Focus is Strategic | Sue MacArthur on Human-Centric Leadership | KIH Podcast

You know, in martial arts we talk about focus a lot, and if you ever tried to force concentration like that, you realize it usually doesn't work. It just causes a lot more stress. So focus really, to a martial artist, is all about letting go, letting go of distractions and detractions. And our guest today, Sue McArthur, has some really good advice in that area. So we're going to kick things off with that, and then who knows where we'll go after that. But I want to introduce you to my new friend Sue McArthur on this episode of Keep It Human. She's an author, she's a speaker, she's a leadership expert, she's all kinds of cool things, and, and she's a new friend. I was on her podcast recently, we had a really nice conversation, and I just thought it would be really cool to share her here with you guys too. So Without further ado, here's my new friend, Sue MacArthur. Sue, thanks for coming on the show today.

Oh, I'm happy to be here. Thanks.

Of course you are. Why wouldn't you be happy to be here?

Of course.

Where else would you rather be? I don't know. Well, the weather's kind of turning here. I don't know where it is where you're at.

We're expecting a hurricane here in Virginia.

Oh, that'll work. Okay, so it's a good day to stay inside. Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about letting it go. So you're letting go of, uh, all the chores you need to do to batten down the hatches just to be here with us today, right?

Letting go of all my patio furniture.

Ah, there you go. Well, letting you know, the neighbors will have it this afternoon sometime, right?

Right.

Yeah, there you go. Oh, we shouldn't joke about that. That can be awful. So I hope the best for everybody that's bracing for that. Yeah, we don't get them too often up here. Once in a while. When we do, they're a doozy, but yeah, we like to spread them out. Well, let's talk about this concept about letting go, because that's, you know, that's really interesting. There's a lot of stress, a lot of strain going on these days, and I know we're going to talk about resilience, which is kind of a close cousin to this, right? But people are worried about a lot of things. Best to let it go?

Yes and no.

Go ahead, go deep.

In terms of its weighing you down, no. In terms of identifying things that you can do, that you can control, and doing what you can to control them, no, we don't want to let go of that. So It's not a straight answer. Yeah, but it's the real answer.

No, that's an interesting concept, right? Because, um, that's what we have to decide on. It's weird because I don't remember if we talked about this on your show, but one of the great lessons I learned from my experience as a drug addict was it's much better to focus on what we have, even though that might not be much at the time, right? And when we do that, then we tend to let go, tend not to worry so much about what we don't have. Whether that's material resources or whatever we need to get us through. I think it's really important if we can let go of some of those wants and desires that aren't possible in the moment, then we can focus on the resources we have and we can move forward because that's what we've got to work with right here and right now, no?

Well, exactly. And in terms of letting go of the stress and the burden, we have to recognize that there are things around us that we cannot control or influence.

Hmm.

So why put your energy there? Instead, refocus, regroup, identify the things that you can control or influence, and move forward with those. That's really all we can do.

That's the operative question though, right? Why are we so fixated on these things that we can't control? And particularly now, and I notice it's not only leaders, Although I'd argue that everyone's a leader, we could get into that at some point. But we're just inundated with so much information. We're inundated with so much stress and strain and problems. For instance, I was just talking to some friends about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Now it's good to be aware of that. It's good to understand what's going on. But there isn't a whole hell of a lot any one of us can do about it right now. So why add to that stress? Why assume that burden? Or better question for you is, How do we kind of let that go, not worry about it as much?

Well, I'm not a psychologist.

Well, you could be. Pretend.

Yeah. But in my work, I deal with people challenges, and sometimes those challenges are people getting really wound up about the things that they have no power over. And trying to talk them off the ledge. And I think if— I find that when I get really stressed out about things, or I'm fixating on something that I can't have any control over, to just stop and take a breath and think about it and listen to myself. And I have this little conversation like, "Can I have any influence over this?" Am I helping with this at all? And if the answer is no, I've got to figure out a way to move on and put my energy in a more productive direction and identify things that maybe are part of that problem or part of a different problem or something that I can find that I can work on, that I can produce something, that I can solve a problem. And that always kind of takes me down a notch from, from that stress and worry.

