapists do a little bit more of the after-emergency care kind of treatment intervention.

So it's mostly like sticking the bone back under the skin. That's kind of what I'm thinking.

Correct. Correct. We need physicians to help us with that.

Yes, pretty much.

Yes.

Okay. So, all right, you've built this business. Did you use that education background to build the consulting business?

100%. Yeah, no, 100%. In fact, I'm one of those people who often say everything that I learned about performance enhancement in the physical space, I've been able to translate over into leadership enhancement. Management, or what I call the organizational athlete, and use very much the same principles. For example, in an athletic training setting, we, like all other healthcare professionals, use the acronym HOPPS for an evaluation. HOPPS stands for history, observation, palpation, and special tests. And that's how— even when you go to the physician for your regular checkup today, they're going to use a version of HOPPS. What's going on? How you feeling? They're going to observe a few things, take your height, weight, blood pressure, stuff like that. They're going to palpate around. Where does it hurt? Here, there. And then they're going to do special tests, either pull or poke on some bones or whatever, maybe even X-ray, something like that. So I took that same model and applied it to organizational diagnosis or personal diagnosis. How do you diagnose your, your efficiency as an entrepreneur or leader, for example? Take a history, ask about your competition, ask about what brought you to this situation, this space. Why do you think your services solve a particular problem? What is that problem that you're solving, et cetera? Then we observe, we take a landscape shot of our environments, our surrounding. Who are my competitors? Where are they at? What are they doing? How are they doing it? Then we do palpations, we do a couple field tests, we do some focus groups. We see what people are thinking and feeling. We ask questions and then we do special tests. And then we, so we actually offer some services and see how they go, offer a few products, see how it goes. So I kind of made that leap over and used a lot of what I've learned in that, and especially the determination to come back after an injury or after a setback. What do you do after a setback? Well, here's what an athlete does. This is what they need to do. How about we apply very similar principles to What happens when an entrepreneur experiences a setback, a leader experiences a setback? How do you recover from those things? So, yeah, I would say very much what I've learned in that space, I've moved over to this space.

Well, that's interesting because on the surface, I wouldn't have drawn that connection, but you obviously drew a connection. So, how did you get into the consulting side of it? Like, what?

Yeah, so another great question because that's another 2-beer story. So now we're 5 beers into this full story. But, um, but how that worked for me was completely by accident, Christian. And, and, and I was actually— have kind of the professor's dream, as it were, the, the academic's dream— is I actually did some research on leadership behaviors that people practice in every environment that they find themselves in. So that's a little unique because most of the stuff you're going to read on leadership and leadership thinking and behaviors are idiosyncratic. Well, if you're in retail, you need these skills. If you're in politics, you need these skills. If you're in government, whatever, you know, you need these different skills for different industries. Manufacturing, for example, needs another type of skill. And I wasn't interested in the nuances of what each place— I wanted to know are there universal skills that are used across the board in every space by everybody, regardless of context? So I was able to identify those through a few rounds of different research projects that I was doing. And so I wrote an article on it. And I wrote an article in a business journal, which was strange for me 'cause I'm working as an athletic trainer at a D1 institution, you know, doing that kind of thing, just the traditional sports med thing. And I wrote this piece and lo and behold, about a year or two even, After I wrote that article, a huge Fortune 500 company, actually at the time they were a Fortune 50 company, and read the article. That's a whole nother 2 beers to the story of how they even found it in a healthcare journal. But at any rate, they found it and they're like, and I called it, by the way, contextual intelligence. And what is contextual intelligence and how to, the things that people use across settings and industries are the set of 12 behaviors that collectively result in, again, what I named contextual intelligence. And they read the article, they called me, you have to come speak to my team about this. I've never read anything like this. I've never heard anything like this. This is the next leadership mega insight kind of a thing. And I'm like, okay. So I did and they helped me. I didn't know what I was doing. Like I said, I was, taping ankles and doing rehab injuries. Icing them. Yeah, and icing them in big ice buckets, you know. And so I don't know what I'm doing. They invited me in to do this little talk to their team, and I turned out to be a much bigger deal than I thought it was going to be. And next thing you know is they're like, well, we need to— we want to hire you to come in and work with our team to develop these 12 attributes that you've identified. And So I did, and that launched me. Anyways, it was a big company. So they're like, when people find out that you're working for us, you know, blah, blah, blah, they're going to give you credibility, right? Instant credibility. And that was my very first client. And so that's exactly what happened. They actually encouraged me. Could you have a book on this? I'm like, no, just the article. Well, write a book. So I did a Kinko's version of a self-published little book, which is basically embarrassingly rookie, but it did amazing. They bought 600 copies and then I turned it into a little self-published book. It sold 3,000 copies. Eventually was picked up by a publisher. And then a few years back, it was Leadership Book of the Year for innovation and cutting-edge perspective. And second edition was actually just released September, just a couple months ago. And exciting. And that's what launched me into the space. All of a sudden they were right. People are like, who's this Matt Kutz guy and what's this contextual intelligence? If you guys are using them, then we want to use them. And so that's how my first 3 clients were Fortune 500 companies. And, and now it's just a side hustle still that I do because I love teaching. I'm not going to leave that. But, uh, but that's kind of how I got into the consulting training space.

