Unfazed Under Fire Podcast

Mastering the Art of Leadership: Bob Anderson on Self-Authorship and Cultural Transformation

• David Craig Utts, The Resilient Leadership Guy • Season 2 • Episode 2

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Unlock the transformative power of leadership with Bob Anderson, one of the most important thought leaders  in leadership development over the past 25 years..  During this conversation Bob and I journey into the heart of what it means to lead with resilience and self-mastery. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for executives seeking to navigate the often-turbulent waters of modern business with conscious leadership strategies. We delve into Bob's Jesuit education foundation, the innovative Leadership Circle Profile, and the pivotal role personal growth plays in aligning leadership with organizational culture and values.

Prepare to shift your perspective on leadership as we dissect the evolution from reactive to creative styles, drawing upon developmental psychology and the wisdom of thinkers like Bob Keegan, Peter Block and Peter Senge, and others. We'll explore the challenges leaders face as they transition toward authenticity, vision, and relational competence, and how universal principles of leadership transcend cultural boundaries. The conversation illuminates the pathway to self-authorship, and how embracing one's full potential can lead to a dramatic transformation in leadership effectiveness.

This episode is not just about leaders but the broader impact they have on the world. We'll examine how the business sector can instigate positive global change, the readiness of today's leaders to handle crises, and the challenges of steering organizations towards sustainability. Bob Anderson and I dive into the intersection of spirituality and leadership, showing how these realms can coalesce to foster innovation and reshape organizational culture. Join us as we unravel the capabilities necessary to lead in an era of complexity and change, and how you can apply these insights to achieve a profound transformation within your organization and beyond.

For more on Bob, follow the links below:

Bob's website: leadershipcircle.com 

Link to Bob's books:
- Mastering Leadership: https://amzn.to/47L8Asq

- Scaling Leadership: https://amzn.to/48IxF8x 

Unfazed Under Fire Podcast - Host: David Craig Utts, Leadership Alchemist

Access to all our platforms:
https://www.unfazedunderfirepodcast.online

Openning :

Welcome to Unfazed Under Fire, a podcast that supports executives to deepen their impact in resiliency in an increasingly chaotic and uncertain world. Your mission facilitates the growth of enlightened leaders who build empowering, high-performing cultures that unify great talent and turn profound visions into reality. Now, tuning into your needs, here's your host and moderator, seasoned executive coach and the resilient leadership guy, David Kregatz.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Hello, welcome back to Unfazed Under Fire. I'm David Kregatz, the resilient leadership guy, your host and moderator for the show. This show aims to support executives to strengthen their impact and resilience in the face of today's growing uncertainty, disruption and chaos. Our stand on this show is that human beings have all the resourcefulness they need within them to address the biggest challenges we face, and to do so with grace. The first step is tapping into this inner resourcefulness. That comes from recognizing that leading and living is an inside-out journey and that the most important move an executive can take is to improve their impact. As a leader is a first focus on developing self-mastery within themselves. It's only after they gain some level of self-mastery that they can expect to be most effective in leading others and perfect for that segue on the show today. I'm honored to be have Bob Anderson with me today, who has been really one of my most important mentors in my executive coaching and leadership development work. There's so much I can say about Bob, and if I did that, we would burn up the whole show, so first I want to just share some highlights. Bob, you dedicated most of your career to exploring this intersection between what I just talked about, leadership and mastery, also competence and consciousness and spirituality and business. You're the founder of the Leadership Circle, which is a development company dedicated to elevating the consciousness and practice of leadership, and you and your business partner, Bill Adams, have been among the most important thought leaders in the leadership development industry in the past 25 years and I would go so far as to say the most important thought leaders. I know your humility might not allow you to accept that, but I'm going to claim it. Bob is the creator of the Leadership Circle profile, which is the most integrative, innovative leadership assessment on the market today, and it's solidly grounded in years and years of research. You've been on the forefront of training thousands of coaches and consultants like me, as I mentioned, across the globe, which has heightened the entire approach of our industry of executive coaching. You serve on the adjunct faculty of the Executive Education Center at the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business. You and your approach have earned multiple awards, including being named the best in the large leadership and partner provider category by HRcom for their Leadership 500 Excellent Awards in 2015. And you also co-authored two books with Bill. One is entitled Mastering Leadership, which shares your entire integrative, holistic framework for leadership and it's development that has been revolutionary. Based on what I've talked about already, you also wrote Scaling Leadership, aiming at supporting organizations to foster outstanding results by giving them a roadmap that ensures they can consistently grow high quality leadership within their culture and align with their culture and values.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

But most of all, I want to just say that you're one of the best human beings I've ever met. You have a heart of gold, a stunning intellect. I think you lead with this practical wisdom, humility, creativity. You have a great sense of humor. We've had many belly laughs together and you also provide a rare and transformer experience for people like me and other leaders in a transformational way when you engage and on a personal front. You live in Toledo, Ohio. You're sitting there in your, I think your living room. I think that's is that where I got certified. I don't know, it might be the other room.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

The other room on the other side, yeah, and.