If I heard you right, and I just jotted that down because I think that's a That's good advice. So maybe we just ought to start with that question, right? Is there really anything I can do about fill in the blank? And if we answer that question no, we should move on, huh? Yeah.

Right. Move on and identify something that you can do.

Yeah.

It may not be related to that particular issue, but I find in my work with my clients and in my own life that if If I'm able to shift my focus to something that I can control and I can accomplish, it takes that burden off. It decreases the stress level because I've done something.

No, I agree with you. Even the smallest step, right? And I think one thing that we can certainly let go of is arguing with other people about the things we can't control. And that can be global issues that often work their way into the workplace. I mean, I don't like the idea of just telling people they can't talk about politics or sex or religion in the workplace. Those are the 3 most interesting things human beings want to talk about. It's pretty hard to ban them. But—

Right, add money to the list maybe.

Add money in there, yeah, yeah. But the point is to develop that discipline, right, of asking that question. Is there really anything I could do about this? Is it worth upsetting the workplace? Is it worth upsetting people around me, right, when we start to engage in an argument or a conflict? That happens too often in the workplace today, I think, especially with politics.

It does, and it sabotages productivity, it sabotages morale. It's just this vortex of negativity. And if we can break out of that, then we have a fighting chance.

Yeah, there you go. And I like that you kind of brought it back again to this idea that I learned from martial arts, this idea of focus being more of a practice of letting things go than to try to force concentration. There's certainly that element. I don't want to be Pollyannaish about it. I mean, there is a concentration of force. There's that idea of focus. But really, when we're talking about it mentally or psychologically, it's more letting go of these distractions and detractions that kind of invade our mind all the time, right? Again, we're barraged by that.

We are. Another part of letting go is particularly as business leaders, we often take so much on our own shoulders, right? And there are a few ways in which that's damaging. We're not able to spend the time on the things that really matter to our business, and we're denying the people on our team an opportunity to learn and grow because we're not giving over things to them. And I don't know any business owner that got into business because they love running a business. They do what they do because they love what it is that they do and they decided to create a business out of it. So it's, it's easy to get back into the minutia of, you know, designing an ad or creating a blueprint or whatever your business because that's what you got into it to do. You love the work. But when you're running a business, you need to understand where the line is and how to let go of some of those day-to-day things so that you can concentrate on growing and running the business as opposed to being in the weeds.

You know, that leads to a really interesting conflict that I run into all the time because obviously our focus is to help leaders keep it human, to be more connected with people. On the other hand, we can go too far with that, right? We do need to respect boundaries, need to respect people's personal places, and there's also, there are certain things we might not want to get or should get involved in too much. Certainly want to mitigate interpersonal conflicts in the workspace, but sometimes we have to let people work things out amongst themselves, right? And if we get too engaged or too involved in that, especially when it's not really a critical situation, then I think it can really expand, it can really blow up, and then again it affects other people around. So I'm sure that's— I'd love to hear your opinion on that. I'm sure you have some ideas in that area, like how do we pick and choose our battles in that respect? You know, when does it elevate to a point where, yeah, we should get involved, we should get in between two people, or we should get more involved in a person's personal issues? Or when do we actually— how do we analyze that? Say this one, it you're on your own.

Well, I would say look at the impact on the business. If it is having a direct impact, negative impact on the business in some way, it's trickling down to other team members, it's trickling down to your clients, it's harming productivity, then you absolutely have to step in. But I would say try at least At first, and things can escalate, and then there's a time to get more involved, but try not to be too prescriptive. Ask a lot of questions. And ask the question, and I did this with my children. My parenting style was never to give advice and tell them what to do. When they had a problem, I would say, Well, what do you think you should do? What do you think your options are? And that was very effective. Of course, recently my daughter called me and said, I need some advice, Mom, and I really want you to tell me what you think I should do. Don't give me garbage. But that's the place to start is we can't resolve a conflict if we don't fully understand it. So to go charging in there and saying, you need to do this and you need to do that, Nobody's going to learn from that. It's not going to fully resolve the conflict. And it's going to come back to bite you eventually. It will resurface.

