Ken Norton: evaluation

Transcript context

…What an amazing analogy. Totally hits home in a good and bad way. It's a really good segue to something I wanted to chat about, something that we talked about before the recording, which is what you're finding to be one of the bigger unlocks for your clients. It's also a concept that you've been spending a lot of time refining and you're finding is helping people shift, and specifically shift their leadership mindset. And so, I'd love to just hear you talk through your thinking there. Yeah, it does sort lead into this. Maybe another analogy that might work for your listeners, if you think about product management, your career arc and where you are challenged from a mindset perspective, in some ways it does feel like the early part of your career. You're learning to play a video game. Hopefully there's a tutorial. Your first job is learning the ropes, somebody's teaching you. You maybe have managers that are giving you simple little missions that you can succeed at and if you fail, the consequences aren't bad. It does feel like a little bit ... And I felt this way, and I talked to a lot of people earlier in their career. It does feel like you're trying to learn the rules of the game, trying to figure out the physics. You want to run up the score. You get better at playing the game. You fail, but you start to develop some confidence that when you fail, you'll learn from it. You'll get better. You get really good at the game. You get promoted, you get rewarded, you unlock new levels, teach other people how to play the game. You start to feel really awesome about yourself. But then suddenly you're put in a place where you realize that the rules of the game aren't so black and white. Maybe there's a long delay now between when you get to see what you did and the score of it. Things start to behave in unexpected ways. The physics start to get weird. You're on a level where you're floating. I don't know what the right metaphor is here. But you start to recognize that there's been this huge change. The most frightening part about it is you look around and everyone is looking at you like you're the designer of the game, and you thought you were playing. That's often what it feels like when you move into a leadership role, to come back to this sense of what got me here is not going to get me there. I work with a lot of leaders and sometimes that's come with a pretty significant cost, this juxtaposition, maybe your happiness, your health, your marriage. There's been this existential crisis of I don't know if I love this anymore. Maybe it leads to burnout. Maybe it's not even that dire. It's just a sense of, well, I'm looking around and I need to be something. I need to unlock something else to continue on this path. There is a sense of stuckness that comes from that. What I've come to realize is this is the precipice of, I think, this pretty fundamental concept in leadership. I'm not the originator of this, so this has come up again and again and again. It's not new. It's going to sound familiar. It's like the flood myth from Gilgamesh showing up in all this oral histories of the world. It's not new. Conscious Leadership Group, an organization that I'm big fan of, they call it above the line versus below the line. Brene Brown calls it daring versus armored leadership, sage versus warrior. Even in the world of sports, there's playing to win versus playing not to lose. It's this concept that's come up again and again. Brown calls it daring versus armored leadership, sage versus warrior. Even in the world of sports, there's playing to win versus playing not to lose. It's this concept that's come up again and again. Leadership Circle calls it creative versus reactive, and that's the term I'm going to use. I like that. Here's the distinction. Very simple. Are you responding to the world from a place of fear, where you see problems and threats, you want to be right, you want to be liked, you're defensive as an inward approach, or are you responding to the world from a place of openness, possibility, curiosity, passion, growth, purpose? Very simple concept. Pretty much everyone understands what I mean. It makes sense. Everyone also then immediately says a couple of different things. "That sounds amazing. I'd rather have that," or, "Here are moments when I've felt that," but that's usually followed up by a couple of questions. "I don't know if that works. It doesn't sound very effective. Is it possible?" Then how do you that? The effective part is actually a question we can answer, which is, yes, it is more effective. Bob Anderson, Bill Adams are two management scientists who've written extensively, done a whole bunch of research, and they have looked at every possible dimension you can imagine of success, both leadership capability, they've looked at revenue, brand, profitability, everything, and it's shown, yes, this creative form of leadership is in every possible way positively correlated with success and reactive leadership is negatively correlated. So, yes, it works yet. Yet, according to their research, some 75% of leaders are primarily operating reactively. So most leaders are operating from a place of fear, reacting, seeing problems, and threats. That's because that other question of how do you do it is such a hard one to answer. It's not an easy thing that you flip the switch of. It goes back to this notion of redesigning that internal operating system, so how you confront the world, what underlying belief systems and assumptions you have that are causing you to operate from that place.…

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