Bob Anderson:

I know you it's a breakout room. Yeah, this is the breakout room.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Oh yes, That's what I remember, right, and I know that you and Kim, your wife, enjoyed traveling with your three adult children from time to time, so I know that you that's enjoyable to you. So thank you for being on the show today. I appreciate you joining me.

Bob Anderson:

Wonderful David and thank you for being such a long time supporter. Anybody who is certified in my home has been with the leadership circle a long time.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yeah,I am grateful to have been an early adapter

Bob Anderson:

We didn't even have money, so we did it as bootstrap as well.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yeah, I'm glad I was an early adapter. I sure am. And while I want to spend most of our time diving into the richness of your work and legacy, I thought it would be great to start off to share a little bit of your personal journey, because you know that's where we all start right on our personal journey. So I mean, you know, if you could tell me how did you remind me how you ended up in this work, what was kind of the trajectory of that journey, what got you interested in leadership and why did you like just dive into the research that you did?

Bob Anderson:

It's hard to say when that starts, you know.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yeah.

Bob Anderson:

It's easier looking back, and the more I look back, the further back it starts. So I could start, you know, in high school.

Bob Anderson:

But I would say in general. I grew up Jesuit educated and the Jesuits are at their best and trying to create, in my case, men because it was an all boys high school men of service men for others, and so I was just constantly challenged with what is it you're going to do to serve the world? And that became a seminal question. So I would say, right at the core of everything that has unfolded has been this ongoing discernment practice of, well, what is wanted of me now, right, what wants its way with me now? And I understand that more looking back. But that's been right down the center line of, and I think it's core to, leadership.

Bob Anderson:

I think that the great leaders, as Warren Bennett said, one of the great pundits on leadership, studied leaders. He said the leaders I've studied didn't set out to be leaders per se, they set out to follow an urge and that urge led them into leadership. And so it led me to John Carroll University. I ended up, quite by surprise, studying economics and metrics, even statistics and econometrics, which I didn't realize. I had an intuitive sense I'm preparing for something, I don't know what. And now I think back. Now it's remarkable that my interests took me toward psychometrics and a creation of an assessment. And then I got a master's in organization development after working for a few years as a manager in a manufacturing firm and started my career in organization development and then leadership development.

Bob Anderson:

Then I got very connected with some of the leading thought leaders, and it was a deliberate strategy. How do I get connected to the people who are really leading this field and learn from the best People like Peter Block, peter Sangy, charlie Kiefer, robert Fritz in those days they led the field play Lafferty and David White, and I mentored and learned all that I could. I was mentored and learned everything I could, and then set out to create an integration. What I saw was the field as a random collection of really great stuff Good research, good theory, good models, but all different language systems looking at different things and so on. I said how does this all fit together? And over a period of about 15 years, working with my client generally in workshops and team development sessions, the model fit itself together.

Bob Anderson:

After which I created the leadership circle 360 assessment to give leaders feedback within that framework, and what I saw in the 360 space was that leaders really want feedback. They like the data and kind of getting a read on where they are. Even though it might not be a pleasant experience, it's eminently practical experience, but I couldn't find one that went deep. Most of them stay on well researched competencies or capabilities and they don't get underneath the pattern in those results to say well, what's at the crux, what's really running the show here? How are you organizing yourself internally? That has you deploying yourself moment to moment the way you are? And if we can get to that internal crux, breakthroughs can happen and change can happen relatively quickly.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

So it isn't as important to know while this is important to understand, maybe what companies have to develop, what's most important is to what's happening in my nervous system, in my brain, in my conditioning or whatever it is that may be keeping me from fully expressing that competency.

Bob Anderson:

Is that fair to say yes, I located in our core beliefs and assumptions and that the profile maps out your assumptions structure. A core belief for me when I got into leadership that I didn't see was I want to lead, I want to lead effectively, and I got to have everybody like me. My worth, my identity was wrapped around how you see me and so losing credibility, risking disapproval, not okay, I'm not going to do that.

Bob Anderson:

And you can't lead from there. And so once I saw it and to get underneath it and see that it's a core illusion, delusion, my worth is not in your hands, period. You don't define me at all and in this particular case I'm not made up by your liking, loving, approval, admiration me. And once I see that as core, I can start to unhook from it these assumptions we grow up with naturally. I mean we all have them. It's just part of the development process. I know how I got that one If I look back.

Bob Anderson:

Yeah.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

It's usually obvious if you do research.

Bob Anderson:

Look back and look at them, You'll see oh well, here I come by it honestly yeah, exactly. And then they work. They actually are brilliant strategically. We take our best, our gift, our strength, and we form an identity around it and it takes us very far, and then it runs out of steam.

