#40 - The Magic of Curiosity, with Chris Clearfield

Hello everyone and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mary o'. Carroll. My guest today is Chris Clearfield, who spends his time helping leaders use curiosity to change the way their organizations work. As a coach and consultant, he supports leaders in attending to the social and technical aspects of their work to solve their unique and complex challenges in creative and collaborative ways. Chris is the co Founder and CEO of the Clearfield Group, where he guides leaders at some of the world's most interesting companies, from professional services firms to major oil producers and tech companies. He's also the co author of what Plane Crashes, Oil Spills, and Dumb Business Decisions Can Teach Us about how to Succeed at Work and at Home. This book was named a best book of 2018 by the Financial Times, won the National Business Book Award and and was awarded the Thinkers50 strategy award. I've just read it myself and found it pretty thought provoking. We had a great conversation today which touches on why Chris and I both don't love the term change management and why it's really more about change leadership. We also found that we hate the term soft skills, though I don't think we came up with any alternatives for that one. We share our personal experiences of success and lessons learned when it comes to leading change and why listening is such an important skill these days. I asked Chris about leadership buy in and support and whether we need that from the GC to help us with a command and control like attitude. When it comes to transformation, as I'm sure you can guess, the spoiler alert is that you don't need it. You can absolutely lead transformational organization Change without authority throughout our conversation we weave in bits about transforming your career as well as all of us are trying to get better, are trying to get to the next level, and are trying to be seen as a strategic leader. So what does it really take to get us there? Because we all know the skills, the talents that got us here aren't what we need to get us there. You'll hear that Chris is a dynamic personality, a great storyteller, and an effective coach. I think he might actually be the first podcast guest I've had who I didn't have a previous relationship with. Meaning I usually just bring some of my old friends to be guests on this show, but this was my real first conversation with Chris and I can tell you I learned a ton from it and it certainly won't be my last. I hope you enjoy the show. Hey Chris, welcome to the show.

Hey Mary, good to see you. I'm so excited to be here.

Yeah. Excited to have you. So I know you're a writer. I don't know if our audience knows much about you, but I read the book, so I've got Meltdown right in front of me. I did take the time to read it. It was great. It read like, it reads like fiction for a non fiction, which is the style that I enjoy. So I liked. And in the book you talk about some global crises, how we can learn from them. But I also know that your day, your other day you have a consulting practice where you specialize in like leadership. And correct me if I'm wrong, but there's a big focus on leading change.

Yeah, big focus on leading change. And I think of it often as transformation. I think of transformation as like a way to frame my focus both for leaders in their relationship with leadership itself and in how they lead and then also in how their organizations work and. Yeah, transforming how their organizations.

Yeah, well, that's pretty relevant these days. Everyone is undergoing transition on a digital scale, at least from an organizational standpoint. But of course, everyone in their professional roles are always trying to transform and get ahead and, you know, change how they're perceived.

Yeah, I mean, how do you see that in your world? I mean, maybe we could just start there, like sort of specifically.

Yeah, well, we can. There's the two sides that you just mentioned. Right. So for transformation, generally, we look at the legal industry as something that's, you know, sort of frozen in time for years and years and years. And especially in like a modern corporation, you see every part of the organization transforming, leveraging data, leveraging technology, changing really quickly to keep up with the speed of business and globalization and, you know, regulatory changes and complexities, as I know you talk about a lot. And legal has kind of been a laggard, but now there is pressure. There's, you know, more scrutiny on how the legal organization is. There's a lot, a lot of pressure to do digital transformation and kind of catch up with the rest of the business. So that's definitely one side of where we see transformation. And on the other side, the community that I run is really about this role called legal operations. You're familiar with it, but everyone is always trying to get out from, you know, what I call the back office to the back office and be a strategic leader and to be viewed as such. And that takes time because as you're, as you show up, there's a lot of just tactical stuff to put in place. And then how do you sort of elevate yourself to Be seen now as part, you know, the strategy and the leadership table, not just the order taker.

That's right, yeah. No, I think that's a really powerful. That's a really powerful framing and certainly jives with a lot of what I see motivating people's transformation, not just in legal. I'm not a specialist in legal, but I've done somewhere. But I work. I get to work across lots of different organizations. And it's pretty interesting because it's the same. It's actually the same conversation in, like, safety. It's the same conversation in software in many ways. It's the same conversation in even what I think of as relatively conservative industries like oil and gas. So it's a really interesting conversation to be a part of and to see this. I think you, you framed it beautifully. Like, part of what's happened is everything has gotten so much more complex. And so these old approaches, these old tools, these old paradigms just don't serve anymore. They just don't work. So if you're somebody who's grown up in the system where your job is to provide an answer, and that's what we all have been rewarded for in our schooling and then in our early careers, you get to this point as a leader where there just aren't any answers. And so how can you shift your whole stance to that? So you're leading from this place of curiosity instead of expertise, where the measure of your contribution isn't showing up with the answer, but it's being able to mobilize your team, mobilize organizations, to actually be creative and explore possibilities and do things differently.

