The Gap: Navigating times of change | with Kevin McNulty

Sam, Welcome.

It's Wednesday, 14th of July. As a recording and broadcasting the show, I want to wish you a very warm welcome to this week's episode of the Shortlist. I'm Johnny Campbell. I'm your host of the Shortlist. I'm also the co founder and CEO of Social Talent. And this week we're going to be discussing the Gap. What is the Gap? Well, the Gap is about navigating times of change. I don't think it's going to be difficult for you to remember the last time you had to navigate a time of change. You're probably doing it right now and you've been doing it, no doubt, for the last 16, 17, 18 months. We all have as an entire planet. And sure, I a person's life, we're met with many, many transitions. And regardless of, you know, a significant life change being a positive thing or a negative thing, people can really struggle between their familiar old world and the unknown. And this can be true for employees in particular who are transitioning through perhaps their career cycle. They might be looking at a new job, trying to find a new role, onboarding in a new position, looking at their progression or off boarding from a team, a role, whatever that might look like. So today our guest brings with him significant insight on how best to manage these types of situations. Our guest today is Kevin McNulty, and he's a speaker, coach and author of a great book called the Gap Between Two Worlds. And it's a book that guides readers on how to turn difficult life transitions into personal growth experiences. And Kevin is joining us today live. If you're listening live on this show on LinkedIn or YouTube, or if you're listening on Apple, Spotify or whatever you listen to your podcasts, joining us live to share how leaders and individuals can strengthen their resolve and provide stability when it's perhaps lacking. Kevin, welcome to the show.

Johnny, thank you so much for having me.

It's great to have you here. And I'm excited about this topic because I think it's a topic that appeals to all of us.

Right.

We've all faced this gap. So I was wondering maybe if you might open the show by redefining that for me. What is the gap as you see it? And maybe if you wouldn't mind telling us your own story of the gap that you faced, because we all face many gaps, but the gap that led you to this current arc in your career and this kind of fascination with helping people get over this gap, maybe you could tell us a little bit your own gap and how you overcame that.

Wow. Well, listen, again, thanks for having me. It's just a pleasure to be with you and your audience and your team has been so fantastic, you know, setting this all up. You know, the, the Gap really came. You know, it didn't come as, as I was thinking about writing the book. What happened is in 2000, I retired a career from the US Air Force, and I spent 20 years inside the Air Force. But prior to that, I also was a military brat. So I grew up, you know, in the same context, moving around the world, constant change, you know, constant exiting and entering into two different worlds. And so even at the age of 40, when I retired from the Air Force, I had already experienced 40 years of change. So I really thought that this change would be relatively easy for me. But as I, as I went through this process, I realized it's not. And this is what provoked the writing of the Gap. So I got out in 2000. I had decided at the end of my military career that I would go into full time speaking and coaching, and we didn't call it coaching at the time, and consulting and this sort of thing essentially have my own business. So a couple of things happened. One, we moved, my wife and I, two daughters, we moved from California to Nashville, Tennessee. And if anybody knows anything about the states, those are two entirely different worlds in and of themselves. But in any event, so my wife, who was also, who plays music and teaches music, she was also starting her own business. So we began the process of moving to Nashville. We weren't from here, so it wasn't a place that we were really that familiar with. It was one that we had just selected. But in any case, so we got out, we moved here, and I was, of course, incredibly excited about this new world, if you will. And to make a long story short, as time went by, you know, we had really downsized our entire life. I say downsize. You know, when you retire from the military, you're not coming out of there with riches. Really downsized, because we knew that we would have to have the ability to sustain ourselves, you know, for, for a year or so to be able to get our businesses up and running. So in any event, we downsize and we were really penny pinching and, and, and doing okay. I started doing little temp jobs here and there. I mean, literally jobs like I was a receptionist to, to also advising VPs. Remember, I was 40 years old at a tremendous career in The Air Force, 20 years old when I got out. My work was primarily in human relations education. So you know, I was really very skilled. I was at the, you know, sort of the top of the pinnacle in terms of the type of work that I did. So I had a lot of skills. In any event, I move into this transition, and over time, after, let's say, a month or so, the honeymoon period was over, I realized I needed to really dig in. But I had no concept, no concept whatsoever about, one, what it was to run your own business. Two, I didn't even know the term human resources. That wasn't even my vocabulary at the time. I didn't know what, you know, how to run a business. I found out that I really had no concept about how to live in the private sector. Now, that's an interesting concept because I've lived here in the United States, I've lived around the world, quite frankly, but you would think that I would be familiar with the private sector. But I realized it was a completely different world than what I had experienced for the last 40 years. So in any event, over the series of months, I became frustrated because, you know, I just thought people would automatically start calling my office, you know, silly enough. But in any event, my frustrations turned to concerns, and my concerns turned to. To fear. And then my fear, after about nine or 10 months into this process, maybe 11 months, my. My fear turned into a very serious bout with depression and anxiety. I mean, literally to the. To the point where I was immobile, I couldn't do anything. You know, if anybody's ever experienced depression and anxiety, it's. It's. It's pretty challenging, you know, depending on the depth of it. But in any event, and then I became physically ill because of the depression and most of the anxiety, I started. My discs in, my spine started bulging, and I mean, just incredible pain in my arms. And that exacerbated, of course, my anxiety. And then my anxiety exacerbated the pain. So in any event, after about a month of that, my wife started studying up on depression and anxiety, all these sorts of things, and she started using some of the techniques that folks had recommended, and one of them was to just start journaling, start writing about your experiences. And so she really pushed me out of the house and said, kevin, you know, from this point on, I want you to go out, go to Starbucks or something and just start. Open your laptop and just start writing what you're feeling. You know, doesn't matter what it is, just start writing. And I started doing that. And the more that I wrote, the more that I began to understand. And I will also say it's very important to also know that in the early 80s, I started studying personal growth and personal development. You know, Wayne Dyer, you know Tony Robbins, you know Covey, all the greats. And by time I got out, I was. I don't think anybody's actually an expert in this, but just for. For the sake of. Of terminology, I was a relative expert in personal growth. So what happened is when I started journaling, I didn't realize it, but I was taking all of this knowledge and wisdom that I had understood and learned and taught about personal growth and almost started coaching myself. So I did this for about a month. And afterwards I decided to. One day I decided to go across the street. I had what I'd been journaling. I had it printed out, I brought it home, I gave it to Jane, my wife. And I said, here's just, you know, this is what I've been just journaling about. And she read it that day, and the next morning she got up, she said, kevin, you had been talking about for a long time to write a book, this is it right here, and essentially fell into this understanding about the two worlds that you have, your old world and your new world and the gap in between. And the book just simply discusses what that transition is like, all the difficulties and all these other sorts of things. And then as my business started taking off and I started consulting and coaching, and business people started looking at my gap and saying, you know what? This is exactly the same thing that we experience in the corporate world. The principles are the same, but it's just the ideas are different. So personal change versus organizational change. So that's essentially how it came about. And I've been using this concept since Gavin.

