67: Dan Pontefract asks "What Do You Want To Become?"

Welcome to the Mutually Amazing Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Domitrz, with the Center for Respect. The episode you're about to listen to was recorded when this show used to be called the Respect Podcast. So, you might hear that mentioned during this episode. Well, let's get to the show. Yes, Dan is the author of 3 bestselling books. Keynote speaker, professor, leadership strategist, and is the founder of the Pontefract Group, a firm that improves the state of leadership and organizational culture. He has spent 25 years in the corporate and public sector as an executive developing organizational culture, employee engagement, and leaders at firms such as TELUS, SAP, Manulife, TD Bank, AT&T, and the Government of Canada, among others. He is Dan Pontefract. Dan, thank you so much for joining us.

Mike, it's such a pleasure. Thanks for having me today.

Absolutely. Uh, we're gonna dive right into it because you have several books. One of them is about purpose. So let's dive right into what's the relationship between purpose and respect?

Oh gosh, isn't it everything? I love where you're coming from in terms of respect and what, uh, ultimately this, this planet needs more of. But then when you, you buttress that with purpose, it's sort of like world's number one-two punch, isn't it?

I agree, but I can see a lot of people going, why? Why? How do— what does purpose have to do with respect? So how do you explain that connection, that interrelation?

Well, purpose is, for me at least, that combination of 3 questions. What do I want to be when I grow up? Who am I trying to become? And how do I want to be known when I leave a room? And so when you think about those what, who, and how questions, That comes back to your center of gravity, that comes back to your core. And for me, whether you are a parent or a neighbor or a leader or a CEO or an executive assistant, those types of questions then relate back to whether or not you respect yourself in the pursuit of purpose and whether you respect others in said pursuit of purpose because You know, if, if you lack purpose, you're, you are ultimately lacking respect for yourself and others because you are steamrolling or you're ignoring, or you're failing to consider the, the empathy of someone else and so forth. Like, to me, I think there's an inextricable link between the two.

All right. So if somebody's listening, wait a second, I go to a job that I don't feel is my calling. I don't know. And I never have, I've never felt I have a purpose. A calling. How am I being disrespectful? How do you answer that, Dan?

Everyone can, first of all, demonstrate respect in their role, in their way of life. So, let's go back to the question specifically, Mike, about your place at work. Maybe you don't like the job. Maybe you don't like the mechanics, the processes, the things that you are supposed to do 8 to 4, 9 to 5, whatever it is. But that doesn't mean that you can't glean aspects of that environment in which to treat others with respect, including and probably starting with yourself. If there's no so-called calling, which is not what I intend to synonymously discuss as purpose, that's different, right? I think then that's a more existential question, right, about why are you in that role? If it's horrible, If you're there just for a paycheck, well, it's time for a life check and get out and find ways in which to sort of fuel your purpose and start treating yourself with a little more respect. But if you're in a role and there are portions of it, let's say, that you don't enjoy, well, where are you getting your mojo from in the other portions? Is it the camaraderie? Is it some of the customer interactions if you're in such an example like that? And again, going back to your point and purpose about respect, How are you treating those interactions? What can you learn from those specific interactions to then fuel something else inside of your life, outside of your life?

When people are evaluating these questions, because you're throwing a lot of questions out there, which is awesome, what is the relationship to respect and thinking itself?

Today, the unfortunate part is we thought that perhaps technology would help us think more clearly, that the technology would help us be calmer, and that we'd be more patient, and that we'd have more free time. And in fact, it's the absolute opposite. And the irony is dripping like a storm in the middle of winter here up in Canada where I live in British Columbia. So you have your creative thinking, you have decision-making type thinking or critical thinking, And then you have the application of thinking. So that's the doing part. And we're really good, Mike, at the doing. And what we're not doing, however, is respecting the need for time to think, the time being the creative and the critical thinking aspects. And we just gung-ho go into action. We're very good at it, but we're addicted to it. And ergo, we are not respecting the fact that perhaps We need more time to marinate in the moment, more time to reflect, more time to dream, more time to respect the process of getting to action. And unfortunately, what you see with everyone stuffing their eyeballs into their mobile phones and their laptops ad infinitum, you have far too many frenetic people. You have far too many people who are disrespecting the process of better, good, creative, critical thinking.