Yeah. One of the reasons I was so excited to have you on the show is that you do work with other industry, and I know you have some experience with law firms and legal departments, but that is a very small portion of kind of what you do. Like, you know, all the industries that you've mentioned, safety, oil and gas. And I think you're exactly right that all the challenges that we're facing are not unique to us. And lawyers and legal folks always like to say that, oh, we're different, we're different, it's really the same thing. And the challenges that we're facing, which is why I so believe in looking outside of our little bubble. And, you know, we're not the first ones to go through this. How is everyone else thinking about it? How. How can we learn from others who have gone ahead from us?

Right. And it's interesting because I think there's a. There is a There's a both and here, which is lawyers are different and they're the same. Right. And I think it's so easy to just fall into one side of that polarity. Right. So one of the things, one of the things that Jason Barnwell has taught me in terms of his paradigm around lawyers is looking historically, looking backwards, precedent, focus, and looking for differences. So there really is, I mean, there's something very valuable in all of those things, and there's something valuable in terms of not just how people are trained, but how people select into the profession.

Very true.

So there's a lot to say there and you can compare that with other professions Jason likes to frame up. Engineering is looking for the system level thing, what is the same across all this, so we can systematize it and automate it. And yet if you're only ever in one of those polarities, you're stuck. Right. So it's about being able to access both. And then the other thing is lawyers are people too. Right. So in terms of how they respond to change, how they respond to, to threat states and feelings of being in a threat state, I mean, that's very much a kind of a sort of universal human tendency that parts of which may be activated in lawyers in different ways, parts of it may be suppressed in lawyers in different ways, but we've, we've got that core human element and that need to collaborate with non lawyers as well.

Well, and the word collaborate is a big one because they're really trained to work alone. There's not a whole lot of collaboration in law schools and law firms even, even after that. As I was thinking about your book and I had listened to some of your other podcasts, I find it, you know, interesting that the oil and gas is one industry we often talk about as being old school resistant to change. I kept, you know, every time I hear that, I think, oh, just wait till you work with lawyers. You know, you want to talk about resistant to change. Like working with Lawyers is a PhD in change management because of all you, you said, you know, they're not like bad people, but the way that they're trained, looking, you know, risk tolerance is very low, looking for what could go wrong, a lot of looking backwards. This is the way it's always been done. So they're not especially known for being innovative and embracing of change. I know you talk a lot about how change is hard in an organization. When you are with a group like this in particular, that is very resistant to change. Are there ways that you would tell folks to approach this or, you know, kind of best practices in trying to transform. Because the Legal Ops role is by definition a change agent. We come in, we make change. It can be threatening.

I'll say that framing of the Legal Ops role that really resonates with me because I have my own practice, right. And as it's evolved over time, what I have found is that I'm really drawn to people that are catalyzing change in their organizations, which means they're a small group, often out to the side, right? They're, they're, they're often not, quote, unquote, in charge, and yet they are creating change that is affecting huge swaths of the organization, right? So those are the kinds of people that I just love working with. And Legal Ops is a beautiful example of that. So there's, I think, two big things that sort of strike me, maybe three big things that sort of strike me. And we can talk, we can talk through them. So one thing is I just to start out with, I absolutely hate the phrase change management. I think as soon as you use that phrase, you're totally framing the problem in the wrong way. You're totally framing the challenge in the wrong way. Because anytime you're creating change, you are leading people from the known to the unknown. And so I, the phrase I always use is change leadership. Because I think management is, it's like what you do with a project and like comms plans. And sometimes I will come into organizations and that's the level they're talking at. And part of what my first job is to just slow them down and say, okay, look, change is not about your comms plan. Change is not about project milestones. It's not about adoption either. Like, adoption is a lagging metric, right? Anytime you're fighting for adoption, anytime you're going for buy in, you've basically already lost is how I think about it. So the paradigm that I sort of operate from is change as a journey. Framing up change is a journey. So with any change, people are starting in the dark. They don't even know there's a challenge. They don't see a need for a change. And so the first thing you have to do is you have to see the challenge. You have to help them see the challenge. You have to support them in seeing the challenge. Once you've done that, then you can start talking about getting started and how you're going to do this, what's it going to look like? And then once you've had that conversation with people, then you're on the Rollout conversation. And you're like, okay, so how are we bringing this to life in our organizations? After rollout, you get results, which means you sort of see what worked and what didn't and you can iterate. It's not an end state, but it's just another part of the journey. And then eventually it's time to move on. Because a change ceases to become a change at some point. It just becomes how things work. And this is a model by this guy, Rick Maurer. And it really, what I like about it is it really works. And it works to help leaders just sort of start to frame the challenge of change in a little bit of different way. Because now it becomes about conversations. What are the conversations you can have? What are the conversations you need to have to lead people around this cycle of change? And the observation, I think that if you try to bring people, if you try to kind of yank people across the circle, if you try to yank them across this cycle, that's when you get resistant. People don't understand what you're doing. They don't understand the reason for it. They weren't involved in co creating a solution that actually works for them. The typical way that people manage change is they identify a problem, a group of kind of technical specialists go off into the corner, come up with a solution, buy a product, and then tell people, hey, we're going to use this product going forward. I mean, that's, it's a little bit of a parody, but not much. Yeah, so you have people that are in the dark that don't even understand what the challenge is. And now all of a sudden you're yanking them to this whole new world. And that's when you get resistance. And you get resistance because people don't feel like they have control, Their autonomy isn't respected. Sometimes they feel like they're going to lose status. They have fear, basically. And so one of the things that the cycle of change does is it really acknowledges that humans are humans. And that if we want to be effective at leading them around the cycle of change, we just sort of have to work with their feelings. We have to say, okay, yes, you might be afraid, so here's how we're going to do this. And part of how you do that is by that kind of leadership and real authentic conversation. Not like one to many communication, but like many to many conversation. And that I think is a like paradigmatically how I start to see this change conversation differently. This change leadership is being really distinct from change management.

