You Don’t Feel Ready—Good. That’s Where Leadership Begins

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements radio show, programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit. Or implies shall be extended to W four CY Radio or it's employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor Elise Cortez.

1:05 Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program, which has been brought to you with passionate price since February of twenty fifteen already. Thanks for training in this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If we not met before and you don't know me, I am a workforce advisor, organizational psychologist, manage a consultant, logo therapist, speaker and author. I constantly am searching and helping my clients elevate their leadership and culture, and my team and I at Gusto Now help companies to enlive and in fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture, inspiracial leadership and nursery managers activated by meaning and purpose. You can learn more AboutUs on how we can work together at gusto dashnow dot com or my personal site, Atliscortes dot com. In today's program, we have with us Pete Barns. He's the founder and CEO of Agile Leadership Journey, where he spent over three decades of guiding leaders through uncertainty.

1:51 He's the author of Into the Fog Leadership Stories from the Edge of Uncertainty, which we'll be talking about today. He Joe today from Boulder, Colorado. Pete, welcome to work looking on purpose. Thank you. Great to be here all right, awesome. Hey, well, let's first things first, celebrate this beautiful thing you brought into the world. I know that you know you have done all kinds of things things in your life, and I can tell you that it's harder to bring this book into the world than it is a child, because no comment, Okay, I'm just saying I can actually say that. So congratulations, thank you. Yes, it is a labor of love, that is for sure. It's not about the money. It's about the purpose.

2:32 Yes, it really is. And I delighted in reading your book. That's just chock full of so many stories, as you say, about authentic leadership and what it is to be on the edge of uncertainty. And so there's a few of those that are supposed to want to showcase in this conversation. But before we get there, I read your books, so I know about your background. My listeners and viewers don't yet. So let's just start with talking a bit about your background and how it is that you managed to move away from engineering into the world of training and coaching leaders. Yeah, it stumps most people. It looks like a very large leap going from an engineer somebody technical to leadership developments, and I often say it's not the leap people presume it is. If you think about what the role of an engineer is, it's to take a system and try to optimize it to be better in some way. And so for many years I focused on technical systems, computer systems, database systems, things like that. And as I worked in business, I found that most of the problems, most of the biggest challenging problems in organizations, weren't technical problems. There were human ones. Yeah, and that put me on this journey of what is it about human systems that's so complex?

3:50 And led me to leadership. And so what I say that I do today is engineering of a different focus. It's optimizing a human system, one of the most complex systems, as you know, to try to optimize. So I feel like I'm still that engineer inside a different medium. Yeah, got you. I love that A wonder wonderful way to describe as such a vast amount of journey. So thank you for that. I completely agree with your assessment. By the way, we are the most complex creatures. So I want to read a little passage from your book that I just thought was really compelling and I think will really situate why your book is important, why we need it, and why it's important to work from this notion of uncertainty. You go on to say pretty early in your book, you say leaders we see today weren't raised in the particular fog we're facing now. They grew up in a time before in our experiencing this fog for the first time, just as you and I are. The fog is dynamic, it's fast, and it's not waiting for us. Gary Hamill, one of the most influential business thinkers of the past two decades, has warned us it's changing faster than we are changing. The real danger of fog even that we don't see it, it's that we don't adapt quickly enough to face it. Fog is already here. Are you prepared to face it? I think that's such a critical thing to start with, because I don't think that most people really understand just the sheer amount of complexity and ambiguity that is confronting them today.

5:13 Yes, and that is the premise of the fog. As you're getting at, it's that feeling we all have where we might know where we want to go, we might understand or have a vision, yet at the same time, everything is happening around us that creates an environment that makes us fearful, that makes us uncertain, unsure, unclear about what to do. And it's that freezing action that we want to pick up on. And the fog I believe as a metaphor everybody can relate to to that feeling. I appreciate how you go on to say that the fog is in your enemy. It's a signal, it means something changing and adaptation is necessary. It's an invitation to slow down, not to panic or power through blindly, to step back, gather insights, and look again for fresh with fresh eyes. I think that's really powerful to situate it that way, too well.