I like your focus on asking questions, right? And it's interesting, we were just talking to David Lee about this, Human Nature at Work, and he had pretty good advice about that too. I think sometimes in the responsibility to— if we're experiencing issues, especially if we're experiencing personal issues, issues at work and we trust somebody, a mentor, a leader, I think it's also good for us to practice letting them know what our expectations are out of the conversation. Say, "Hey, you know what, I just wanted to share this with you. There's something going on. I don't really want your advice. I just want you to listen." Or, "I'm sharing this because I think it's— I'm asking you to reflect back to me. Is it showing up at work? Is my attitude coloring things?" I want to make sure it's not that type of thing. I think the responsibility goes both ways, no? Of course, we have to educate people in that.

We do. We do. It's a tough line to walk, to instruct and to understand. There's two sides there, and we can't effectively instruct if we don't completely understand.

Oh, there it is, right? That's Stephen Covey. He stole it from Lao Tzu, but seek first to understand. And I think that's critical because I don't know how you feel about this, but I really think this whole idea of work-life balance separation is an illusion. I mean, we can't separate our personal life from work or vice versa. We're one person. We're a human being. And one affects the other very greatly.

Absolutely. And in fact, at our company, we have unofficially banned the term work-life balance.

Good.

We refer to it as work-life integration because that's really what we're talking about, is that both can exist in a healthy way and complement each other and make room for each other. And that's really what we're You're talking about integration, not a balance.

I like that term. I'm going to steal that because that speaks directly. Like I said, one of my most treasured masters, Dr. Yang, would explain that Tai Chi symbol to us, the yin and yang symbol. It has a lot of different applications, but one of them was that, that the understanding that balance is a dynamic process. It's not a static state, right? And so it's sometimes different parts of our lives need a little bit more attention. And that can change moment to moment. That's, I think, one of the greatest challenges of leadership, right? Recognizing how fluid everything is and being able to adapt very quickly.

Right. And work and life are not separate but equal.

Not at any given moment, right?

Not at any given moment. Some days work is in the driver's seat because there's something going on that really needs your attention. And other times things happen in life that we need to withdraw from work for a while, at least to a certain level, and pay attention to that. If we're to be fully present and effective in our work, we need to have opportunity to be fully present and effective in our lives.

That's a tough thing.

It is a tough thing.

Mm-hmm. People have a hard time reconciling that. And I don't know if that's maybe what some people see as a degradation of work ethic these days. I know in talking to you before, you and I are kind of old school about that, right? We can be very much nose-to-the-grindstone people. And I think there's fewer of us now. And I don't know that that's necessarily a good thing. I mean, I understand that the pendulum has to swing, but I agree with you. Sometimes work is the most important thing. I mean, that's just the way it is. And people need to understand that around us, I hope.

Something I've also come to understand is, you know, I'll be doing the nose to the grindstone thing and I'm just toiling away and I hit a block and I'm just trying to work through it. I have found that the most effective thing to do at that moment is to walk away.

There you go.

Walk away. Take a walk around the block. Go grab a coffee at the corner shop. Go do something else, something completely unrelated.

And when I come back, it's, "Oh, there's the answer." See, you must be a black belt because that's exactly the whole process of focus. Because, you know, it addresses to this another great illusion, the illusion of multitasking. I mean, it's well documented. Nobody can multitask. It doesn't happen. Right? It's an illusion. But some people can switch their focus very quickly from one thing to another. And that's, I think, what we feel is multitasking. And, you know, the best— yeah, sometimes the best thing is to let the mind settle again, right? And then all the possibilities there. How many— yeah, like you said, how many times you go to sleep, you wake up with the answer? Well, that's because your mind quieted down and was processing things, right?

