Welcome to Hacking Your Leadership. I'm Chris and Lorenzo, and welcome to this
week's Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking Your Leadership
and leave us a review on whatever podcast platform you're listening to right now.
On this Thoughtful Thursday, I came across kind of an infograph on LinkedIn called
the ten Principles of Strategic Leadership, and I'm gonna read them to you real
quick. There's a specific one I want to talk about. They are Distribute
responsibility, be honest and open about information, Create multiple paths for raising and
testing ideas, make it safe to fail. Provide access to other strategists,
develop opportunities for experience based learning, hire for transformation, bring your whole self
to work, find time to reflect, and recognize leadership development as an ongoing
practice. And I like all of these. I think that they some of
them are very obvious what they are based on just that little kind of those
few words. Some of them we could do an entire episode or more on
some of them in terms of just the box that opens up, you know,
the box of worms that gets opened up with them and what they actually
mean. But the specific one that I want to talk about here, the
one that kind of piqued my interest a little bit, and one that I
think a lot of leaders they would agree with the statement, but they don't
necessarily do it in practice. And this is this concept of the seventh one,
which is higher for transformation. And we've spoken about this before around hiring
process and the right people to hire, but hiring for transformation. To specifically
say that you're hiring people for transformation, that can that can raise some eyebrows
because you don't necessarily what if things are going well, right, what if
things are going well in your organization, you have a high performing team,
why would you want to change that as opposed to just, you know,
keeping things the way they are. And so I won't know what your thoughts
are about this one. Yeah, Well, I think there's always a need
to constantly evolve. I think when people hear the word change, they immediately
think of like everything must change, everything, like the opposite of what we're
doing now, which is not which is not the case. Right. I
think that even high performing teams great cultures, like you need to feed those
teams. You need to feed the culture with new ideas, new perspectives,
new energy like these are all things that are needed to keep that going,
because I think that if you don't have that happen to the team or to
a culture, then you get really really kind of like complacent and what was
great and what was awesome two years ago, five years ago, ten years
ago, now it feels normal and stale because there's been no evolution, there's
been no change, there's been no addition to you know, by bringing people
in that help to push things forward. And again, like all things in
the world, sometimes those initial ideas are are they hurt, they're tough,
they're different, they're they're not what we've done, and we want to hold
onto things sometimes because that's where we've gotten success before. That's what feels like
what we are today, and that can be really tough for teams or individuals
to think about the future and how that type of kind of like like controlled
conflict. That type of new energy is helpful in questioning the things that we've
done, because then when the answer to the questions are very clear and precise,
then you know that those things are the ones that should stay. When
the answer to the questions that they have are I don't know or this is
why or we've always done it that way, then you know there's room there
that should be addressed and there should be some some different actions that are taken.
Right whenever I see, you know, kind of advice on how to
hire people, there's this thing that happened for a long time where you people
talked about hiring for company fit or cultural fit, and that was kind of
like the way forward for many many years. And at some point someone said,
well, if you if you hire for cultural fit or company fit and
you don't kind of quantify that with something else, you don't kind of,
you know, really outline what that means, you end up hiring people that
continue the way things are currently going, whatever that looks like. And so
you don't hire for transformation. You hire for people who are really good at
continuing to do the things that you see as working well for you in the
moment. And so when you're talking about the idea of hiring for transformation,
I kind of interpret that as being you're hiring for the ability to transform number
one, meaning people who are comfortable with the idea of transformation and of change,
even if it's gradual, because it will always be happening not someone who's
going to kind of fight against change, fight to keep things the way they
are, but be able to objectively look at a situation and decide whether or
not things need to stay the same or if they need to evolve or change
as as you move forward, even if it means having to do their work
differently. And that's where the kind of the rubber meets the road here.
If a team is hiring for transformation, they're hiring people who are not kind
of intimidated by the idea of changing the way they have to do things,
because they understand what's good for business as a whole as you go forward.