I think this is so true and we can all fall into it so, so easily. And I believe you should have, and we've talked about this with other groups I've been with too, is this idea of, do you have thinking time in your week? Now, not everybody's going to make time every day for a set-aside hour just to sit and think, but even to do it a few times a week to allow evaluation. Because what we tend to do is go, oh, I thought of a solution. All right. But you didn't actually pause and sit on it for an hour just to think. You went and did more things for an hour and came back to the exact same thought process you were in before. It was just confirming what you already thought. Whereas when you sit and think, you actually may leave the original idea solution you had with a completely different one, because that thinking allowed you to have new concepts come into your mind just through thinking, not by engaging in conversation, but just sitting in quiet.

I could not agree more, Mike. I mean, we are, In that fine and wonderful example and illustration, you are allowing the brain synapses to connect as opposed to almost disconnect. And again, if we're not allowing that time to permeate new thinking, new ideas, and potentially new decisions that come as a result of it, I argue again that that's kind of disrespectful to your own professional status, to your own way of being. And the myopia kind of sets in. So, you know, the myopia being the tunnel vision or the horse blinders, as some might be aware of. When you have those blinders on, you're not opening yourself up to these other wonderful possibilities. And I think we are time bankrupt. Like, we're so stressed when it comes to our time and our management of time and our calendars. I mean, I do this a lot when I do executive coaching. As a kind of more concrete example, Mike, one of the first things I do is I make people open up their Google or their Outlook or their Apple Calendar, right? And I say, okay, show me this. And 9 times out of 10, I kid you not, it is like back to back to back to back to back to back with meetings Monday to Friday, 8:30 to 5:00, or whatever the time is. This is good. I mean, in a sense, you are having a lot of collaboration happening, and there's a lot of phone meetings, and there's a lot of face-to-face meetings. I said, so Where's the breathing space to be creative, to respect the creative process? Where's the decision-making space individually or collectively? I don't see any of these meetings that say, hey, we're going to think about this as a team, or it's a planning strategy. It's just meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting. And that's part of my bankruptcy comment is that we need to win back our time to respect the process of better thinking.

Oh, I agree. And what's interesting, like if you look at my calendar, several days literally have a block that say thinking time. That's literally what it says. So I get this because I didn't do it. And you would say to yourself, oh, I'll make time for that. But if you don't put it in there, something else will fill that time. And that's where it becomes so important. And a lot of organizations struggle with this because your example is so perfect. They struggle with this concept of, well, we need meetings to have great ideas instead of we need silence sometimes to have great ideas.

So again, when I'm doing the calendar exercise, right, then I show mine, or even when I'm doing keynotes, right, I sort of show a screenshot of my calendar, a weekly calendar. And to your point, right, I block off, uh, because again, the world is large and so you have different time zones, but I block off 7 o'clock in the morning to 8:30 always, and I block off 4 o'clock until 6 o'clock always. And I also block off 12 o'clock to 5 o'clock Friday afternoon. And to your point, I call it DP thinking time from the initials of my name. And those times I do not take meetings. I do not answer my phone. I'm not looking at social media or whatever. Right. Those are my reflection times and my critical thinking, decision-making times, because if I'm writing books or planning workshops or planning executive— I need that time to be thinking as opposed to answering or responding or being in a meeting.

Yeah. And I want everyone listening, whether you're working in a corporate environment, working for yourself, maybe you're at home raising children, that thinking time, wherever you can find it, becomes so important. And we need leaders to support that. So, let's dive into that. Why do you think leaders forget the important concept of respecting people's space and just actually respect, period? They forget. Like, you— I'll talk to corporate leaders. They'll be like, oh, respect is very important to us. And I go, Well, where is it in your daily schedule? Where does it show up? Where do I see it being practiced? Where is it in everyday development? Why do you think leaders so quickly forget about the practicing of respect and how you treat others and how you value others?

Oh my gosh, I could go for another 3 hours on this question, but let me try to be succinct. So 2 key points here. Uh, the first is empathy and the second has to do with pace. So on the empathy piece, I don't know what's happened since kind of, I guess, the mid-'70s. But there is a significant lack of empathy on behalf of leaders towards the common worker, the proletariat, if you will. And that drives me bananas because you've got leaders who have worked their way up to some sort of leadership role, whether it's leading a team, a unit, entire organization. And they've just completely forgotten how to empathize with the load, with the balancing of life, kids, soccer matches, et cetera, and the pressures inside of getting the job done. And so, we have not been able as leaders to put ourselves in the shoes of those that are below us in a very hierarchical term there to understand what's going on in their lives, their work lives. And that's a problem because by not putting yourself in the shoes of the, of the common worker, you're not able to truly understand those pressures. You're not able to truly understand what's making up their lives that's causing such duress. So overall, I'd say we need to win back our empathy as leaders to better understand what's going on in the lives of our workers.