Yeah, you're Touching on something really important, which, you know, I think we focus so much on the tactical piece, the picking, the software, the, the, you know, business requirements, the doing an rfp, the deciding this is how we're going to roll it out. Here's the project plan. You know, we're thinking we've done all this great work, but I often, a lot of us often say the skill set that you need to be really successful in a transformation is, you know, we call them soft skills, but I think it is this. It's the relationship building. It's the how do you convey the importance the why to your stakeholders?

I'm totally with you. I'm starting to figure out what my relationship is with the phrase soft.

Yeah, I don't like it either. So if you have an alternative, I.

Don'T know what it is because I think, like, part of what I do is I really. I bring a rigorous approach to soft skills is, I think, part of what I do, because I've got an engineering brain, I've got a very analytical brain, and I've had to learn in my life how to build relationships with people, how to build. I've had to learn how to build trust because that's a key part of what I do in my business. I don't have a better phrase yet, but to me, it's. Yeah, it's like these skills that are deeply a part of being. Being an effective leader of people, an effective human.

I don't know what the right word is for those skills, but that is what I think makes a leader, makes someone successful, and it allows them to sort of elevate to. To the next level beyond the. I know the requirements. I've picked the software I can implement.

Yes. Yeah, I'm in. I'm in agreement with that. There was something else you said there. Oh, I mean, so building trust and influence, I think is such a hugely important component of leading change and leading transformation. And I think I. I brought a program to a client who was. Who I had worked with them. They were a small team. They were like a team of seven or eight, and I kind of supported them in getting started on their change journey. And then they went away and they were very successful. And so then they were a team of 30 and they were like, hey, we need to bring the rest of the people up to speed on how we're working. And so I brought them, I designed and delivered a program to them that was called Earning the Right to Be right, which was all about. It's not about. It's not about the facts. Right. It's not about the business case. It's not about the. We know. It's not even about. We know this situation has worked because it's worked in this part of our business. It's about how do you build that trust and influence. And the truth is you do it by offering people something and then listening. I mean, many leaders, we were sort of touching on this a little bit earlier. Like we're rewarded for our expertise. Right. We're rewarded for our technical and our subject matter expertise. And then you get to a point in your leadership where showing up and bludgeoning someone with your expertise just doesn't work. Right. Because then they can resist. Right. They can slow down the whole thing. Because what you're really in transformation, what you're asking people to do is to think differently and to work differently. And so you can't mandate that people be more collaborative. Right. You can't mandate that people do that. There's a kind of deep irony in that. One of the skills I'm often end. End up working with the leaders I work with and the, and the teams I work with is the skill around how do you listen, how do you engage with people, how do you sort of shut down that little voice in your head that's going and the chattering and looking for the answer, trying to think about the next thing to say when a person is sharing with you and just how do you get into people's worlds? Right. To. To co create the change with them rather than to co create the why with them rather than to, to kind of impose it on.

Right. My team used to call it inception where we'd try to convince them that it was their idea. But I, I think you frame it in a much more polite and proper way.

That's right. If you really do this with an open heart as a leader, if you really do this deeply, authentically, like you are showing up, you are offering them something, you believe you have something to contribute and you believe you have something to learn. And it's that both. And that I think is the what can unlock your ability to really lead and create transformation in your organization.

Yeah. What are your thoughts on the true leader's role? So in legal it would be a general counsel or managing partner or a CEO. In some of the other industries, like you said, the person who's often the change agent is a small band of misfits on the side who are trying to make things happen. They may not have the authority. And what I often hear from people getting Frustrated is, well, the buy in from the CEO or the GC to put the hammer down and just tell people this is how it's going to be. And there's a, there's that command and control culture that exists in some places. We know it doesn't work in other places.

Right.

What are your thoughts on that? Well, I can't get this done because I don't have that.

