264 - The Greatest Shift: From Self-Focused to Outward Mindset in Leadership with The Arbinger Institute's Mitch Warner

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Mitch Warner, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the managing partner of the Arbinger Institute based in the Salt Lake City area. I have been a fan of Arbinger for as long as I've been a peacemaker, which is over 25 years, and I'm honored to have you on the show with me. Thank you so much.

Oh, I'm honored to be here. Thanks, Doug.

Thanks. Let's start off a little bit about your backstory. If we go to your LinkedIn profile, it looked like you went to BYU, but it looked like you also spent some time in New York studying fine arts. Tell us a little bit about how all that led to you being the managing partner of Arbinger.

Yeah, I don't know that either of those two experiences led to this, but I valued both of them, including learning to study art professionally. And then I went into healthcare administration. I really wanted to help people and I wanted to help people in a business format and healthcare seemed like the perfect marriage of those two. And I loved it. I was in long-term care in California and the work, Doug, was was figuring out how to take really underperforming facilities that no management team wanted and to somehow use the ideas that we teach here at Arbinger to help that same group that we had acquired turn these facilities around. I remember the first facility that I was at, we purchased for a dollar. Just nobody wanted these facilities. You take over the facility, and it was so interesting, you would take over a facility and the prior management would tell you as you acquired the facility, hey, here's a list of the 4 or 5 people that you've got to fire if you want to turn this thing around. And of course, the first thing you think is, well, why are they still here? But then you go to work. And the amazing thing about that, Doug, was that same team that this management company didn't want, 4 of the 5 of them became your best performers.

So it's a power of leadership.

It is, it is. Absolutely. It's a power of culture.

That's right. That's right. When I'm called into an organization to help them deal with the chaos that they're dealing with, fights and arguments, the first thing I'm usually called in by HR and I said, have you talked to your CEO about this or your senior team? If they say no, I said, no thanks. I need to talk to the leadership team before I take on an engagement because What you're saying is so true that the chaos in an organization starts at the top.

It does. And it can be turned around too.

Absolutely.

And then it has this ripple effect throughout the organization.

So you, you're in healthcare, you're doing these turnarounds.

Mm-hmm.

You're finding these toxic employees don't turn out to be superstars, not toxic at all. Then what happens?

Because the organization that I was a part of had such a disciplined approach to applying Arbinger's work. To turn these facilities around. Ultimately, they turned around 64-some-odd facilities in their history. Being intimately associated with that work, when the call came from Arbinger to come join the team here, it was a perfect opportunity. I thought, instead of just doing this on my own in the work that I'm doing as an operator, I could help lots of organizations do that work. That was just a really special opportunity. And I've been here for the last 13 years.

Yeah. And so coming back to, are you originally from Salt Lake?

I'm originally from Utah, not Salt Lake, but here in the area.

Nice. Get out of the Bay Area or get out of California and come home. That's right. That's a nice. So you've been with Arbinger. First of all, for people that don't know, tell us a little bit about Arbinger and what it does.

Great. Yeah. Arbinger is a culture transformation organization. We work with organizations to help them transform their leaders at the most fundamental level so that those leaders can transform the culture of their organization and see their organizations become truly excellent. And sometimes that work begins where, you know, thinking about your work, Doug, so much of that work begins often where there's a conflict that is so painful that the organization realizes we can't keep going. And, you know, a lot of the organizations that we work with they're not mired in massive dysfunction. They just know that they could get better. But all of the organizations we work with, whether there's massive dysfunction or they know that they could optimize things if they could just get the culture right, they have to recognize the pain of not doing that work. And then they see through the work that we do together, the power of a culture where people really see each other as people. And that's, that's really the distinguishing feature of our work as opposed to other organizations that do similar work is that Whereas many organizations see the behavioral changes that would have to happen in an organization to see cultural change, we know and therefore focus on the shift in mindset that has to happen in order to get those behaviors to happen in the first place and to get them to stick.

And what— and so what are the typical mindset shifts that you have to have your clients go through?

