L&D In Action: Winning Strategies from Learning Leaders - B-Suite Influence: How Middle Managers Can Overcome Chaos and Deliver C-Suite Impact

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with the volume of information we are exposed to these days. Not only the barrage of social media and news updates, but we’re also offered so many new tools and technologies at work that theoretically make our teams better, work easier, and lives happier. As leaders, how do we rise above the noise, and ensure that our impact is not just felt, but recognized? To help answer that question, we’re joined by Rebecca Houghton, founder of BoldHR and 25-year veteran of leadership development.

You're listening to L&D in Action, winning strategies from learning leaders. This podcast, presented by Get Abstract, brings together the brightest minds in learning and development to discuss the best strategies for fostering employee engagement, maximizing potential, and building a culture of learning in your organization. Today we speak with Rebecca Horton. Rebecca is a leadership and talent expert, author, and founder of Bold HR. She cut her teeth managing complex teams and large organizations over the past 25 years and has settled on transforming middle managers. In her words, she hopes to

create B-suite leaders with C-suite impact. As a writer and speaker, Rebecca is a regular contributor to major media outlets and publications such as ABC Radio, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. She is also the best-selling author of Impact, 10 Ways to Level Up Your Leadership. Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to L&D in Action. I'm your host, Tyler Lay, and today I'm speaking with Rebecca Horton. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me. It's great to have you on the show. Thanks, Tyler. Great to be here.

So you have dedicated most of your career, if not all of it, to empowering leaders and managers to have greater impact, especially in times of chaos. You are a big observer of challenges that leaders face when it comes to just organizational malaise and organizational stress, anything that can disempower somebody from, you know, the executive leaders changing things very rapidly to society changing things very rapidly. And I would argue that right now is a great time to have this exact conversation. I want to jump into an acronym that you discuss in your book. It's VUCA. I believe this comes from military terminology, actually. Volatility, uncertainty,

complexity, and ambiguity. I believe those are the four components of VUCA. And this is a loose framework that you give for dealing with chaos in the world. I want to jump in here. We're going to rewind once we get through this question and sort of talk about the frameworks that you ultimately use to talk about leaders that you teach and how you coach them. But let's start with VUCA. So how should we apply this thought experiment, if you will, in the current cultural moment as we're on sort of an AI technological precipice, if you will? Oh, we're on so many precipices, aren't we? AI is just one. So welcome to Terminator coming true. It's quite a curious time. I think the first time I've ever really paid attention to what AI can really do. And then you pay a lot

more attention when the creators start warning you that they may have unleashed a monster. I think there is also a huge amount of societal stress post-pandemic. You know, that's been one of the first global incidences that's really brought us all together and leveled the playing field for everybody. And of course, we've got economic uncertainty on the horizon, both in the US, here in Australia and over in Europe. Recession is very much a looming threat to the planet. And of course, there's also the prospect of a third world war

if China, Russia and America don't start playing a little bit more nicely with each other. And little old Australia stuck out here in the Pacific, you're getting quite nervous. So Tylee, yeah, you're absolutely right. This is one of those moments where all of these threads of different kinds of chaos, stress and uncertainty are coming together.

It does feel like quite a pinnacle moment. I certainly hope that anyone alive today doesn't go through anything like this again. It's quite enough. Thank you very much. So how do we kind of deal with it? Well, there's a couple of different ways. So two models I would probably talk about. One is BooCup, which really helps you with how you handle changes to plan. So one of the things that we're all very good at, and particularly mid-level leaders, which is where I play, we're really, really good at having a plan. So one of the things that we're all very good at, and particularly mid-level leaders, which is where I play, we're really, really good at having a plan. We're not so great when the

world doesn't go according to plan. Now, right now, the only thing we know is that it ain't going to go according to plan. So what VUCA gives you is a really cool framework to be able to say, okay, well, it depends what kind of disruption you're experiencing as to how you respond in the moment. And you're right, it was created by the military, the US military, actually, which was brilliantly done, A, because they spend billions on leadership decision-making in chaotic moments, which is why they're so great in the field. But B, because they recognize that you can't wait anymore for the chain of command to tell you what to do. Now, for a lot of leaders in the middle of

