Conscious Leadership: How to create conditions for others to thrive [Dr. ​​Louise van Rhyn]

Hi, I'm Susan Drum. And welcome to the Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each episode we feature groundbreaking techniques and strategies to help you get the edge in personal and leadership effectiveness. And this episode is brought to you by Meritage Leadership. At Meritage, we strengthen leaders and empower teams to achieve high performance. So go to meritageleadership.com to learn more. With me today, I'm happy to introduce Dr. Louise van Rhijn. Dr. Van Rhijn is a social entrepreneur and an organizational development practitioner. Louise holds a doctorate in complex social change and is the designer of Partners for Possibility, which won the prestigious Thinkers50 award last year. The program is a unique way for leaders to develop leadership capacity to through an innovative leadership development program where leaders are partnered with school principals in under resourced schools. Leaders report that they learn more about leadership from working with a school in an under resourced community than attending a course at business school. So welcome, Dr. Van Rhijn.

Thank you very much, Susan. And please, let's lose the doctor. I'm Louise. Got it. Thank you, Louise.

Well, could you please tell us a bit more about this incredible program, the impact it's having on leaders and schools? It sounds like.

Yeah. So this program is having significant impact on the lives of business leaders who traditionally would have gone to a business school to go and develop their leadership capacity. But in South Africa, the issues that we face are enormous. So in many ways, we can't afford to have our business leaders sit in classrooms listening to clever people when actually we need them working in these under resourced communities. So when your beautiful president Barack Obama was in South Africa, he said, he did the Nelson Mandela memorial lecture and he said the best way for business leaders to discover how not to do things is to try and apply what they've learned in, in the corporate world, in communities when they want to deal with significant social change. And what we've all learned is it doesn't work. And one of the things we have to learn when we go into communities is that one of the core ideas for our program is that the delivery vehicle of my expertise is my humanity. So no one in a township school is interested in my degrees or my job title or my. They want to know how am I going to make them feel and can I show up with genuine curiosity and interest rather than thinking people should be listening to what I have to say. So, and because of this program, we've touched about 3,000. Well, 3,200 people have been through the program, and we've touched About a million lives. And we've seen significant impact in more than 1,600 schools across South Africa.

That's fantastic. So tell me more for the skeptic that might say, well what is leading a school going to give me to help me in my business today?

So the most important opportunity in this program is that we creating an opportunity for business leaders to be what we call a development partner for a school principal. And if they can learn how to do that for a school principal, then maybe they can learn how to do that for their colleagues and for other people in their community. And the idea here is that they don't get to give the solutions which is a big pattern interrupt for many of these business leaders. Most business leaders think that their contribution is to go into the corporate world or to other places and to tell people what to do. But what we've discovered is that nobody wants unsolicited advice. And so people accept the unsolicited advice in the corporate environment because they don't really have an option. It's like the power differentials are such that they should when they go to the school. There is nothing in that relationship that says the principal should listen. So principals give very strong feedback to these business leaders about their tendency to be judgmental, their tendency to give unsolicited feedback, their, their tendency to want to multitask and not be fully present. So all of the things that we really want people to kind of become aware of happens because the delivery vehicle of this whole program is a one on one relationship and it's a very different relationship that would be normally in. Because normally there's clear understanding about what the hierarchy is in this relationship. We are asking the business leaders to be co action and co learning partners to the principals. So we shifting the story that the answers will come from business and that the education leaders need to just accept all of this advice from business and saying well, what if the business leaders could learn more from the principals that they could that the principals would learn from them. Which is typically what happens because they, they learn how to be fully present, they learn how to listen, they learn how to make a massive contribution without giving unsolicited advice. They learn how to be willing to be changed by another person's perspective rather than always being certain and having the answers. There are so many things that they learn. And then the feedback that we get from the teams, I regularly get calls from team members who've been working with these and they say what did you do with him? He's a nicer person. And we hear the same from the, you know, we hear the same. And it's not just men. It's like, you know, all of us, but we hear the same from their children and their partners that these leaders have become more conscious, more compassionate, more understanding, less judgmental, more willing to listen.

And therefore more effective. Right. And that's the question, like, does that all of that breed effectiveness? What you're talking about is the true paradigm shift. Lately I've been asked to deliver some programs on leading without authority. And inside I sort of chuckle because the reality is in Timbuyo they think it's very different because of their model. But the reality is this old idea that we could lead with just authority and you need to do what I tell you to do because I told you to do it, is not working so well in this new environment. Right. That's why we're losing people to the great resignation. Fed up with it. So I think leaders are being forced to really think through how do I inspire someone, how do I think about listening to what their needs are and translating that into a vision of what we could create? And also how do I talk about this project or this company, whatever it is, in an inspiring way that has the person want to participate and give their best. And those are really the job. That's the job of leadership today. And if you're not working on those skills, you're going to keep falling behind.