It's a great story. Thanks for sharing it. Because from personal change in one's life, maybe moving to a new city, changing careers, losing a job, and lots of us can resonate with these things, maybe breaking up a marriage. There's tons of things that, you know, could be defined as the change. To find that universal red thread is really important. And I want to bring that red thread right up to date with some current events. And if you don't mind, I'm going to jump to a couple of news articles. Ask nod to share a couple of news articles with us in just a second because I think this is a really pertinent time where although we always all go through change throughout our lives and it's constant and there's always some part of your life probably influx or change, there's been this universal time where the Changes have maybe been more, more common. So let's dig into that with this week's news.

Let's do it.

And the first news article I want to bring up, and it comes from Deloitte. Deloitte have for the last four years published a global resilience report, and they recently published their latest 2021 Resilience Report. Kevin and this is something that we both read in advance. And we're going to share a link out in the show Notes, but also live on LinkedIn and YouTube to those listening live. And I'd love those listening live to jump in, share your thoughts or comments around gaps in your life or perhaps how this story here might relate to you. But tonight we're talking about resilience in organizations. And this is probably the best year to really talk about it because 2020-2021 tested the resilience of a lot of senior leaders and their organizations. And the study focused on what they call CXOs. So it could be CEOs, CFOs, CROs, whatever letter you want to put in for X. And they surveyed a whole bunch of CXOs from different organizations to understand what the previous year, so 2020, really look for them in terms of resilience. And they've kind of teased out five key traits that resilient organizations seem to have. And they had typically many of these. And they called out preparedness, adaptability, collaborativeness, trustworthiness, and responsibleness, or accountability, if you like. And these five pieces, prepared, adaptable, collaborative, trustworthy, responsible. They resonated with me when I read this article as, yeah, these make sense as the types of things that leaders and individuals and organizations should and probably did display that would correlate with resilience. How, how, I guess how relevant do you think these five that were, were teased out by Deloitte are to your own research and your own background in this? Kevin, would these be the five or some of the five that would have jumped out at you?