Yes, I have my most brilliant ideas either when I have insomnia at 2 o'clock in the morning or when I'm humming along to music in the shower. Because I'm not consciously thinking about it and then there's this moment and it's— there it is. You know, I do a lot of puzzles. I love crossword puzzles and jigsaw puzzles and such and sometimes I just get stuck. And every time I get up and walk away, I come back, oh, there's the piece I was looking for, there's the word I was looking for. It happens all the time, but I still, knowing that, will continue to sit at my desk and plod away at something and not take that opportunity to walk away. I have to consciously remind myself.

Yeah, yeah. No, and that's the downside of people that have an obsessive work ethic, you know, that sometimes we will get— we'll force ourselves, even though we know it's not the right thing to do, we'll force ourselves through. I shouldn't say that definitively. Most of the time it's not the right thing to do. Sometimes it is necessary, right? So that speaks— you know, that's a good crossover because a lot of times when we do force it, when we over-force ourselves and we don't give ourselves a break, we don't give ourselves time to reenergize or just to let things flow again. That's very often we get in a lot of trouble physically and mentally, right? That's when stress builds up. It can actually manifest itself physically, heart conditions, all kinds of crazy stuff, right? So there's where we have to talk about that idea of resilience. You know, how do we bounce back from these moments? How do we, how do we make sure we reclaim that space and reclaim the optimal performance level, right? That we demand of ourselves. I guess there's no better way to say that.

Right. And I don't think anybody ever aspired to be resilient because all that means is hard stuff is coming your way. You're going to have to figure out how to—

Yeah, it just happens, right? It's just the way it is. Yeah.

But I think when we really get to the core of it, being resilient means that you can face those hard things and you can come out on the other side having learned something, having to— having risen to a higher level of understanding. Something positive comes out of what was a negative experience, and that's what real resilience means, and that's what we have to, to figure out how to do it. And that's a hard thing because, you know, when, when the tough stuff comes along, it can really lay us flat.

Yeah, it can.

And it can, can affect every part of our lives— our work, our family, our, our own health and mental well-being. So that's the trick, is to figure out a way through it. And, and part of it is, you know, what we talked about earlier, is taking a look at the problem, you know, really look at the problem. Understand what you have any impact over and what you have to accept as this is the landscape and identify the things that you can start working on.

Yeah, that works internally too, right? I mean, because at any given moment, you know, it's— I'm not a big fan of big goals, you know. Sometimes people set these great, especially beginning of each year, it's, you know, the very famous studies about how New Year's resolutions vanish by February, right? 80% of them. I think sometimes people just set their sights on something they don't have the resources to manage yet, right? Better to set the sights on maybe developing the resources necessary to go after the big goal, something like that. And I think internally, I think that's huge because one that I hear all the time is people say, well, you know, I would just like to I would just like to be happy. Well, define that for one thing, right? Better to say, well, I'd like to do something that would make me happy right now, right? Which, by the way, justifies my whole experience with golf. You just hit on something. You know, you were saying in the shower, it's funny, I play golf by myself a lot. Sometimes people say, geez, are you goofing off? You're playing golf? I said, no, actually I'm writing.

I go down to the pier at the end of my street and I sit on a bench, watch the boats, and I'm writing my book in my head.

Exactly, exactly. That's important.

I don't remember to bring a piece of paper and a pen though, because by the time I get back to my house, I've forgotten all those brilliant ideas.

I know. And I was just looking at the pads because I just, you know, I told you about my I mean, I'm a paper guy and I've got mountains of notes and that's not a good way to manage that anymore. We've got the technology to overcome that. That's silly.

I like that, but I'm a pen and paper person too.

Yeah. Resilience, not to lose that thread, it's interesting because here's the flip side of it. And when you first mentioned that you wanted to talk about resilience, I thought about this. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. One of my coach/leadership therapists talked about— we were reviewing some, some strength, you know, you do your personal SWOT assessment, right? What are your strengths and weaknesses? And I kept coming up with resilience because, hey, again, from martial arts we learned knock down 7 times, get up 8, and we train ourselves to do that. And I've certainly had enough knockdowns in my life, not that I'm done yet.