Yeah. And I would say if you're a parent, you can practice that right in home life. A lot of parents—

Absolutely.

Parents forget. Am I being empathetic to what my child just experienced? What they tend to think is, how do I fix what my child just did? Which is not empathy. That's not empathy at all.

No.

And we all tend to do it in leadership roles, whether it's parenting or it's corporate. How do I fix what that person did versus how do I have empathy for them in this moment? Because they're gonna be more embarrassed, frustrated, disappointed than anyone that that didn't go well. It was their project. It was their decision.

My beautiful better half, Denise, and I are raising 3 goats, as we call them. The kids are 16, almost 14, and 12, and girl, boy, girl. And, the middle guy suffers from a pretty extreme case of ADHD. And, from whatever we've known, 9 years or so, we've forced ourselves as parents to empathize with the middle guy so that we better appreciate where his headspace is coming from When he snaps or whether he's attention deficit in a particular situation, et cetera, et cetera. So I agree, as a parent, whether it's ADHD or otherwise, you can't just jump off a cliff and berate your kid because they've done something wrong. You got to put yourself in their shoes and say, you have no prefrontal cortex right now. You have no executive function. There's no ability for you to pause. Because that's just the lack of brain development with these kids. But so to make my point analogously with leaders, imagine if leaders were pretending, if you will, that also adults have a deficiency with their executive function. And at times, because of the load and the pressures and stress, et cetera, there is a lack of ability to withstand some of that pressure. That's what leaders, like a parent, ought to do. What's going on with that kid? Oh, what's going on with that employee? Oh, that's leadership to me. It really is, Mike.

Oh, I agree 100%. And that's why when we live it 360, it makes it so much easier in the workplace, right? If, if you're just trying to be a respectful leader in the workplace, but you're not one at home, odds are you're not really a good one in the workplace. You just fake it really well because you've got to live it.

Well, that, that goes back to, you know, I'm Canadian, so I'm going to use a hockey metaphor here, but it's applicable to basketball and to, for Football and baseball. As a leader, are you playing for the name on the back of your jersey or for the crest on the front? And the crest on the front for me is your team or it's your organization. It's, you know, I might, I might have the captain, you know, C on my— on the front of the crest here. I may be, quote, the leader, but I'm going to send that elevator back down and I'm going to be there with you on the front line. I'm going to work with you. I'm going to empathize with the situation. We're going to get this done as a team. I might take an accolade, but I'm also going to take the hit if we fail because it's my responsibility. But I'm going to be there with you. And that's what we need more of.

Love it. And you yourself were an athlete. You were on the national soccer team in Canada. Tell us about that.

Well, with a couple of English parents and immigrating over from England to Canada, I guess I had some DNA in me naturally and not a lot of soccer players at the time in Canada. But the lesson I learned out of that actually was one that That got me into leadership strategy, leadership development, leadership coaching for my entire career now that I'm turning 48 in a month. And that was this short little story. So we're at a national team training camp and it was in preparation for the Under-16 World Cup at the time. And a team of 30 kind of kids from across Canada, and it's the final day and we get called into this auditorium. Because they're going to tell you the makeup of the final team. Everyone's excited, but we know that some guys aren't going to make it. It's been a week-long training camp. We sit down. The managers come out on the stage. They get to the microphone. They got a clipboard, and they start calling out the names of the boys that have made the team. Once your name was called, you'd come up on stage. You'd shake the hand of the managers, and you walk off into this other room, and you'd be feted. They take 18 Kids, and, uh, you know, I was not one of those first 18 to be called. And so, you know, kind of shock, chagrin, you're sitting there and you're— and the manager comes back up to the mic and he says, well, better luck next time, boys. And he walks off the stage.

Oh, geez.

Leaving these 15, 16-year-old boys in a pool of misery and tears. And I, I'm sitting there, Mike, and I'm staring at this guy and he's just walked off and there's There's 12 of us there in the room and crying and wailing and mad. And I get up and I walk to my dorm room. I pack my bag. And at the time, my parents had a cottage about 3 hours away by car from the campsite. And I decided to walk to the cottage and collect my thoughts and say, what the hell just happened? Not just that I didn't make the squad, but that how could anyone treat people that way, Mike? And there's certainly no empathy, certainly no respect to the point of your good work, uh, and certainly no higher purpose, right? And so that, as a 15-year-old, 15 and a half, I was like, never again. And that set me into sort of a 30-year journey, I suppose, into leadership.