their organizations, they actually feel like they are in a bit of a war zone. You know, there is constant disruption, this constant sensation of attack. There's never anything that is stable and certain. So they're constantly reacting and reflecting against what's happening in their universe. And that can just be within their organization, let alone the global stage. So VUCA is dead simple. If your plan is disrupted by something that is a sudden change to plan, the answer is operationally pivot. You know, be good enough to be able to move your resources to a different space and just switch gears or switch lanes. When the outcome is uncertain, and I think a lot of us are struggling with this, and our research certainly shows the mid-level leaders struggle

with uncertainty more than they struggle with volatility. They're actually really good operationally. But when they don't know what the outcome is that's required, or they don't know where they're going to land, it's difficult to make a plan to go in that direction. So one of the things that we teach with the uncertainty piece of VUCA is how you can kind of network to get all the little clues about what's the most likely landing place so that you can make a more confident plan towards that. Complexity is another area where most middle managers are actually pretty good. They're really good at unraveling complex webs and especially working cross-functionally to reconstruct or deconstruct problems. They've been doing it pretty much their whole careers. And that's really what that's about. It's bringing together experts, giving them the right framework

to work through things and then getting out of their way so that they can unravel the problem. And the last one is ambiguity. And ambiguity is a killer. When you can't see what's in front of you and you don't know where you're going, it really is quite paralyzing. So for most people to be able to almost do, that's what I call the kind of the negative test. So you know when you take photographs, we tend to focus on what's in the foreground. When we've got ambiguity, we can't really see what's in the foreground. It's like putting a veil over it. So actually what's useful instead is to work out what's in the background, because then the shape of what's in the foreground becomes clearer, if that makes sense. So it's looking at things in the negative, the black instead of the white, if you like. Now that's

quite complicated in terms of how you work it through. And with ambiguity, you've always got an incomplete stack of information and you've got to make a call. And that becomes one of the really important things for decision, for leaders, is this decision making, this confident decision making in times where they don't

have the information, they don't know where they're going. The landscape keeps changing and it gets more and more difficult to unravel. And that's why VUCA is so great. It really gives you a different tactic

according to the change that you face. And it's why VUCA is so great. It really gives you a different tactic according to the change that you face. And it stops disruption from feeling like one big amorphous mass, which sometimes it can when we're feeling overwhelmed. I think right now that we're facing all four of these categories of chaos and change. And I would hate to be in the position of a middle manager, as you describe them. You currently work with those types of folks. Middle managers is the term that you've used a couple times already, but you, especially in your book, and you refer to these folks as B-suite. I think this is an important distinction you mentioned in the book also that middle manager almost is reminiscent of middle child,

which has negative connotation. We don't really want to go there. Also, it's almost taken on a life of its own that's squished in between the individual contributors and the executives. So I think this term B-suite works really well. Would you mind just extrapolating on that and defining what that ultimately is? Yeah, absolutely. So if anyone's ever done an MBA, you'll be really, really familiar with this concept

of a visionary leader versus a strategic administrator. And that really is the core definition of the executive, the visionary, and the middle manager, the administrator. And that really is the core definition of the executive, the visionary, and the middle manager, the administrator. And unfortunately, we've been locked in that paradigm for about 30 to 40 years, which is why middle managers have got such a terrible name. And you're right. The middle has a bad connotation. It's middle age, middle class, middle kid. It's not great. We all kind of want to lift up from there. And I think one of the other things that I don't love about the word middle is it's mediocre. And there are a lot of leaders out there who are in the executive who are quite mediocre,

as well as middle management and frontline management. But there are also some brilliant, brilliant people who want to be leaders in the center of the organization, don't want to be in the C-suite, but are not really enabled and empowered to really show their full potential and to add the maximum value that they can bring. So for me, separating this old gnarly version of the middle manager with the B-suite was really, really important.

And the research that we've done shows that there's actually about six levels of middle manager. And that's really where the robustness of the B-suite concept came from, which is that there are different levels of impact that you can have. And it's only when you hit about impact two or three that you start to really,

the moniker of a B-suite leader, because you are starting to be that kind of leader that is sitting just underneath C-suite impact, because you are starting to be that kind of leader that is sitting just underneath C-suite impact, may always be there. So a general manager, a head of, a director, for example, as opposed to a president or a vice president. But they're actually really happy to be there. They're hitting goals there. They've got great influence and authority there, but they don't really want that middle manager nickname. And what we've discovered is that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all middle manager nickname anywhere. There are six layers of middle manager.