Yeah, it's a great question. So one of my, he was a client and a mentor. He taught me this metaphor of leadership as the glass hammer. Yes, you can bring out the hammer and you can whack with it, but you can really only do that a couple of times until it shatters. I think there's two interesting questions in here. When I'm coaching somebody who is in that leadership role, the GC or the CEO or the cep, I'm often coaching them about how do you let go? Because so much at that level is about, is about letting go. It's about being clear about your intent and your context, your and what you want from people and what success looks like and then unleashing them on to deliver that success, letting them handle the how. Right. It doesn't mean you abdicate your role, but it means you let them generate the how and then you empower them and then you talk with them about the how. Hey, you can say, I actually don't see how this is going to get us to where we want. I actually don't see how this is going to get us to, to the goal that we want to get us to. So that's a really, you know, that's when I'm working at that level. Right. Like the people that do have the glasshammer, it's about that. And so much of that work is about supporting those folks in really seeing their strengths. Right? Really seeing what are you really good at. Right. Where do you contribute the most in your leadership, in your organization and then also helping them get curious about where. Does that thing not serve you? Right? If you really have a strength about being a technical contributor, that's going to serve you some time. Right? But as you get more senior, less and less of your job is about showing up and solving technical problems. Some of it still might be if you're a gc, you might be a subject matter expert. In particular question of law that comes up and if it's not your realm, if it's not your thing, then how can you let go of control but hold enough of a container? I talk about containers a lot with leaders. Hold enough of a container so that you're confident that people aren't going to go off track. Right. So you need to build the structure to support people in staying on track, even when you've articulated your intent very clearly. And I often teach a structure of a briefing and a back briefing. So you brief people on the work and then they brief you on the how they're going to do it. And then you have that rich and robust conversation and just having a little bit of structure around that can really help leaders, can really support leaders in empowering their team and really growing and scaling up. So that's the answer at that level, at the level of the change agents, this kind of, this sort of band of misfits, there's different things you can do. So one of the leaders that, that I have worked with for a number of years and I really admire, he, he has a great relationship with his boss and so his boss will tell him to do something, go look at X. And I'll say, I don't think you really want me to look at X. I think you want me to look at Y. Is it okay if I go and look at Y for a little while? And the boss will say, yeah, that's fine, go look at Y. But you know, the boss really still thinks X is the thing. Right.

Okay.

But then he goes away and he's able to be effective at looking at Y and figuring out what needs to be stirred up there. And then the boss starts seeing the results. And results often speak for themselves. Right. So being able to contract a little bit with your boss about, okay, you're asking me for X, but I think what we really need is Y. Are you okay if I go and explore this for a little while? Right. So. So just being explicit about the mismatch that you see, that's one thing part of, I think what happens especially in big organizations is people try to roll out a change everywhere all at once.

Oh yes, big mistake. And I've learned that the hard way. So it's close to.

Yeah. So where, yeah, where have you seen that?

You know, we, I work at a contract lifecycle management company now and these are really big cross functional, lot of stakeholders with different needs across the company type project. And trying to align everybody on the fact that there is even a problem that we need to fix is hard enough. Never mind align on the right set of requirements and features that you're looking for, timeline, all that stuff. I mean it's a really big meaty project. So I have learned an alternative way. But I'd love to hear why you say that.

You've just nailed the problem. You've just nailed it. And some people are more conservative than others, right? I mean, if you know that, that kind of adoption diffusion curve, if you've got the early adopters, you've got the fast followers all the way to the late adopters. So what I think is really interesting about that adoption curve is the person who did all that work, his name was EV Rogers and he worked, he looked at adoption of conservation technologies among farmers. That was what, that was his testing ground for this. And one of the things that he found was that the early adopters were people that were more cosmopolitan. They were farmers that were more likely to be part of Rotary Club and Lion. This was in the, in the, I think 40s and 40s through 70s, basically. But Rotary Club, Lions Club, they were more likely to travel to Des Moines. They were just, they were more in it. They had deeper networks of people who were thinking differently. And I actually think that you can, you can identify those folks in modern organizations too.

Yeah.

And so the thing that I'm often counseling the leaders I work with around is find your pockets of willingness, like who are the people that are hungry for this right now? Right. You could do a bunch of analysis, right. But people know who these people are and so figure out who's interested in the change, who you have a good relationship with and build a sandbox with them and say, hey, we want to do this. Would you be interested in this? Oh, yes, I'm very interested. That, okay, now you've got somebody who is willing to go on this journey with you, willing to lead you on the journey as much as you're leading them. And if you, when you bring whatever it is like a CLM technology to them, when you actually get that implemented, they are going to start to see results. Right? So they are going to start to see, whoa, this is amazing. This saves us X whatever. This is a great, like all the business case, it's not going to be hypothetical on paper. They are going to be living it. You're also going to be able to experiment and iterate with them. And then you use that example to get the next group interested. You build this momentum over time rather than being stuck trying to get A, trying to get a hundred percent adoption and B, dealing with the resistance of people who frankly are never going to appreciate your solution. But you also get to tap in a little bit to the like the kind of friendly competitiveness that can often exist between folks like that.