So if you're looking at your entrepreneurial journey and/or any of the people that you've worked with, obviously not the Fortune 50 or 500 people because that's more enterprise corporate stuff, but like entrepreneur founders, what are some of the common things that you've seen or experienced in applying, where applying your principles have helped? That was a long question.

Yeah, no, I think I get it. I can tell you this. The executive management teams that I've worked with after our training or whatever is over, our conversations, what have you, there is definitely a common thread here. And what they have said is, thanks, Matt, that was great. 'But here's what's interesting. Nothing that you said,' and I know I'm probably getting myself in trouble, or not pitching my business very well, but they said, 'Nothing that you said was rocket science. It's like everything you've said, I've always known in my heart or in my gut that it's true. But what you did was amazing in another kind of a way. You've given me a language to communicate what I've always known to be true in my gut, but could never articulate.' to my team or to the people around me. You've given me that language, and that in and of itself is a tremendous asset because now we can be on the same page using the same language, using the same terms, and knowing what we mean. And that has been a tremendous resource and help to me. And what they're talking about there is my language around contextual intelligence and what it looks like, what it is. How it behaves. Contextual intelligence is rooted in a 3-part model, what I call 3D thinking. 3D thinking stands for the 3 dimensions of time in this case. So, not like 3Ds, but 3-dimensional thinking. And 3-dimensional thinking is the simultaneous use of hindsight, insight, and foresight. So, hindsight being, what did I learn from the past? What mistakes have I made from the past? What benefits, good things have happened in my past that shape what's going on today? Insight is what is going on today, what's actually happening in real time in my life in these moments, 7 seconds in my future and 7 seconds in my past is what most psychologists consider the immediate moment. So, what is actually happening right now? What is coming to bear on my decisions right now. And then foresight, of course, it's pretty self-explanatory. That's the vision, the aspirational identity. Where do you want to be? How do you want to get there, et cetera? And when we think of those three dimensions as equal inputs into the decision-making process, you find that you are much more likely to make a better decision because you're considering more variables than you normally would have beforehand. So most people statistically overemphasize hindsight. Yes. Few people actually emphasize insight at all. And those executive senior-level leaders, the visionary type leaders, overemphasize foresight. So the goal here is to get all 3 time orientations to be represented equally in your decision-making process. And of course, we talk about the— I've developed an instrument. This is the other big part of the entrepreneurial thing is I developed an assessment that can help you see that. It's a 48-item quiz you take or questions you answer, and they expound on how frequently you practice each of those 12 behaviors. And coincidentally, it works out statistically or through the research that of the 12 behaviors, 4 of them are insight behaviors, 4 are foresight, 4 are hindsight. So we can look at how frequently you practice each of those 48 behaviors, and then I can extrapolate from that, oh, well, you're really weak in your foresight, and here's where you're weak. These— of these 4 behaviors, 2 of these you don't do very frequently. And I could do that for individuals and the whole team, and I can say your department is foresight-oriented. That's why you're missing out on this market share because you're not thinking about older users or whatever it might be. And so that's kind of how we use the model.