And ultimately, these leaders and managers, they struggle with the chaos. The volatility often makes it very hard for them to do the job that they want to do. And one word that's very important to you is strategy. It becomes very hard for managers and leaders to conduct and carry out strategy effectively because of all the change that takes place, especially in modern business. You make a distinction between the strategy and being strategic in your book. So the strategy, capital T, capital S, and also being strategic, capital B, capital S. Can you explain the difference there for me? Yes, sure. It's a bit controversial,

but I'm not a big fan of the word strategy. I think it's one of the most overused and misunderstood words on the planet. So for me, the concept of the strategy is a big corporate five-year strategy where people disappear for three days and spend lots of money on consultants like me to come up with a big glossy strategy, which then really only filters through the first level, the people who were in the room creating that strategy and is shown to universally fail to cascade all the way down to the bottom.

So I'm a little bit cynical about the value of the strategy. What I'm not cynical about and what I absolutely advocate for is the ability to be bottom. So I'm a little bit cynical about the value of the strategy. What I'm not cynical about and what I absolutely advocate for is the ability to be strategic. So this really means your ability to think in strategic frameworks and to think broadly and still react and pivot on an almost daily basis. Now, I know the two things can sometimes feel like they're contradictory because the strategy tends to be a three or five year view and daily reactions tend to kind of undermine that concept. But I totally disagree. I actually think that in a strategic frame where you understand your key priorities, your key constraints, and really all of my case studies show, that when you're responding in a strategic

manner, you're typically making the right decisions regardless of the strategy. And what we find often, you get to the end of that five-year plan and the strategy didn't really unfold the way that you thought it would, but you're still winning. And I think that really comes down to that ability to use strategic mindset to inform better decision making on a day-to-day basis. Critical to that strategic mindset is pace and space. So controlling the pace and space at which you work and how that allows you to work with your team and manage up. Can we go over pace and space really quickly? You give like a matrix in the book that describes, you know, if you have pace and space, X and Y axes, and then on the top right is impact. I believe the top left is strategy. Is

that right? And those are the two good areas and you're trying to avoid the two bottom areas. So if everybody can please visualize with me who's listening right now, but I'd love for you to just jump into that really quickly, if you don't mind. Yeah, fantastic. Well, we always start in the programs that I run, we have three key areas. So pace, space, and making the case, which is influence. But the really important ones to get right first are pace and space. And in that order, what we find, particularly with B-suite leaders, with middle managers, is that they are running so fast because they're handling change, they're handling replanning, they're constantly on for their people who need them, they're constantly on for their

executive who need them. This switching between personalities has a cost. So the burden that middle managers carry in terms of workload is actually far greater than is visually evident in their diary, for example. So one of the things that they really have to work on very quickly is how can they reduce the pace of work and get some control over it. So there's a couple of things. One is how you respond to the pace and the pressure that's associated with the pace. But a big one is how do you start to influence your environment to slow the pace down. So you're beginning to triage, negotiate, push back, slow things down so that you've got room.

And what we do with that room is we use it to use the space properly. And for middle managers, this is absolutely crucial because most of them have come up through the professional ranks. They've been an expert. They're still in expert mode. And they've got to learn to let go and reprogram if they're going to become more influential, more like a C-suite executive. So really learning to use that space carefully and learn to reframe what is your role? What is the space that you hold and how do you hold it appropriately?

That's actually one of the really difficult switches. Controlling the pace of work ostensibly is much easier, but using that space properly, that becomes much harder. That's the big transition. How do we control the pace right now, though, as we've been talking since the top here? I mean, the pace seems like it's not something that you can control as much just because of the anxiety that is reverberating through organizations right now with, you know, mass layoffs, as you've already mentioned, the opportunity for AI to radically change

organizations. It honestly feels like nobody really knows what's going to happen next, what major change operationally is going to happen, what categories of work are going to cease to exist and which work are going to cease to exist and which ones are going to arise? You know, new jobs that we didn't have five years ago, 10 years ago. How do you recommend we control the pace in such a challenging time right now? Yeah, absolutely. Well, Tyler, remember I mentioned, you know, first of all, we have to look at our own reaction and then we have to look at the environment. So, what a lot of people do,

and this is people in general, but leaders as well, is we tend to allow these larger universal stresses to affect us disproportionately. And when I say disproportionately, it's not because these things are small, but it's because our ability to affect them is tiny. So if you've ever looked at Stephen Covey's model for spheres of control and influence, it's a really, really useful tool to just be able to bring back your anxiety levels. And we all do it, right? We lie there in bed and we think about the global crisis and we think about AI and we think about the rise of robots and blah, blah, blah. And all of this, this is actually creating pace inside our own head.

