S1E10 Corey-osity Unleashed with Grace Judson

Welcome to Curiosity Unleashed, where we turn bold ideas into action and help businesses and leaders step it up.

We're your hosts, Debra and Ken, obsessed with fresh takes, bold moves, and shaking up the way we lead and work.

Alongside our amazing guests, we'll dive into the good, the bad, and the and the actual what the hell of the workplace, served with a side of sarcasm and a splash of wisdom.

Oh, and fair warning, this is an adult podcast. Expect swearing, like Ken just did, brutal honesty, and the occasional dramatic reenactment of some of the most epic workplace fails we've ever seen.

Or done. So grab your drink, get comfy, and let's unleash some curiosity.

Well, hello everybody. Thank you for joining today. I have the pleasure and the privilege of introducing Grace Judson. Now, this is the part I really like the most in a podcast because I get to embarrass her just a little bit. So here we go with, here we go with the intro. It is such a pleasure for us to introduce Grace Judson, a leadership expert with over 25 years in the corporate world, including senior executive roles at industry giants like EMC Document Sciences and Munich Re America and global consulting for Hewlett-Packard. Grace is a certified coach, mediator, knowledge management pioneer, and author of The Five Deadly Shoulds of Office Politics. I hope we get into that a little bit later on in the conversation. Her passion is helping leaders break free from the shoulds and lead with authenticity awareness, and courage. And if that's not enough, Grace once held the title of fastest knitter in America and competed for the world title live on Good Morning America. So if you need your leadership untangled, she's your go-to.

Good one.

So, uh, Deb, I think you got the first question. Carry on.

I do. And you know, I would love to talk about knitting, even though I do not know how to knit. But, um, Ken, You need to do the special effects with the congratulations for, you know, that's amazing. Congratulations for that. And, but I'll be in the more serious.

There was some controversy around it, but hey.

No, well, go ahead. What was the controversy?

I, it was so long ago. It was just a confusion between the British and the American for the world title in terms of, yeah, it was a long time ago, but yeah.

Goodness, in the middle of controversy, but now you're straightening things out. Anyway, so I'd like to talk about the concept of your book because I just love that idea of the 5 deadly shoulds of office politics. It's just such an interesting topic. So what do you mean by that? And what do you help leaders with when it comes to these deadly shoulds?

Well, without going— I mean, we don't have time to go into all 5 of them. But basically, the idea is that there are some There are some beliefs which are, that I call the shoulds, around how things should work within an office. And part of that has to do with things like, I should be recognized for the work that I do just without having to self-promote. And especially as women, you know this, Deborah, as women that, you know, keeping your head down and just doing really excellent work does not get you the recognition or the promotions or the raises or any of the things. I was at a conference once many years ago where it was a panel discussion of women, and one of them actually said, just keep your head down and do the work. And I had to practically physically— yes, Ken, exactly.

Control yourself.

I had to physically hold myself in the chair to not leap out and scream, no. So there are things that we believe about how about how our relationships with people should work that just really aren't necessarily true. And one of the things that I really talk about in that book is that office politics are not necessarily a bad thing. We have political— and I don't— politics, of course, is a bad word these days. It is.

We won't be talking in great deal about politics today. No, no, no, no. We have—

anytime we have We have multiple people, whether it's in the office or elsewhere, there are political machinations and gyrations going on. The question is, how do we work within that to make it a positive thing instead of a negative thing?

I think it's good. I think, you know, the more we can talk about all the things that people believe in and breaking them, you know, breaking them apart, ripping up the playbook, whatever it's called, I think that's fantastic. And I love the idea of the shoulds because it makes it a bit more a bit more fun. That'll be a topic for another one. There we go, Ken. Put it on the schedule. We'll go through all 5 of them. Watch this space.

I really do want to get you back, Grace, to talk more about that because, because we have so many programmings built into us. Yes, we've been told since early on that we're— that are just not conducive. They're just not ideal, not fit for purpose.