Well, that's brilliant. I think oftentimes we have this understanding, we have intuition, learned experience. It could be any of it. But like you said, they reflected back to you that it was like, yeah, I knew this, but I didn't have a way to communicate it. Right. And I find that oftentimes those deep truths are similar between people, but there isn't that common language. And when someone presents you with a common language, it really clarifies things and you get traction on it. Yeah. My recent— this year, my recent epiphany was I always understood that my behavior was largely controlled by things other than my rational thought. And I had a coach. It wasn't a personal coach. He was presenting at a group of entrepreneurs. And he said, well, he said, you know, he did this graphically and it really resonated, but I'll try to describe it. He said, you know, most of your thought, most of your actions, most of your words come from subconscious routines that could be described as habits or beliefs, etc. You know, we think that we're acting out of our conscious brain, but we're not. There's only a very small part of it that's really conscious. And the ability to bring that subroutine up into the conscious and evaluate it, or even just be aware of it, like that it exists— like, you're, you're saying this, you're doing this, you're feeling this, you're acting like this. Because of something that's not conscious, that clarity allowed me to say, yeah, I knew that, but I wasn't able really to communicate it that way. And that was very helpful. The second thing I'd say about what— well, actually, it's really a question. So when you talk about present time, Does that include intuition, like what your gut feels, or is it just an observation of fact?

Yeah, so that's a great question and it's a perfect lead-in to what I would like to say next. And that is yes, very much so, because of those 12 behaviors— talk about insight, for example— they are all predicated on what I call 3 meta skills. And so we won't describe meta skills other than to say meta skills are a combination of soft skills and hard skills. And so when you, when you are operating both in the appropriate soft skills that you need to be successful and the appropriate hard skills that you need to be successful, what comes out of that is what's called a meta skill, something you are uniquely good at that you manifest by the combination of those 2 things. In order to practice contextual intelligence correctly, especially insight, like you just asked about, the meta skill that's associated with that is tacit knowledge. Now, what's interesting about the concept of tacit knowledge is it is the scientific term for what we would say colloquially as wisdom or intuition is the two things. So anytime you want to look up scientific literature on the concept of intuition or wisdom, you need to type in tacit knowledge.

And that was not what I was going to go with, but yeah.