Oh, oh, yeah.

Like Jane is. Wow. Like she's processing so much, I don't know, whatever the metric is, she's processing so many more contracts than we are or whatever. Oh, that's pretty cool. And then you get your boss's attention. Right?

So.

So that I think is a. That I think is part of it.

Yeah. And so that's exactly the lesson I learned. And that's what I try to tell folks now, which is, yes, find your people. They exist. Everybody knows who they are. They're the. There are detractors as well. Yeah, it's a lot harder to get them around. So start with the people who want to experiment with you. And the great thing about those folks is it's okay to make a mistake. Okay to, you know, try something and iterate. Because they're, they have that mindset idea of like, we're just, we're just piloting, we're just trying something out with you.

Totally.

And then totally when they're successful, they're going to look great, like you said to their manager, their boss. And then they start telling people and everyone else, and lawyers especially are super competitive. So when they see this group doing well, they're like, why can't I get some of that? Why are you not helping me? Right. And so it's so you get them to pull instead of push.

Yes, exactly. And I love that. And I worked with this team at this global manufacturer and they were working on transforming basically how their sites did maintenance. I mean, they just are such a massive scale. Right. And they started at this massive scale and they were like, we don't know how to do this. And it's actually because it can't be done. It's impossible to do this at the massive scale, especially in the way you want to do it. So find somebody you have a really good relationship with that believes in what you're doing or that has an inkling that the old sees the challenge, sees that the old way doesn't work. And then one of the things that they did, which I think is also can be really effective, is they skipped the frozen middle. They skipped. They sort of got the leaders buy in of this particular plant.

Okay.

And then they went and they worked with the frontline workforce and their supervisors, the middle management, tended to be very scared and conservative and, and so by going and working with the people that actually face this problem on a day to day basis and sort of unleashing them, they were able to then see results. And then it was hard. It's hard to Resist results. Right. Like it's easy to resist a theoretical process, but it's hard to resist results. And now this group is in a totally different position than they were. They did that initial site or two, they learned a lot. They learned how not to do things. Then they rolled it out to additional sites and now people are coming to them and saying, we want this. And you're actually not ready for this yet. You're not big enough yet. So it totally goes from that push to that pull. And from the perspective of somebody leading change, I mean, that's transformational.

That's right. That's right. And I love what you just said about it's easy to resist a theoretical change or theoretical process. And that's the sort of like initial gut reaction. We're going to change something. Nope, nope. Everything's fine. Right? And we hear that all the time. Yeah, that's great for other people. Our group is fine. No one's complaining, everything's right, it's not broken. And I like to use the word, the art of the possible because I think oftentimes, yeah, if you haven't seen it, if you haven't seen the success, if you haven't gotten your hands in it, it's so easy to just say, no, we're good, we don't need anything. Right. So there are groups that are willing to try, but then you, when you see the success, when you see how it actually works and you see they didn't lose their jobs, you know, get threatened by anything, that it's actually a good outcome, they'll come.

Yes, that's a really good way to put it. Jim Carrey, the actor, Jim Carrey, yes. He's actually a super awoken dude. He's pretty, he's a pretty incredible human being. And I saw him give a, I saw a video of him giving us a graduation speech somewhere once and he talked about the difference between. It's important to know the difference between the dog that bites you and the dog that bites you in your mind. And I really love that distinction because part of what that initial gut reaction, it's just fear based. Right. It's just. I know what's here. I'm comfortable. You're asking me to do something unknown, I'm afraid. Right, that's, that's a very incredibly useful reaction.

Right.

That is the reaction that has brought our species to this point. And yet it's not the reaction that is going to help us thrive in, in the future. And so part of what bringing things, making things tangible does is It. I think it helps settle that reaction for people because they no longer. Yeah, they're no longer projecting their fears onto the situation. They can actually see what somebody else is doing. Maybe a little bit more adventurous than them, but you'll always have that spectrum.

Yeah, Sometimes it just takes time to get your head around. What does this mean to me, you know, personally? This changes. How is this going to affect me? I always think back. You remember when we all had to. When Covid hit and we all had to go work from home and you couldn't come into the office anymore. Everyone was used to going into the office every day, and they. And they loved it. So when I was at Google and I was telling people, you can't come anymore, there, there was like, mass uprise. You know, I will come to the office and I don't care, and you can't stop me. And we had to literally, like, barricade the doors and say, you cannot come in. You cannot come to the office. You will work from home. That's how it's going to be. And people were so angry. And then, of course, you know, fast forward to now. It's like, hey, we need people to come in twice. Absolutely not. You know, we will not come in twice a week. That's crazy. Like, they're the same people that we were dragging out of the offices just three weeks ago. It's. It's. It's just, you know, you get used to the way you're doing things, and so even if it is a better outcome, your initial response is, that's not how I work now. That's not the way we do things.