They're not at all. And Yeah.

Great. I'm hungry for that one. I'll be back in touch on scheduling.

That's the teaser. There we go.

Yeah, that's the teaser. Okay. Moving on. One of the next things I saw in your writing was when teams are stuck in old habits or resistant to new ideas, what helps leaders break through that resistance without pushing people too hard?

I talk about the three resistance monsters. Primarily when it comes to change, but it really applies to pretty much anything. The first one is, I want to help. I see problems with whether it's the change that's happening or whether it's with process, how things are working out. I see problems and I have ideas about how to fix them. And I'm worried that if we don't fix them, things are going to go badly. As the British delightfully say, they will go pear-shaped.

Yeah.

And that is somebody that you need to talk to and find out, you know, what is the problem here? What is it that you see? The second one is what I call the anxious monster. And that is somebody who is concerned for their own well-being. They, especially again in change, because a lot of what I work with is change, change initiatives, They are worried about, I mean, we all know that when change is afoot, layoffs often happen. They may be worried about having to learn something new and whether they can or not. They may be worried about, you know, what is the actual rollout schedule for this because nobody's communicating effectively. So that's the anxious monster. The third one is what I call the combined one because they have ideas about the change as a whole. They also have concerns for themselves. The thing of it is, is in every case, What we need to do is find out what's going on. You know, I have done some interviews and research. I'm kind of on again, off again writing a book about change and change leadership. It's a little bit on the back burner right now. I got kind of like stuck with it. But some of the things people have been told, you know, you're either— the train is leaving the station, you're either on it or you're off. There are plenty of people who would love to have your job. I mean, it's horrifying, but steamrolling people through change does not work. It just makes them resist harder. So there are certain things, there are some conversational tools that I teach. I think the one thing that is probably the most interesting is the simple question, what's the worst thing about this for you? Because if you ask that, I mean, there are a whole host of reasons that have to do with how people process emotion versus logic. And if you ask them that sincerely, you will learn a lot and you will also bring the temperature of the conversation down because you're not steamrolling them. It's that simple.

Not only that, we have an outsized fear of the unknown.

Yeah.

You know, you watch a horror movie and about 15 minutes in, you get your first glimpse of the horror of the baddie. And then after that, it's like, oh, well, you kind of laugh a little bit when they come on stage and, you know, whatever. So the same has to apply, I think, in a corporate world where if you have, if you think something is happening, but you're not sure, now that is terrifying. But when you find out exactly what's going to go wrong, it's like, well, I could deal with that.

Right, exactly. The, the, I mean, look, let's face it, we are products of many, many, many, many, many, many years of evolution. And the brain is wired, neurologically speaking, the brain is wired to look for problems because the person who just went happy-go-lucky around the savanna got eaten by the saber-toothed tiger. But the person who was looking for what was about to go wrong saw it and ran away, or, you know, dived into a cave or whatever. So, the brain is neurologically wired to look for problems. We have a negativity bias.

Just have to look on social media and what are the types of posts that more people engage with. And it's the negative ones and not exactly the positive ones. So, can I just jump up, jump into the conversation on change? One of the things that really pisses me off about change is that a lot of leaders jump right into the how. So, this is how it's going to impact you, or this is how we're going to manage it. But they don't really explain the why. I mean, what are your thoughts on how do you help leaders when it comes to really focusing on the why?

I coined a new term probably, I don't know, maybe a year ago. Time is wonky. Communi-telling.

Okay, I like that.