When you hire for company or cultural fit, where that fit should be is
on a from a value standpoint. You should be hiring for someone who holds
the same values that your organization has or that your team has, but how
they bring those values to life. There should be a very wide mix of
how people bring those values to life, because that will in kind that will
initiate those conversations, those those kind of like friendly headbuttings that happen when both
of you have the same X marks the spot of where you have to go
to, but you have different ideas on how to get there. You combine
that with some psychological safety and there's no stopping that team in terms of what
they can do. And so what I want you, Lorenzo, is have
you ever been in a situation where you were hired for transformation? You were
brought in to a situation because there's some transformation was needed, and you had
to find a way to kind of fit in to make sure that people understood
that your values were aligned. But you also had a job to do there,
and part of that job was, you know, kind of shaking up
the status quo. So I want to ask you that, but first I
want to get up to words one of our sponsors. All right, Lorenzo,
when was the last time you went into a situation and stood up in
front of everybody and said, all right, all this stuff's changing, get
used to it, and had that go over every day my life? No,
I recently, obviously, as a leader of leaders, I've led teams,
led different teams, and that's different. That's different when you are kind
of like the leader that's responsible for, you know, a team. The
time that I can think of was many many, many many years ago where
I was not the leader, but I was an assistant manager was added to
a team to help with some of the cultural transformation. And that was a
tough, tough time because again I was kind of asked to be there and
was given that exact reasoning of like, we are asking you to go do
this work because the culture that we need to exist within this team, we
think you could help with that. But also, uh, you know,
if if if the culture was what we wanted it to be, then you
wouldn't have to go there. And so like there was this kind of relationship
element where U I had to go in and influence a team with with my
direct boss being the one responsible for the previous culture and now the current culture.
And those were tough times. And I think what I learned through that
um was building the most amount of trust that I could by just doing the
work, by by being there, by having an open mind, by listening,
by picking my moments, picking picking the times when I felt that I
need to speak up maybe and push back on something, and then over time,
picking the times when it was best to just kind of like sit back,
listen, learn and understand. But I really think that in those moments
I had to find advocates. I had to find people that wanted to go
on this journey with me. I had to build trusts from the team.
I had to get the respect of my peers, and for me at that
time, the only way I knew how to do that was just going there
and do a really great job at what I was responsible for. Be willing
to do the work to the best of my ability, Be willing to support
the other leaders the other teams when they asked for it, be present,
be available to the team. And through that time and through those behaviors,
I was able to garnish enough trust from those around me that when I was
providing my thoughts or my insights, over time, they would listen to more
and more and more often. And it was not It wasn't long. I
was not there for a very long time. So I'm talking about this transition
happening over a couple of maybe months, but it was a lot of really
intentional work. And looking back on it now, I think that I think
that I did the right thing by role modeling the behaviors. I think what
I've learned since then is I should have walked in and been much more curious
about how they did things. And I wish I had the skill at that
point to ask questions that would have walked them down the path of where I
felt they needed to go and having it be their ideas like that. I
think that's what I've learned over the time, is that there's a different way
to do this, which is not just to like go in and then just
do everything for everybody and then find the conflict what I needed to I could
have gone in there and been like talked about the great things that were happening,
talked about the things that I saw, recognizing the right behaviors when I
saw them, and then asking questions in a very curious but non judgmental way
to understand why they were doing things the way they were doing them, and
then and then helping them to find and the answers that would help them build
a better culture collectively. UM, I think that's probably what I learned from
then till now. Right, no one ever changed the way they do things
by being told that the current way of doing things, you know, made
them stupid or that they were wrong for doing it, you know. The
The idea of having people believe that the change was self imposed and that they
decided this was the right thing to do while you kind of knowing in the
background that you you know, kind of sowed the seeds of it. You
know, you didn't you know, you didn't beat them over the head with
it. You you demonstrated what good looked like and the right way of doing
things, and and it was kind of, um, they kind of learned
by osmosis in terms of being able to take those things and go forward with
it. But again that's that's something that comes with just experience, you know,
doing doing things a certain way, and and they both can work.
You know, if you if the team wasn't wasn't showing success when you came
in already, then that becomes sometimes easier because you know, it's it's hard
to say, it's hard for a leader to say we're doing things right when
the results that are being expected aren't there right. Where this becomes more of
a process for a lot of teams, and something that needs to be incredibly
intentional is when you're trying to hire for transformation but things are going well,
and this is about just getting the right people in place so that when these
things need to happen, they can as opposed to owe things need to happen.
Now we got to change up the whole team because no one on the
team wants to make any changes. No one on the team wants to transform
or be a part of this. And that's difficult to do when you don't
see a need for it because again, at the moment, things seem to
be running smooth. So I like that example a lot. I think a
lot of leaders really get it. Get in situations where they have to be
able to transform or hire people for transformation, and they can't do it because
they haven't started the process when things didn't need to transform. Absolutely and but
that it brings us to the end of this episode. This is hacking leadership.
I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and have a great day.