6:09 It often is when we think about us in uncertainty and change, we feel like this is a problem that needs to be fixed. This is a situation I've got to clear up. When we imagine fog, or when we think about our work worlds or society today, these are parts of the landscape that will never truly go away. They will never fully clear up, and it's a mistake to assume that they will, or to cling to control or to cling to a plan. When we realize that these are all illusions of control. And so it's really recognizing this is the landscape, especially in leadership. If we think about what is leadership, leadership takes us place as we've never been before. That's inherently uncertain, that will inherently change, that's inherently foggy. So this is the nature that I want to get across that it's not a defect, it's not a problem. It's something we must navigate that we're going to be effective at this game of leadership.

7:14 Yeah, and I appreciate that you actually further go on to say that it fog doesn't mean that you are broken. I think that's really important to say too, And if you could situate a bit. I think what's really interesting in my own years of helping to develop and coach leaders and I really appreciate I've gotten to be on the front line of helping those people that are getting their first supervisor jobs. They go from being an individual contributor to a supervisor and now they're managing their their former colleagues to managers, to senior leaders to executives. And I have really loved that whole process. And I think for a lot of people, this idea of thinking that I'm supposed to know the answers is so built in, and so if I like and appreciate this notion, when you say that fog doesn't mean you're broken, you say a bit more about that.

7:57 I mean, go back to school. We're taught there's a right and a wrong, there's a good and a bad. There's grades that measure our effectiveness. And I think we're ingrained through our education that this has a particular way to do it. And as a leader, then I start to feel responsible not just for myself, but for others that are following or others that I'm responsible for in the organization, and so that burden we carry becomes a burden of I've got to be right. I've got to have the answer. They're all waiting for me, they're all choosing to me. And this is one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is I believe the best leaders counter that. It's a bit of a leadership meme that we follow the you know, the one who has the vision and the answers, and it's all right, it's more about I've got a vision, but I can't get there without you. That's this weird mix of ego but also human that you can name a better future and then also be vulnerable to say, but I can't do it alone. And so it's that balance between having some direction but not necessarily all the tools and all the answers to get there that we find to be in the best leaders.

9:21 And maybe I think you also alluded to several times too, it's not even necessary that we know where we're going necessarily, we just know where you need to put some steps forward here, and so have an idea of the direction, but maybe not even completely sure of exactly where we're going, just know that we need some kind of forwardab momentum. And that's another oxymoron in the fog is wait for clarity. No clarity doesn't come from standing still. Clarity comes from movement. And one of the agility constructs that we think about in uncertainty is unless we start to create some movement, we aren't going to get feedback. We're not going to see what's right, what's wrong. And then do we all these mistakes? Do we call them wrong? If I make a step or two and it turns out to be not the correct step to where I believe we should be going judgments then starts to get in our way.

10:12 So yeah, this construct of movement creates clarity as a critical one when we start thinking about the fog. But you specifically talked on vision. I think this is one of those things where we often get wrong. The fog doesn't preclude us from having a vision or where we want to go. It shouldn't. In fact, having a vision is really the only way we know whether we've made steps right or wrong, because it's either leading us to it or away from it in some way. So agility doesn't counter vision. I think it a vision serves agility so that we can make those pivots necessary when we realize we're not following it. Beautiful. Thank you for that, Pete. That was great. I do think that one of.

10:54 The most compelling users of your book. There are many, but I do think that very notion of getting into motion so that you have get that feedback is really a critical part and distinguishes your approach from others that I've talked about or worked with before as well. So I just want to celebrate that part of it too. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. The other thing that is interesting, There are many aspects of your book that really kind of distinguish it. And one is absolutely that you reference climbing and leadership piece throughout your book, including your own experience. So if you could talk a little bit about, you know, the choice to include that is like a thread in your book, the idea of your own experience climbing, what you learned about yourself and what you learned about leadership, and what you kind of have learned to teach as a result of that.