Right? That's right. Yes. I think one of the things that I think about with resistance. Resistance is super valuable. We all have the experience of resisting, right? Oh, yeah, always. We just don't think of ourselves as resistors. Right. We think of ourselves as, I'm smart. I understand something. They don't. Right. They don't get me. They don't get my world. Right. We don't think of it as resistant. There's something really valuable if you can turn toward resistance and sort of enter into it and say there's. There is something about that that I think is really valuable. This. I love the return to the office conversation because I think part of what shows up for me in this is there are things that people get out of being in an office. There's costs and benefits to it. So what can you do to understand people's kind of belief around the benefits of it and people's belief around the cost of it and also the benefits and the cost of staying at home. So you can actually craft a solution. It's not just come into the office two days a week. Right. Why are we coming to the office? So maybe Tuesdays are days when we don't have external meetings and we're just collaborating internally. Right. So we want people to be in the same place to collaborate. We have certain kinds of structures that we've brought to things. We have lunch together in different ways. Because I think those sort of informal things is often like the cost of being at home, the cost of being all remote. So how can we as leaders construct the both in solution? Right. That's. That I think is holding contradictions and constructing the both. And I think is like one of those, it's one of those soft skills.

That we were talking about before. How do you think about the pockets of resistance or the detractors when you are leading change? How can you use them to your advantage?

Yeah, sure. So one of the things is interesting is what the research says, particularly when you're talking about transformational change. What the research says is actually ignore the deep resistors. Right. Don't spend your time and effort on them. You've got a finite amount of time, you got a finite amount of effort. You can identify your champions, you can find your pockets of willingness, but you'll always be working in a population where people are resisting. And that's good, that's adaptive. So it's about working with the fence sitters and it's about how do you understand their perspective? And it's about engaging with them. Right. It's not about convincing them, it's not about getting buy in. It's really about understanding their perspective. And you can do that through one on one conversations. And you can also do that through sampling. Right. So talking with people about things and then sort of going back to your group and echoing back what you've understood, what you've heard. So you don't have to have the same conversation with 300 people. Right. You can have kind of samples of these conversations and synthesize it and bring it back to people. I think that's one of my superpowers, like as a, in my consulting practice, like talking with people, getting into their world, understanding it, and then sort of holding a mirror up to the organization at a sort of higher level. And that can really help people articulate what is actually important to me here. What is actually important to us here. And I think that can be a really powerful. Yeah, a really powerful way to, to do that. The other thing, I think that is a skill of modern leaders that many people just don't have a lot of practice or supporting or sort of supporting or they haven't built the chop is like, how do you facilitate conversations with bigger groups? How do you bring in the creative power of everyone in your organization and how do you unleash them? And there's a book that I love which is called the Surprising Power of Liberating Structures, which is all about like, how can you, in a group, in a big group, anywhere from, could be from eight to a thousand people, right? How do you have these conversations where you're really having these many to many conversations that are very engaging and yet you're getting the insights and together as a whole room. And there's lots of little sort of micro facilitations that you can do. So you don't have to have 300 conversations, but you can have one conversation with 300 people and it's actually participatory and it's actually engaging.

What are some of the tips to make that happen? That sounds pretty hard. I mean, if you do that, that's amazing. But that sounds difficult.

Well, so the, the real tip is you lean on the structure. So I'll give a, a simple example of one of these structures. It's called the 1, 2, 4 all structure.

Okay.

You pose people a question like you could talk for a few minutes about a p of content or something like that. Oh, so I'm, I'm actually, I think, going to do this at CGI in one of the executive sessions. I'm going to lead a workshop. So I'm going to talk a little bit about change and then ask people a question like how does this show up in your organization and give people a minute to think about it. So you just give people a minute or two to sort of reflect on their own. Right? So you let the introverts catch up, right? Because so often we're in this extroverted, you know, it's about how do you be smart quickly, right? And some people are really good at that and some people like that process. So you give folks a minute or two to sit, think, reflect, write. Then you put people in pairs. So now they're discussing something with somebody else, with a colleague, with a peer, just discussing their observations. You let them chat for a couple of minutes and then you put those pairs with other pairs. So now you've got groups of four. And so those groups of four now start to talk about what are the common themes that they saw, what, what were their experience, what overlapped, what was different?

Okay.

And then you bring everybody into the room together and you can now, you can harvest the takeaways from those groups. Groups. And so what it does is it lets you, in 15 to 20 minutes, you. You have a very rich conversation where everybody is participating and people's wisdom gets to bubble up to the top and you really, as a leader, you get to see it. And not only that, the structure. I'm getting really excited, I can tell, because I love this stuff. Not only that, the structure, what it does is imagine asking a question like, what didn't we do? What didn't we do? Well, here in this context, right, you're actually requiring a lot of bravery from people to speak up about that.

Right?

But if you ask that question and then you have people in, individually, think about it, put them in pairs, put them in groups of four, now all of a sudden you've got some hiddenness in the crowd, right? So nobody has to sort of be the one to. Yeah, you, you've created some safety just by the structure. You also want to create safety with your kind of stance as a leader, but just by the structure, you've created some safety of. Yeah, this kind of. You make the norm to participate and you make it so not. You don't have to fall on your sword to, to share something. I mean, you can do it in this way that's encouraged by the structure.

