Leading Beyond Any Title – 5 Big Ideas from 5 Great Conversations
Jul 22, 2024
Terran Allen
In this quick conversation we revisit some of the best lessons from our recent guests. We look at the importance of developing a learning organization, whether there is such a thing as too much trust, how to capture attention in an attention economy, how privilege and power impact leadership, and how to avoid lazy thinking.
This episode will look back on great conversations with Rod Miller (Strategic Intelligence), Ila Edgar (Trust in Leadership), Tamara Sheppard (Business Writing in the Age of Tik Tok), John Partington (Inclusive Leadership), and Evan Weselake (Critical Thinking).
If you have questions about leadership, please send them to us at leadership.questions@sait.ca
Referenced in this discussion are these prior conversations:
In this quick conversation we revisit some of the best lessons from our recent guests. We look at the importance of developing a learning organization, whether there is such a thing as too much trust, how to capture attention in an attention economy, how privilege and power impact leadership, and how to avoid lazy thinking.
This episode will look back on great conversations with Rod Miller (Strategic Intelligence), Ila Edgar (Trust in Leadership), Tamara Sheppard (Business Writing in the Age of Tik Tok), John Partington (Inclusive Leadership), and Evan Weselake (Critical Thinking).
If you have questions about leadership, please send them to us at leadership.questions@sait.ca
Referenced in this discussion are these prior conversations:
Have burning questions about leadership that you'd like us to address? Email them to leadership.questions@sait.ca and let your voice be heard.
Craig:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to a short Leader Lesson episode of the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast, where myself and Jennie Gilbert provide a short version of one of our longer conversations. It's a chance for you to get some quick insights to an important leadership topic, and we know you don't always have time to listen to us for 45 to 60 minutes. So we hope you enjoy this short episode, and if it encourages you to want to hear more about the topic, be sure to link to the full episode in the show notes. Now, for a quick Leader Lesson. Okay, Jennie, we are. Off for the summer, but we're here in people's ears right now and wanted to take a moment to recap some of the great conversations that we've had over the past couple of months. We've had a brilliant opportunity to have a number of great guests join us. And what I thought we could do today, if you're good with that, is quickly run through five of those guests. The big ideas they shared on their topics and perhaps a strategy that anybody listening today could walk away from this conversation and implement. But if you want to dive deeper into it, we'll make sure we'll link to the show notes of the prior guests. How's that sound?
Jennie:
That is a good plan for today. Let's try it.
Craig:
Perfect. All right. So the first individual we had join us, oh, back in the spring, Rod Miller came on to talk and talk with us and join us to, to chat about strategic intelligence, an important aspect for any leader to be able to focus on. And his big idea was that we need to, leaders need to, or organizations need to figure out how to leverage strategic intelligence across all levels of the organization. Yes.
Jennie:
Yes. And I think one of the things that stood out in there too is how organic strategy is becoming, like it used to be that one big event and then we had the binder and now it's almost like strategic doing all of the time and that agility was in there. And one of the things that popped out was the importance of learning, learning, learning. Within that conversation, he had a phrase that really stuck for me. Create learning collisions or encourage learning collisions. And as leaders, how do we make that happen? And also how do we encourage that across departments too? Like when we stay really within our silo or within our team, we're not hearing anything new. We're not getting that new perspective. And. I wonder too, if we couldn't take that further, how do we encourage that across companies or across industry as well?
Craig:
That's an interesting one. One would assume associations, home like builders associations, et cetera, would share those things across the construction industry, for example. Now, I really liked his thoughts too around create, to your point, creating a learning first organization, right? How do you focus on that? How do you leverage failure? We've talked many times before about just the ridiculousness at times, perhaps of this concept of fail fast. I think what you're trying to do is make sure you're setting up an organization that knows how to learn from its failures to influence strategy.
Jennie:
Yes, and that we're really hanging on that learning point, which is somewhat apt actually, as we work in the world of learning. How do you learn from your failures? How do you make that an everyday part of your conversation? It could be as simple as an agenda item that simply says, What have you learned this week? And you can narrow the focus and keep that absolutely on your number one priority. Or you can open the focus and go more social capital based. What have you learned this week? We are all constantly learning and unlearning. Which to your point just adds to that strategic knowledge and the dots that we can connect as well.
Craig:
Yeah, absolutely. I think ultimately what Rod was getting to is we want to be able to have organizations that can better develop strategic leaders. Folks that know how to think in strategy, how to convey strategy, how to learn from past mistakes, how to teach others in the organization, how to take a strategy and implement it. Jumping then to our next guest, Ila, and I think it ties very well with, with learning and this failure piece is Ila was focusing on trust, how to build trust in leadership. She had a few big ideas, like you usually have more than three questions, but Ila had. A few big ideas. And I think the one that stood out for me was that trust and distrust is a choice as an, as a leader, as an individual, you, you have a choice as to how much trust you're going to extend or not provide.