11:36 I think that would be useful. Yeah, there's when you pick a book and you're looking for some of those themes, which ones jump out, and you know, there was parts of this book that the mountains and the paths were the theme, and then you know, they become the sub theme when fog emerged as the primary theme. Mountains, to me are something quite important living in Boulder, Colorado. They're right outside my backyard and they represent the challenge in front of us. They represent the landscape that is not easy to overcome when we think about business. So it's a useful metaphor in thinking overcoming our challenges. One of the things that I tried to bring about with the Landscape of Leadership, though specifically, was what I'd call elusive peaks. And one of the early chapters is called elusive peaks, where we're actually describing these false peaks that we think we want to achieve. This might be, as you mentioned, a leader growing in their capacity, I want to shift into be a strategic leader. Sure, so is strategy a peak? Well, yes, and no. Strategy we realize is useful. But if I go there and I get a loop to the tactics, if I become disconnected from the real work, strategy becomes useless. So it is a peak, but it's an elusive peak because it only comes in concert with something else strategy and tactics,

13:08 or expertise and openness. If I have all this expertise, this this knowledge, this learning, yet does that close me to being open to other ideas? This is another one of those peaks that we kind of see but then realize, ooh, it's trickier than I thought. So we use that metaphor in many ways. Leadership shows up in many of these tensions that we believe it to be one thing, but it turns out to be more complex than that. M H. And then if you could see just a bit about you know you you talked about your own experiences of climbing, and you know the rigors of that and the stresses, the tensions of that too, if you say too a bit about you know how you layered that in because it's so beautiful.

13:51 How you know, we learned a lot about. You in this book, which makes it cleasy, makes you accessible, right, And I applaud you for that because not everybody does that, right, But you share a lot about climbing in your own personal experience of learning from it. Yes, I'll share maybe one of the key stories in the book that starts to introduce a concept we haven't yet explored yet, the inner fog, and that is when I was co leading a group of teenagers on a mountain hike. And it's one thing to go on a mountain hike on your own, right, that's an adventure, that's fun, and if you're in danger, that's yourself and whoever you're climbing with. You're leading a group of teenagers, that's a whole different category. You feel responsible, you feel nervous. They're not fully formed yet, so you never know what they're thinking and doing. We're on a multi stage, multi day hike in the mountain, staying at about eleven thousand feet climbing towards what we call a fourteen er in Colorado.

14:57 And our goal was two of those two fourteen ers in one day. And we get to the first and we're late, we're behind schedule, and of course in Colorado the storms start to emerge, and that's when leadership really starts to show up. Not when it's easy, but when it's hard. What do you do? And what was interesting is I was really young, and this was a story of me. I felt barely above a teenager. I was in my early twenties. There was a more experienced guide with me, and long story short, we made a decision in that moment to split the team. Some wanted to go on, some wanted to go back. I didn't want to look weak. I wanted to look fun. I wanted to look courageous. And so I'm like, yeah, let's go.

15:45 And sure enough, we descend down in the saddle, we start going up the next mountain range and before I knew it, our hair is literally standing on edge. And it's a feeling. If you've never had, this feeling is scarier than anything I've ever felt before. It means electricity is about to charg and strike. And in that moment, my leadership finally showed up, the courage finally showed up to make the right choice. And I realized looking back on that the initial decision to move on wasn't leadership, it was it was cowardness. I was afraid to look vulnerable in front of these teens. I was afraid to look weak in front of these teens. And this is one of those stories where we're illustrating what might feel like courage and elusive peak. Courage might be recklessness in this case, likely likelihood, you know? Or is it too cautious? Right? Again, It's one of these elusive peaks that I failed to find in that moment, that I only found through almost complete failure. Fortunately, I was very lucky. Nobody got hurt on this particular engagement, and I lived to tell this.

17:00 Story beautifully told as well. Beautiful way to take us into our first break, Pete, let us let our listeners and youwers consider your story where they were maybe in their own leadership journey that they might relate to that whole climate experience you were talking about. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortez. We're on the air with Pete Barons. He's the founder and CEO of Agile Leadership Journey, where he spent over three decades of guiding leaders through uncertainty. We've been talking about some of the principles in the book that really anchor what he has put what he's putting forth after the work. We're getting to get into a few more stories that illustrate how they show up in action. We'll be right back.