Bob Anderson:

It just simply reaches limits to the complexities we face as parents, as leaders, as adults. And when it runs into limits, we start to struggle and we bump up against it. And it's that bumping up against, which is not easy, where we can see it and break through to a higher order of understanding of who and what we are.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yeah, beautiful. Well, and this kind of bleeds into your integrated holistic framework that you share in mastering leadership and is baked into leadership circle profile. So, however you like to introduce that to the world people probably are listening to this at know your work. Some people may not be as familiar with your work, so how would you, how do you like, to share about that framework and how it helps you deal with that growth that you just spoke about?

Bob Anderson:

Well, I don't want to get too theoretical, but in the leadership research there's really two core things that stood out right from the beginning. We're going to go back all the way to the Iowa State Studies in the 1950s. They did all this research on leadership and they came to the conclusion that it's really two things how well do you treat people and how well do you organize and structure to get task done. If you can get both, get those in balance and get them both strong, you're going to be effective. And so the profile and its horizontal axis is task in relationship. And then we fill in all the kind of key competencies that have been measured through the years that relate to effectiveness with those key competencies and we bucket them into the main bodies of work, like achieving purpose, vision, strategy, results, decisive, so on, systems awareness, redesigning systems, right Authenticity and courage and telling the truth and being a person of integrity, self-awareness, which you introduced us with this deeper knowing and presencing of self, and then, of course, relationship with others and teams and organizations and so on. So that's the category of what we call creative leadership.

Bob Anderson:

Now, what I got then later, actually, in the development of my framework, I got introduced to the stages of development and the whole body of work that's been going on on the sidelines of leadership theory and is now being imported to the mainstream of leadership theory, partly with the work of Bob Keegan and others and myself and others.

Bob Anderson:

Right, it says that adults can if they grow, and that's a big if if they develop, they can develop, but it develops through progressive and measurable stages, and these stages have been measured universally, meaning across cultures and so on, and so there's a predictable trajectory of how adults develop, if they develop.

Bob Anderson:

And what I realized is that the what Keegan said is this way of leading is highly authentic, visionary, relational, competent, self-aware form of leadership cannot emerge on earlier operating systems. That that is a marker for a level of development which he called self-authoring I'm authoring the future, I'm authoring myself and we call creative Right, right Prior to that, earlier than that is what he called socialized and we call reactive socialized. Socialized, I described, socialized is I got, I want to lead, but I want you to like me, like me, this belief, this conditioning that I grew up in and I took it on, yeah Right. And there are many forms of that that have been well researched in psychology, that take us so far and then become limits. So one form I talked about, I'm leveraging my gift of relationship or like connection.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right.

Bob Anderson:

That strength. The other opposite of that is I leverage my gift of power. I'm okay, if you like me. The gift in here is I'm really good at driving things forward. I got a powerful will. I want to make things happen and I'm good at it and I leverage that. Then I get identified with it. I have to be seen this way, or I'm nobody.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

That's the winner or achiever right, that the driving towards achievement right.

Bob Anderson:

Right and there are measures of that on the assessment. But it's basically where the highly controlling, autocratic, overly ambitious driven leader comes in, and that's the opposite energy. That's the yang to the yin of I want to have everybody Right. So they're the same thing, just different forms. So the first one is heart centered, like relational. The second is will center, or gut centered, you know, power, power base center. And the third is head center, which we call protecting, which is I want to.

Bob Anderson:

I'm identified with my rational brilliance and I'm really good at it. I'm great with ideas, strategic thinking, systemic thinking, but if I'm constantly needing to prove that to you, then it can become overly harsh, overly cold, overly distant, overly critical, overly arrogant, and I have all of these in me. So do I. I can speak from personally to my inner controller, my inner protector and my complier, all of those. But the point is these are well researched in the field of psychology and the assumptions and beliefs that run each one and display themselves in behavioral patterns mirror themselves in the top. So if I'm high on autocratic, I need to be in control. I'm usually low on teamwork.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right.

Bob Anderson:

So there's dynamic model that integrates and since these are universal tendencies, every culture has forms of the need to comply, the need to show my brilliance, the need to be self-important, the need to be in control. Every culture values relationship, values of integrity, values, integrity values, purposefulness and vision. So this becomes a dynamic, integrated, universal model. Not that it covers everything, but these are universal themes in the field of leadership but, more importantly, human interaction and human development.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

What do you see in all the work that you've done with leaders and coaches, that work with leaders and training workshops and hearing the stories? What is the biggest challenge a human being faces to move from unloosening that reactive tendency and moving into a creative realm? What would you say? Some of the bigger challenges are for us that we faced Well.

Bob Anderson:

I'm gonna Notice your question Because it's influenced by our therapeutic, psychological, mental model training. Yeah, there you go. We loosen the grip of reactive tendency in order to.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right.

