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The topics and opinions express in the following show are
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solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not
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What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the
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answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose
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at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their
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lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization
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that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their
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highest potential. Business can be such a force for good
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in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide
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guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we
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all want working on Purpose. Now here's your host, doctor
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Elise Cortes.
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Welcome back to the Working Purpose Program, which has been
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brought to you with passionateurprise since February of twenty fifteen.
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Already thanks for tuning in this week. Great to have you.
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I'm your host doctor at least Cortes. Most leaders are
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sitting on untapped human energy. I help them unlock it.
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I'm an organizational psychologist, local therapist, workforce advisor and the
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founder of the Gusto Now movement. But the title I
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live by is much simpler. The everyday title is I
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traffic and energy, not service level motivation or another engagement initiative.
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The deeper force what I call Gusto, the life force
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of performance that drives commitment, perseverance, and genuine ownership of
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a shared mission in the clients we serve. You can
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learn more about how we can work together at gustodash
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now dot com or visit my personal site at least
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Cortes dot com. Getting into today's program we have with
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this back for a second time. Norman Wolf. He's the
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founder and CEO of Quantum Leaders and the creator of
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the Living Organization, which is a framework that replaces machine
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thinking with a leadership model grounded and how organizations actually work.
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He is a former Helott Packard executive who led a
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one point two billion dollar turnaround and has spent over
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four decades, helping CEOs close the gap between strategy and
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execution by aligning what people do, how they relate, and
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what they believe with the organization's goals. He's the author
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of a soon to be released book he co author
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with his wife Jane, called Living the Leading Living Organization,
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How Transform, How You Lead to deliver Extraordinary results, which
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we'll be talking about today. He George today from Vancouver, Washington,
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just north of Portland, Oregon. Norman A hearty welcome back
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to Working on Purpose. Thank you, Elise, so great to
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have you. And as I mentioned, friend, I just really
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really enjoyed the book. I thought it was so well written,
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so engaging, and it's so personal and I really love
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that you wrote it into a parable I'm seeing that
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more and more in terms of business books, because we
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love stories. You know, we're wired for stories and we
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can relate to them. So let's introduce, you know, the
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main characters. Catherine is the CEO of Sharp Training Solutions,
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and this is a training organization that was really in
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the process of moving from doing training in person to
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doing online training. So that's kind of the gist. You
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want to fill in a little bit more about what
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was going on there?
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Sure, So Catherine, as you might call a reluctant CEO, right,
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her dad had started the company and ended up having
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a heart attack and the doctor said, you're stressed out,
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you need to retire, and Catherine took over. And interestingly enough,
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she took over about I think it was six months,
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just trying to when COVID it. So while they had
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these plans to go online eventually, now they had a
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pivot really quickly, and that presented a lot of tensions
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and stress in the organizations that challenged Catherine's leadership style
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leadership approach, how do you get a team of people
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to execute much quicker than they were doing. So that's
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sort of the context, if you will.
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So it opens with a particularly vexing conflict between two
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people I think I want to call it Charlie and Jason.
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So she's really grappling with this how they're really blaming
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each other for not producing results, and she's lots and
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loss attention, and somewhere in there she gets introduced to
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this wonderful person named Merlin.
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Yes, yeah, Merlin is Merlin has a lot of meaning
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to Jane and I. But Merlin is the consultant that
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comes in, Marylan has been trained in the living Organization
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framework by it's founder me, and Merlin comes in and works,
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let's just say, works his magic on working with Jason
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and Charlie to have them see each other through a
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different light. That's sort of the bottom line of how
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the first product it goes. And in that process, Catherine
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is observing how Marland so definitely manages these conflicts and
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moves from conflict to cooperation and breaks down the silo.
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And then of course there's a few other issues that
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come up with the person in charge of I think
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it's customer support and other small tensions. To about that,
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Catherine says, let's go to have lunch with Merlin and
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see what he has to say. And so Marlin walks
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through again a way of thinking about the challenge. You know,
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most of our challenges are we get stuck in them
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because we have a certain way of thinking about it.
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And when we look at something through a certain lens
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and we feel stuck, oftentimes what's really necessary is what
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I call reframing, looking at it through with different lens,
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and all of a sudden you can see pathways to
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solutions that you can't see the other way. And a
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lot of the living organization, where I call reframing the paradigm,
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is based on we're stuck at seeing a business a
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certain way, and while we keep trying to fix it,
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we're still stuck in the way we see it, and
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that causes us to not be able to affect the
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solutions we want to see in the organizations in general.
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And that's really what I make to write the book
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in the first place.
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Yeah, So first we want to contrast for our listeners
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and viewers who haven't yet read this book or the
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previous one that I had you on some years ago
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as well, talking about you have a very strong foundational
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concept and distinguishing between an organization as a machine versus
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a living organization. If you want to see a little
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bit more about.