17:49 Doctor Elise Courts has as a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose and inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Elise A LISEE at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

18:41 Thanks for jeating with us and welcome back to Working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Release Cortes, as I am dedicated to helping create a world where organizations thrive because they're people thrive and they're led by inspirational leaders that help them find in country with their greatness. And we do business at Betters the World. I keep researching and writing my own books. So one of my latest came out called The Great Revitalization. How activated meaning and purpose can radically and live in your business. And I wrote to help leaders understand today's workforce, what do they want, need to give their best and want to stick around? And then I give you twenty two best practices to equip you to provide that for you, for them and your culture. You can find my books on Amazon or my own site at leastcore test dot com if you're just no joining us. My guest is Pete Barrens. He's the author of Into the Fog Leadership Stories from the Edge of Uncertainty, which we've been exploring in today's conversation. So really quick, when you're sharing the story on the energy storm, I could relate to that exactly because I experienced it when I was like twenty six years old. Living in Brazil and my then boyfriend at the time, who I was there with, we were living down there. We were out in the Pantanal, which is the central part of the central area of the country.

19:46 That is, you know, it's just this huge, beautiful wilderness, birds the size of airplanes kind of thing. And we were out riding horseback through like a foot of water, and I felt that feeling and I'm like, oh my gosh, can I think of a worst place to be right now than this? And that's when my leadership kicked in. Pete, I'm like, let's go. So I could really relate to that. It is a terrifying feeling. You are, you recognize you are in a small little you know, might in the universe, and at the mercy of this. So I really appreciate that story. To me, just to add on to that, the value to me is pointing leadership out in unusual places.

20:28 Yes, you beautiful. Yeah. And it's then you mentioned it's a very it's a very personal book. It's it's it became a lot more personal than I expected. And part of that was to show leadership in non common ways. It's not about our political or pro tech culture. That we see a lot in our in our politics and news. It's about the humanity of leadership that shows up in very uncommon places or unexpected places. Mm hm. Well, the other thing that I would say, and Pete, you got to recognize of and who this podcast for eleven years and so you're I think number five seventy five or something like that. I read a lot of books, and I the ones that I relate to the best, and I think probably most readers do, or is when I do get to know the author, I want to know who you are as a human. And then you know, we're talking about leadership here, and you do talk about authenticity, so you know, I would expect that by the time I finished reading this book that I feel like I'm connected to you. And then you did that.

21:26 Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. So going on here, one of the other things that I thought was curious and I could so appreciate that you talk about is the leadership choice. And you go on to say that many people hesitate to lead because they believe that leadership belongs to. Somebody else, or they're not qualified, they're not ready. Somebody has more experience, more authority, more charisma, So they wait for permission. And you say, true leadership is a decision. It's a choice to act or engage, a choice to make an impact where you. Are with what you have right now. And I think that is such a beautiful thing to put forward, because I do think so many people hold back when they really could come up and really make a difference. Yes, yes, it was my invitation really to strip away titles and positions and offices with name badges. And I've been training coaching leaders for two decades now and I find more and more those actually get in the way of true leadership. We become dependent upon the authority they bring, and so I lose the capacity to influence others towards a common goal. That's really what leadership is. Because are people following because they want to or are they following because they're obligated to? And as a leader with a title, that's hard to know. You don't have to be good at leadership to get people to do stuff if you have the power and the influence to do it. So my invitation is really stripped that away. What is the essence?

22:54 What is this choice that people have wherever they are and whatever position to demonstrate this can show up been speaking into a room, This can show up and leading your community. This can show up in you know, how you're managing with your kids. So that's that was the invitation was to see it in this new light and hopefully then take that into the workplace and become better leaders. Well. To showcase that, we have to talk about the wonderful story that you talk about of how someone in your neighborhood stepped up to think and recognize the firefighters after you've experienced that fire. And by the way, I can't even imagine what that must have been like. We cannot imagine. So let's talk about that, and then I'll share my own story about how this shows up and do it in the same way you do in the book where you share it kind of reveal the reveal.

23:44 Yeah, fair enough. So the story. Four years ago, we in bold of Colorado, or just outside both of Colorado, had extreme fire in December twenty seventh, the very unusual time for a fire in Colorado. We have long dry periods here as an area community, and a huge wind about one hundred miles an hour came and we had this intense storm. Long story short on the fire. It destroyed a thousand homes in twenty four hours, not too different than what we saw in La La was even more extreme. I think ten thousand homes there in multiple communities, but very very similar here in Boulder, Colorado. What I say in the book is leadership in those moments is clear, the adrenaline fueled response that first responders and we as humans have in chaos and crisis evacuate, protect, say what happens when the fire subsides, but the remains are just as damaging when the fog sets in. That's this story is when there's not a clear what to do next.