Yes, you know, they would be some of the five. I would certainly add a few, and I'll tell you about those in a minute. But let's set the context real quick about, you know, and we'll talk organizational change. So again, the old world and the new world and the gap in between. So within that gap, though, again, maybe put up the drawing very quickly, if you don't mind. Can you put that up very quickly? Yes. Okay. So this kind of illustrates just the basics of the gap. So you see, there's the old world, which we call the current State. So this is the state that you're in, or used to be in. And again, think of this in terms of an organization. And then there's the future state. And this is the new world. The thing about the new world, depending on the transition or the change, is the new world is somewhat unknown. Again, it does depend on the change itself. But inside of that gap, there's also called the foggy zone. And the foggy zone is typically populated with all the things that we just talked about, the anxiety and all these other sorts of things. It's more psychological. There are the practical aspects of, for instance, if we're going from a storefront to online sales, then there are some practical things that have to be done in order to create that new world, to move through the gap, if you will. But all of the other. The emotional things, like, you know, like disorientation, ambiguity, and all these other sorts of things, these are what typically plague people. And the difficulty in organizational change is you're not talking about a person, a personal challenge that you're having. You're talking about a wide group of people who may have many different emotions, many different concerns. And I think we'll talk about this later on when it comes to traversing the gap. So what I would say so. So when you think about the gap and going through the foggy zone, then you look at these traits. Preparedness, adaptability, collaboration, trustworthiness, responsibility. What I would say is that prepared, I would actually move this out of that, call out of that category, and saying that being prepared is one of the pillars, if you will, that moves you into the gap. So you're prepared to be adaptable, you're prepared to be collaborative, you're prepared to be trustworthy and responsible. You see, it's establishing that culture up front. What I've seen organizations too often do is not be prepared. They're focused on the mission, they're focused on the shareholders, they're focused on, you know, they're busy, they're distracted, they're complacent. And then suddenly a big change happens, like Covid, and they go, oh, crap. I didn't see that one coming. Well, chances are there's a lot of things. Think about Borders books. Do you remember Borders Books? You remember that they were the largest. They were second to Amazon, the largest bookseller in this country, maybe even in the world. And they closed, they shut down because they did not see the new world soon enough, Amazon consumed. But by the way, Barnes and Noble, who was second to Borders, succeeded. Why? They. They. They Immediately jumped in and started making the change and had the ability to do that. So the three that I would add are proactiveness, to be proactive, to communicate. You know, the communicating is one of the greatest traits. And it does go on to talk about some of these things in the article. And then the last one is what I call being revisionary. I mean, imagine any company moving into the COVID environment. They have to think about the new world. They have to re. Envision what that new world is like. You've heard this term being thrown out there all the time, reimagine. Well, you could say it that way as well. But the idea is getting a clarity about where you're going and then be able to bring your people along to, to take on that new world to, to. And so all of these other things. I'd like to just say one other thing about this notion that again I do agree with the article, but one of the things again that I've noticed and it's fairly noticeable I think around the world and that is that many companies are move. Are working so hard to attract and retain great employees that they're going through a lot of measures that are almost moving them into this sort of a nanny state. So in other words, more and more employees are relying on their supervisors, their managers and the company to make them happy, to make them resilient, to, you know, to. To, you know, to motivate them. And again, it's not, it's not that employees are sitting around saying, you know, yeah, make motivate me, but it becomes part of the culture when the company works so hard to do that. And what I suggest organizations do is if you really want to make your organization resilient, create a culture of interdependency and as it says here, and collaboration. In other words, if I work for you, Johnny, and you had to make this major change based on Covid or anything else, if I relied on you to do everything for me in terms of my psyche, my well being, my engagement, my, my performance and all these other sorts of things. When time comes to make a major change, guess what I'm going to do? Take a wild guess.

You're going to come to me and say what do I do?