So, but tacit knowledge is the word that psychologists and sociologists use to describe the phenomenon of intuition. So in order to use insight correctly, yes, you need to be very adept at tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge defined is the things that you know to be true believe to be true and like a faith religious belief to be true. I know this is true. But then someone asks you why or how come or where did you learn it? The answer is, I don't know. I just know this is right. I just don't know where that came from. And it's the domain of expertise. So experts and thought leaders kind of live in this tacit knowledge realm, which is why they make the worst professors and teachers because when you ask an expert how to do something, they'll say, "I don't know, just experience. Just keep trying, you'll get to it." Whereas someone who's a little bit more novice, maybe they'll call them proficient. Someone who's very proficient can show you, "Oh, this is what I did to do this. Do X plus Y and it leads to Z," you know, kind of thing. Experts don't do that. Experts won't tell you, "Do this, do that, then you'll get this." Experts are like, Well, I don't know. It's a little bit of this. It's a little bit of wing bat in the stew, a little bit of eye of newt, a little bit of hair. You know, you mix it all together and that's kind of what you get. That's what experts do. And they have a hunch that this is going to lead in the right direction. What they can't communicate is where that hunch came from. You know, I'll give you an example. Early on in my career, not early on, I was 10 or 15 years into my career when I was working a football game as an athletic trainer. And I was standing with somebody who was observing me because they were thinking about maybe getting into the profession or whatever. And one of the athletes got hurt returning a kickoff. He planted, he cut, he rolled, and then he falls down, grabs his knee. And I looked at— there's a woman in this particular case— I looked at her and said, "He just tore his ACL." And she looked at me like I had 6 heads. You know, "How could you? You don't know that." I mean, that's what she said to me. "You don't know that." And I said, "Yes, I do." kind of a thing. And, and we got a little, little argument there for a moment. But meanwhile, he's rolling out on the field out there. So we go out there and doing our evaluation, took him anyways. The next day he was in surgery for a torn ACL because he did in fact tear his ACL. As I was following up with her about it, she was insistent to know, how did you know that? You didn't do a clinical exam. You never asked him one question. You never palpated anything. You didn't get an x-ray. You didn't have an MRI. You know, how did you know that? And I just looked at her like, and I said, I don't know, I just knew. You know, that's tacit knowledge. Now, when you unpack that at a deeper level, which is what Malcolm Gladwell did in his book Tipping Point, he talks about this idea of thin slicing. And basically all tacit knowledge is based on a whole bunch of years of experience stacked on top of one another. You're not even aware that you're going through files in your mind of all these different experiences that you had because it happened so quickly. And so because of that reality though, tacit knowledge can be learned. You can accelerate it despite your youth because we all are not novelty, so to speak, if you're a novice. We all know people who have an uncanny wisdom or an uncanny inspiration or intuition despite only being being 26 years old or whatever, you know, how do they get that? Well, they've learned this over the years through this use of intuition, wisdom, or again, tacit knowledge. So, to practice the art of insight, you know, knowing what's going on in real time, yes, you do have to have a strong element of intuition or tacit knowledge that can be developed. That's one of the things I do in my workshops are show you how to develop that insight, that intuition.

That's very interesting. So, okay, you said that a lot of people gravitate to putting too much emphasis on past experience. Yes. And you also said that visionaries tend to put too much emphasis on foresight. Yes. To me, you know, thinking back about my own experience, I've experienced both where, you know, where I've relied, you know, too heavily on either of those. I think when I'm relying too heavily on past experience, it's when I am acting out of Fear.

Fear. I was gonna, I was gonna interrupt you and say fear, right?

But yeah, right. Okay. And, and then the flip side of it is that when I'm, I'm looking towards the future, foresight too much, it's maybe the opposite. I, you know, I don't know if you want to call that optimism. Um, is that scientifically backed up? I mean, is there, is there It totally is.

Yes. And I'll say this because when you look back in the past and frame through the lens of fear, the word for that is rumination. We ruminate. Yes. And we are like, yeah, what if this happens? Remember last time that happened? And this could go really, really bad kind of a thing. And that's ruminating. And that's what we tend to do. Rumination is stuck in the past. Whereas foresight, on the other hand, the word I like to use, and I use it in the book, is aspirational identity. So, when we think about the future, we generally think new things, positive things, exciting things. Boy, wouldn't it be nice if kind of a thing. In fact, I go through great lengths in my book and in my workshops to distinguish foresight from fantasy just for that reason. 'Cause a lot of us confuse foresight with fantasy. And we think, boy, wouldn't it be nice if I had a golden parachute out of this thing right now? Or wouldn't it be nice if when I retire, I can get a lake house or a beach house or whatever it might be, finish my novel, finish my doctoral degree, whatever it might be. And we think about it and then we follow it up immediately with, Well, I can't because, and I call it the I can't because clause. And that's how you know, well, that's how I know if someone is operating between fantasy and foresight. I'll ask, what are your goals? What are your ambitions? What do you want to do? How do you want to be there? How do you want to get there, et cetera? And they'll lay out this elaborate detailed plan. And then they'll say either to themselves or out loud even, yeah, but I can't because, or this won't happen because. And that's when we have to stop and say, okay, wait a second now. Let's stay in the realm of foresight here and develop a plan to get there as opposed to developing excuses as to why you can't achieve that or what it— because what that is, it's the current projection of your current moment. People have a very difficult time, an incredibly difficult time, I'll actually even say, of looking at themselves in the future as different than they are now. Most people can look at the future and see the world differently than it is now, but they place themselves as they are now in that different future, and they don't know what to do with it because it's not compatible. The real trick to foresight is understanding that you will also be a completely different person in that aspirational future. So what will you look like there? And then what are you going to do to get there? And then that helps them overcome the immediate obstacles in there that are in their way, because the obstacles they see now are the obstacles that they will always assume are there. So that's a big part of the foresight piece. To the hindsight piece of that fear part, we just have to be open, vulnerable, and aware of our own insecurities, our own biases. The, the thing that I work very very diligently to do with people who are ruminating and who are really sticking to the hindsight bias, it's called, is the idea that we— A, the past is already the past. It means you can't change it. But again, what we do is we go back and we keep seeing ourselves in the past as the same person we are now, again, not realizing that we were also different back then. So, if we can get them out of that space as well, it helps them to see the value in all 3 spaces. And I very much liken it to the Ebenezer Scrooge story. You know, I thought it was an interesting idea when I had it, but then a few years ago, I was watching it at Christmas time with my family and I realized this is what Charles Dickens is talking about. He's exactly saying, listen, Ebenezer Scrooge, this crotchety old man, is not practicing hindsight, insight, and foresight correctly. He needs 3 Christmas ghosts to come in, recalibrate his past, identify his present, and help him see a different future. And that's what we need. We can't do this 3D thinking thing without help.

