Leo & Randy On The Learning Zone

Welcome to Peer Innovation, the podcast with Leo Bottari and me, Randy Cantrell. Building on our previous shows, The Year of the Peer and What Anyone Can Do, we turn our attention to helping business leaders build high-performing teams. We'll talk with a diverse group of thought leaders who will share stories and insights that will help you and your teams achieve new heights. If you believe there is strength in numbers and that meeting the challenges of the future can only be achieved if we do it together, then join us for the conversation. Welcome back, another episode of PeerNovation, the podcast. The website is peerinnovation.co, and I don't think we've told folks, but we've got a new landing page at peerinnovation.co. It's dot C-O. So we encourage you to go and check that out. Uh, you'll see everything that Leo is about and doing and the stuff that we are jointly trying to do as we push our agenda our evangelism of this notion that the power of we begins with me. So good to be back online bringing another show.

Yeah, begins with each of us, right? So, uh, no, totally great to, um, great to be here. You know, one of the things that I've been intrigued with lately, and I've actually been using, um, quite a bit in the workshops because it provides people an understanding, you know, oftentimes when we talk about the— this 5-factor framework for peer innovation, right, which we know is the right people, people, psychological safety, productivity, accountability, and leadership. It's interesting, the more you talk about psychological safety and drill into it a little bit, the more you recognize how leaders tend to shy away from this notion of creating psychological safety because somehow they believe it's going to compromise their culture of accountability, that they're just going to make everybody comfortable and make everyone, oh, we can talk about anything and everything's feeling good, but no one's accountable anymore. And actually, you couldn't be further from the truth. You actually, the higher your psychological safety, the more likely you're going to have a healthy culture of accountability. And, you know, one great example of it was about 3 weeks ago. I had a CEO who said to me, you know, one of my direct reports, and this was in the context of group, right? So there were other CEOs who know this person really well there. And he says, yeah, you know, this person just doesn't take ownership over the department in the way that I need them to. And you could see some of the other CEOs starting to smile a little bit, like they know why. And all of a sudden, you know, we get into it a little bit and I'm asking him some questions about it. And of course we determined that the person who reports to him has no psychological safety at all. So what is he? He's scared to death to make a move, to try to take any initiative, to take that kind of ownership that the CEO wants him to take. So, you know, what he needed to do was actually buy into this idea that I've— and that has to begin with him, the CEO, to really take an initiative to create a level of psychological safety to allow him to do his job and actually take the kind of ownership over it that the CEO wants him to take anyway, because he knows he's got the ability to do it, but he didn't have the freedom to do it. And this was why When we look at that reinforcing loop of right people, you can have the greatest people in the whole world, but if you're going to put them in a box, if you're going to make them feel afraid to ask questions, dumb questions, but maybe there's no such thing as a dumb question, right? Just ask the question they need of anyone to do their job or to contribute ideas or to challenge the process or challenge the leader for that matter. It's all about the purpose of whatever it is your team or your company is trying to do. You know, so that has really come to light, interestingly enough, in recent weeks and months. And because of that, I put together a piece for CEO World, which shined a light on the learning zone, which was actually from Amy Edmondson's work from Harvard Business School. And so you and I talked about this 2x2 in the past, I think, haven't we?

Yes.