Wrecked. That's exactly right. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And so the idea is that in some form or fashions, organizations need to get their employees on board and we'll talk about trust later and build that relationship so that when. Johnny, to follow you. The other thing is that in times of change, transparency and communication are hallmarks. You know, it's probably the one place, Johnny, that I find organizations, let's just say, not doing well enough is that they want to protect the employees from themselves or they don't want to. They don't want some sort of a catastrophe to take place, people to freak out and flee or do whatever the case might be, which. I get that. And I think also in that article they talked about sort of this clear and calm demeanor. I think emotional intelligence is very, very important. But you have to be able to also describe to, to the people. I mean, think of COVID The panic that took place amongst so many organizations. And I get it. I mean, I panicked, you know, to, to some degree because we, we had no clue, none of us, where this was all going. And so now, again, the leadership, they, they, they certainly want to display that level of calmness and emotional intelligence. But on the other hand, they also want to convey the sense of urgency that needs to take place here. So I would say, you know, certainly, you know, trust is the biggest one. But again, you don't start. You don't. And sometimes this happens that leaders, they, they realize that there's no trust there once they've hit this change. And they're like, wow, you know, people don't trust me. Well, that's sort of like being married for 20 or 30 years, and then your spouse comes up to you and says, listen, I, you know, I, I don't like you anymore. I've, we, we just, you know, this is a disaster. And, and I don't trust you. And so I'm leaving. And then over the next, you know, what does the other spouse do? They, they try to repair what's been going wrong for 20 years in about, you know, two weeks. They try to hurry up and build trust and build relationships and all these sorts of things. And this is just a classic mistake that organizations make. And they do it for good reasons because they're busy and sometimes complacent and just, and sometimes distracted. And they're all sort of, you know, operating around this, this, you know, the tyranny of the urgent. And so, And Covey describes this a lot, Stephen Covey describes this a lot about understanding what is important and what is urgent. And that oftentimes those things that are most important get pushed to the background, like building trust and relationships, and then suddenly it becomes urgent in the time of change. So I say establish these things before the change takes place, and then when the change begins to take place, communicate, communicate, communicate. Here's where we're going. Here's what it means to you, here's how long we think it's going to take. We want you all on board and to help us think as well. We need you as bad as you need us to make this organization run well in a Covid environment. Now think about that. That messaging that's going on, it's not hey, hey, hey everybody. Or as they say, intensely, hey y', all, we're going this way and you all just follow me. And then, and then they're like, hey, where's everybody at? Rather this concept of I need you, I need you as a team, as an employee, no matter where you are, to help us get through this. All of our lives dependent on you see the difference between the communication and the transparency going on, some vulnerability going on. It's a powerful way to operate.

Is that probably came home to roost for so many of us last year. I remember myself and our leadership team at the end of February and beginning of March last year and the decisions we had to make in the, the steps we took and hopefully, you know, time has proven that they were the right steps for us. And you know, whilst I perhaps didn't go in with a roadmap, the, the elements you're, you're speaking about there, trust, transparency, you know, we were transparent in, in saying we didn't know what would happen because it would be foolish to say you did. Correct? No, but we, we did say we had a plan and we explained the logic of the plan. We rolled out the decision making framework we were going to use. You know, what was the framework for job losses? What was the framework for, you know, what will be the trigger to signal further cuts or changes. We were transparent and then kept the team up to date as to those metrics and I think that's as good as you can get. But we had a clear plan. We had no idea if the plan was going to work. But we got as many people involved in building the plan and we worked on it and we adjusted it. I think that's what you just got to do. You know, your analogy of being in the dark is by, all right, you know, it's like, I got this, but you know, don't worry, I'm not going to blindly stick to the same plan. If we get signals that it's wrong, I'm going to ask for constant input, but I'm going to take ownership for this. But you got to, you got to have my back and we got to work together. I think that point's so valid. Does that lead in your experience to. To a situation where people who are perhaps panicking have the anxiety, who are flapping around, who are more of the. The type of person who sees change as dangerous, does that help them become more centered? You know, is it a straightforward thing that act like this, your team will all come in, come in and align and all be fine? Is that how it actually works? Is it as simple as that, you think, Kevin?

No, I'll be honest with you, Johnny. I think you just really very well articulated how to carry a group of people, be it small or large, through the gap. And the first thing that you defined was the. Was a framework and clarity. Now again, imagine moving from the old world to the new world. You're moving this way, or is it the other way, this way to the new world? And you're inside the thick of the gap. It's really dark inside there. You see, the concept is, with the foggy zone, is that because of the variety of notions from anxiety to Covid, we don't know exactly what's happening with it. You can't see through that foggy zone. And the more challenging the change, the more anxiety that is produced and emotions that are produced makes that foggy zone darker. And the concept is that you, as a leader, you're moving everybody into this dark place. And to your point, people become disoriented and they're like, wow, I don't know. I'm not really. Even though you've been communicating, I'm just not sure you know why. Partly because you're not sure, but your transparency, you're going back to these people saying, yes, it's true, we are not completely sure where we're going. You know, we want your ideas, your thoughts. And when people get on board, you begin to then work these things out. And what happens is the more you move through the gap, the. That's when the fog starts dropping. So even psychologically, to your point, that as you describe, you know, you know where we're going, sort of the vision or the idea or the framework or whatever the case might be, the more people can see the new world. And this is what gives people motivation. It's like they see hope. And hope is a powerful, powerful motivator.