That's powerful. And that's, you know, a lot of us get into this because something negative that happened that propels in that way, and you turned it into a positive to help others from experiencing that because you had also had an experience Uh, when you were asked to go home from work at 4:30, that also was evidence of no respect. So let's— if you don't mind, you had brought that up with me previously, uh, share that story.

Yeah, so I mean, I've, I've only recently gone on my own, uh, to sort of help the, the world in leadership. And I've, as you've mentioned— thank you, by the way— I've had these kind of really cool and senior leadership roles in, in many different organizations. Anyway, this particular moment was week 3 of a new gig where I was the director of learning and sort of internal culture and external education services and so forth. But my boss, a VP, had also been hired the same time as I, which was weird. So HR had hired these 2 guys differently, different times, but we started the same week and I reported into this new guy. We'll call him Eric for the purpose of the story. So his desk and his EA's desk in this kind of open concept arena was right beside an elevator. We were on the 3rd floor of 3 floors, and the only way to get down other than going way on the other side of the building to the stairwell was to go down the elevator. So it's 4:30, and I walk past Eric, and I'm about to go to the elevator, and he looks up over his kind of cubicle, and he's like— and he got my name pronunciation wrong, right? He's like, Pontifrack. And I was like, okay, it's Pontifrack, but whatever, in my head, right? So, come here. So I, uh, I tropped over to the to the cubicle area and he's looking at me, this little pregnant pause, right? He looks down at his watch on his wrist and, Mike, he says, hey, you know what time it is? And I don't wear a watch and I look at the fake watch on my wrist and I say, it is, it's half past 4. He didn't know what that meant. I'm like, it's 4:30. He's like, oh, right, exactly. I'm like, and?

And?

And again, he looks at me and he's like, don't you think it's a little early to be going home? And so in my head, I'm thinking to myself, well, that is an abuse of power. But I'm like, okay, collect your thoughts, Dan. How do you turn this into a positive? New boss, right? And I said, well, actually, I came in at 7:15 because I like starting early. What time did you come in today, Eric? Knowing he came in at 9. And he said, oh, you were here at 7:15? I was like, yeah. And now I'm going to go home and I'm going to spend time with my newborn daughter, Claire. And is that okay? Because I think that's fair. I put in 9 hours. And he's like, oh, I'm sorry. I was like, well, I'm glad it went this way, but it could have gone differently, couldn't it? So it was another kind of egregious example where a leader is trying to assert power for some reason only to serve its own word, power. And I think, I hope, and I know Eric later one day said to me, hey, thanks for setting me straight there. And he was just a couple of years older than me as well. But again, it's just a little capstone example where the disrespect at times that leaders think they need to exert because of their title, Because that they have, quote, a bigger budget. They have, you know, the top of the ladder is where they ought to be perched. So they're going to have to bark orders. That's the makeup of many people who think what leadership is. And I think Eric got a very soft punch to the head by me to say, you don't have to act that way.

Why do you think that people get stuck into those systems of 9-to-5 structure, Versus are we getting the job done, respecting what the person's bringing to the table versus are they following the rule?

You know, there's a myriad different answers to that. I think a couple, the first I would say is we're still stuck in Taylorism. And for those that are unfamiliar, the quick story there, Frederick Taylor back in the early 1900s was the principal founder of something called the Scientific Principles of Management. He had a stopwatch at Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania. And he started trying to find ways to make workers more efficient through essentially command and control techniques, like carrot stick stuff. And then as World War I turned into World War II and command and control of an army became the way in which to win— I'm using air quotes— those tendencies got picked up in some of the management training, and those tendencies then drifted into management structures themselves. So you have just kind of a one-two punch of Taylorism and command and control coming out of war. And then the third one I'd say historically was right about 1980, to be dead honest. And that's when a guy called Milton Friedman became the economic advisor of Ronald Reagan. And when Reaganomics and Margaret Thatcher gleaned in and glommed onto everything we do in an organization is for profit and we fixate on the profit, then what happened was many leaders became addicted to taking whatever measures was necessary to ensure that profit was increasing. We lost our humanity. We lost certainly respect, Mike, of how to treat the worker and the culture of the team. I think it's been brewing and I think it's exacerbated. It's wrong, in my opinion, because we're all on the journey to the waterfall, as I often say. We all end up 6 feet under, so why can't we treat each other as human beings with a little more respect in how we operate?