What we've learned over the years is that the the most important shift in mindset that occurs is in how people see others. Yeah. Now, it always involves how I see myself because those are really two halves of the same coin. If I see you as inferior to me, then I see myself as superior or vice versa. So we're always in relationship, but how I see the people around me in an organization determines everything. It determines everything that I think to do. In order to improve things. If I can't see the people around me as people, then my focus is just here. I'm just inward in my mindset. And that's really the shift is from an inward to an outward mindset, from a focus on me to a focus on how am I impacting everybody around me.

So in my work, I call that listening other people into existence. And I talk about Type 1 listening and Type 2 listening, where Type 1 listening, I'm only focused on my own agenda. In Type 2 listening, my only agenda is to validate and make sure that you feel heard from your frame of reference. Yeah, same thing, same idea, although specific to listening, listening and de-escalation skills. So you've been doing this for 13 years. What does it get you up in the morning and get you excited to go to work?

Oh man, it's change. It's seeing people change, and not just personally, but seeing people fundamentally able to transform their relationships. That is— there's something so powerful about that, whether that relationship was with a boss, with those that report to them, or vice versa, whether that's a parent with a child. We're just— we're one person. So when we begin to see differently, that affects every relationship in our life. We just can't be the same anymore. And then seeing that transformation in relationships than writ large across an organization. When people transform at that relationship level, what happens in an organization? I, I don't know if there's any more exciting work in the world. I love what I do every single day.

It's a blessing, isn't it? Yeah. It is amazing to get up and think about how many people you get to serve today and how powerful their, their lives are going to be as a result of The things they learned from you.

It's, yeah, it's amazing.

It is amazing. I get this, I get the same thrill every day.

And you have people walking into a workshop or something and they're sitting back there and you know, they're like, why am I here? This is such a waste of time. And then by the end, their life is different.

Right.

Because they see different.

That's right.

And all, and so all these possibilities open up that just weren't possible before.

I know. It's an amazing— and for those who have never experienced this, what we're talking about is this transformational experience. Transformational is overused, but it truly is transformational when people walk in the room one way and come out completely different. It's amazing to watch. So Mitch, what do you think it is that's unique about you that you bring to Arbinger that has allowed you and the institute to be so successful?

I don't know if it's anything unique about me. I think if I have been able to bring anything to Arbinger, it's the ability to find really talented people and people that are fundamentally outward. You can't do this work to help other people turn outward unless you're on the journey yourself. You don't have to be perfect. We're all on the journey, but at least people that are self-aware enough to recognize that I'm not there right at this moment. And then you couple that level of self-awareness and humility and drive to, to see my impact and change it with remarkable skill and talent. That's, I think, what I've been able to bring to the organization. And then just the way that these, that these ideas have transformed my life and transform my life all the time. That to me, I think, is critical. To doing this work is just being on the journey.

I would think that the people in your organization have to be very special to be able to do this. It's not just any person off the street. How do you go about finding people that you think would be a good fit and would thrive with Arbinger?

We look for people that are very skilled, number one. That's the baseline litmus test. And then of those people, we look for people that are really curious. We look for people that are totally engaged with the people around them. And the truth is you can't really fake that. There's, we know at a fundamental level whether or not people are outside themselves or whether they are showing up in a curious way as a tactic or putting on some kind of skill. And so we just look for that. Who's really curious about the people around them? Who's a constant learner? Who is aware of their impact on others? They just, they just seem to have an awareness and they're eager to change. There's no ego that is getting in the way of their desire to constantly change. You just look for that. And sometimes, Doug, I'll ask questions in an interview process, for example, that try to elicit a view of whether or not somebody is at that place. Tell me the last time you were dishonest. And just see what people do with that. If I can, if I'm alive to my impact on others, I know when I'm not fully honest and I'm willing to talk about that. For example.

Interesting. I'm sure that some people listen to a question like that. Yeah. It, that, that's really, and so what kind of people do you think are attracted? Because you guys are doing consulting, teaching, transformational work of all different kinds, leadership, conflict management, all kinds of stuff. What kind of people do you think are attracted to the work that Arbinger does?