24:54 We lived on what I call the fire line. Our house literally our street was divided in two. Half were completely destroyed down to foundation, the other half untouched but not really it smoke damages, very damaging, but not burnt. And our house was right in that dividing line. It was the last ones they saved along that particular evening, which is surreal in it of itself. Somebody following that episode decided it's time to step forward and thank the first responders who helped save our home and many others, and so went only to the homes that were saved to collect donations and cards and thank yous and gifts and money to thank the first responders. And of course, in a fire of that magnitude and speed, the biggest challenge for her was who do we actually think who is on our street? We have no idea. There's hundreds of units from not only Colorado, but from Kansas and Wyoming and Utah that came to assist this particular fire, and so there's no master plan. It was chaos when it was being protected or attempted to be saved. She went through a diligent effort of finding, discovering, and determining who to thank, and finally found thirteen departments, mostly located around Colorado, that were on our streets. And she could

26:24 have just given the boxes and gift cards, she could have just said, okay, thank you, but she didn't. She invited us into conversations. We went to visits to these firehouses to meet them in person, to thank them, and man, was it some of the most powerful moments that I've ever experienced as a human. I think the firefighters needed it as much as we did. It would describe experienced long living firefighters described this as the most intense they've ever faced in their career. Some have said that they've never been personally thanked after a fire. They would show videos and that they took during the fire and tell stories and it was just an impactful experience. I learned so much more than I thought going through that process.

27:17 The reveal the leadership lesson here. Number one, my Nahbor did not have a title. There's no community organizer title that she held. She just saw a gap and chose to fill it invite us on the journey. The other reveal is she's my partner, my wife Janna, and I hesitated to share that at the beginning because I wanted people to follow this person unbiased, But to me, it actually pointed something even more valuable out that in our relationship with thirty five years, she's been a supporter of my leadership journey. I've been the one more on the forefront. She's been in the supporting role of working nonprofits and supporting our business. And yet here's she was profoundly shaping what I saw as leadership. And she's not loud, she's not strong, she's quiet, she connects, she relates, And how powerful that authentic leadership showed up and how people respected her for this journey, and it just it was one of those light bulb moments where you just sometimes have to get hit in the head again. Hey, that's leadership.

28:26 I think that's such an important story to share for a number of reasons, but also just to also help invite our listeners and viewers, you know, who maybe haven't quite stepped in to this or the level if they want to take that leap, because it's such a powerful story. You talk about impact and even you look come up. To sympact you. It's wonderful, right, it's just wonderful. Well, and I'll show this just quickly because it also speaks to you know, accepting the summons. Right. So, you know, you and I travel all the time. We're on airplanes. Many listeners and viewers do as well, and we all know that situation when we maybe leave a city a little bit late and we arrived to our arrive and then you get the announcement that says, ladies and gentlemen, there are people here with tight connecting flights, this is your final destination. Please stay seated and let those get off the plane. And without exception, every human stands to their feet and starts rushing down the aisle, and so I started doing this last fall Pete where I got like, I'd be like in row twelves for another twenty rows behind me, and we get that message, and so I would try I started doing this.

29:30 I'm like the first time I did, I was like, oh. Okay, all of you in the back, would of you have connecting flights? Could you put your handuff for me? Okay? And they'd be like, you know, urgently putting their hand up, and I'm like, ok okay, great. All the rest of us, we all know it's like, you know, to be running for that next flight, and we're not sure if we're going to make it. Let's just oh, it's so great to see us all working together on this. Stay seated and let them go. So I'm sitting there and there was a woman next to me this first time, big tall woman, clearly an athlete of some kind, and she is less to this and she's like holding herself rigid, like waiting for the command of when when. Can she go? Kind of thing. People are getting off the plane and they're saying. Thank you, thank you so much, thank you so much. And then once everybody's off, what that has to get off?

30:11 Then I can start getting off too, and get off the plane. There's a young woman behind me and she says to me, you're my hero, and I'm like, that's all it takes to be a euro these days. And the cleaning crew had gotten on and they were watching all this and they were like, man, you should be on every flight. But but you know, it's so simple, right. I had been wanting to do this forever and I finally got to the place that's it. It's the right thing to do. And the really cool thing was everybody joined in and then you know, let's not make them wrong or bad. Let's celebrate that they're good humans. So easy, right, And that's then we're also modeling it for other people as well. But the courage it took you, it did, yeah, to stand up like that, and you know, have no guarantee that that was going to work.