Bob Anderson:

When I started synchronistically, I started with what I've done. Best in my life is follow this urge.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yes.

Bob Anderson:

So Peter Bloch, when I mentored with him, was working on authenticity. How do you get the conversation that happens in the bathroom to happen in the meeting room? It's great. Do it in a great way, in a way that really is respectful and breaks through to win-win kinds of solutions. So he got into authentic politics and he ran headlong into. If I said that, I'd be shot. You can't tell the truth. So caution emerged and he then began to work people. What's bigger than your caution? Yeah, exactly, it matters enough to risk. What do you love more than you fear? And this is the essential beating heart of this creative operating system.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right. What matters more?

Bob Anderson:

what am I trying to bring into being?

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

What is life calling for me? What?

Bob Anderson:

does life want from me and how do I create myself as an authentic expression of that and build an organizational life that's consistent with that, that expresses my highest aspiration? That's the pull, and it's a transformative pull, because we run into ourselves and then, when we run into ourselves as the limit, we're invited to look more deeply, and there we'll find self-limiting assumptions underneath our behavior patterns, and so it isn't. The core driver isn't how do I get rid of what I don't want? How do right? The core driver is how do I become what I'm longing to become? Yeah, then, in the service of that, things emerge that I need to pay attention to, and so we then have to have a practice of how do I go in and get underneath a moment where I caught myself in an ineffective pattern, in a react pattern, and start to feel it, what was happening in me, and then, underneath it, what was I making up was true in that moment.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yeah.

Bob Anderson:

Which requires some reflection.

Bob Anderson:

Which requires some reflection, right Requires some reflection and dropping in somatically Can't be done from here. Right, this, listen, that's for sure. Listen to the body as it understands. Oh, so, for example, I'm talking with a senior manufacturing manager, large automotive industry, and we're debriefing his 360 profile and he's got a high score on autocratic and controlling and low scores on relationship, even though his basic orientation is to be a highly engaging leader and he knows that's important for getting creating the kind of culture and getting the kind of results they want to get in the organization. And so I said well, can you think of a moment recently where you acted out that pattern? Maybe you were in a meeting and you jumped in and took it over and started telling people what to do, or whatever. And he just smiled yeah, and I got a little bit of the story?

Bob Anderson:

not much. And I said well, now put yourself back in that moment, just before you jumped in. What's happening in your body, how are you feeling? And he was quite descriptive. Oh man, I'm starting to feel tense. I'm leaning forward. I can feel this pressure building in me, like I got to do something here. I got you know, I feel like a tiger ready to pout. Yeah, yeah, that was his language. Yeah, and I said great, right, stay with that. Feel that for a minute. What's at risk for you if you don't pout? Right? And while the meeting is gonna, we're not gonna get enough done. Right, what's at risk for you if you don't get enough done? And on and on, and on. And when you get to the bottom of a reactive pattern, you'll always find a survivor.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yeah, If you're, I'll lose everything. Exactly.

Bob Anderson:

And underneath that is, I lose myself. Why? Because my identity, in his case, is tied to being the one who gets results, and if I don't get results, I'm nobody. This makes me me Not to be. This is not to be. This is a core socialized construction of identity. 75 to 80% of adults are operating from this construction of identity or mind.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yeah, that's really beautiful, so beautifully said, as always, you know, to me it is you know. And the question you even actually got the structure. The question came from this kind of old way of of looking at things but under. But what's true and I know this to be true is that life is always urging us forward. We have to start learning how to listen to what is urging. And it's not about overcoming some problem behavior. It's about finding the spark in me. Yeah, that cares more about the outcome or the vision or the creation I want, than me looking good in certain ways.

Bob Anderson:

Yeah, and.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

I'm willing to take risks, even in learning how to lead, and maybe step on my toes, because I've never done some of these behaviors before, but because what's most important to me is that vision becomes reality and that we somehow do this together to make this happen.

Bob Anderson:

Yep. And there's no safe way to be great, and that's a great way to be safe.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

So as well.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

So well, I mean, I don't want to speak to this like this is a good time to talk about, like you know.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

I want to talk more about the structure and even you know, integral and unit of stages, which it seems like we're being called to higher order here, but I wanted to. I want to talk to you about, like, the nature of what's happening in the world today. And what if we could inoculate people with that statement and somehow get in their nervous systems and they would wake up to their own self offering, and it feels like right now, fear is driving the boat and division is driving the boat and I'm just curious to see, like is is you know what? What do you think we have to do in the world today to embolden that kind of leadership more that actually solves most of the problems that we've created through the other way, right? I'm not trying to get political here per se, I'm just saying in general what I'm noticing Fear is driving People are shutting down, they're emotionally overwhelmed with what's going on, and yet the gift that you talked about in your, in talking about your model, is still there for them to unwrap, right? Yeah?