Everybody kind of sort of knows that you're supposed to communicate about change. I did meet one change consultant who said that she tells her clients to just jump in and do it. And I sort of scraped my jaw up off the floor and backed quietly away. So, people do know. You got to tell people what's going on. By the time leaders have gotten to the point of really being ready to roll the change out to the teams that are going to implement it, they're ready to move on. They know it really well, and they're ready to move to the next thing, the next priority on their list. It's the curse of knowledge at that point. And if you don't give people the why, you aren't giving them the context within which the change needs to happen. I tell a completely stupid, silly, not stupid, silly story about tomatoes. Where I went to a party and somebody said, you know, as one does, one says, "How can I help?" And she thrust a knife, a cutting board, and some tomatoes at me and said, "Cut up the tomatoes." And I was like, "Okay, do you want chunks for salad or slices for sandwiches? Because chunks don't go real well on sandwiches and slices fall apart in salad." It's the context. You have to give people the context and you have to tell them If we don't do this, here are the negative consequences.

Yeah.

So, it's both ends of the why, if you will.

It's interesting. When I was working in a global HR role, I did an analysis of all of the employee benefits. And I ended up taking away one of the favorite employee benefits. But it's because it didn't align with our strategy. We were like spending money, a lot of money, and only 10% of the employees actually received it. And when I got rid of it, I explained the why. And I had people come up to me and say, "I don't necessarily love it, but thank you so much. If I was in your shoes, I would have done the same thing," which to me is success. That is absolute success when they buy into that change.

That leads really, really well into the next question.

You're welcome, Ken. I set you up there.

Thank you.

No way.

So, how can leaders make sure that everyone feels truly heard and valued, even those that don't speak up very often, the ones that keep their head down?

I would say two things. One is if you're in a meeting and you know that there are people who aren't talking, ask. Ask them specifically for input. Hey, Ken, we haven't heard from you. Well, no, you talk a lot, so that's not going to happen.

You got me. You got me dead to rights. Okay. Okay. Now let me tell you where you're wrong.

I had to slide that in. But ask, you know, Jane, you haven't been talking to— you haven't said anything so far. What are your thoughts on this? Be aware of those who may consider themselves not in the majority. I'll just put it that way. So be aware that people of color, minorities of, you know, whatever type, LGBTQ if they are out in your organization, women, we've, you know, they may not be willing to speak up as clearly. I could go on a whole rant about this thing with the new, not so new buzzword of psychological safety, which often ends up being safe for those of us who look like Ken.

There's more who look like Ken?

Just for the record, Deborah is from Pennsylvania, not Arkansas like us, Grace. So yeah, she hasn't quite gotten used to it. We've only been married like 28 years now.

So, Deborah, I gotta ask, are you a Philadelphia Eagles fan?

I was growing up, yes.

My husband and his whole family, yeah, my husband and his whole family are rabid Eagles fans. He grew up very near Pennsylvania. Anyway, so, but the other thing is that when you think you're dealing with a resistance monster, or even when you're not, if you just know that somebody is really smart on your team but is not speaking up, Have one-on-one conversations. Hey, what do you think about this thing? What's going on?

Now, you talked in the previous question about the curse of knowledge or something like that. Did I get that right? And that's where you know everything about a problem. You've already thought about it a lot. You're ready to move to the next phase. And the people you're trying to talk to, my God, they're so yesterday. Read the damn paper. Just come on. Let's go. Let's go. Right?

Right. Right.

But you're not bringing them along. And in the case of these people that have their head down, that don't feel empowered to speak, it's even worse because you're never going to know unless you—

unless you ask.

Unless you stop and make sure that you can go back and bring them along, right?

Yeah, exactly. I listened to a stupid number of podcasts and I heard something the other day that talked about humility is not about being you know, aw shucks. It's about having the confidence to say, you know what? I know a lot about this, but I probably don't know everything. And my team probably knows some stuff and let me ask them.

I find the biggest blocker in that is a change of mindset because I 100% agree with you. And I've seen leaders go through the motions and you know that they don't mean it. And I know like for me, Partly because I remember being trained as a leader, you are the one with the answers. And I had a boss once who told me, "Do not go out and get other people's opinions because that's what I pay you for." So I think if we, to your point, how can we change the mindset of leaders to embrace and to look forward to hearing the ideas of other people?