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That, sure, sure, if you think about just step back
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from most of the rhetoric we hear about leadership and
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management and organization. See, the foundational framework is that an
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organization is a black box that's supposed to take inputs
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and produces outputs. And it's that type of simple framing
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of what an organization is that most of our leadership
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theories and practices are based on and under that the
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designer of that machine, that black box is the leader
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or the leadership team, and that design we call strategy
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and business model and structure and processes. And then inside
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the black box, we want to optimize the flow from
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input to output. And everything inside is a component if
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you think about that. No matter what we say about people,
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the most important assets, the critical stakeholders, you know, we
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reckon their importance, and we really do. But the thinking
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is to get the work done. I need these component
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parts to perform a certain way. The way we structure
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job descriptions, the way it's almost like structuring a spec
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sheet for a new robot, you know. And that's the
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way people feel they experience it. No matter what we
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say in our words the lived experiences, I'm just a
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component part, and we say you play out when new
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technology comes along like AARI, everybody's concerned about being replaced. Well,
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it's because that's the way the paradigm we live in exists.
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So as I looked at why, you know, the basic
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question that stimulated all this was seventy percent of strategies fail,
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seventy percent of people are disengaged. And with all the
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wisdom we have from your books and other people's books
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and academics and the bookshelf beyond me. The question that
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really stimulated my journey was why aren't we making a difference.
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Why are the same statistics happening decade after decade after decade.
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And that's when I concluded, it's a paradigm. And so
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I asked the question, what's a different paradigm, And again,
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looking at the thirty percent that all successful, whether they
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talk about how do they think, how do they relate
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to their organizations? And then of course my own experiences,
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I began to really see organizations as operating like a like,
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more like a person does than a machine. And so
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I began to go down that path. And it's that
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notion that a collective of people that come together for
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a common purpose actually give birth to a living entity
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that surrounds them. You know, a little interesting size story.
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When I got married a chain, which is going on
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twenty five years ago. Now, one of the things I
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learned from my previous marriages was this notion that when
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two people come together in a relationship, they actually give
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birth to a third entity called the marriage. The marriage
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itself or the relationship itself is a living entity and
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over the years were initially Jane and I called it
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our usness, but then we got to talking about and
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then we said we should give our relationship a name.
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And guess who our relationship.
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Name is, Marlin. Yeah, okay.
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And so these are the principles that I lived in
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terms of what makes me effective as a person, what
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makes relationships this is effective. And I just kept extrapolating
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that into the framework.
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So that's just such a solid fundage for us to
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stand on now for help our listeners and viewers better
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understand why this works so well. And let's go back
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to Catherine. She really was a reluctant CEO, and yet,
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of course, as I was delighted in, we see her
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grow so much over the course of the book, which
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is a reason why you and I probably both do
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the work that we do, because it's such as I
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don't know a better drug than to be able to
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help facilitate the work and transformation in another human being.
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I just don't know. And so what's interesting is she walks,
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she steps into this role. She's got a very different
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leadership style than her father, who hadn't by all accounts,
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a much more command and control sort of approach to leading,
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and his employees became dependent on that. They wanted his
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direction for them to tell him move the just piece
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over here and move it that far back kind of thing.
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So what that does, which is really interesting and so
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important for us to presence for our listeners and viewers,
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it's just how important that creates a sense of dependency
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in the employees, a learned helplessness. So if you could
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speak a little bit of that, she was dealing with
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that too in the beginning, also with Jason and Charlie,
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she was dealing with that.
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You yes. So it's a very common buy called the
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byproduct of the machine paradigm. Right, the leader is the
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one that's supposed to figure out what needs to be
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done and more or less how to do it, and
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the other thing leaders are geared towards. This gets a
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little complex, but think of it like this. I'm a
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charge of sales, so I'm Jason, I'm charge of sales.
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My focus is to optimize sales performance. I'm trolley, and
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I'm supposed to optimize operational performance. And I've got certain
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criteria such as quality, right, that requires me to achieve
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my goals and Jason as his goals and your qualities.
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So what you find in these kind of silo oriented
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conflicts is one person saying yeah, I understand, but and
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the other one's going, well, I know, we got to
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make sales. But and what you got is this whole orientation.
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Guess who has to resolve it? The leader. And so
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now the leaders are pressured with trying to get the
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silos to work together. What Merlin comes in and does
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is helps Charlie see how Jason's goals compliment his goals,
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and get Jacon to see how Charlie's goals complement his goals.
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So all of a sudden, now the two are working together,
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helping each other as if they had one goal, the
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success of the company. And see in the mechanistic approach,
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the goal setting methodology, if you will orientce people the bonus,
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the rewarded their acknowledged for achieving the goals that their
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department is given, and that inherently crease the silo. You
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can't break the silo unless you break the way you
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think about relationship in the living organization framework. And what
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Merlin does it brings Charlie and Jason together into a
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single goal, a joint goal recognizing that they're interdependent. They're
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like an ecosystem. They rely on each other, and that's
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that's the shift that happens, and it's beautiful.
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I also like that part of what you include here,
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of course, one of your prints, part of your frame
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concludes this idea of drawing from improv, which you know.
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I'm a fan of things. I take improv and I
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take an in part because of what you put forth
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in the book, because it helps me develop a greater
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ability to be present, to listen, to respond, to be creative.
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And so part of what that entails for your model