30:58 Yeah, yeah, And because it could have been. And if they had gotten up and just try and started, you know, run and running over me, I mean I would have still had held strong on that. But anyway, yes, and so yes, and I recognize it as such, and I want to live it as such. Right, I do want to be that human that you know is doing something to help my fellow people. So let's just let's take our last break so that our listeners and viewers can also think about their opportunities to where where could they step up into the next place of impact and contribution that maybe they've been beholding for themselves. While we take this last break, I'm your host, Doctor Lee's Cortes. We've been on the airic Pete Barons. He's the founder and CEO of Agile Leadership Journey, where he spent over three decades of guiding leaders through uncertainty.

31:44 We've been getting into some of. The examples of how you can activate the principles in his book. After the break, we're going to continue the storytelling, which will help illuminate what it is we're here to teach you. We'll be right back. Doctor Elise Cortes is a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author. She helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization. Please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise A. L Se at elisecortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

33:01 Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Relie Cortes. As you know by now, this problem is dedicated to empowering and inspiring you along your journey to realize more of your potential. If you want to learn more about how we can work together and learn about the Gusto Now Academy for leaders and individuals on various journeys alike, make your way to Gusto dashnow dot com and then go to the training tab and you can find the academy there. Hope to see you on that side if you are just joining us. My guest is Pete Bearns. He's the author of Into the Fog Leadership Stories from the Edge of Uncertainty, which we've been we've been exploring in today's conversation. So next, what I would love to have you do. I thought, I really on a number of levels, A felt that your story of how you were talking about working with the high performing healthcare tech company that we're dealing with some problems of collaboration and adaptability. There's so many aspects of that story that I think are important to share.

33:51 One the work that we get to do to help organizations that then they need this kind of help, but too just the impact of the story is so incredible, especially when it comes to leadership and where it came from in that story. Yeah, Yeah, I was leading a as you mentioned, a leadership education program for a really impactful healthcare company. They were they hire exclusively from the IVY leagues in you know, in the northeast there, and they prided themselves on the best and the brightest people, and that showed what was really interesting though, is as you develop a culture like that, it's a culture of heroes. It's a culture of individuals, not a collaborative culture by nature. So we were there to work a lot with not only leadership development, but a leadership culture where it's more collaborative and collective than it is solo adventurers. In this particular session, we're talking about leadership power, and I mentioned the concept of what's called the double bind in terms of leadership power that females face in the workplace. This is the bind between your role in society as being a nurture and supporter and the role of leadership, which requires some assertiveness, and that when women often try to try to find that balance in this role, they're often seen as say bad words,

35:23 bitchy or you know, too emotional. And in this particular moment, one of the gentlemen yelled out and explicitive and I was like, oh okay, threw me back, caused me to pause, partly because I was shocked, partly because I'm like, okay, where do we take this? And in the story, Rebecca is the one who shakes and breaks the silence. She speaks up, authentic about her experience. When she says things it isn't accepted until a man repeats it, being looked over in terms of leadership positions. And what was interesting is I talk about this as this is leadership. This is the courage to speak into a room that doesn't want to hear what you have to say, with no guarantee of what's going to happen next. And what that opened was a door and other women spoke, and then other men spoke to the challenge, and I felt like the individual who yelled the explicitive was left on an island.

36:36 I don't think they were ever changed in that session, but they were definitely felt that they were on the island. And it's a representation of what both the courage leadership takes, but the simplicity that leadership can be. Rebecca speaking in that moment created an opportunity, a door open for others to follow, and they did not changed, didn't change the culture on that day, but it changed the direction of the culture on that day. What I also want to celebrate about that story too, that is so important is we started with the podcast conversation with this in the beginning, and that is the criticality of ongoing learning and evolution. We have to unlearned things, we have to learn new things to be effective today.

37:22 And you know we are vastly, you know, being outpaced by all the other changes. So they need to examine those mindsets and how we behave and respond and react from those mindsets. It's so, so so critical to be effective as a leader today, especially the bigger the organization that you have, So I think that that story has so much power and potency to it. Thank you. Yeah, it's definitely one. I'm hearing a lot from women in leadership positions and describing their entire careers and how they've had to live through this this this type of situation, and in the book I couldn't even speak to it enough. I invited my COEO woman, Tracy Wilson to speak on my behalf in the book to help some of that gap too.