Yes, yes. Well, and I, long time ago, Alan Alda of M*A*S*H fame, for those of us who are that old, He has a podcast. In one of his very early episodes, he made the point that real listening requires us to be willing to be changed by what we hear. And there's an— I am so awful with names. I immediately forget them when I need them. And I'm totally forgetting this guy's name, but he was a rocket scientist. I can see his face because I've got pictures of him in some of my presentations. And he's Name is gone. But he then went off to be a lawyer and a tenured law professor. And now he writes books. His first book was Think Like a Rocket Scientist. And what he says, and I will butcher the quote now as well as forgetting his name, is that people who have different opinions, it's not a question of you're right and they're wrong. They have a different perspective and different beliefs than you do. And you're not seeing that perspective. And that is why I keep coming back to this question of you have to ask the questions. You have to find people. You have to go to your people and ask questions, talk to them, have conversations rather than communica— telling.

Yeah, I think it's brilliant. And, you know, going back to another point that you made just to connect the dots. And when you talked about you've got a diverse workforce, even just how you get them to speak up to you, how you get them to contribute is different because personality styles, culture. I mean, we've all worked in global companies. If I do a feedback survey in one country, there's some countries you would never speak up. Whereas if I had a one-to-one with them, it might be different.

Right, right. Yeah, I did a project last year, a year-long project with an international company. And one of the things that we dove into was identity. And identity cascades. So you've got the company identity, culture, and then it goes down all the way down to the team. But in an international organization, on top of that are the different countries.

I did look it up. I think the author's name is Ozan Varol.

Yeah, that's it. I knew it began with an O. I could not— I kept thinking Omar, and I knew Omar wasn't right.

I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, but I do apologize, Mr. Varol. But yeah, it sounds like that's the person.

Yeah, he's really a fascinating person.

This, this, this need for vulnerability is one of the things that kind of draws me to your, to your writing, Grace. I was blocked in my career, I couldn't get ahead, I couldn't get a promotion, I couldn't get anywhere. And I was working so hard. And I was the smartest guy in every room. And I didn't know that that was my problem until I was in one of those meetings, big old long table, 12 people on this side, 13 people on that side. My boss is over here and his boss is over there. And one of the people that reported to me stood up and said, Ken, you're wrong. And it was like one of those movie scenes where the camera goes—

Everyone got quiet.

It did. It did. They're like, oh God, what's Ken going to do now? Oh God. And I thought about it for a second. I thought, okay, do I really try to play this one out and try to BS 25 people? And I thought, no, no, no, no, you can't. The only way to deal with this one is to go, you know what, tell me what you're thinking. And when he did, and he was right, I had to then go, I was hoping I could really shoot it down, but I finally had to realize, no, no, no, no, I had to say, you're absolutely right. Well, let's do it that way. And I felt like I had been defeated in that particular meeting. But what it meant was that we all moved ahead. We were better off than letting my ego run the situation. It was a better situation.

And you learned something.

I did. And later on, it finally occurred to me, it's really, really simple. I only have the one brain. It's got my heart going and my breathing going. And that's about all it can really handle. How is it going to handle a team of 10 people? I can't make that many decisions. And so by being willing to say, I don't know, all of a sudden we have 11 brains. With 11 different sets of experiences working on a solution.

And that is exactly the point I was making earlier about humility.

What a superpower that was to be able to go, no, I don't know, what do you think?

Yeah.

And to wait until the other people have said what they think before you chime in and say what you think.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, goosebumps. Okay. How can leaders help team members figure out what they really want instead of what they think they're supposed to want? And I have to say, I've changed what I want in my career, in my job, in my life about every 3 to 5 years. Something major changes.

Yeah.

So, I don't think we ever get to a destination where we have figured this out.