Jennie:
Yeah, absolutely. And the key for leaders to always is to remember just as much as I am determining, deciding, assessing my trust in you, it's two ways. So your people are doing that for you as a leader. Yeah. as well. And I often say, if you can't trust your team, how can your team possibly trust you? And this idea that both are a choice and both, there's no finite on it. We used to talk about trust as an absolute, and that made it even harder. And it is really difficult. If you put all your trust in somebody and it gets broken, it's emotional and it hurts. But in our workplaces, one of the things that she talked about was that we have the ability to intentionally design trust, which means we have the ability to have conversations around behaviors will build trust for us. What can we reinforce that allows trust to get stronger? And of course, ELA is coming from that model that we use at SAIT, Charles Feltman's model, where there's four different areas that we're talking about within there too. So reliability, sincerity, competence, and care. So many good conversations that teams can have within there.
Craig:
Absolutely. A couple of other things that she said that made me think a little bit was that, More trust isn't necessarily a better thing. Too much trust can expose us to excessive risk, but not enough trust can make us blind to potential opportunities. So it was just an interesting spin on it. And the fact that when we talk about trust, you think that more trust is always better, but that piece around too much could be a bad thing.
Jennie:
Yes. There's a gut instinct in there somewhere. I'm sure.
Craig:
Moving along. And so again, I think these kind of build on each other. I'm not sure if we did it intentionally or unintentionally as we planned out the series, but to build trust, you need to be able to communicate. Right. And Tamara Shepard joined us to chat about business writing in the age of TikTok. And this was an interesting one. We never, we haven't cut a TikTok yet. I don't know if that's what the kids do is cut TikToks or if they're, I'm sounding like I'm back at Sun Records cutting a single, but. Her big idea was really all around attention. And that an attention that, that we are in an, an attention economy. Easy for me to see an attention economy and in an, in that attention is a scarce resource and you really have to compete to capture it. And I think we see that, again, go back to TikTok and other social media. It's all quick hits now, right? But this whole idea that attention is scarce and you have to figure out how to capture it.
Jennie:
And she spoke so well, didn't she, about, about attention, and about how we fight for that attention, and I think there's two things that stuck with me, we'll see whether they caught you or not, but the first one, she talks a little about the preview pain, and how important that preview pain is, so, up until this point, I'm always somebody, hey, how are you, or, hi Craig, how are you today, And that's such a waste of space. And so I think a big message was what do you need to capture their attention in? And it's so true because most of us read our emails on our phones in a hurry. And it really is, do I want to read or do I want to delete? So capture that piece really early. And then I'm still struggling with emoticons in the title of emails. And maybe my emoticon literacy isn't expansive enough, I don't know. But that one's not hit home yet.
Craig:
Yeah, I think what I took from that was her comment or her strategy around, don't be afraid to inject personality and authenticity into your communication. If you use emojis, right? Lots of people do. Don't be afraid to throw them in the subject line.
Jennie:
Yeah.
Craig:
I, for one, would never think of throwing an emoji in a subject line. Just would not work for me. But don't be afraid that so often I think we get into business writing and communications that it becomes so anodyne and so sterile that you just forget to put, uh, emotion or personality into it. I think where you have to be careful in that is if you're somebody like me who can be a little sarcastic at times, sarcasm perhaps doesn't read as well as it sounds.
Jennie:
There's no fun for sarcasm just yet.
Craig:
Yeah, no, there is no fun. That's where you have to put the sarcastic, parenthetical, comment, and.
Jennie:
Yeah, it was good, and I don't know, the, what captures your attention, that kind of stuck with me too, and there's a real point in there, if you think of the number of emails that we're receiving in a day, it's the interesting ones that capture our attention.
Craig:
Oh, absolutely. And so as you, I think the thing that I took away from that too is just be more intentional with your subject line, right? Be more intentional. Don't get into those email strings where the subject now all of a sudden changes halfway through, but you still maintain the same original subject line. You can change those. It's okay, right? Or better yet, maybe stop, think about whether everybody on that email that has grown to a 20 person CC list actually still needs to be there. As the writer of the email, think about whose inboxes really need to be filled. Yeah. Right. And I think the piece around how do you just think about capturing attention and making sure that you're focusing on that as you're in your communication is a big piece. Yeah. We then switched gears a little bit, and we moved into what has become a very important subject, subject that many organizations have been focusing on. And we were lucky enough to have John Partington, who is SAIT's director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, join us for, it was a pretty powerful conversation. I think we covered a lot of ground. The big idea that John shared was that we are all intersectional human beings. Thanks. In other words, our social identities are made up of many dimensions of diversity, and that as you go through your day, your week, et cetera, whatever it may be, you, you really need to think about that and, and what, what those levels of privilege and power that you might have influence and flavor your interactions with others.