Yep. Yeah. So basically what it does is it shows the relationship between psychological safety and accountability. So if you can imagine, you know, a 2x2, right? We have our big square with our cut into 4 blocks. And on the left-hand side, we have 0 on the lower left-hand side up to 100, let's say, and we'll call that psychological safety. And then below we'll have accountability from 0 left to right to 100%. On the lower left, in this lower left block, if you have really low psychological safety and really low accountability, you're in what Amy Edmondson calls the apathy zone, right? This reminds me of these stage 2 companies that Dave Logan used to talk about. Well, these people aren't committed to setting any standard of excellence. They're just committed to doing as little as humanly possible, um, and just enough to avoid keeping from getting fired. That's pretty much the deal, you know. That's about the level at which they care about anything. And certainly it's not about the purpose or any of the goals and objectives of the organization. So they're living in that apathy zone, right? If you, however, have really high psychological safety but you don't have a culture of accountability at all, you're not really challenging anyone. Now you're in that comfort zone. And this is that zone that so many CEOs are so afraid of. They don't want to be so focused on psychological safety that somehow everyone just lives in the comfort zone, right? That's not what they want. All too often, unfortunately, when you get like that organization when I mentioned with the CEO and his direct report, you can have whole organizations that live with hardly any psychological safety at all, really high levels of accountability, right, where Everybody's just playing defense and just figuring out, and the stress of that and everything, right? So where does that put you? You can pretty much name it by yourself. It's the anxiety zone. It's the place where if you live in that too long, those people are just— they're all looking for a job. They're, they're like, get me out of this thing where not only am I never going to realize anything in terms of any gifts or talent or anything I could bring to the table, but I'm constantly in fear and having to play defense every time I show up to work, you get stuck in that anxiety zone. Now, what's interesting and where Amy Edmondson's work, I think, and ours really dovetail and really come together is when she talks about when you have really high psychological safety and really high level of accountability. Because now you've got the comfort level, you can be open, you can challenge one another. Why? Because it's not about taking things personally or trying to call somebody out or whatever. This is about the purpose of the organization. We are challenging one another to help each other be better because we're committed to a certain level of excellence in what we do. Now, for, for her, and I thought it was smart, she could have called this anything. But I think there was a real reason she called it the learning zone. And it's not a lot different from what we talked about in terms of the learning-achieving cycle. So in the article for CEO World, it basically says, Yes, you get into the learning zone when you get high levels of psychological safety and high levels of accountability. But let's talk about what takes place in that learning zone. What happens there? This is what we've learned from CEOs through hundreds of groups that we've talked to and learned from and interviews and everything else. What happens in that learning zone is that learning achieving cycle we talk about. That's where you're committed to just getting better every single day. When you can do that and you can drive that culture, That's a game changer. That changes everything. It goes back to that thing we talked about where the very best organizations, the very best consistently high-performing cultures are not ones who consider goals so much as they consider championships or excellent products or anything the reward for that being in that learning zone and being committed to getting better every day. You know, I, I think for me that has come to the forefront, meetings. It's why I kind of put those two concepts together in the context of that article. And I think something for people to think about, particularly as we are trying to figure out our way back or our way forward or whatever, whatever you want to, however you want to frame that in your mind when it comes to the future of work. But, um, you know, I'm sure that with your clients, you're kind of seeing a lot of that too. And you're seeing a lot of those challenges.

You know, it's interesting because you and I've had conversations in the past about all the money spent, the billions of dollars spent on learning, whether it's, whether it's online or whether it's in person and particularly whether it's a convention, whether it's a seminar, whether it's a workshop, these in-person things. And a number of people now, especially in the last 6 months, have begun going back to a lot of in-person stuff. And just a week or so ago, I had a client and they spent a few thousand dollars. They went to a 3-day thing, uh, that they had gone to pre-pandemic, and they came back, you know, ridiculously disappointed, uh, because there's like, you know, I mean I just, there wasn't anything I could really sink my teeth into. There wasn't anything that I could really practice. And I kind of got fixated on that word. And I know you are too, which is why you inserted that word achieving. It's one thing to learn something, to intellectually, we know it, but now let's put it into practice. So I got grandsons, I got two grandsons in junior high and we were talking about their math class. They just started back to school. And talking about their math, and the youngest, who's just started junior high, says, you know, I'm gonna have— my teacher said I'm gonna have math homework every day this year, you know. So he was lamenting that. His father, who's practically a math— was a math major in college, is a master chemist for a pharmaceutical company here in DFW, but he's explaining to him that, you know, this is the way mathematics work. I mean, you, you can intellectually think that you can grasp these concepts, but your teacher is having you actually perform this stuff. It's no different in the workplace. I mean, it seems to me that that's exactly the point.