38:11 Yeah, well, I can appreciate that. I also work with a lot of those things too in my work too. It's just it's so pervasive. So there's so many things that we could still talk about from your book, but so I'm going to cherry pick a few that I really really gravitated too. I'd love how you talk about this idea of leaders recognizing where you are here marker is placed and and and that is really amazing. And there's always a disconnect there right between where they think they are and where their followers think they are, et cetera. So how how can leaders more adeptly discern where they think they are versus where their leader or where their followers think they are. Sure that story shows up in the construct of inner fog, and just to provide listeners and watchers a little bit more context. We often think the fog is an external event, something outside of us, something we have to navigate, but just as often it gets inside of our head, between our ears. This represents our ego, our blind spots, our assumptions that we make, and these are equally as damaging, maybe even more so, because it's kind of like on a humid, rainy day, the windows from the inside fog up, so what we're seeing we're not actually even seeing, and so we often think it's fog, but it's actually something going on inside our heads. So the question that you have is all right that you are here? Is a fun little story about a leader I worked with. It's like I'm an old dog and not really really willing

39:42 to learn new tricks. I'm like, well, congratulations on knowing who you are and what you want. That's great. The bigger challenge I have as the leaders who think they're this place when they're really back here, because they're often in their head they believe they're collaborative, but in their mind they're just having people agree to them and It's this really confusing state that a lot of leaders find where it feels like, yeah, we're doing this together. Yeah, we're all a consensus, where it's really no, we're just saying whatever the leader wants us saying whatever the leader wants to hear. These moments, these blind spots in my career have only shown up when others have the courage to say something like the emperor has no clothes to me, Yeah, somebody else in my career, through a three sixty feedback, through the courage of a one on one, through whatever it was said, Pete may not have heard that right, but this doesn't make sense to me. And only in those moments was that fog starting to clear up. So what does that mean for a leader? It means you've got to create the space for those moments to occur.

40:54 You've got to create that psychological safety, which I know you talk a lot about, in order for others to be able to break that fog that might be in your head. I think that is so powerful. I had Jeff Wetsler on my podcast some years ago. He wrote a book called Ask. I think it was but it was developing this capacity to constantly solicit feedback and make it safe for people to tell you the truth. So you were constantly getting feedback about yourself before it became an issue, and I think that's really really powerful if you can learn how to do that. But boy, you know, if you could take in that information about where you are powerful and speaking of that, I'm not going to let you go without talking about the kindergarten story. Here, Pete's got it happened. Sorry, so you know, so listeners and viewers, Pete shares a story from when he's in kindergarten. His kindergarten teacher sends a note home to his mom that says, quote, Pete has become quite a discipline problem lately, challenge is authority by doing what he wants end quote. And so you know, you and your mom both seem to recognize that this is experiments in leadership, and of course in a funny and revealing way. And of course, what I love about that is a couple of things. One, I love that this kind of showed up early in you.

42:10 But the other thing I want to celebrate that is from the vanished point of leadership, is I want all leaders to do that is to notice this what seems to be unusual behavior or activity, and look for what's great about it, not for what's wrong with it, but what's great about it. And that's one of the. Things that I think that story also shows. Yeah, it's one of my favorite stories to tell. It usually open my keynotes with it as a confession. It's I want to have a confession here too. I don't know that my mom necessarily agreed with me that it's leadership. It may have just been me. Right, and you didn't say that. You said, yeah, book. Yeah, At the same time, you're right. When it comes to this construct of right and wrong. Leaders, the further they go along their journey often get pretty stagnant in what those judgments are, especially as we break gender and we break social cultural as we break generational lines. These are things where what looks right to a leader comes across as them judgment and it blocks me from learning.

43:23 And so it's these moments, and the fog generates these all the time. There was a great story that actually didn't put in the book about Old Navy. The CEO basically said, our culture is just too much blame, blame, blame, judge a judge, and it's creating a culture of negativity. He says, I'm refusing to use the words right and wrong anymore in any of our assessments of our business models and results. We can only say what happened and what do we learn from it. That's the trigger, the mindset change we have to think about as leaders in the fog. Judgment hurts, it kills, it stumps, it puts us backwards. It creates more tension in the fog. But there is the concept of what is this and how can we learn from it? And that's incredibly valuable.