So that's the first place we've really got to get a handle on. Whilst it's a concern, is it something I can do something about? Because if it's not, you just need to put it in a box of, yes, it's a concern. I can't affect it. I can plan around it. I know what I would do if I was impacted by it, but I'm not going to let it stress me out. know what I would do if I was impacted by it, but I'm not going to let it stress me out. So that first piece takes about 30 or 40% of your anxiety down a peg. And that's really important to control your reaction to the world at large. So Cody's models are terrific. And I really recommend

looking at that one. There's some great examples of some really, really influential, high-powered people who will take 10 minutes out at the end of every day to do something really simple and completely in their control, like doing the washing up before bed, walking around the house and turning all the lights on. Now, that might sound ridiculous, but what it does to the human brain is it asserts complete control, independence, and dominance over your environment. And that calms your stress levels down immediately, and it rebuilds your confidence that you can go to something more complex next. So anytime someone's feeling really overwhelmed and quite

panicky about the world at large, it's really important to bring it right back to your sphere of control. Do one thing that you don't depend on anyone else for, that you have total control over, and keep doing that till your breathing is back under control, till you're thinking more clearly, and then take something a little bit more complex that might mean that you have to influence somebody else to get something done or to control something. The last sphere with COVID is the ones where, unless you are on the global stage, there's very, very little that you can do. It could be a space where you decide to go on a protest march or get involved in some other way,

where perhaps your work can be of use. But again, it's about taking control of your reaction and taking the steps that you can manage rather than worrying about things that you can't. So killing that worry in our heads because it's not productive is a really important first step. Our reaction is a really important first step. I want to circle back around to self-care and just making sure that you remain balanced a little bit later as a leader, especially. But as long as we're talking about control right now, I'd like to discuss the differences among the generations in the workforce right now. I don't think it's controversial or untrue to say that each generation prefers to have

more control over their work life and the organization, the ethics of the organization, the product, the services of the organizations that they go to work for. It seems like, especially between millennials and now even Gen Z, there's a greater preference for a matching of values and a matching of just principle when it comes to choosing a job and pursuing a career. And you wrote a piece probably about eight months ago. It's on your blog, Connecting Metaphysics and Leadership. I thought this was an interesting little piece that you did.

You did it via the question, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? And I want to, you discuss how, you know, for leaders to decide to make an impact within their organization, you know, is it important for them to do so? Or can their impact just simply be felt if they aren't exerting themselves? That's sort of the comparison, the analogy made there. But I would like to extrapolate this to, like I was saying, Gen Z and even millennials who feel unenthusiastic overall about the state of work and being in the workforce. There's just a sort of a bubbling malaise. And at some point, it feels

like when younger folks have to become leaders, it's not going to be the same as it is today as boomers and Gen X being leaders. In fact, you talk about a mismatch between how boomers and the younger generations prefer to be taught, whereas I believe boomers prefer like external training. But that's not the case for the younger generations, especially when it comes to leadership roles. So how do we reconcile all this? The future generations, you know, I assume the safe answer is that organizations always adapt. There's always generational differences, you know, in the workforce and organizations either adapt or they get disrupted. But do you

see this as a bubbling issue or is this something that actively needs to be worked on in training younger generations to become the new leaders? It's a really, really good question. So what I see, and you might not know, but I was a historian before I went into leadership. And what I've seen over ancient and medieval history, which is where I studied, is this sense of the way the generations interact with each other and the increasing desire as things become more visible to us as individuals to have more control. So remember how we talked about this sphere of control? The more we know, the more anxiety we get. There is this concept that when we couldn't leave our village and we never got a visitor, that things were a lot less stressful

because we didn't have this broader horizon of concern. Everything was right in front of us on our doorstep. We just dealt with that. Now, what we've seen, of course, as we increasingly become connected, social media is always on, we're seeing things, true and untrue things. This adds a lot of burden to our intellectual sphere of concern. So we start to be worried about things that 50 years ago we would never even heard about, we would never have known. So this is something I think that we just kind of need to see from a meta perspective, this journey of more visibility and transparency doesn't necessarily equal more control. In fact, it equals more anxiety. So we're seeing that all generations.