And it's difficult to work on those skills where the whole environment is designed to say to you, you have all the answers. So in most corporate environments, the structure gives that feedback to the leader all the time as the, you are so wonderful. You have the answers. You just need to open your mouth. We will all listen. The reality is that that's what's leading to the great resignation. So when these leaders arrive in the school, their default position is to go back to the pattern that they know well. And then they get very real feedback that actually that's not very helpful. And it's interesting those moments of insight when a principal would say to a business leader, you know what was most helpful in this moment? And they would kind of wait for some affirmation, oh, the fact that you just stayed quiet and just listened and created an opportunity for me to find my own solutions. And they kind of rethinking their what's my story about contribution. But after a while they go, actually, I quite like this. I like the fact that by the quality of my listening, I can ignite someone else's thinking and help them Find their own solutions. Imagine if I could do more of that. And then they go into the world and then they do that and people are loving it because it's so much more in line with what we want from our leaders. When I say to people, when I say to leaders, and I regularly spend time with them, I say, one of the things that we've discussed is nobody wants unsolicited advice. That's hard for these leaders because their whole career has been built on unsolicited advice or certainty or giving solutions or telling other people what to do. And when they realize that actually if they can just get really curious and interested in what someone else has to say and create a space for that person to find their own solutions, they are multiplying the potential impact of their organization. And it is, I hate the word empowerment because there's a kind of power differential in that. But this is true empowerment. This is truly creating new capacity and strengthening people's agents sense of agency and getting things done without being told by a leader what to do.

Yes. And isn't that everything you described what coaching is at the heart of it? Coaching is about helping your coachee to find their own solution, not telling them what to do, but through your listening, through your powerful questions to have them discover that. And, and so what we are finding now is leaders, even if they are not interested in being a coach, they.

Have to become a coach.

So to get coach training to me feels fundamental to leadership in today's environment.

So what we've what? Again, I was so lucky because I'm the designer of the program. So I got to choose what we're going to, you know, what, what skill development we're going to put into the program. And, and I was able to look at my own life and say, what were the five days of training that had the biggest, most transformational impact on my life? And then when we kind of said to people, this is the curriculum, they all go, why would I do this training? And then at the end they go, oh, this is just amazing, the fact that it all fits so beautifully. But the first day of training, the first time that the business leader and the principal spend a day together in a workshop, we just teach them how to be thinking partners. And that means that each of them are going to get a chance to develop their own capacity to take their own thinking to the edge of their thinking. Which means I'm not going to be told by someone, I'm going to discover it for myself and I'm going to figure it out. For myself and I'm going to develop my capacity to do that and that in its own right. So people often say after the first workshop, oh my goodness, this was just amazing. And then they go and apply it and they see the impact and then they go, what's the next training? And then the next training is around consulting skills. It's around, how do you, when you, when you have to take people along or influencing skills, if you have to take people along on a journey, how would you start the process? And they realize that they've been focusing on implementation, but there are a whole bunch of other work that they need to do. Create fertile ground. So that's a new insight. Now if I had gone to them and said, you know, I really think this inferencing skills course or this consulting skills course would be useful, they'd probably have kind of said, no, I'm not interested. And then the last workshop that they do together is about learning how to host conversations where all the voices get heard and where everybody get a contribution. You know, everybody's invited to make a contribution. And again, most people don't think that's a skill that they need to learn, but once they've learned it, they go out into the world and they apply it all the time and they just, they become so much more effective and much more conscious leaders.

What was it about this program that enabled you to win the Thinkers50 Award, which is quite prestigious.

Yeah, it was an amazing moment. It was because the team at Thinkers50, they've known about the program and they've been watching the impact and they've seen how they've just, we've been sharing the story quite widely, but they've been hearing the words of the people who've been on the program. And every time you hear one of those leaders speak, you stand astonished. So it speaks for itself. You just need to have a conversation with a few leaders who've been through the program and hear them talk about how much more they now understand their leadership role in this world that we live in today. And specifically, many of these business leaders grew up quite privileged and they've never really spent time in under resourced communities and they've been confronted with that privilege and been asked questions around. And so what, I grew up as a white privileged person in South Africa and that has a. There's a big responsibility that comes with that. But if I, if I wasn't involved in this program, I don't know whether I would have ever really confronted that responsibility in the same way.

Yes, yes, well, tell me more about who is this program best designed for, what level of leader and maybe logistically, how does it work? Is it's designed a day, a week, or how does. Tell us more about that.