No, of course not. I mean, how boring would that be? But I'm not sure that that is necessarily the leader's responsibility. I think as a leader, we can pay attention to the messages and the signals that we're getting from someone. And if somebody is like, I really want this promotion into leadership, let's say, you can lay out the things that they may not be aware of. That leadership entails. But I think it really is more the individual's responsibility to self-inquire and maybe to get therapy. And I say that with a sort of chortle, but I mean that because I think oftentimes in order to disentangle ourselves from the rules, regulations, and beliefs that we acquire as kids, we often need some help to do that. I mean, it's— if I forget, I wish I could remember where I hear some of these things. But somebody on another podcast said, it's really hard to see the picture when you're the one in the picture frame. And I thought that was a great metaphor or analogy, I can never remember which is which, for how difficult it can be to understand ourselves until we've had some practice at it and some experience being guided through it. So is it the leader's responsibility to help a team member understand what they want? You can poke and prod, but I don't think it's your responsibility. I really don't.

I would go farther than that. I would say that it's not possible for the leader to try to figure out, you know, there's no— I've been married to Deborah now for 28 years. There's not a snowball's chance in hell I'm going to be able to figure out exactly what it is that she wants, no matter how many times that she tells me. But I can encourage, I can inquire, I can ask, I can support. I can say, is that really what you want? Because your actions are pointing you in this direction and your words are saying another. So, I think the leaders can be very supportive in the whole exercise.

Exactly.

And I think that's why coaching is so important to have that external perspective. And we, again, we expect leaders to have all the answers. And sometimes, we just need to be quiet and listen and coach and support our employees and drive that shared ownership. Because to me, that is a big shift in the past, we used to say that bosses own things like motivation and engagement. And I've written books on engagement and such. And I want to write a book for employees because employees own it just as much. You cannot expect your leaders to own and drive everything.

Yes. And motivation is a slippery topic anyway. I mean, it's a fickle master if you try to use it for everything. But, and I would also say, that the leader as coach can only go so far because there is a vulnerability requirement in the interaction between coach and individual that may not always be helpful or appropriate within a leader-employee relationship.

Absolutely. And to me, nirvana is having your boss who's acting as a coach and having an external coach. I mean, to me, having both of those people coaching me, it's like I did gymnastics. I'd have one person who was really good at choreography and another person who was really good at technical. And I couldn't ask them both to do it because they were specialists in that. So, it's getting that right mix.

Yeah, absolutely. Exactly.

So, moving on to a couple other things that are even more important during change or everything else as a leader is the whole idea of trust and empowerment. What kind of advice do you give? What type of support do you give in helping leaders understand why it's important and how to trust and empower your people?

Well, if they don't trust, if they don't understand that trust is important, then I'm not sure they're going to succeed as a leader. So yeah, I'm not a huge fan of empowerment because It's a two-sided coin, isn't it? I mean, on the one side, you have to give people appropriate authority and responsibility. And on the other hand, they have to be— another word I'm not altogether fond of— but they have to be a self-starter. They have to be willing to go after what they want, but also to go after the additional responsibility or whatever it may be, and not just be passive about, "Okay, you tell me what to do and I'll do it." Trust, if you don't have it, you're not going to get very far as a leader. And it means being, again, I'm not fond of the idea of transparency because you can't be completely transparent as a leader. There are things that are going to be confidential about what is up, about strategy, about what might be coming down the pike, and so on. But insofar as you can, you build trust by letting people know what's going on and saying, okay, I don't know about this, or I can't say about this, but I will say when I can. And it's about following through on what you, what you say you're going to do. One of the things, you know, I've said a number of times now to have conversations, not just communitelling. But if you have those conversations and you learn things and you don't follow up and take action on those things, that people will not tell you things anymore because you have destroyed trust. Trust takes a long time to build and it is very quick to destroy.