Bob Anderson:

No Reactive leadership behavior, reactive structure, is run by fear At its core. I'm playing not to lose, not to lose face, not to fall short, not to risk disapproval. I'm trying to forward my objectives but the underneath that is a play not to lose, fear driven game. And so you know, if you look in the political arena, what's a lot of. What's going on is we manipulate that and it plays to people's fears because the predominant consciousness on the planet is fear driven and that's where we are evolution, evolutionarily, and the adult development research bears this out. It doesn't mean the people don't care about stuff.

Bob Anderson:

It doesn't mean they're not loving, no no, no People doesn't mean anything, but the core structure is one of your driven hasn't kind of collective conditioning.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

right, it's kind of collective conditioning, yeah.

Bob Anderson:

Hasn't yet moved on to being love, passion, creation driven. Who am I really? What am I here for? What do I want to contribute? How can I serve? That hasn't emerged yet when it's owned. I am this self-authoring self. I can create the future that I believe in, and we can do that even more powerfully together.

Bob Anderson:

That's a completely different operating system, and I remember once reading about Keegan's work and he described this kind of leadership, especially the part about the ability to be authentic and honest in every conversation, to really listen, to treat the other person's position with respect, to not get triggered as much by things that disagree with, and so on.

Bob Anderson:

If we could just learn that, the world would be a remarkably better place. And so I think leadership in the business sense or organizational sense is a leverage point here, that leaders more and more the leaders we're working with know that they can't create an agile, adaptive, innovative future organization, culture, structure, process of leadership that's fundamentally reacting. They just can't get there from here. So we're being pulled in because we know we have to transform the leadership in order to transform the culture and system, in order to get more consistent results, high performance in ever more disrupted and complex reality context, and so the more complex the context, the more we need to evolve in order to meet that context. So if the context is more complex than we are and by complex I don't mean complicated, I mean reactive structure is not as complex as creative structure, like the iPhone is more complex than Blackberry, you know, or?

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right, right exactly.

Bob Anderson:

And so this is why technology keeps improving its inner operating system to be more complex but more elegant, because then more can unfold on that platform. And so this is the same argument that leaders are getting that in order to really be effective as a leader and collectively effective as a leadership organization, we need to do our work, otherwise we can't get them from here.

Bob Anderson:

Exactly, we get in the way of the very change efforts that we're sponsoring and to which we're actually really committed, but we don't see how we're in the way. That's what got me into 360 in the first place was I was involved with really innovative leaders with bold visions and they were the ones in the way of it and they didn't see it and nobody would tell them because right around them was a lot of caution. If I say that, I'll get shot and if I can't, I can't really tell the truth here or I'll be packing my bags so that even in a bold change effort that can be right at the core of the leadership and it doesn't work.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right? Well, it's interesting because, as you're speaking about this and you know I've had this conversation with my partner about this you know that as we look out at the leadership in the world you know, before, post, pre World War II, there was Eisenhower and Patton and people like that. Before Civil War, there was Grant and McCullin and all these people they were going through the military colleges it feels as if, like, we might be facing some something similar proportion. You know, it seems unsustainable out there that some shoe is going to drop and we're going to be facing some bigger crisis. And I'm wondering if you concur that maybe the healthiest leadership we have in the world today may be in business. You know, and don't want to counter other places where it might exist, but we've actually invested over the last 20 years in business more than any other place and growing the kind of leadership you're talking about.

Bob Anderson:

It could be right there.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yeah, and then the question becomes is you know what I've noticed? And again, this is just you know, not saying leaders should be doing anything different than we're doing leading the organization. Now there's no judgment or you know making like, but there's a sense of you know there will be, there feels like there could be coming a call from these people that they could be right for those people that could help us move forward.

Bob Anderson:

But yeah, I would take a little different tack on it, that we shouldn't be doing anything different. I think, we're not impressed in any times. Yeah, and the world, the future of the planet and civilization hangs in the balance, and I agree with that. The old order that we've all grown up with and all participated in creating is imploding, it's coming apart at the seams, and it it because it's built on some very false presumptions and we're at the point where it's no longer sustainable.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right, it's where we are. I agree it is not sustainable. Yeah.

Bob Anderson:

So, as business, which is the primary force in the world today, as business leaders, I think we're being challenged to not only lead in a way that allows our organization to thrive in the midst of complexity and disruptiveness, but also to make our organization to be more successful in the future. How do we serve humanity's future, the planet's future, through our endeavors? You can call this a triple P bottom line. You know people, profits, planet and really take that seriously. And we have clients that are.

Bob Anderson:

If you look at Honda and this is not giving anything away they're they're calling it their second founding. That's how significant it is to them in response to the world where it is, and they want to go. They're the largest manufacturer of ice engines, internal combustion engines in the world, and they're going all electric by 2050 and 85% by 2035. They want to be zero carbon footprint company. They want cycle regenerative cars. In other words, they're all completely recycled.