That's a fascinating insight because you're exactly right. The constant that we assume is ourselves. Right, when it's not. And I've lived enough life, uh, to, to recognize that. But like, you know, I, I can sit there and look at, you know, my, my, uh, 25-year-old self and be like, I don't know that I really identify with that person anymore. Like, I'm not that— it's clear I'm not that person, right? Except that it feels like it is because it was you and those are your memories and those your your experiences, but objectively you can look back and say, well, like, uh, that's not that— I'm not that same person. If, if I had been put in that situation going backwards, I would not make the same decision or choices. It's very clear, right? Um, I hadn't really thought about looking at it forward, but it absolutely comports with my experience and beliefs. That if you want something to be different, I think a lot of people start focusing on external things like this, this, this, this, and this have to be different for me to achieve what I want rather than starting with the internal work. I reference Dan Marcos, he is a scaling up advisor in San Antonio, Texas, I believe. And he wrote an article many years ago that I go back and read, you know, at least once a year. And it's essentially— I think the title is You Have to Grow Yourself to Grow Your Company. And it's, it's kind of a roadmap of how the company evolves over time and what you need to be as the founder leader for those different stages. And so like, if you, if you're not willing to progress personally, uh, change your skill set, change your mindset, um, you, you can't be what your company needs to be, and therefore the company's growth is capped. Yeah, like you can't go past the founder.