Yeah, so it's designed for senior leaders or mid to senior leaders. And I know most of your listeners are from the U.S. they don't come from South Africa. But one of the things that we're excited about is the possibility that people from around the world might take this on, might get interested in a different way of developing leaders. So it's designed mid to senior leaders, and then they get partnered with a school principal, which kind of works for them logistically. So it's someone that they can easily get to. These two people then join a leadership development program, a facilitated program, for a year initially. And our hope is that the relationship will become so strong that they will want to continue to work after the first year. But the first year is a facilitated program, and that program then happens in what we call cohorts. So it's leadership circles of about eight to 10 partnerships who meet every six weeks, spend quite a bit of time together at the school, dealing with some significant challenges at the school where the business leaders, the thinking partner and the action partner for the principal. So the.

Is it like two days or is it a week?

The expectation is that they'll spend about two or three times a month at the school and about two hours at a time, so it's not a massive time investment. And then they do five days of training over the period the year, and they come together as a community of practice every six weeks for three hours. And then they also get coaching. So they have a coach who walks this journey with them. So there's a lot of opportunity to look at who am I being as a leader and what is the impact that I'm having. So we say to people that the key performance indicator for leadership is whether people have shining eyes around you. If their eyes are shining, then you are leading. Well, if the eyes are not shining, then you get to ask yourself, who am I being that their eyes are shining or not? That comes from Ben Zonder, who is one of our kind of contributors. And so that's a big question. Who am I being and what is the impact I'm having? And, and, and why is this principal not excited about seeing me? Or why are they excited about seeing me? What is it that I bring to this setting that kind of leads to that kind of quality of relationships? And then they get to work on the partnership and to what extent are they developing their relationship and capacity to do more together because of the quality of the relationship? So we believe very strongly that the quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first. And the quality of our thinking depends on the quality of the relationships we have with the people we are with while we are thinking. So that means that we have to pay attention to that. And then there's the question around and what is the impact of who I'm being in relationship on the work that we're trying to do? So there's some real practical work that needs doing and then they try it out and sometimes they're successful and there's a lot to learn from that and sometimes they're not successful and there's a lot to learn from that too.

Nothing like the real world experience to see exactly how you're leading. And I love the idea that it exposes them to the challenges of under resourced communities to build that empathy and understanding. But they get immediate feedback, it sounds like, on whether it's working in a way that they wouldn't get in the business world, as you've highlighted. And I imagine that directness of feedback is confronting, but also refreshing.

Yeah. And so because this whole program is being held by a trained coach, we're not letting people do things that feels harsh to each other. So a big focus of the program is to create psychological safety, to create belonging, to make it possible for people to say what's going on for them in a particular situation. I have to be careful that the feedback is not harsh, but it is direct and it is, is. It's a mirror. So there's a mirror being held up to. Maybe I am a bit demanding or maybe I am a bit certain. And when I am so certain, it's difficult for other voices to be heard. Or maybe I am a bit judgmental and maybe my tendency to multitask when I'm with people is actually disrespectful. Or my tendency to finish other people's sentences feels deeply disrespectful to the people I'm working with. But they just don't. In the work environment they will just bite their tongue. In this environment people go, actually that doesn't work for me when you finish my sentences because it feels so disrespectful.

I can see how that is going to be. I show the mirror and hold the mirror up now after the year so they go through this is most of the time they're wrapping up or do they Continue. And what does that look like?

So part of what we want these business leaders to take away is new insights around how to get work done. And so we ask them to spend the first three months of their partnership simply on building relationship and getting to know it, getting to understand the environment in which they're working on. That comes from Otto Sharma's theory U oh, and that's hard for these business leaders because their tendency is to go into action mode, you know, sort the stuff out. And now we're asking them to sit on their hands and just understand and build relationships without exception. After three months I go, oh, thank goodness you didn't just let me go into action mode because that would have been a big mistake. So the year is paced to ensure that they're successful, but also paced so that their relationship is strong. And what we find in most of the situations is that the business leaders and the principals say there's no way we now going to just walk away from each other because our relationship is strong and we care about each other. And the business leader says, I know we've only touched the surface of the work that needs to happen. So I'm going to hang around, I'm going to continue to be in relationship with this principal. I was the very first partner for possibility. I was in relationship with my principal for more than 10 years and continue to track the impact of our relationship on the school because there's no way that you can just walk away. That school becomes your happy place. It becomes the place of contribution. It becomes the place where you learn something or you get confronted with your well also and you get confronted with your gifts. That's the other thing. So yes, they get immediate feedback about the stuff that's not working but they also feel loved. This afternoon I heard one of the business leaders, he said, you know, sometimes I get cross with my principal because he doesn't want to do what I suggest to him that he should do. But I feel loved at that school and that's more important than anything else. So I'm going to go back and going to have another go. So there's a deep spirit of generosity and compassion and love that gets developed through the program because we know that that's what will lead to long term impact in those schools.