I'm sure I'm in for a few more, but never know what's around the corner.

You never know. Make the dragon laugh. Tell him your plans for tomorrow. But at any rate, that was two clichés in the last 60 seconds, so I'll try to fit one more in. No, but we were talking about this resilience thing, and I said, I'm very resilient. And what she asked, she said, is that always a strength? Is that always a good thing? What do you think about that? Because that was a challenging question.

Well, I think for me, when people say that, I'm not sure I take that as a compliment because I have to wonder, does that just mean that I have attracted some negative things from the universe? What am I doing wrong that adversity keeps coming my way? And yes, I come out on the other side and people admire me for how I handled the situation. But, you know, I have to wonder. You know, what, you know, the law of attraction. What am I putting out there?

I always think of the Wayne's World thing. I'm not like, what the hell did I do in a past life to put myself in this situation? Right.

So we have to wonder about that. And I think that's part of the process of being resilient is looking at what part did I play in creating this situation that I now have to resiliently get through? Did I have a role in this or not? We have a responsibility whether we cause something or not. We have the responsibility to deal with it. I once gave a talk for a while. I was doing some conferences and it was fostering personal responsibility in world of it's not my fault. Just because it's not your fault, just because you didn't cause the car accident you were in, doesn't mean that you can abdicate any responsibility for how you move forward and how you resolve the issue. So I think that's, that's part of being truly resilient is taking ownership even if you didn't cause the problem problem, you own at least in part finding a solution.

I think you hit on something really deep there, and I think it's something we have to bring back to our society. I won't say it's necessarily lost. A lot of people might justifiably make that argument. But yeah, this idea of abdicating responsibility, this victimhood mentality that so many people express these days. Yeah, it doesn't really matter whose fault it is, right? I'm the one that has to deal with it. I have to, and I can't control the circumstances and conditions, that's for sure, but I certainly can control my response to them, right? And I think that's the, maybe that's the positive aspect of resilience, where if I can muster up the energy and the mindset to move forward, right, and be grateful for what I have, no matter what little that might be at the time, then I can, I can respond constructively. I think the flip side to resilience, though, I think that's the point this person was trying to make to help me, was sometimes it's okay to just acknowledge that you're taking some lumps, you know, and not feel too obligated in any given moment to just suck it up and keep going, because that can be very self-destructive too, can't it? We can lead— that can lead down to some very dark places sometimes. We get caught in the mud. In football, anybody who plays football, they talk about that a lot. You get stuck in the quicksand, right? One mistake leads to another, leads to another, leads to another if you're trying to force your way out of it. Sometimes it's better to just let go, which we talked about earlier, and try to get back to the flow. Just like you keep alluding to, you keep saying very specifically, consider what you you have control over, consider what you can do next, right?

Right. Right. And sometimes what you can do next is find a friend, whether that's an actual friend to talk to, or do some research and find someone who has some insight into the problem you're trying to solve. Find a therapist, find friend, find some information or person person or something that can help you navigate through this.

That's pretty cool. And I scare people because sometimes I say some of these people are dead and they think I'm talking to ghosts. I said, no, these shelves are full of books of people who are long since gone, but their wisdom is still here. Their wisdom is still with us, right? We can access so much of this stuff. But I agree with you. There's no substitute just for another person around. Sometimes just to listen, huh?

Right. Sometimes to be for you what I was to my children when they were growing up is to ask those questions. What have you thought about for solutions? What do you think you should do? What is your gut telling you you should do?

Yeah.

But sometimes it's hard to ask yourself those questions. Sometimes you need somebody else to ask for you.