And then we've got this moment in time where we're stacking these different age groups on top of each other. And what we know with millennial and Gen Z is they're one of the biggest cohorts in the workplace, one of the biggest cohorts we've seen since the baby boomers. So that's two or three generations.

My generation, for example, is less than a third of the size. So teeny, teeny, tiny, squished between these two giants, the baby boomers and the Gen Xs, the Gen Zs, which is kind of cool because it puts my generation, you know, the 40-year-olds in this middle of the sandwich. And that's where most middle managers live as the translation point between the baby boomer and the newer generations, these two power points, if you like, in a workforce. So what I see is that this difference has always been there. It's being constantly enhanced by

greater transparency, greater information flow. So what we're really seeing is that 60-year-olds and 20-year-olds never really saw eye to eye. We look at when we've had the Second World War, for example, coincided with the time where we had significantly large proportions of young people disaffected. So we have this kind of this uprising of energy and nowhere to put it. So I feel at the moment, this dissatisfaction with the workplace is not necessarily new, but I think the scale of it and the dimension of it is what's different. I put a lot of that down to information flow. It's so much faster when we're connected. If I hear that Seattle is unhappy at work, it makes me look at my work in Melbourne and wonder if I'm happy at work. So it's kind of

really contagious, this malaise, as you've put it. One of the things that I think is really, really important for everyone to understand is that it's not just affecting the younger generations. In fact, the biggest cohort where burnout, disengagement, and likelihood of resignation is highest is in middle management, which tends to be the 30 to 50-year-old grouping, so a little bit of the older generations. So I think that's one thing that we really need to kind of drill down on. Is the disaffection just the younger future leader generations, or actually is it affecting everyone?

Okay. I had not heard that statistic before. You said so between 30 and 50-year-old middle management are actually most affected by burnout right now. They certainly are. So 60 to 70% of them have definitely got burnout symptoms. Up to 80 or 90% feel used up at the end of every day. That's a really significant number. And of course, that has a knock-on effect to the people that they lead, right? There's a cascade that if they're disengaged and they're burned out, they're going to lead disengaged and burned out teams. And the problem that I'm really seeing, the biggest risk to leadership globally, is that the more we see this middle management group struggling, the less inclined the next generation are to step up.

And the level of interest in becoming a leader is at an all-time low. The level of people opting out of leadership to go back into individual contributorship is at an all-time high. If these jaws keep happening the way they're happening, we're going to end up with no leaders. I want to give you a moment to brag really quickly, because in our pre-chat that we had a while ago, you mentioned that the percentage of folks that you coach or that you work with directly that wish to go into executive leadership or to be promoted into like C-suite leadership is lower than the percentage that actually end up in C-suite leadership. Is that right? So you actually send more people getting promoted than actually wish to be promoted when they start with you. Not all leaders want to be a CEO. Not all leaders even want to be the next level down.

Most leaders are very happy and fulfilled leading, developing, coaching, and nurturing their team, working effectively with their peers, and managing up from time to time. Now, what some leaders are not recognizing as they make that transition through the levels of middle management is they're not recognizing that to give more nurturing and to protect your teams more, and particularly at times like this, you really feel the need to do that. We call it the kind of the iron umbrella, right? We just want to make sure that nothing gets through to your team. We actually have to spend less time with our team and a lot more time being that iron umbrella, which means a lot more time managing up and a lot more time being that iron umbrella,

which means a lot more time managing up, a lot more time influencing across, a lot more time defending your territory and managing the boundaries of your function, but also managing the reputation of your function so that people leave you alone. Now, that typically means that you start to play at a different level for the good of your team. I think your value set So you're still,