Yeah. I mean, you're just not going to, you're never going to be able to apply it, you know, that way. And, but this is why we talk too about why group learning is so powerful. Because we can read things, and all of us learn in different ways. Some of us are more auditory learners or visual or kinesthetic learners or whatever. But the reality is that when we engage one another in conversations and dive deeply into these things and can help one another work through, whether it's grasping an idea or literally solving a particular problem and doing it together, we're going to gain a lot more from that. Like I said, Josh Berson talks about neural pathways that are created with that human interaction that, you know, is extremely powerful. And but, you know, just being in that place, it is so funny that for all of the— for all of anything that gets talked about, you know, in business, you know, in the end, um, being in that place and having it— we're back to school, right? We're, we're talking about learning. You know, I did a piece for, um, LinkedIn that was kind of fun that I hope if people haven't checked it out, and it's just a LinkedIn article. I didn't write this for CEO World, but it was basically contrasting the Peanuts classroom, you know, with the teacher with want, want, want, want in front of the room with the School of Rock and the difference and what that experience was like for the students, what they learned, you know, the whole dynamic of everything. And how it may sound bizarre, and it certainly was done with a lot of— in front of a lot of skeptical parents in the School of Rock, but the School of Rock actually produced a more impressive outcome by far. Yeah. And, uh, so I, I mean, these are the kinds of things, and I'd like to think that there's been some, you know, discovery and some awareness that's been created about not trying to just have your thumb, you know, on everybody, you know, all the time, and that the people, you know, can work remotely, they can collaborate in a way that's cooperative and collaborative and, and produce good work and be productive and come up with new ideas. And the thing that I think we have to work harder at when we consider the learning zone is I think we have to work harder at having a lens into what's going on in the rest of the organization. Because I think when we're home, it's very easy to get kind of heads down into our own work and our own piece of it, where two things happen. We don't see that important connection to what's going on, you know, in a, in a larger way. But we also really get disconnected. If we think those silos are bad when we're in the office, they only get tougher and higher and more difficult to navigate when, when we're at home. So I think these are some challenges we have there, but, you know, I think being in the learning zone doesn't change. I think that remote, hybrid, wherever you're in the office, whatever you are, finding a way to have your organization operate with a high degree of psychological safety, a high degree of accountability to be in that learning zone. And then once you're inside that learning zone, really apply the principles of the Learning Achieving Cycle as driven also by what? The right people. You know, a commitment to those other things that we go through with the 5 factors. And I think it's really why it is so effective. And I think, I think it's, it's more and more people, I think, are kind of grasping that this is a necessary shift that they've got to make.

Well, the system, for lack of a, you know, a word that I think a lot of people can understand, and we call it a framework and rightfully so, because that's what it is. But don't you find that there are vast numbers of CEOs, vast numbers of entrepreneurs and other executives, that that's the missing, that's the missing part. You know, it's not so much that all of this is so magical and there's no, there's no easy button. but it provides people a framework for something that they have found either impossible or they just flat haven't known how to do it. And all of us, I think everybody is just, we're kind of naturally wired that if we've kind of got a framework or a recipe or something that we realize can give us predictable results over and over, the results vary, of course, because people vary, your team varies. I mean, I don't know of a single CEO who's got a team intact today that was that exact same team 24 months ago.

Right.

You know, the ins and the outs of people leaving and taking better jobs and retiring. But this gives people a framework that can give predictable results if they can just give themselves permission to get away from kind of that old traditional command and control. Mindset. Because to your point, people are— people do get stuck. They absolutely— that's the only word for it. They are stuck because the devil you know is better than the one that you don't know. And if you know that you're liable to get in some trouble accountability-wise because you did nothing, that for many people is vastly better than getting into trouble for doing something that they didn't— the boss didn't want you to do, or you don't think they wanted you to do. So you just do nothing. You stand still.

And from a leadership perspective, let's face it, I mean, control is a myth. It is that metaphor that I kind of talked about with regard to the ping pong ball when we have it in our fingers. We think if we squeeze it harder, we'll have more control over it. Reality is that it's just the opposite. It's either going to squirt out of our fingers at 100 miles an hour or we're going to crush it. And that's typically what'll happen in real life. And once we recognize that leadership isn't about control, which is a myth anyway, but it's about influence, it's about inspiration, it's about service and support, and allowing and unlocking the incredible talent that you've hired around you in order to get things done. You know, you think about one of the stupidest expressions I've ever heard is, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. I mean, think about how idiotic that is, right? A, as if you even know what right is, you know, uh, you know, it's right according to you, um, which could mean God knows what, uh, and not to mention you, you decide that you're just going to shut off all other possibilities and other ways of doing things that, um, could make it much righter, let's put it that way, and usually faster and better. Um, I, I was always amazed that, um And, you know, as we're kind of growing up in the world, and I'm sure I had my moments where I was very much about, you know, imposing my will in certain things, but there were also many times, especially when I was leading teams in, you know, the PR business, where I really wanted them, I really wanted to let them go, I wanted them to cut loose, I wanted them to be really thinking about things in a way, and I loved I always loved it when they came up with someone that I knew I would never have come up with in a million years, and it was great and it worked really well. And, you know, it just feels good when that happens. Feels much better to do that than feel like, oh, someone's just executing on my idea. That's— that's— it's a disservice to the client, probably 9 times out of 10, and it doesn't make people who have to do it feel great. You know, but if they own their— but if it's their idea and now they want to execute it, now they want to be able to say, hey, wow, we can implement this in ways that 2 days ago we didn't even thought were possible, but they're rolling in it and they're inspired by it and behind it in a way that allows for that. You know, I remember Marshall Goldsmith one time talking about the fact that when someone comes to you with a good idea, what is the leader's first tendency? Oh, great. And you know what? And if you did this, this, and this, it would make it even better. He says, now you just stole that idea from them, basically. He said, you know, if it's 90% there, whatever, let them roll with it. The chances are good that when they get into it, they'll figure out the rest anyway. And you don't have to get yourself— because whatever you think you did to improve on the idea, you by the same token just took away probably their will to deliver on that idea. With the level of enthusiasm that they— that you're going to need to actually make it work.