44:08 Well, so that speaks too. If you could speak just maybe briefly, i'd this question one more than I wanted to. I want to get out is just this idea of letting go. And you know what, what use leaders from letting go when it's time and so that you're really speaking to that, how do we let go of this old behavior, this being, this old wave of relating. Yeah, leadership is a journey of continuously letting go. And that's the fear. Is I move from you know, a line worker into a manager or a manager into a director. Each one of those steps you're letting go of what used to be. And one of the interesting things about letting go that we've learned over time is if I let go and yet I don't grab something new, I end up being that hovering parent, that that helicopter manager.

44:56 I micromanage because what else am I going to do? I'm doing doing the same thing you are only at one step above. That's a very negative relationship as a manager. What we've learned is if I let go, what am I grab? What's the next wrong? What is it that I'm driving on to? And that could be anything. It might be I want to learn a new skill, I want to be strategic. I want to focus on the next generation of technology, whatever that is. Find something so that you're not doing the exact same thing the people you're leading, and that's that tends to be. That releases a little bit of that tension that we feel in letting go, that I've got a purpose. I still have something valuable that I'm doing for this organization that wasn't what I was doing before.

45:41 Love it, absolutely, love it, so so inviting. Okay, so the last formal question I want to ask you, which is going to bring us back to really that you know your book and why I wrote it in the first place. But to me, this is incredibly timely. So you say, quote, the real challenge isn't the next wave of technology, it's the new leadership mindset required to the wave effectively. I know I. Cannot you know, I can't imagine a more apt two sets of senses than those. Thank you. Yes. It comes in one of our last chapters, the Enduring fog, you know, as a reminder number one, this isn't going away. Number two, Technology is a massive fog generator. AI specifically today is an incredible fog navigator, but also a fog generator and what it's doing to society and workplace culture. And again this is a reminder to leaders it's not who you are, it's how you show up in the world that makes the difference. This is a reminder that technology will always There's always going to be another wave. There's always going to be yet another wave crashing. And think of it the ocean, and these waves will continue to come, and they've come. And I've been in this business for thirty five years and we've seen dozens and dozens of technology waves, and each one of those it's not about the wave of the technology, it's how we're showing up in the mindset we are to address it and deal with it and navigate it.

47:05 And that's just a lesson for all of us to take as we carry this board. Indeed, indeed, well, I'm so grateful that our pass across that I've got to learn from you from your book, that you've come on to be able to share your perspective and bring to lives of these stories so that people recognize what's in your book and available to them. You probably know by now that this show is listened by people around the world, and they tune in to improve their own leadership. They tune in to better understand the world of work, to become better at story and their cultures. What would you like to leave them with? Yeah, you know, I just maybe say leadership doesn't begin with clarity. It begins with courage and the choice to step in even when it's not clear. And so don't wait for that flog clear, don't wait for permission, have the courage to step into the fog.

47:57 Beautiful way to finish, Pete, Thank you so much. Stay with me. Let me just go ahead and tell our listeners and viewers where to find you. So, listeners and viewers, you're going to want to learn more about Pete Bearns, the work that he and his team do at Agile Leadership Journey, and the book he just wrote, Into the Fog, So you can start by making your way to the website Into the fogbook dot com. That's the best way to find and connect with all that he's up to. Last week, you give missed the live show, you can always sketch it be a recorded podcast. We were on air with doctor Monica Mitchell, who spent decades in a Fortune fifty company as an executive. We talked about her research and the area of employee engagement in the era of return to office in AI ethics. We talked about the case for return to office mandates, why employees often heartily dislike them, and some possible ways forward to make them work. Next week will be on the air with Norman Wolf talking about his latest book, Leading the Living Organization, which is the practical leadership guide that brings to life the paradigm introduced in his first book that organizations are not machines to be engineered, nor generic living systems. They are living persons whose outcomes arise from what they believe, how they relate on what they consistently.

49:02 Do see you. Then let's continue leaning into discovering how to elevate your operating system as a leader, becoming inspirational, and create destination workplaces where legendary business takes place. Let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four CY. Together, we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.