I think your value set is still the same, but where you play, how you operate, how you get the results that you want, that starts to change dramatically. And what it does is it demystifies being a C-suite leader. You know, you're suddenly operating like them, operating with them. You just haven't got the paycheck or the recognition or the authority that goes with that job title. And a lot of time what we find is that those people as a result of playing at that level, get the visibility, get the recognition, get tapped on the shoulder. They're no longer afraid of the responsibility because they've operated in that circle for long enough. So they're more likely to say yes. Now that's helping a great deal

with breaking a succession planning problem, particularly here in Australia, where less than 11% of organizations have got their succession plan ready to step up into the C-suite. So it's a big risk that we're trying to solve for. So the moral of the story though, is that if a manager does great work in the middle of the forest and nobody's around to hear it, they're still doing great work and that should be recognized. And ultimately they have a really strong opportunity to make a great impact. Is that right? Well, no, it's kind of the opposite. The argument is in fact, if you're doing all this great work and nobody notices, stop doing it. Right? If nobody notices, then the impact of what you're doing is significantly lessened. Now, what I'm not

saying here is spend your whole time kind of climbing the greasy pole. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is if your team are doing great work and you're not promoting their successes, you're letting them down. If you are doing great work with your team and nobody has noticed, maybe that work isn't as great as you think it is. If you're doing all this effort and you're not projecting the results, the learnings, the wins and the challenges, if you're not doing that, then you're not really helping your team to get the recognition and potentially the investment and the support that would make their lives easier. So what I would say is don't be that person that lets your work go unnoticed. We make sure it's noticed, but make sure it's noticed for the right reasons,

not the self-serving reasons that a lot of people are scared of. Of course. So all of the information overload that you were talking about that comes from society, which obviously we all feel very deeply opening up my phone some mornings and seeing, oh, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are going to have a fight. Like, is this really what we want to see from the leaders of our greatest corporations? There's a lot that comes through the pipeline. And I would argue that this also is happening internally in organizations as well. Information data is everywhere about in organizations as well. Information, data is

everywhere about what you're doing. And I would think, especially this impacts middle managers, especially if you're in sort of a sales role, or if you're in some sort of a programming role, all of the new opportunities to see the work that you do through different lenses with the use of data and with the use of various different tools and resources that are coming out, especially now with AI augmentations, there's a ton. Do you think that some of this anxiety actually comes from just the mass of opportunities, you know, theoretically to improve what you're doing, to reformulate what you're doing and approach your job and your leadership from a different angle? Does that also create more anxiety? Oh, you're absolutely right, Tyler. It's always two things, isn't it? One is the expectation on leaders to just be constantly better and to carry the burden of maybe not such great

executives and not such great teams and to be the magic bullet for all of that. That's an enormous burden and pressure and quite unfair in many, many ways. It's almost like, you know, at the body, the hips are the kind of the joint of the whole body. Middle managers are like the hips of an organization. If they're not working, your back is screwed, your legs don't work, right? So it's super important that they work. And the problem is that there's so much burden put on them

that they tend to fail. They get stiff, they get cranky, sometimes they break. So that is really what happens with middle managers. And it's so important to make sure that we're looking after their health and their ability to handle this pressure. And then the other point that you make, which is the day-to-day deluge of information, data, opportunities to rethink how you're working, that can be like an avalanche. to rethink how you're working. That can be like an avalanche.

So one of the things that's absolutely critical, and that goes back to, you know, really using that space carefully, is to take a big breath and remember that all of that data is only useful to you if you know what your priorities are, and therefore you know what questions you want to ask of it. Otherwise, it's just bitter. That's lining the road that you're walking down. it. Otherwise, it's just bitter that's lining

the road that you're walking down. Your job is to only pick the things that matter to you. And if you don't know what matters to you, you'll never know which pieces to pick. So the priority is your priorities. Get them really clear. Even if they change every now and again, get them really clear. And then it becomes obvious to you which bits of data are useful and which bits are just background noise, because there's plenty of that depends on your priorities. Back to the question of influence. It's very clear from your writing and work that you do that many, many managers and leaders don't wish to exert themselves as influencers among their teams. And they don't, they wish to more or less passively have the influence that they ultimately should have without really putting the effort out there. But it's critical to acknowledge that as a leader, you have influence and you should

think about that and exert it properly. One way that you suggest embracing your influence is by listening effectively and asking the right questions to make sure that you have the right information. So let's talk about this topic of influence. And why don't we start there, listening and asking the right questions to make sure that you have the right information. So let's talk about this topic of influence. And why don't we start there, listening and asking the right questions? Yeah, absolutely. So we've got a phrase that we use a lot in the programs that we run that says influence is not a coincidence. Back in the 80s and 90s, people were trained that influence was part of a charisma, right? This kind of this magical fairy dust that leaders had, these alpha type leaders had this great charisma and their charisma would carry them. Now that has long been discarded as a fairly unattractive and uncontemporary model