Um, so that, that, that's exactly what I think you're describing, and that is exactly what I'm describing. When most people think about the future, like we said, we we envision a different environment. I'd be in a different house, I'll be in a different state, you know, this kind of thing. Same wife, but I'm— same wife, but, but I'm gonna be the same person. And no, it actually works the opposite of that. You've got to recognize that you're going to be different, you're going to want different things. And that's why it's so hard to forecast. That's why it's so hard, or so easy, to fall into fantasy and so difficult to get into foresight. Because fantasy Fantasy includes a different future with the same self. Foresight includes a different future and a different self in that future, and then what I need to do to get there. And that's incredibly difficult to do, but I think a critical discipline that we need to be able to adopt. And again, we need help to do that. And going back to your example of my 25-year-old self, it's very, very popular practice to say, all right, write a letter to your 18-year-old self. What would you encourage your 18-year-old self to do or whatever? Not so much talk to your 80-year-old self. Now I'm 53, so let's just say, what's your 70-year-old self look like? And we do that, but not as much as going back and what would your 53-year-old self tell your 23-year-old self, so to speak. And we have a hard— it's easy to do. And the reason is because we recognize we're not the same person. Christian Brim. But see, we say that, but we don't really believe it. The best example of that is the psychology research on personalities. You know, we were raised and grew up in a world where this is my personality and that personality goes with you everywhere you go. I'm an extrovert, I'm an introvert, I'm a whatever, a feeler, a judger, I'm an I if you're a DISC person, Enneagram, whatever it might be. I'm a this and this is who I always am and you I can't help that. Sorry, it's who I was born to be. That's actually totally bunk. And there's some tremendous new research coming out that shows personality changes over time. And we know that because you look back at your 18-year-old self, your 20-year-old self, you're like, yes, I am not the same person. What I liked then, I don't like now. How I would have responded then, It's not how I respond now. How I would have taken that comment now versus then isn't the same thing. You have changed. Your personality has changed. But all the research up until the last decade has only looked in small bite-sized chunks. So we— the longitudinal studies, the best one is a 77-year study on personality. And what they found, what they reported originally was personality doesn't change. And the reason they did that because they checked someone at 8 years old, made a personality check, and they checked them again at 9, and they compared 9 to 8. Not a significant change. So personality must stay the same. Then they checked 10 to 9, not a significant change. So it must have stayed the same. Then they checked 10 to 11, you know, 9 to 10, to 9, 11 to 10. And you see where I'm going. And then they realized, so personality never changes. They're the same every time, or at least the change is not significant. Well, only again, literally 8 years ago or so did they get that same data back out and they looked at. Well, look at the person at 77 years and look at them in 8 years, and these— all these tiny little non-significant changes from year to year end up being a catastrophic monumental change over 50 years or 60 years even. And that's exactly what they found out. Now they're realizing, oh my goodness, we've had this wrong for decades. People's personalities do change. And, um, and that's why CI Contextual intelligence is so important because it's not your personality, it's not even your charisma, whatever it might be, that influences the culture. You know, it was Drucker that said years ago, strategy eats breakfast for lunch, or culture eats strategy for breakfast. And we have always thought, well, the leader sets the culture of the personality of the, and the personality of the organization. That's not true. Context does. Your environment does. Your setting does. Your current situation does. And when we can learn to see the world through the lens of context and through the lens of our hindsight bias, which most people do, we actually begin to see a different world and can now act more appropriately based on the conditions we're in right now.

Okay, let me tug on that a little bit further. You're saying that the leader doesn't set the culture, the context does. Can you elaborate on that?

Yeah. So, so take COVID, for example. I don't care how progressive a leader was, how insightful a leader it was, whatever. There's nothing they could do about the context of the moment.

Okay.

The ethos of the time, the zeitgeist, as the Germans would say. You know, and so that is actually the driver of what people feel, what people understand. They don't come to work because of a great work culture. They come to work because of what the context demands of them at the time. They are not there because they love you or your vision or your mission or even the product you make. Let's be honest. They are there because they have bills to pay and they need resources. They have a family. To feed, et cetera, things like that. That's the context. And when the, when the economy goes up, when the economy goes down, the work culture shifts. It's not when the president comes in with a bad mood or the CEO comes in having just had a fabulous weekend in Vegas and won a million. All of a sudden, you don't see the morale of the organization shift with the mood or even who the leader is. You could change CEOs, you can change leaders, and generally the morale and the culture stay very similar. They might say, we need a new CEO because we need to reset the culture. It doesn't happen like we think it happens. Even in the sports world, the culture is still pretty much the same. But what does change the culture or the climate of an organization is the mood swings of society. It's the greater, grander culture. Who's in admin? Who's in government? Who's the administration? Are, you know, this kind of thing. What are the rules being in place that no one can control? Those are what set the culture and standard predominantly. Am I saying the president or the CEO doesn't have an impact? No, I'm not saying they do not have— they have an— they do have an impact, but they are not the tone setters by themselves exclusively. In fact, there's a greater influence on the context that dictates the appropriate behavior. And, well, I'll leave it at that and see if that— what that brings up.