There are, I would say that the people that are attracted to this work are people that have a fundamental understanding that it's the people side of a business that drives everything else. And some people get that and some people don't. And we don't, we end up not spending a lot of time with people that just don't get that because this is a bridge too far. But people that understand at just an intuitive level that the results that we're getting, those are all a function of the way people are working together. Those are the people that are ready and primed to say, yes, if we can get people to work differently together. And that is not a function of behaving differently together. That's a function of seeing.

That's right.

Those are the people that are ready for this kind of work and ready for the investment because it's an investment. We can continue to just do what we're doing and get the same results. But it's an investment of time and energy and intentionality to take that work seriously.

There has to be a real commitment to change.

Yeah.

Because, and to your point earlier, people feel the pain and if they're not committed to doing the work and growing and learning and have a growth mindset, then they're wasting their money, right?

Absolutely. And there are some leaders of organizations that just doing this work, they can't stomach it because doing the work itself seems to be an admission that we're not everything that we want to present ourselves as being. And so they can't do it.

The pain and the shame is too great to overcome.

Yeah. When the reality is we all struggle with this. There's not, there is not an organization I've ever walked into that doesn't struggle with this. And the truth is, you know, from your own work, you go into big brands, internationally recognized brands, and you walk in and you get to know what's happening there and you wonder, how is this place still standing? People dysfunction exists everywhere. And so to just recognize that and say, hey, let's tackle that. That's where someone has to be.

Yeah. The mindset shift that I teach people, I teach them two things. One, one, there's no such thing as rationality. Everything is emotional and all behavior is emotional. Every decision is emotional. And the second thing I teach is in relationships, abandon reason. There, reason has no place in relationship and it doesn't matter what kind of relationship it is. And if people can make those two mind shift, then they begin to see the world in a different way. Because when they're looking at behaviors of people around them, they're seeing humans for who they really are, emotional beings, not these little automatons. And that tends to help people understand why they have chaos, why they have fights and arguments, why they have conflict, because they've been trying to use a, a, an ancient way of thinking going back 4,000 years that is, doesn't work.

Yeah. And, and, and yeah, to simply recognize that there's no one that is from their perspective acting irrationally.

That's right.

No one is. I don't know why I'm doing this. This is totally crazy, but I'm going to do it anyway.

You just—

when you get underneath that and you realize that everybody is acting from a place that where they are emotionally seems rational to them.

That's right.

Where are they at? That's really this outward mindset at work, is that it's getting so curious about who the people around me are as people and what their experience must be, and what their experience must be like working and living with me. That I can then see possibilities at the level of behavior, what I could do or what I could ask or what maybe I should not do that unlocks new possibilities.

The work that you do and the work that you've done in your turnaround work with healthcare companies required you to become a really powerful listener. How did you learn that skill? How did you learn how to listen?

There was an experience I had. I hope you'll indulge me here, but it was— Of course. The first time I was working in a nursing home, I was actually 18. I had just graduated high school. The company that I worked for was brand new, just had a handful of facilities that were actually run and operated by the, the owners of the company. And I was hired to work in one of these in the business office. It was newly acquired, 78 patients. And the administrator, one of the owners of the company, said, hey Mitch, In addition to your work collecting on insurance and things like that in the business office, I'd like you to interact with every patient in this facility every day.

Wow.