It is, especially with the urgency we face in the world today. But you're hitting— I don't want to let that go unnoticed. What you just hit on there is so profound, I think, particularly for leaders. One of the issues we face, I'm sure you face in your work a lot these days, is a gap in the succession, right? That people are saying there are not leaders stepping up ready to take the absent roles. But whose fault is that, right? We have to expose people to these things. We have to expose them to the challenges. We have to give them opportunities to grow, not set them up for absolute failure, but I think they do need to be put in positions where there's some manageable risk there so that they get stronger and they learn how to grow and react. And then we can provide guidance, not necessarily all the answers, right? Provide situations where there's fertile ground for learning. I like what you're saying with that. So leadership is a lot like parenting, just you don't want to cross that line mentally and start becoming everyone's parent, right? Yeah.

Well, because that, that is again taking more on you as a leader than you should have to carry.

Yeah.

Yeah. You don't have to carry all of the problems of all of your people. But you don't, you don't have to carry them.

That's a tough lesson for many leaders.

Or work around them, but they're not— it's not your burden to carry. And too often we do carry that. So we need to let that go. But we also need to create opportunities. And when you mentioned succession, we need to create opportunities for the people coming up to learn and grow. So many times I talk to people when I'm doing recruiting Why are you leaving your current role? There wasn't any opportunity for me. So that, you know, we see this trend of people are staying really short-term, they're hopping around a lot. You know, gone are the days like my father where he worked for the state for 35 years, hated the last 25 of it, but, you know, he slogged through because there was a path and he was being trained and you was moving up and there was a natural progression. We're not building that into our companies as much today, so people have to do the job hopping in order to move up, to have a new experience, to have a new opportunity. It's really hard in small companies. You don't want to create a false hierarchy and give people promotions just because, well, they've been here a while and they deserve serve it, so we're going to create this title, but it doesn't mean anything.

It doesn't mean anything, right, exactly. It means more work, that's all, right?

Right, maybe more work, or maybe the same work but a new title. It just means you spent some money on new business cards that didn't mean anything. But look for opportunities to give people projects that stretch them, that give them new experiences. You've got to be able to let them fail if that's what it takes to learn the lessons. And that's the thing, you've got to know what your tolerance for risk is. How much rope can I give them before it's going to negatively impact the business? But give them a shot at it. And, but the problem is that it can take a lot longer to do that than to just do it yourself.

Yeah, but if you keep, but if you keep doing that, you're going to be doing it yourself Always, right?

Forever. And you're not going to have a deeper bench. You're just going to have a bunch of people who sit in their cubicles and do their siloed little task while you're doing all the other things. And you're never going to have somebody who can step up and really have your back and let you go on a real vacation without having to call into the office all the time.

Let you move up to a bigger opportunity. Yeah.

Right. Let yourself consider retirement or scaling back. We can't keep all of that to ourselves and expect that people will just be ready when we need them to be.

That's a perfect place to wrap things up. That's very powerful. Let's make sure people understand how to get in touch with you and just share a little bit about exactly what you do and your services. And how can people get in touch?

Right, so I am president of Strategic Talent Management, and we solve people challenges primarily for small to mid-sized companies. So sometimes that's leadership coaching, sometimes that's recruiting, succession planning, performance management— anything that is a people-related challenge in a business, we've probably touched it in some way, shape, or form. We have a lot of free resources on our website, which is strategictalentmgmt.com, and I welcome people to, to go out there, poke around, and find something that's helpful to you.

Sue, thanks a lot for visiting with us today. I hope it's the first of many.

Thank you, it was great to be here.

Share your thoughts, make sure you jump in and join Join the conversation. That's the most important thing. If you haven't joined the Keep It Human network yet, you gotta do it. You gotta do it. There's a free forever plan called Engage. And we're not gonna be stingy there. There's gonna be a lot of cool things. We've got some live online events coming up too. And the IEG Experience course is, it's up there, it's running. It's not a static course. It's a living, growing project. So we're gonna be adding material. We're adding a set of videos to that right now. So get on there. Get in the conversation though. Leadership is sharing. A leader shares. Make sure you share your great wisdom, knowledge, and experience with all the great leaders that are involved. So, Sue, thanks again, and everybody, we'll see you on the next episode.