of leadership. And we're moving much more regularly into a space where introverts are becoming far more effective leaders. But an introvert's inclination to put themselves out there is virtually zero. In fact, it's in the negative numbers. For many people, the concept of putting yourself out there kind of makes you feel a bit icky. You're a bit like, oh my God, I feel like such a show off. I feel like it's all about me. I feel a bit creepy. These reactions are super common. And actually in every culture that I've ever coached anyone from, they have the same reaction to this deliberately influencing, this putting your head up, standing up and saying something. The issue though, is that without deliberately influencing, you're not really going to get the outcomes that you need. So

when I think about influence, it's really important to remember, again, what are your priorities? When you think about influencing, it's not just a personality trait, it's an action, and it's an action towards an outcome. So if you're influencing for an outcome, then getting that outcome is not a coincidence. It's part of your plan, part of your strategy, and it's part of the actions that you put in place to make sure you get what you need for your team and for your business. So when we're looking at techniques like listening, that becomes a really important point. Back to the kind of the charismatic leader, the charismatic leader would do a lot of talking. I'm sure we've all sat around the table with one of those in the room and thought,

oh my God, when are they going to stop talking? And that's part of their MO, right? But the really smart leader asks a whole load of questions to make sure when they say just one thing, it's going to land perfectly. And there's a big difference between selling your idea to people and responding to them with a solution. People are far more inclined to agree with you, to buy what you sell, to invest in you, to give you what you need, if they feel that you've solved their problem. And the only way you could possibly solve their problem is to really listen to them. Once they know that you're solving their problem,

they're far more likely to say yes to whatever it is you're about to ask for. And as an influencer, it's absolutely crucial that you know that. Because if you're trying to influence by selling to the benefits or pitching or any of those things, you've missed this critical step, which is that most people these days are very cynical about being sold to. And if they're feeling that your leadership style is like selling to them, they'll close down and back away really quickly. And particularly at a time when you need them to open up and lean in, the only way you can do that is to make it about them rather than about you. You also talk about getting stay-in versus buy-in. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Yeah, well, that's the outcome of taking this approach. So one of the things that can really annoy leaders, and it certainly used to annoy me when I was an executive in my proper job before this, one of the things that used to really get to me was this concept that we'd all be around a table, everyone would be in agreement, and then over the next six weeks to six months,

people would kind of drop off, right? Other priorities would happen. Conflicts would happen. They'd lose maybe some resources. They couldn't commit to the same level, whatever it was. But slowly but surely, everybody kind of slipped off the bus. Now, the problem with that, of course, is that at the end of that journey, you're still left driving the bus, right? You're still left carrying the responsibility of delivering whatever it was, but you've lost your allyship. You've lost that network of people that were going to make it possible. So that's the real difference between buy-in and stay-in.

Buy-in is where everybody goes, yeah, I'm on the bus, and then kind of sneak off the back door. Stay-in is where it matters so much to them that if you got off the bus, they would still drive the bus. So it's not just about your force of will. It's not just about your discipline. It's not you, the driving force. It's actually us, the interested parties for whom the vested interest is so strong that any one of us would pick up the leadership of this initiative or project and keep it going. And the only way you can be sure of that is asking loads of questions to make sure that you're solving their problem, not just your own. So ultimately, the framework for

influence is make the case, pace, space, and make the case. What is the case and how are we making it? For us, making the case means influencing in all four directions. So we think of it like a lighthouse. A lot of leaders often have their light fixed on their team. So they're really focused on motivating, engaging and developing their team. And that's one form of influence. Leaders that go up to the next kind of couple of levels, they're starting to move between their team and their peers. You know, that light is beginning to sway. They're beginning to focus more attention on their peers, give their peers more love, get more of that stay in with better relationships with their peers. And that collaboration layer, that's another type of

influence because you're really looking to influence those behaviors, staying on the bus like we talked about. The next one that a lot of people avoid is the upward light, which is really the classic managing up. And that means not only managing your leader, but also pitching and positioning your executive, business cases, public speaking. That's a bundle that a lot of leaders are like, oh no, I'd rather not that. And the last one that a lot of leaders forget about because they're so used to being an internal chief administrator type leader is the external market. What we're seeing a massive upsurge and it all comes back down to the connectivity and the transparency, but we're seeing a really big upsurge in middle managers starting to speak to the media, starting to be the voice and the face of their organization, starting to be influencers on behalf of their organization.