Yeah, no, that answers it. I mean, so I would agree with that because I think culture is really— I mean, you take it outside of business and put it in a community or a country or whatever, the culture is the shared values, right? Like, and And so if you have more than an organization of one, it's, it's going to, it's going to involve other people than the founder. And it's going to be limited by its context, right? So, so, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm taking your thought and expanding on it. So like in COVID, like, external factors affect a culture. The culture is still the culture, but there's only so much culture can overcome or deal with, right? Like, contextually, somebody that, you know, you live in a community that follows the Mosaic Law, and they're like, we're not going steal, that's a bad thing, right? But you're in a situation of famine or drought, and you know, you contextually say, you know, I, I got to feed my family, right? You might steal, right? So that culture can't overcome the environment, I guess.

That's a great example. That's a great example. But yeah, that's exactly—

feel free to use it.

Yeah, I will. Thank you. But no, that's, that's what's what's going on. And so this is why contextual intelligence as a general concept now is so important, because this is one of the things that I try to help leaders understand is instead of trying to dictate or establish a culture, why don't you become a reader and discerner of the culture better so that you know which skills to apply when. And I think one of the greatest leadership behaviors, and one that's not talked about as much, is the versatility of the leader to switch leadership styles. If personality isn't permanent, leadership styles are not permanent either. And the best leaders among us understand what— I think it was John Maxwell that said, one of the cardinal sins of leadership is treating everyone the same. Well, I don't think— I know it was John Maxwell that said that. And he said that, and that to me is a tremendous encouragement for what I'm talking about is a truly astute leader understands how each person's history, insight, and their aspirations, their future affects how they do their job every day. So now my job as a leader is to identify with each individual person. And believe me, I know what I'm saying. I know this is incredibly time-consuming. I know it's incredibly difficult to do, emotionally draining like maybe nothing else. And so I know what I'm saying when I say this, but those are what the great leaders do differently than other people don't. It's just easier to come in and say, here's what the culture is going to be. I'm going to set it. I'm going to model it. I'm an example I want everybody to do it like I do it. And that rarely works unless you are such a powerful personality. And those leaders are few and far between, especially in your mid to smaller size entrepreneurial endeavors.

Nick Saban. Nick Saban comes to mind.

Nick Saban could do it. Jack Walsh could do it. You know, Julius Caesar could do it. Very few people can do it like that. But that's the elite, you know, half of a half percent.

Yeah. And I think a lot of people are looking to emulate behavior rather than to learn their own behavior. And so, like, you know, they look at a Jack Walsh or a Nick Saban and they're like, oh, well, I'll do it that way. Right. But, you know, not realizing you don't have the capacity or the gravitas to pull that off.

Like, that's not— that's right. Or the commitment. You know, that it takes to do that. Ironically, you talk about Nick Saban. So in my athletic training days, he was actually one of his first head coaching jobs at the University of Toledo, of which where I was a GA. And, and we'd never crossed paths or anything like that, but his, his way out was my way in. So we actually crossed paths in the athletic department for about 2 or 3 weeks there. Never, never actually, uh, talked to him or met him, but I saw his— the team and how they responded and how they interacted. And to do things like what Nick Saban did— and again, I'm watching from an armchair here— but he had a commitment to his ideas and his way that very, very few people have the ability to commit to. I would— I would—

Yeah, I would— I would almost label it a psychosis. I mean, I'm not a psychologist. Yeah, but, but it, it really has to be that level of commitment. Like, you, you're— you literally don't understand any other way. Like, right. Yeah, fascinating stuff. I feel like we could go on and have some more beers, but unfortunately my time with you, Matt, is up. How do we get in touch with you if we want to learn more about contextual intelligence?

Yeah. So the best place is my website. So MatthewKutz.com or DrMattKutz.com. Two different— same place, but Dr. Matt— D-R-M-A-T-T-K-U-T-Z.com. And on there, there's assessments on there, there's articles on there, my books are on there, my email's on there. So happy to connect with anybody about any of this stuff.

Perfect. Thank you for this. This has been very insightful. Listeners will have Those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. And until next time, remember, you are not alone.