Bob Anderson:

And then no accidents, like they think their vision would be. We could design technology in this so safe there would be no deaths. Not no accidents, but no deaths in our vehicles. It's a bold vision. I know from being internal with them that the leaders in that organization are overwhelmed with the complexity that they face to both reinvent the company while staying at industry leadership with their current products. That's unbelievably complex, and they're one among a number of them that we work with that are taking seriously. We need to be really good at what we do in the world and thrives in organization, but we need to do it in a way that contributes to a sustainable and thriving future for all of life on the planet. Right.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Well, you just gave me an example of they're undaunted by the. They're not maybe undaunted, that's wrong word, but they're unaffected or they're continuing to move forward. That the idea that the vision is bigger than the complexity, the vision is more important in the complexity, right, and I look at a lot of leaders today. They always say they still have to run their business. And then there is this emotional drain that many of them I think they'd stay in their bubble and they don't acknowledge. But it's happening to them and their people being in this world of the fear and the distraction and the disintegration that's happening, that's affecting people, whether you like it or not. Right, it's affecting us and at the same time, having to be called to a greater order of leadership to deal with all that. So they know that instinct.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Most of the leaders I work with know that instinctually. The question they have and it goes back to the Honda example I'm coming back around that that's a lot to take on, to deal with still running your business, deal with taking care of yourself, becoming more resilient and also growing as a leader, and some of them get caught dear in the headlights with that right. But what I'm hoping we're reminding people in this conversation is there's that spark is there, you just have to ignite it. And you have to be brave enough to go ahead and ignite it and say it doesn't matter. This is what I want to become, this is who I want to create myself to be next iteration.

Bob Anderson:

Well, the challenges that we face are what if it's called adaptive challenge? In other words, we can't create that future from our current level of operating system. So if it can't get there, you won't create that future, no matter how much you want it from a reactive operating system. So we're literally challenged to evolve our inner game or inner complexity, the complexity or elegance of our inner game, or we won't be able to thrive and contribute in the way that I'm describing here. It demands creative or higher.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right and that's why I saw so. Talk to you about or higher you have, like you have the integral and the in unitive. So I know that your attention has started to attend more to those other levels of leadership you have for some time. So maybe you could speak. We can't skip a stage. We can't go from reactive to unitive. No, Even if we wanted to I don't know if that we told together, if we tried to do it but talk a little bit about what you've seen in the world as far as those other levels emerging. You seeing that, Do you?

Bob Anderson:

I can't even say that we see a lot of it.

Bob Anderson:

But yes, there are stages beyond creative and different systems that measure them, measure them different ways and give them different labels and create distinctions. But if you say what's the next, maybe third wave, it's what we're calling integral level leadership and it's beyond. It's beyond creative in many ways and it's designed for being more effective in complex environments. It's really design, it's really a match for complexity, and only about 5% of leaders are operating here at this level, and maybe another 5 to 10 in route or in transition there, and so we think there's an opportunity, a tipping point opportunity to say, oh, there's about 15% of leaders in the world, which is a big number, that are ready to go the next step and looking for what would take me to an even higher level of effectiveness and impact and through my leadership, and we think that's integral. So I'm spending most of my time saying what's the next iteration or generation of leadership work on the planet? Most of what has emerged, and I've been part of that emergence from early days. We were talking about participative management and total development.

Bob Anderson:

Some of the early and into empowerment and to involvement and to whole system redesign and to right, and most of that is moving into creative level of leadership. And so now the focus for me is what's the next stage of it look like and how do we develop it? And just do a brief sketch. This notion of purpose moves from self-authoring purpose vision moves from self-authoring to being authored. So this is the true understanding of servant leadership. I'm now a servant of that which is trying to come through something greater than self.

Bob Anderson:

So, I'm all about. What's the mission? How do we serve the mission in the organization? And it's authoring me now because it's so complex that we can't see it. We can hold a cold possibility but we can't see it. It's kind of emerging like the first light of sun over the over the ocean. You know, oh, I'm getting a sense we need to go this way, and so it's. So there's a more of a knowingness.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

A knowingness that's where we have to go, versus waiting to get all the data in and figure it out. It's like I got. This is where we have to go.

Bob Anderson:

The path will show itself one step at a time. So it's an emergent, unknown future that has my attention.

Bob Anderson:

This is a you can see, it's higher order than this is where we need to go. It sounds like it's confusion, but leaders at this level are leading forward in the face of unknown, and that's required now because nobody can nobody's smart enough and nobody can figure it out. Looking back, you'll say, oh, we did it and so that's. That's the evolution there. Then the work underneath that, where you run into yourself like we talked about, is deeper than belief work and we are to see that there are, underneath that are, some core wounds and trauma and shadows. That and parts of myself, strengths that I've disowned, that I've rejected, and I start to become a student of that and I get able to hold the partialness of myself At self-authoring. I'm presuming myself to be this whole authentic, visionary person and I've worked really hard for it and I'm really good at it. I've created an organization and I've authored a life and it's like this is who I am At, integral. We start to go yes, that's all true, and there's this inner opposite Jackal meets hide.