Absolutely. And I, you know, I'm glad that you're shaking up some of these terms because one of the things that gets me really frustrated, going back to empowerment, empowerment is that some leaders think that empowerment is, "Oh, I empowered them. I gave them this project." And I had this with a boss once before. You know, they gave me this project and then they waited for me to fail because they did not give me the support, the information, the feedback, and everything like that. So, I think some people are leaning into empowerment because they're told they need to do it. But then, well, and they get lazy about it, right? Yeah, or that. Yeah, they just throw you in the deep end and like, oh yeah, they'll do it. And then you end up picking up the pieces. So it's balance. Everything that you're talking about, I think, really points to the whole idea of balance.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And you need to be able to delegate appropriately according to someone's skill level and then to support them in, you know, you give them something that's a little more challenging and then you support them in how to get the skills that they need to do that.

Yeah. And it goes back to understanding your people. What's the best way to do that? Again, I go back to my gymnastics days. I was the biggest chicken on the balance beam. I hated the balance beam. So, my coaches knew they had to gradually start me on the floor, then on the little beam, whereas some of the other people on my team would just throw it right away up on the big high balance beam. So, it's understanding the beams of your people.

Yeah. Mentioned something some time ago on LinkedIn about the concept, and I think I wrote an article about it, about the concept of uncertainty tolerance. And somebody commented on that post that it was kind of an, oh wow, thing for her because she said, you know, back when I was leading a team through whatever the project was, I had a very high uncertainty tolerance. If I had recognized that people on the team had a much lower uncertainty tolerance, I would have been more kind.

Now, one other thing about the trust, though, is that it's not a one-and-done kind of a thing.

Oh, hell no.

I have worked for people that, you know, we're all human, we all mess up. And I've worked for people that the first 3 months before you make a mistake, you're a darling, you know, it's a honeymoon period. Yeah, yeah, you're going to be the second coming here. You're really going to make a difference. And then you make a mistake and all of a sudden, that's it. You have now lost my trust forever.

Right, which is ridiculous.

And when you're a manager, when you're a boss, you must be the first to start that trust over again. You have to trust the employee long before they trust you.

Yes, yes, excellent point. Yes.

Okay. So let's see where— oh, okay. So the next question that I have here is what's the most important thing that you've seen great leaders do to inspire lasting change in their organizations? Not just today while we're talking about it, but in a month's time and then 6 months' time and by next year.

I'm not sure I've ever really known any great leaders. That's a slippery— There's another quote from Ryan de Rousseau. There we go. I actually remembered a name that says something along the lines of, you know, there are great leaders who do really awful things, but they are great leaders because they have the following and they have the impact, maybe disastrous impact, nonetheless. Leaders who really have the ability to create the lasting change, I'm going to go back to they, they are the ones who have those conversations and who create modifications based on what they learn in those conversations. You go and you talk to the people, not just the people on your team, but the stakeholders across all the, all the people that are going to be, or all the areas that are going to be impacted by the change. You talk to the stakeholders, the thought leaders, which may not be the leaders, but maybe in the teams, because there are always people in teams that the rest of the team looks to for their opinion. Is this a good thing or not? And you talk to them, you have those conversations, you learn from them, and then you go back and adapt accordingly. And you'll have a better change. It will last longer. And you'll have people behind you on the— who have bought in, you know, who are on your side.

Yeah, it is amazing how much people can be passive-aggressive. When you ask them to do something, "I'm trying," you know, and yet they can put on a good show of trying and still absolutely scupper the effort.

You know, there's another question that I suggest to my clients and students, which is a question you ask yourself when you're faced with somebody like that. And it's a question everybody hates. Why would a reasonable person behave the way they are behaving? And of course, the instant reaction is, they're not reasonable. In their mind, kind of like Ozan Varol was pointing out, they are reasonable. They are 100% reasonable within their context, their perspective, their framework. So why would a reasonable person be doing that? And you can come up with a whole bunch of hypotheses, but then you go and talk to them. And validate the hypothesis with that question. For instance, what's the worst thing about this for you?

And that's got to be really risky because, oh my God, they might actually change my mind. They might change my opinion or my approach or anything. Good heavens, we can't possibly have that.