Absolutely. You believe there's a great lesson in Space Challenger versus Apollo 13, which I know is very off what we just discussed, but you believe this brings different types of respect to the discussion. Can you explain that, the different types of respect in discussing the Space Challenger versus Apollo 13?

Yeah, I mean, sometimes in hindsight, tragedy is one of the best educators of empathy, of respect, of leadership. And if you juxtapose those kind of 2 challenges, in the Space Challenger example, we have an example whereby leaders at NASA were ignoring The pleas of both the contractors and those that were involved with the so-called O-ring that eventually led to, you know, the Challenger disintegrating before our eyes. And the memos and the pleas to say, look, this space shuttle cannot launch in below 50-degree Fahrenheit weather, please, like, wait till the afternoon when it gets warmer. It was right in front of them. And leaders ignored it. They ignored the science. They disrespected the opinion of others, to be dead honest. Whereas if you kind of look at Apollo 13, there was no one's fault what occurred in, in the lunar module and what happened up in space with Lovell and team. What you saw, however, between Gene Kranz, who was kind of flight ops director, was this wonderful demonstration, whether you've read Krantz's version or Lovell's version, or you've seen Tom Hanks in the movie Apollo 13, what you see is a demonstration of empathy, of collaboration, of listening, of respecting the fact that everyone has got an idea in which to bring these 3 men back, including the 3 men they're hurtling towards outer space. In these 2 kind of NASA examples, you've got one which was ironically earlier than the Challenger one. You've got the Apollo 13 one that happened. 15, 17 years before Challenger example. But both of them tell you lessons about that listening, the empathy, the respect of people. Because at the end of the day, again, aren't we all on this for one reason? It's just to have a good time and work together and enjoy life. Why not listen to the opinion of others? Why not respect that such that maybe the end result is, in the case of Apollo 13, Certainly much better off, and and we kind of know what happened with the challenger situation.

Well, Dan, this has been so insightful. That was another great example. I want to make sure everybody knows your books. They are Flat Army is one, The Purpose Effect is another, and Open to Think is a third. So, and they can find you all at Dan Pontefract.com. Now it's just like it sounds actually: P-O-N-T-E-F-R-A-C-T. So Dan Pontefract.com, and that same with Twitter. It's D Pontefract. Instagram is Dan.Pontefract. But all of that is at danpontifex.com. We'll have that all in the show notes. Thank you so much, Dan, for sharing your brilliance on purpose, on respect, and the whole relationship.

Uh, Mike, thank you. And, and really, uh, on behalf of the world, thanks for what you do at the Center for Respect. We need more Mikes in this world, dead honest.

Well, thank you so much. That means a lot to me. For our listeners, you know what's coming up next. That is question of the week. This week's question is, Mike, Do you believe in chivalry? And my answer is no, no, I don't. Now, whenever I've said that to people who know me well, they're like, what? You open the door for other people. Like, you do things to intentionally make sure you're helping other people. So what do you mean you don't believe in chivalry? Well, what you just described, helping other people, open the door for other people, is not what chivalry is based on. Chivalry was based on this concept that one gender was too weak, so you open the door For them. You walk down the street to protect them on the street side. It was about gender power dynamics that play— that played a big role in there versus, yes, I open the door if I'm first to the door, no matter who you are behind me, because it's a nice thing to do for all people. So if you believe something's nice to do, you say, well, I do that for women because it's a nice thing to do, then why don't you do it for all people? That's my personal belief. You should do it for all people. And therefore, that's not about chivalry. That's about being kind for all people. That's something for me that is in alignment with my values. And so, instead of thinking of chivalry, I just think, what's the kind thing to do in this moment for anyone and everyone? We'd love to hear your questions, your thoughts, and your ideas. And the best place to leave those with us is on our Facebook page at facebook.com/MutuallyAmazingPodcast. Of course, you can always contact us on our website at mutuallyamazingpodcast.com. Remember to subscribe to the show so you automatically get it every week. And if you could take one moment to leave a review, that really helps other people find the show, which we are greatly appreciative of. So thank you so much for joining us. May you make today and every day a life full of mutually amazing relationships.