Jennie:
And just those words in themselves led to a great conversation, power, privilege. How does that work? How does that play out? There's a lot of people who hang on those two words, the connotations of them have changed through the decades, and here they are being brought back to life in probably the healthiest way that they've ever been used before. Yeah, truly, it was a very interesting conversation. I think as always, one of the things that John brought to us were all the things that as individuals, we can do in the space when we notice something isn't right. When we notice a conversation as perhaps swung away from the sort of classic EDI premises, and we did touch a little bit on microaggressions within, within the conversation when we were chatting. And it is one of my favorite takes that's emerged from the EDI world is the difference between calling in and calling out and how effective that can be. And if I remember correctly, I think John did a great job too. There are times. where it actually is appropriate to call out. But most of the time, our lean would be better served if we called people in. And, and it lines up, it lines up with everything we talked about. You remove the blame, the shame, the judgment when you call people in, it becomes an educational conversation. Takes us right back to that learning piece. These are learning collisions, like this conversation. I'm not sure if you're aware of the impact that your comment has on our group that's in the room. That is a calling in one on one conversation. So I think that was the bit that was strongest for me. This was a good conversation.
Craig:
Yeah, no, it really wasn't that, that calling in, calling out piece. We spent a bit of time on because it, I think it's an important one to unpack a little bit and really focus on to help people understand. So calling in could be something like, I'm curious, what was your intention when you said that?
Jennie:
Yeah. Um,
Craig:
calling out could be, that's not the way we do things here, right? That behavior doesn't align with our values. So some really key things in there. I think as a leader, you need to think about. Uh, the moment, the situation, is this the first time that somebody has said something that would result in that? And whether you call in or call out in public or in private, right? There may be times to do both. There may be most of, I'm just thinking off the top of my head, most of the time it's probably best to do something like this, perhaps in private, but again, without a specific example in front of me, it's very difficult to say. But That's, that's the art of leadership is trying to figure out those moments of where do you call, where do you do something publicly versus privately, right?
Jennie:
Know your people, know your
Craig:
people. Though the, the rule of praise in public, criticize or correct in private is always a good one to, to follow. But yeah, no, John touched on so many important topics and it was, it's a bit of a heavier conversation I would suggest. Again, a really, a really important one. And one that requires a leader to employ some critical thinking skills, which is where we ended up our series, speaking with Evan Westlake around critical thinking for leaders and why it's so important. And the big idea on this was that critical thinking is work, right? Critical thinking is deliberate mental effort. The way to think about that, he suggested, was pointing out that the opposite of critical thinking is lazy thinking. And I'm not sure how many of us want to be accused of being lazy thinkers.
Jennie:
No, I don't want to be, but I'm pretty sure I own that title sometimes. I
Craig:
think we all do.
Jennie:
But I think what was, it was cool the way that this connects entirely with John's conversation too, in, and I think you said this during the conversation with the three of us, was Is bias the enemy of critical thinking or something along those lines, you put it better than that. And the answer is yes. And so we did lean into the biases that get in the way of critical thinking. And the other part that really stuck for me was the three truths that Evan talked about. You have a personal truth, you have a objective truth, and then there's a political truth. And the political truth. Is the group heading in the same direction that becomes a political truth. We all work within that. We tend to think of politics as government politics, but we have a political truth within our organization and that you need two of those truths. And when we lean into bias, we're so heavily just caught in our personal truth. And it's hard to get out of that sometimes, which is the work. Maybe
Craig:
no, a absolutely, he covered so many great areas and it was with his unique style of course, that Evan always brings to a conversation and I think it was a great way to wrap up as we moved into the summer break. And yes, I think what we wanted to do today was really share with folks, hopefully you've taken four or five great ideas from this, that you can really think about it as you can employ some critical thinking as a leader o over the summer months and, and really. Focus on those areas, but we will in the show notes, of course, link to all the original episodes that you can go back and get in more in depth detail. We'll also be sure to link in the, the resources and slides that were shared in those conversations, but Jennie, thank you so much. I think this was a great quick way. To, uh, get some great big ideas and great strategies out there for folks to, uh, to consider.
Jennie:
Yeah. Thank you too. And I see now we've been talking, I'm going back to re listen to some of our conversations.
Craig:
Yeah, absolutely. Until next time, folks, thank you so much for sticking this far, if you've made it this far, to the end of the podcast. Welcome to the end of the Podcast club and we will talk to you next time. Take care. Thank you once again for joining us on the Leading Beyond Any title podcast. If you'd like to stay connected and receive more updates from us, please follow state corporate training on LinkedIn. Stay in the loop with the latest insights and valuable content to the link in the show notes.
Jennie:
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