And Doug, I thought to myself, fine, if that's my job, I'll do it. But I hated it because I really didn't like elderly people. But I did it and I did my job every day. I went in and interacted with all those patients. And I would remember there was this one particular patient Her name was Linda, and I walked into her room the very first day to do my job. And here's this woman, she's in her 50s, she's laying in this hospital bed alone in this room, and the sheets are pulled up and tucked around her so tightly that I can see the shape of her feet underneath the sheet, and they're contracted like this. And then it's— the sheet is pulled up over her chest and her hands are on top, and I can see her hands are severely contracted like this. And I introduced myself. I said, hi Linda, my name's Mitch, I'm brand new, how are you? And she doesn't say anything. She just looks at me and she seems annoyed. And so I think maybe she can't hear me, so I get closer to the bed and I say it again. I said, hey Linda, first day, is there anything that I can do for you? And she doesn't say anything. She just looks at me.. And I don't know if you've ever had a truly one-sided conversation, but it can't last more than a couple minutes. So eventually I said, it's great to meet you, Linda. I'll see you tomorrow. And I came back the next day, and then I came back the next day. And this went on for weeks, Doug, where I had the same one-sided conversation with this woman laying in this hospital bed. And I remember about 3 or 4 weeks into this, I'm doing my job. I'm diligently interacting with Linda every day, and I go to leave after this one-sided interaction. And as I turn to leave, I see that her patient closet door is ajar. That's behind the door that goes out into the hallway. And so there's something that's fallen out of that, and it's rolled up piece of paper, but it's all ripped up and it's dusty. And I go to pick it up, and I'm walking down the hall to take this to the dumpster, and this nurse stops me. And says, Mitch, where are you going with that? I said, oh, it's just a, it's just a piece of trash. I found it in Linda's room on the floor. I'm just taking it to the dumpster. And she said, don't you know what that is? I hadn't looked at this, and I remember opening this up. It's about 11 by 17 piece of paper that's been all rolled up, and there are all of these black and white images on it, like a tray of food and a glass of water and a pencil and the telephone and the toilet. And this nurse says, Mitch, that's a communication board. Linda, she can't speak. And I didn't know this. And so here I am, Doug, going into this woman's room day after day, thinking I'm doing my job, and I've never done my job because I had never listened to her. And you say, yeah, she can't talk. That's the point. Here's this person who doesn't have the capability to speak, but I had never actually listened to her, which means for me I'd never actually seen her. She was not a person to me. She didn't have needs and hopes and objectives. She was just— she was an object, really. And I remember when all of a sudden that realization that, wait a minute, I have been in the room of a person and she's never been a person. Who is this person? I remember going to the medical record with this nurse and finding out about Lisa—

Linda—

and finding out that she had gotten married. And then after she had gotten married, she had gone into the hospital for a very routine procedure. It left her with an infection, completely paralyzed, without the ability to, to move or speak. She'd been in that hospital bed ever since. And so you start thinking about that. And I remember with the nurse going to the medical supply room and finding this box that some supply had been shipped in, about the size of a shoebox, and we wrapped it in construction paper and we put all of those images on different sides. And then we printed out a keyboard and we put that— tape pasted that on one side. And then we put a dowel rod through that box so that she could hold that. We could affix it inside of her contracted hand. She could hold that on her chest. And then with some dental wax, we could affix a pencil in her mouth, and she could point to those images or the letters on that alphabet. And for the first time, she could talk, and we could have a conversation. And Doug, that experience changed me because I realized that— you think about people that might be listening to this conversation You've got all sorts of people in an organization, and they all might think they're doing their job. But if we're not seeing people as people, if they don't matter the way we matter, we can try any listening technique. It won't make any difference until we see the people in front of us as people. And sometimes people can't talk, literally or metaphorically. Sometimes people they don't know how to communicate what it is that they need. Sometimes people don't even know. But you get an entire— you get a family or a parent or an entire organization of people and teams, and they see their job not as doing what they've been told to do alone, but figuring out, who are the people who are on the receiving end of what I'm doing? What do they need? What's life like for them? What's life like for them with me? Interacting with them. You help those people see people in a way that I wasn't seeing Linda, you can do anything. And the satisfaction of people that, that start to see and listen, like really listen, not just with their ears but with their whole being, to the people around them— nothing is impossible to a group like that. Nothing.

Yeah, that's a powerful story, and it shows you the power of what you're talking about, listening other people into existence, paying attention, making them— they are real people with real needs, and they have the right to be heard and validated. They absolutely have the right. And to the degree that we, each of us, can do that for each other, we create a harmony that's unbelievable when we do.

Absolutely.