And so this is mostly. This has been going on in South Africa for how long and how has it been exported to other countries so far?

So it's 12 years. For the last 12 years I have dedicated every day of my life to this work. I've recently stepped away from leading it on a day to day basis. And part of my hope is to say, is there a way that we can export the idea to other countries? We'd love to work with some people who are in the business of leadership development in other countries and who also know that the best way to develop the capacity of leaders is to get them to do the work, not talk about it, not sit and have many theories about how we should and what we must and, and why don't we do get, go do that. If that's your idea, if you think that's going to be the best way, go do it. We're going to support you every step of the way. So yeah, that's going to be my next is to figure out ways to export the idea because we've been running it for 12 years in South Africa. We've, as I said, 3200 leaders, 1600 schools, millions of people. Literally. It's been kind of validated, but it's, we can't hold this, we can't keep this, this to ourselves in South Africa. It's time to now engage other people in a similar program. I love it.

Oh, I hope we can bring something like that here. I know it's incredibly needed. I'm wondering what the schools also get out of the process. I mean, it sounds like they, they too must benefit greatly. Can you share a little bit about that?

So last year or two years ago, during COVID just before COVID hit, we had the opportunity to go to 40 of the schools that have been involved for more than five years. And it was amazing to see how five years after a program like this, the impact on the program and the impact, we track the impact on a number of levels. One is whether the principal is more confident, competent, have more sense of agency, is a stronger leader. And that is without exception. These principles blow your mind. So many of the principals, when they start the program, they're kind of shy, they're not entirely sure, they don't feel very confident and they become, oh my goodness, they become leaders of their communities. Secondly, the extent to which the school management team works together as a cohesive unit. Thirdly, whether the teachers are more energized and engaged and fourthly, the extent to which the community supports the school. So this afternoon we had a conversation about principals who told the stories that because of what they've learned through Partners Possibility, they've learned how to engage and other members of the community so that the school becomes a magnet for the gifts and contributions from the people in the community. But the same thing then happens in the business because that business leader goes, oh, well, if they can do it here, maybe I can do it in my business. So there's this beautiful, you know, ultimately the children benefit because the adults work together and the adults create a conducive environment for good education to happen. And we're very interested in kind of how we can apply that in other places, that when the adults work together, the children benefit. But I mean, but that's the case everywhere. When the adults start to work together and collaborate in a true spirit of partnership and generosity and abundance, amazing things become possible.

Well, given the fact that we don't quite have a program here yet, what advice would you give to leaders to do one thing different this week or next week or tomorrow to improve their leadership?

I can give you a few. But the thing that's made the biggest difference in every one of these partnership is that leaders have learned how to listen, but genuinely listen with a willingness to be changed by the other person and with a commitment to create what we call a thinking environment for that other person so that they can do their own best thinking. So if we as leaders could go into the world today and know that whoever we speak to hold what the mind that holds the challenge holds the key to the solution, and that my job as a leader, the biggest contribution I can make is to create a space for that person to think through their own solution and for me to be bear witness to that process happening and imagine what will happen. One of the beautiful stories is I spoke to a CEO, you know, one of these really important people who was part of the program. I said, so what did you learn from being part of the program? He said, oh, I've learned, you know, I've learned so much about education and I've learned how to facilitate change in a complex environment. And then he kind of talked and talked and he got to the end, he said, you know what, Louise? But if I have to be honest, what's had the biggest impact through this program? I've learned how to hug my 18 year old son.

Wow.

And the other one says, I've learned how to be present for my six year old daughter. Can you imagine a world where we can actually learn how to hug each other again and be present for our children and learn how to be that?

Yes. It's always amazing to me in working in leadership development, how much translates back to the personal relationships because we're really doing is human development. Right. It's just leadership business is the playground, but it is human development. Well, where can people learn more about this transformational program?

So we've written a book which is available on Kindle called Partners for Possibilities, Stories of Impact. There's many, many, many stories on the website. There's obviously a website called pfp4sa, but I'm very happy for them to contact me on Twitter or anywhere else. I can never get tired of talking about this, so I'd love to personally be connected with people if they're interested to know more. And I can give you my email address or I'm sure that can be in the show notes for people if they want to know more.

This was so amazing to talk to you about what you're doing, and I'm so inspired by the gift you're bringing to the world and how you're impacting not only the schools who need it, but the leaders who also need leadership development. So the work you're doing is truly transformational. Thank you for what you're doing.

Thank you so much. Thank you for the opportunity.

If you like this episode, you're not going to want to miss my interview with Petra Schmidt, who uses an apprenticeship model with high school students to detract and new hires and drive employee retention. Let's lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of the Enlightened Executive. Sam.