That's really interesting and a great tip. I mean, as you're leading change and bringing people around, you want to give them a space to be heard and you want to listen. But you're right, some people will just sit in that big room and look down and be angry and bite their tongue. Right? And not.

Yeah, totally. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, just. Yeah, imagine that the kind of counterfactual to this is a 20 minute conversation with 30 people, even well facilitated in a traditional way. It's like, how many of those people are you going to hear from? Right. Six of them. And there are certain people and there are certain demographics that are very comfortable speaking up and sharing in those groups and other demographics who are historically less encouraged too. How can you. Yeah, how can you build that in?

Yeah. I had a great conversation with Ash John, who. Who might eventually be on this podcast as well. He's a. A leader in London and he was telling me about a change that he was leading and his work with listening and really working on some of the more vocal detractors to come around to their point of view or whatever the change that they were trying to implement. And they had one of these larger meetings and he said something like, well, what do you guys all think? And the person who was, I guess technically or well regarded as the most negative person in the room, he said, yeah, I've looked at it, this is pretty good. And the whole room kind of went, well, you know, if Joe thinks it's good or if Joe's on, then it's okay for us. He's the most skeptical, he's the most risk averse, and he says no to everything. So I, I thought that was an interesting way to have people feel heard, bring them around and then turn your detractors into kind of your heroes.

Yeah, yeah, yep. No, exactly. I think that's a really. Yeah, that's cool. I have a story of on a smaller scale, but it's just about the power of listening. And I think in general we underappreciate how much listening creates a sense of safety for the other person. And I mean kind of like true deep listening. I have a client who I've worked with for years and he was working a particular change in his organization and he had worked with kind of everybody around this one VP who was a big resistor.

Yeah.

And he knew that the VP was a resistor. He knew that the resistance was going to happen. He had really done his work to understand the perspective of that team. And people were on board with what he was proposing except this vp. So we had this very high stakes meeting coming up with this vp. He's in a manufacturing company and he. I have, I won't go into it now, but I've got this diagram, this model about different levels of resistance. And I'll go into it just a tiny bit, but it's. I don't get it. I don't like it, I don't like you or I don't trust you. And one of the mistakes we made when we're leading changes, we often engage with people at the I don't get it level. And we think people don't get it. They need more data. We need to make the case stronger. When really it's I don't like it or I don't trust you. I don't believe you understand my context.

Definitely.

So this client was, he like spent the, a couple of days before this meeting just looking at this model and thinking about, where is this leader? Where's this vp? What doesn't he like? What doesn't he get? What doesn't he Trust. And so he went into this meeting and he said, hey, Alex, I have a deck here that I'm happy to take you through about this change. But before I go into that, I wonder, would you be willing to share with me what some of your concerns are? And it just opened the floodgates, right? And this VP was just able to share. This isn't going to work. This isn't going to work. This isn't going to work. And my client, his boss was in the room and he said to me later, he said after about 20 minutes, this VP had brought up all these objections and then resolved them all himself totally. He said, I've never seen someone bring up so many objections and then talk himself out of them so quickly. And all this team I was working with, all they did was listen, right? All they did. I mean, they brought something, right? They had a little bit, but they listen. And I think listening is such a superpower. Yeah. How does that show up in your world? I mean, I can, I can see a lot of resonance here, share a.

Story with you, which I may have already told on one of these previous episodes, but the first time I've ever had to work with true change experts that, you know, Google had brought in change experts to help me and my team do something. We were collaborating with our real estate team. So we were moving to hoteling desks and we were the first group at Google. This is way pre pandemic. Like we were going to be the first group at Google to experiment without having an assigned desk, which, you know, lawyers, they've been trained on trying to move up the ladder in their law firms to have the big office. And so their desk is their territory. Like there's a lot, you know, people sit by the window or whatever it is. And we, our general counsel, our leader had worked with the real estate team and said, no, our team is going to go first. We're going to be the first that do this. And it was already decided. So at this point, it was up to me and my team to communicate, implement, you know, like we said, do the technical moving from point A to point B. And in my young and naive mind, there wasn't much change management, change leadership involved because the decision was made from the top down. We had the glass hammer, but there was a lot of resistance. These change experts came in and I said, I don't really know if we need you because it's already been decided people are going to come into work and there's not a desk for them. So there's not much that we need to do here. And they said, no, we gotta make people feel heard. So we had these meetings with especially the folks that we had hand selected to be part of this council to get us ready. And we picked all the people who were the most worried, scared loud about it. And we just gave a lunchtime meeting once a week for the next few weeks to get ready. And all they did was, like you said, voice all their concerns and then sort of resolve them on their own. And by the end of this, they were the ones saying, we're part of the council. You guys should get really excited about this new hoteling desk situation. And I was just amazed, you know, watching this whole thing happen, because I would not, you know, on my own, have thought to do that. But having learned from that experience, I mean, I use this tool all the time now.