Yeah, but that's what good leaders do.

Yeah.

And I will say that from a personal perspective, when I have been leading change in organizations, And I have gone through that process, which of course, you know, that's how I developed it. The results were always better than they would have been. 100%. I mean, I left one company after leading a change that there was a lot of resistance to that change. And I went through this process. And after I left that company, even as much as, you know, 8, 9 months, a year afterwards, I'd run into people who were still working there, and to a person, they would say something along the lines of, that was the best thing that ever happened around here. But it wouldn't have been— I'm not patting myself on the back necessarily, because it wouldn't have been if I hadn't gone through that process of talking to people and integrating the things that they saw as being potential problems and how to fix it.

And when you integrated what they said, Didn't it create a whole army of people who now owned a part of it, who wanted to be a part of the solution? Yeah.

Yeah, people love having a hand in the making of the sausage.

You know, it's interesting when you made that very bold statement saying there are no great leaders. And it just, as you were saying it, I was thinking back to myself of great leaders that I've had. And I think there's no perfect leader. So, if I think of great leaders that I've had, but as you were talking, I was thinking about what was the common theme in all of them. And one of my best best leaders was probably— goes back to a word you used earlier, Ken, about humility. And it was this leader knew when they didn't, they couldn't handle it and they'd bring other people in. And they also left our company at a certain point in time because the business got bigger. And they said, you know what? I am not the right person at this time to be a great leader. And to me, that's why I think being a great leader is not perfect.

Yes, that 100% fair. And I just have a sort of visceral problem with superlatives.

It's so black and white. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because you can be— we talk about it in, you know, in our book, in our work, and we talk about being a great boss. And you could be a great boss to one person and a terrible situation and a terrible to another person in a different situation. But, you know, if you can look at it as a challenge, I try to look at it as things like this as a challenge. And figure out how to sort it out so you can be the best that you can be for every—

yeah. And, yeah. But, and, you know, leadership is a huge fuzzy situational gray area.

Yeah.

Always.

Always.

Which drives some people crazy, but there it is. As long as you've got people involved, it's going to be a huge fuzzy situational gray area.

And I don't think even with AI, we're never going to get away from that. We need that huge fuzzy. We're all squishy.

Yeah.

Well, a good friend of mine likes to say we're all an experiment of one. And that is true of people, situations, organizations. Yeah.

You are like the quote master. I'm telling you, I love it. Your brain is just like full of all these quotes. Someday my goal is to be quoted by Grace. There you go. That is going to be on my bucket list.

When you grow up. Yeah, yeah. We'll have to send her a book so she has some material to work with. Yeah. Okay. Shall I move on then, Deb, to the next one? Okay. If you could choose just one leadership habit or building block, and by the way, we've got a couple of building blocks here, just if that helps, right there. If you could choose just one that makes the biggest difference, which one would it be and why?

One? I'm terrible at just one. I never pick favorites because it's always situational.

I'll give you the top 3.

I can, I can do it. I can do it.

Okay.

I would say humility, the way we've been defining it. And because that encompasses so much, right? It means being confident in your own skill and awareness of situations. It means having conversations with people and being willing to be wrong and being willing to to be challenged, you know, appropriately. It means learning to understand your people and recognizing that situations and people are always different and having those conversations. Does that answer your question?

It's bang on. I remember when I first became a manager and I was mystified. I'm treating Bob and Alice exactly the same.

Lord.

And they're not responding. What's going on here?

Oh yeah. Yeah, this is why I go off on rants about leadership style. Don't get me started. You have to, you have to know, again, it's about the humility to understand yourself.

Yeah, it does all start with yourself. Absolutely. So I know we need to wind it down. So I had to pick one last question. I think this is, this is one of my favorites. So how has something unusual or personal in your background, like competitive knitting, influenced your approach to leadership? Yeah. How can we segue knitting, leadership? Yeah, there we go.