So, and if you're lucky, you sent them to the apathy zone, not the anxiety zone, but they— but they're both bad. So you didn't do good. I regularly challenge clients and I said every leadership mistake that I have made, that I have observed others make, stems from one thing, and that's pride, a loss of humility. And I've yet to have a client If you're out there and you want to challenge me on that, please do. Every leadership mistake was where, you know, you inserted yourself, you pushed yourself, you know, in front of the group because it was all about you. And it's not, it's really not how we see leadership. Increasingly, the good news is, especially post-pandemic, if we can even call it that, I don't know that we can call it that, but many are. Are you seeing, because I am, are you seeing CEOs, are you seeing executives be more open to trying to figure this out than maybe ever before?

Totally. Yeah.

Yeah. I am. I mean, it's clear to me that they realize I'm not equipped. I need something. I don't know what I need. I mean, that, that kind of a sentiment, I'm seeing that on a really regular basis when it comes to remote work. Some people not working remote, but even if everybody is back, I'm, I'm, I'm seeing it. Just relationships is the word that I keep hearing over and over and over.

So since we're— so you reminded me of something because, um, in my younger years, I've done probably like when I was probably literally almost half my age I am now, I was competitive to a fault from the standpoint of, so here I'm leading my company. We go to this award show, we have all these entries in the award show, we clean up at this place. We had more awards than anyone else. We had a great night. We were a young firm. It was really great. But there were things that we— there were great programs that we did, great campaigns that we had that didn't win anything. And so instead of you know, celebrating what we did win for myself and for everyone else. I'm like pissed about like, hey, what happened here and why didn't we get there? And the judges were this and that. And I'm like, I think about that today and I'm like, that is just the dumbest like thing in the world. Like, why in the world, you know, would I have reacted that way? You know, that, um, and it just ruined— it probably ruined the night for everybody. You know, it's terrible. But, you know, Called growth. It wasn't lost. Yeah. Oh yeah. We're all growing. Yeah. Hopefully, hopefully I'll be around another couple hundred years and I'll get there. But no, but back then, yeah, I mean, I certainly wouldn't handle that that way today, but it was, it was so interesting because I was just, yeah, just really brutally competitive about it.

But that does bring up a point and I was too, I was too. And I don't think that that's so terribly uncommon. But it's interesting that, you know, that once we reach these mature ages in our life, I mean, I had lunch, you know, I had lunch with a city manager today and we were talking and, you know, he's an older fella and we're just talking about how, you know, we've never known this much. We've never been this experienced. We've never, I mean, we've just never been better in so many ways. We can see things so much clearer than we saw when we were younger and chasing it. So we've got this perspective. Now we still need other people. I'm not saying it's all about us.

But we're in our prime right now.

Yeah, yeah. We've got this history. Well, there is something to that. There's absolutely something to that. I mean, no offense to anybody that's younger, But the, the age and the experience, your experiences and your competitiveness to learn some of this stuff and to figure this stuff out and to vet it so thoroughly in front of live human beings and put it to work and test it and to come up with this framework. Yeah. You know, I mean, that's right place, right time and all that. I'll just leave it at that. I'll be politically correct.

This also, you know, it's clear to me that you and I live in the learning zone out of necessity.

Oh, there's no question. My hands, both my hands are in the air. Yeah, you absolutely have to, for sure.

That's right. Well, on that note, I think that was, you know, we'll leave that article in the show notes. Definitely not only check out, actually both articles, the one on the learning zone. I encourage you also to look at more and dig deeper into Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety. No question about that. And also check out Peanuts and the School of Rock and figure out what your workplace is more like. But anyway, Randy, you want to bring us home?

Yeah, let me, let me hawk one more time: peernovation.co. This is a brand new landing page, which means it's just a one-page website. But there's links to everything. So if you want to keep up with everything that Leo is doing and all of our work in Peer Innovation, you will, you will, you will see it there and you will, you will be properly directed anywhere you want to go. So peerinnovation.co is the website. We appreciate you. We thank you for listening and subscribe and tell a friend. Thank you for joining us. To subscribe to the podcast and learn more about how you can engage peer innovation for your organization, contact us on the website at peerinnovation.co. Until next week, remember, the power of we begins with you.