How do you overcome the resistance of people to these ideas, which I'm sure you see frequently, because I know I do. People, you know, this stuff—

totally. I think people are afraid of confronting the reality that they've created.

The—

it's hard to— it's hard to face up to the fact that I've been in that room for 3 weeks and I've never once done my job, number one, and I've created an experience for this person that's actually a person. That's hard to— it's easier to create a justification. And that's what our work is about. It's about the self-deception that is driven by the need for justification that what I've been doing is okay. And not just that it's okay, but like, I couldn't have done anything else under the circumstance. So how do you break down the resistance to that? I think you simply have to create the circumstance where someone, the reality, the humanity of another person can penetrate, that somehow that reality can break through. And oftentimes what it means is that you just, you have to sit with someone long enough and ask enough questions about what do you think their needs, their challenges, their objectives, what do you think life is like for that person? To the point where just enough of a window is, I wonder, and then you're there. It's just getting someone outside of themselves. Because as you said, it's not only does listening bring other people into existence, listening brings me into existence. Like, I can try as hard as I want to be like a great leader when I can read everything and I can adopt all these behaviors, or a great father. But the reality is I don't become a great leader or a great father until the people I'm leading or the person I'm parenting is a person to me. Then I become exactly what I'm trying to become, but not ever by trying to be that thing, because that's a project that's about me. And a great leader, a great parent, that's about somebody else. So not only do I listen someone else into existence, as you've said, but I listen myself into existence.

That's exactly right. And, and, and as you do that, you become emotionally self-aware, which then allows you to emotionally self-regulate. And now you're on a virtuous cycle of getting better and better as time goes on. I've watched this happen in the prison thousands of times to the degree that 700 life inmates who have gone through our training in California have been released. Zero recidivism. Wow. Not one person has reoffended because they get into this virtuous cycle that we're talking about, and it changes them. These are murderers, people who kill people. Now they're out living. Most of them are going back into the community doing training and working in community service. And that's, and that's the power of what you're talking about.

It's not that you— no one who is in that system is unaware that the behaviors that they were engaging in are problematic. How do you break down the resistance to not engaging in that behavior again? Most people don't want to engage in that behavior, but they don't see an alternative until their whole life is reoriented and their life is no longer about them. It's about what's my impact, right?

How do I serve others? Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's— you're right, it's a mindset shift. And once they get it, and all of a sudden you see the transformation. And it's amazing to watch and a joy to behold. It's incredible.

Absolutely. So for a leader, really, to the degree that what we're talking about here today is real, then we've got to get out of the business of prescribing behaviors as if we're the smartest people in the room or the company or whatever. We've got to get in the business of helping people fundamentally change their mindset because The ideas that they would come up with about what needs to be done now in their life, in their role, in their team, they have it. In fact, they're the only ones that can have it. But it doesn't happen if we're trying to just prescribe behaviors. And so many times we think of leadership like that. It's not. It's just helping people see and then rethinking what it means to have a job here. Your job is not just to go visit Linda every day. Yeah, we want you to do that, but your job is to see Linda and then you figure out what's needed in order to help her succeed. And that's true of everybody in every role. Everything that we do is designed to help someone else. So when we learn to see people like that, it changes not just our own experience at work, it changes what we think to do. You unlock innovation at every level of an organization.

Amazing. One more question and I'll let you go. Personal. What's one thing about yourself, Mitch, that we'd never know about unless you revealed it to us? Wow.

The thing you might never know about me unless I revealed it is that my favorite, one of my favorite things to do is make food with my kids. I love watching my kids do all sorts of things. It's, it's my favorite thing. I've got 5 kids. The oldest just graduated high school. The youngest is 9. They're just amazing kids, but I think one of my favorite things to do is just be in the kitchen making food together. It's, it's one of my favorite things.

Yeah. There's a lot. There's a lot to that. That's really cool. Good for you, Mitch. This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for your time out of your busy day today.

Doug, it's been great talking with you. Thank you so much.

You're welcome. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend. Friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Wanna know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.