I'm not sure I can connect knitting and leadership.

Okay.

Although I do teach knitting, but—

Okay.

Something— Ask that question again. Run that by me.

Is there anything in your background, if you think about this is when the light bulb went off about great leadership. Either you had a great leader, you saw a great leader, something that shaped how you now help people.

I think it was more a question of seeing how people didn't lead.

I knew you were going to say that. Yep.

And recognizing that I have apparently got a skill a talent that I have developed as a skill for understanding people and a curiosity for understanding why people do what they do. And I, you know, which really goes to the heart of what I talk about when I talk about needing, you know, the context, understanding context, understanding the people and how different, like Ken, you were just saying that you did the same thing for two people and they responded differently and not the way you wanted. How we have to understand ourselves before we can really understand other people. And just that was sort of an awareness that I think I've had a fair amount of the time, but that knowing that and then developing it was probably where I get my philosophy around leadership and the fact that leaders We don't just lead in the office. We lead everywhere. How we behave—Deborah, you mentioned online, you know, social media earlier—how we behave everywhere is observed and gives people permission to behave the same way, or conversely, inspires them to not behave that way, or to behave that way. You know, it's, yeah, it's that sense that things really are global.

Now, following on from what you just said, then I just want to make sure that I'm understanding. When, in some cases, when you've been talking, you've been talking about managing or being a boss or whatever. But there you purposely chose the word leader. And to me, it sounds like there's a difference. You don't have to be the CEO to be a leader. You don't even have to be a manager to be a leader.

Is that fair to say? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, we lead in our communities, we lead in our families, and management and leadership are two different things. Deborah, you want another quote? Yeah. One of my all-time favorite people in the world is Rear Admiral Grace Morrow-Morrow Hopper. You know, you know who she is? She is a legend. And She was part of developing the COBOL programming language, and I was a COBOL programmer. But that's not why I adore her. She's smart, funny, and if you are curious about her, Google Admiral Hopper or Grace Hopper and the nanosecond, because there's a beautiful little clip of her teaching a whole bunch, a room full of military men on what a nanosecond actually is. Anyway, she said, and this quote's on my website, on the footer on my website, "You don't manage people, you manage things. You lead people." Absolutely.

It's interesting. One of my books, we have a model called the Engagement Bridge. And we have management and leadership separately. And people would always challenge us. And we're like, they are not the same thing. They're not the same.

No. And I do think that there is a management aspect to people. I mean, I don't think it's quite that cut and dried, but it, it is in many ways.

Now, Grace, you've mentioned— unfortunately, we're out of time. We have to wrap up. Now, you have mentioned that you're kind of working on a book. Are there, are there any projects you want to publicize at this point? Is there any way that you recommend people find you or get in contact with you if they want to hire you or learn from you?

I've got a ton of stuff on my website that you can just download. Some of it asks for the very high price, and I'm actually not entirely sarcastic in saying that, of your email address. And then I, I'm not wildly active on LinkedIn at this point, but you can always find me on LinkedIn. I check in at least once a day just to see what's going on. Those are probably the best. I'm pretty pedantic.

You can't say 'on my website' without actually giving the URL. What's the URL, please? It's a good thing.

Yes, that's not pedantic. That's smart. Of course, pedantic can be smart too.

GraceJudson.com is just my name. Fantastic. Thank you so much for that, Grace. It has been a real pleasure. I wish we could go on more this time, but we can't. So next time we're going to get together again and we're going to have a much more in-depth talk about 'shoulds.' Yeah, sounds like a plan.

Yeah, I think we should. We should.

Oh, there we go.

Oh, you're dangerous. You're dangerous. Thank you, guys.

I'm a, I'm a linguophile or whatever. Yeah, I, I, words are my playground. Nothing wrong with that.

You guys take care.

Thank you very much, Grace.

And that's a wrap on this episode of Curiosity Unleashed. Huge Much thanks to our amazing guests and of course to you for tuning in.

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