Yeah, yeah, it's really powerful. And what's interesting about listening is it's so simple, right? And it's so challenging. It's so challenging. It's very hard.

Yeah.

What do you find hard about it?

Like, off the charts, extrovert. And I'm also someone who likes to fix things. And so whenever someone starts to tell me a problem, I'm like, oh, here's this. I mean, I just think about my teenage daughter. I am constantly jumping to fix. She's like, can you just tell me it sucks at, you know, the teacher's wrong and you know that they're wrong. I think she just wants to talk about it and I see that.

Yeah, she wants to be heard. This is what is, I think, the real. This paradox that we've gone back to a couple of times. There are, there. There have been times in your life, there have been times in your career. So many of us are trained to solve the problem, right? We show up, it's there, we solve it, right? That's that, and that's what we're rewarded for over and over, whether it's in school, in our career, and. And yet I think of. I almost think of like the definition of growth or the definition of development as raising your awareness. So you can choose the right tool for the job. You can choose the right approach at the right time. What I hear you talking about with your daughter is that she's really asking you to show up with a different tool in that she's asking you to show up with a different. A different paradigm, a different stand. So how are, are you able to do that? When are you able to do that successfully with her?

Oh, I have to be Very conscious. Yeah, I do. Yeah.

And what helps you be conscious? What contributes to your ability to be conscious and aware in those moments?

I think it's just taking a moment and listening to her react to the, you know, this isn't working in the conversation that I would want it to have with her. And so it's. It's exactly as you said, is listening and then pivoting to find the different tool. The, you know, telling her what to do is not working right now. Okay, let me. Let her come to the conclusion.

Right. Can I offer you another tool? And I know we're talking about parenting, but the parenting is just.

It's all the same, isn't it?

Yes. Of smaller humans, I think being explicit is often really useful, too, like asking what somebody wants in the moment. So the kind of simplified way I've heard this is, do you want help? Do you want to be heard, or do you want a hug? Like, which one of those three things do you want?

Yeah.

And you will then, like, almost like, contract with them in the moment of what would be of service to you in this moment. Because sometimes it is help. Right. And sometimes it's help much less than we, I think, generally gravitate to. A lot of the time it's being heard, and just saying I just want to be heard is a powerful way to just make that explicit, Giving somebody the opportunity to sort of share what they really want.

Yeah. That's great. That's great. This has been a great conversation. I want to just touch back on one thing that I know we touched on throughout this conversation, but that I really want to highlight for our listeners because I think it's so important, which is the listening, the knowing, which tools to use, the knowing how to bring people together and move things along in a way that doesn't feel forced. Moving away from that, as you explained it, what we've been trained on our whole lives that we get rewarded on is, you know, showing that we know the skills, we know what's the next step. Right. And that's all great. And that's. It's the same story of kind of what got you here won't get you there. Like, it's gotten you to this point in your career. And I know everyone's trying to become this strategic leader.

Yes.

And that's where we have to start recognizing that we have to change, too. And not just, you know, pointing at everyone else saying, well, I'm. I'm doing the right thing. Right. It's here. Exactly. It's myself.

We can only Point the finger towards ourselves. Right. I have a 12 week leadership program that I do and it's a mix of recorded content and one on one coaching work and group coaching and it's all run under Chatham House rules. But one of the pieces of content is about taking a hundred percent responsibility as a leader and what that means. And it doesn't mean that you can make everything go well. It does mean that you're always asking yourself how am I contributing to these conditions that I say I don't want to exist.

Exactly.

And you're always pointing that finger back. And the reason that I'm I think, able to teach this is because I am constantly in imperfect practice with this. Right.

Like we all are.

That is, we all are. Exactly. And it's this constant quieting, the mind, deepening, being introspective. It's part of why I love coaching leaders. I mean the skill level of the leaders that I get to work with is just, it's phenomenal and I love supporting them in their. Yeah. In their work and their transformation.

Well, I, I didn't realize you were going to be at Clock's Global Institute. That's quite a gift for everyone. So happy to hear that.

Yeah, thank you.

I'm really excited and this has been a wonderful conversation. I've learned a lot. I know everyone else is going to learn a lot from this. So thank you so much for your time. Chris. It's been fun.

Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you. Mary, Can I tell people where they can connect?

I was just going to ask you that so please do.

Great. Rad. So I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active. Chris Clearfield. You can also go to my website which is clearfieldgroup.com expertise and I have there a video on how to let go of your expertise or how to work skillfully with your expertise as kind of something that you maybe don't always have to lead with. That's clearfieldgroup.com expertise. I think people will get a lot out.

I did watch video and I. Oh yeah, yeah. I thought it was really useful and I would say there's a lot of other really good nuggets information on your website. So if people want to spend a few minutes around there's, there's a lot of good content there.

Brad, thank you.

All right, talk to you soon. Thank you so much, Chris.