Bob Anderson:

I have these other parts of myself that I've banished or disowned, that are that show up in certain situations and make a mess of them, and that I become more interested in that and I become more able to hold that inner opposite-ness.

Bob Anderson:

So when I see it in you, I don't turn you into an enemy.

Bob Anderson:

I go oh, you too, let's talk.

Bob Anderson:

Yeah, exactly.

Bob Anderson:

And I've come to realize that where I've been holding this before, the rightness of my vision, it's partial, I don't have the whole thing in the face of this complex, so, especially where there's conflict, I lean in with curiosity, I'm wondering what it is you have that I don't understand, that I need in order to be more complete in my perspective, and that orients us toward a quality of dialogue, another marker for integral, where we sit together and listen to people, to what's emerging in the conversation and even deeper in the field, the energetic field of the conversation, which gets into another capacity that develops at this stage.

Bob Anderson:

And so we're now able to hold a conversation at a level at which breakthroughs can emerge more readily to really tough problems and really conflictual situations. And that ability to listen also is enhanced by the development of an intuitive capacity, the ability to intuit information, and this has been well documented in the sciences, been well documented in the psychic research, that we have this capacity and there are certain practices that predispose us to getting more informed, and so we can break through in the quality of dialogue that I'm describing and, in relationship to this emergent poll, we can break through with new and innovative technology, new and innovative processes that are required in order for us to create the future, and, as leaders, we need to change everything. I mean our economic systems, our political systems are being called for.

Bob Anderson:

Everything is being called for and nobody knows how. So leading in the midst of the unknown and being informed as we go is the capacity that's required, and it takes a very mature capability to sit in all that and hold that level of complexity without requiring or recoiling.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Well, that's the invitation that we're having right now, and you would hope that human beings don't have to go into deep crisis to realize that, but sometimes it seems like that's one of the things that gets us going. And this strikes me to another question. When you look at you know from your book, scaling Leadership and Talk About you know, just to answer, what can organizations do you think do most today? If you were, if a senior HR leader or head of talent was listening to this and they said you know, what do we have to do to start supporting the environment and the culture and our leaders in developing that kind of leadership? What are some of the things you typically recommend? Obviously, this is a general statement. You'd have to know the specifics of the organization and their challenges, their business and all that, but if you would speak to that generally, well, you know, we often come in in our consulting organization.

Bob Anderson:

We often come in through the door of HR and that's a blessing and a liability in the sense that if the ownership for the effort is with HR, it's doomed to failure, no matter how good they are. It's only when the senior leadership says we're responsible for the development of the leadership and the culture in this organization. So the senior leader, depending on where the change effort starts, could be the CEO or vice president of the development. Senior leader says I'm the chief development officer, Okay, now I can really use the help of HR and HR can be a really powerful ally.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Of course.

Bob Anderson:

So it has to start at the top, which means the leader asked us to get to a place where they go. I'm the project.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yes.

Bob Anderson:

It's not going to change if I don't. What's unfolding here is not only my accountability but, in part, my responsibility, and I'm showing up in a way that enables this or encourages this, or, and so I have the most to learn. And they start that process. So, step one, start with yourself, or else that's it.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Or else.

Bob Anderson:

Right. Start with yourself. Make yourself a project, not in a kind of punishing way, but like with curiosity and self-acceptance. Okay, and it's radically human. It's vulnerable Leaders that do this, learn out loud, they ask for feedback. They get, and we have stories of this kind of leadership in our book. And then they, that's step one, step two, and they aren't. This is not sequential. These are like major movements that happen right.

Bob Anderson:

Step two is get your whole team on that journey, Do it together and really get serious about your collective effectiveness as a leadership team and how you are playing into it. We do a case study in the book where we show how they did for didn't for a while and then saw the impact on results. And then and you can literally track results with their 360 scores and it's really quite dramatic. And so the whole. When the whole team says, okay, now we're all in this together and we're learning from and with each other and we're creating your collectively effective leadership organization and it's team on teams, yeah, how do I, as a member of the senior team, take responsibility for developing leadership in the organization? And there can be programs that we institute that support that Right.

Bob Anderson:

But if that fundamental structure and ownership doesn't happen, it's not going to happen. And then it's feedback. So we try to set up feedback rich environments where people are getting feedback all the time and that becomes a norm. And if you look at Bob Keegan's work on what he calls deliberately developmental organizations organizations where leaders are designing them so people develop, just the natural of the way we work together, Feedback is a huge part of that you don't want feedback. You don't work here.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right.

Bob Anderson:

Yeah, period, and so everybody's constantly encouraged to provide feedback and do it in a great way and given, then given support for learning and development and you get an organization that can Upgrade its leadership Significantly. And this is what our clients are doing. In parallel with systemic kinds of transformation, like an agile, we need to get more processes, need to get more agile and adaptive and innovative. So, in parallel with that, how do we get good help.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Human beings more adapt, be adaptive and ability to do that and agile, etc.

Bob Anderson:

And there's a stomach side of that and there's a human side of that leadership side of that, and those two things need to go in concert.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Oh, you know, and it you know as we start to move. To wrap up, a couple more questions. One of the things you're speaking about is it touches on spirit, almost a spiritual domain. Right, and, and, and. More and more we're seeing spirituality being an people, seeing that as an integral part of their lives. Are you seeing more acceptance of that within corporations in any way? Not trying to get too out there, but is there? Is there more acceptance of that? Is there? What was your thoughts on that?

Bob Anderson:

It's hard for me to know. Yet People say, yes, I haven't yet seen it. I've had, I've said, situations where people come through a workshop and they go. That's far too spiritual and has no place here. So I would say the reaction to that is very mixed. But here's where I'm trying to land. I've been studying, again urged on by intuition, I've been studying quantum physics pretty insistently and deliberately and through reading and through relationships with leading physics and trying to understand how they see the fundamental nature of reality.

Bob Anderson:

Some of this I've documented on our website. There's a whole series of video conversations with really amazing thought leaders. One like Federico Vigine, who, federico, was the brilliance that behind Intel. He created technology that made the microchip awesome. There's a very clear understanding of how intuition and innovation are intrinsically linked and what consciousness has to do with leadership and break through innovation in his case a very technological domain. So you can call that spiritual, I'm calling it higher capacities that have mostly been left to atrophy because our mental model of reality is so inaccurate.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Yes.

Bob Anderson:

We don't understand the fundamentals of how reality works, and the spiritual traditions have been forming that depth Thousands of years. Yeah, their lens Physicists are now seeing it, and quantum biologists and quantum neurologists are now seeing it from their perspective. And my read on all that, from a lot of work, is they all line up that they're not describing different things, they're just different languages. And so we can actually begin to import some of the practices that allow for seeing into or greater access to this field of intelligence, this quantum intelligent field, for both being informed, as we've talked about, for break through, but also to shape it. And this is some of the most cutting edge work that's going on, where they're doing pre and post, for example, pre and post measurement on DNA, blood work, stool samples and so on, and so we're going to have pre and post, a seven day meditation retreat. I don't think it's actually meditation as much as it's some really powerful energetic practice, accessing the field, being informed by the field in the body, naturally, oh, okay.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

I guess what to do with that. I got the right information.

Bob Anderson:

Now I know what to do with that and they're seeing dramatic shifts I mean beyond clinical trial type shifts in blood work and DNA and so on, epigenetics, so you can inform the field and shape through intention, shape what's happening. And so what I think comes along with this integral is informed by a larger understanding of the unit of reality in which we operate, and what can come along with that is the ability to work at higher orders of, or expanded orders of, energy frequency, information density, which I'm talking? Physics language, I'm not talking new way. Yeah, I know, I get it, yeah and so, but that can also be spiritual language, right? So how do we get a more integrated framework, which is what I love to do? That you're in your sweet spot, bob. Here's how this is actually eminently practical if you really want to change the future, if you really want to break through on. What's it going to take to make a computer? Right? How do we? How do we create a processor?

Bob Anderson:

Well, he looks on that now and he says, well, it's how consciousness works, right and so in any event in fact, federico has just published a book of physics, really serious physics, with some other leading edge physicists, on the nature of consciousness and I have to pick that one up.

Bob Anderson:

Well, it's not out in English yet. At least it's about to come out, it's been sent to the public. So I'm Italian because as native languages, but in any event. So I'm playing at that edge of how do we Not differentiate between what we call spiritual, what we call physical, like how do these things actually describe, from different lenses, the same reality? And what's that got to do with being more effective in complex leadership challenges?

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Right, so I covered quite a distance today. I appreciate especially the way we went to the last third of the conversation was hope. What I was hoping for. So I really appreciate your time. So anything else you'd like to share? Do you feel still hanging there? You'd like to just kind of put a exclamation point on our conversation today. Anything you want to end with?

Bob Anderson:

Oh no, it feels pretty complete right now.

David Craig Utts - The Resilient Leadership Guy:

Well, I appreciate you spending your time with me today. It's always great to be in your presence and have these conversations. I already got my wheels spinning, Some thoughts and ideas and I just want to thank everybody that that joined this podcast and you know, as I didn't say at the beginning, please share and get this out to your network, especially this conversation. This is a very timely and important conversation. I hope that you'll share with everybody. In the meantime, I just want to thank you all for attending today and joining me on a phased under fire and until next time. David Kregots signing out.