I think this is brilliant. It terrifies some of the older crowd up at the board level and the C-suite level. And it's definitely being driven by some of the younger crowd. It doesn't matter. What it really shows is that kind of authenticity and that depth of culture. And I think that is going to be a bit of a game changer. But for a lot of B-suite leaders, they're still in that program of only your C-suite talk to the press. So that one will take a bit more time, but those are the four areas where we have to be focusing our torchlight in fairly regular rotation, just like a lighthouse.

If we overexpose ourselves into one place, something crashes. This sounds like a lot of work. Influencing virtually everybody is not an easy thing to do. And because of that, as I mentioned before, I would like to return to the topic of self-care. And you discuss keeping yourself in check or in balance, I think is the term that you say,

making sure that you can observe when you are in fact feeling burnt out or when you're starting to sort of lose control. And there are many ways, I think you actually list about nine ways where you can sort of recenter yourself. My favorites though were laughter and offering help to others. So I'd like to discuss those if you don't mind. Yeah. So there's a really complex framework around self-care. And we certainly talk about resilience. And remember earlier, we talked about managing our reaction to the environment as being the first place we have to start. And certainly being able to replenish our own energy so that we can manage that reaction

is a really important part of leadership. In fact, energy management has probably become the third biggest topic in the last two years that we talk about on our programs. So this sense of, you know, how do I come to work motivated? How do I not become a victim to that bubbling malaise of disengagement and work is a bit rubbish, so why should I care? So a lot of this really comes down to our own energy management and making sure that

we've got a little bit of time to just boost the batteries on a regular basis because leaders and particularly leaders in the middle, they're giving in all directions. They're influencing up and there's an element of gift. They're collaborating. That's giving a lot of giving to your team. So you're really getting sucked dry like a sponge. You've got to be refilling at every possible opportunity. Self-care is not the only answer, obviously, to resiliency and to burnout and to engagement, but it is a really important place to start. I'm a big fan of the laughter thing. We have a pretty serious job. We have a pretty serious life. The world in general feels like it's getting really serious right now. So we have to find some silliness. There's a reason that one of the most watched

video genres on any social platform on the planet is funny cats, right? It's because we need a break. We really, really need a break. So finding things that make us laugh, finding things that really focus us, but give us a little bit of joy is super important. So for a lot of people, it might not be funny cats. It might be doodling. It could be a coloring in book. It could be gaming. It can be any kind of escapism that brings you joy and allows you to focus on something you love instead of everything else that's in your head and causing you anxiety. So I think for me, the ability to focus is really important. But if you can focus on something that makes you laugh even better, changes your whole chemical makeup, makes you feel an awful lot better afterwards. And then offering help to

others is another one that you say, just because of the way that impacts the brain as well. Others is another one that you say, just because of the way that impacts the brain as well. It is remarkable. So offering material help to others actually gives you a sense of reassurance, a sense of connection to community and a real sense of purpose. So we've talked a lot about bringing things back to your sphere of control. The ability to help others may not be to solve somebody's divorce crisis. It may be that you put the dust bins out for your elderly neighbor, or you cut your grass and the grass over the road. So small, easy to control gifts will actually make you feel better. It's not really as much

about them as you might think, because what it means is it means that you've got something in the tank and that's got a circular replenishment. So we're up against time now. I want to finish with one final question about one of the more fascinating parts of your career as you describe. You headhunted NASA scientists, in particular chaos theorists,

to work as quants in financial markets when you were working in London. And this just fascinates me so much. This kind of brings it back around to the top when we're talking about VUCA and just dealing with all the chaos. But I'd like to know specifically, did this endeavor have success? And what did you learn from recruiting these chaos theorists to work in financial markets that can help us? It was hugely successful. And I think, so for me, what I absolutely loved about working with these physicists was that these are people who are deeply thoughtful, 90% introverted, but incredibly wise, real deep thinkers.

So one of the things to bring that cohort people and introduce them to classical investment bankers who are, wow, super alpha and not necessarily deeply reflective, or they certainly were in the 90s when I was doing this work, right? A bit of a clash of cultures. So for me, that was a really important learning in terms of how do you blend these two types really effectively? How do you find that yin and yang that makes it work perfectly? And this combination of the promoter of the function and the deep thinker of the function, when we got that combination right, we would have leading analyst teams, we would have leading investment banks within the year. It was a remarkable change. One of the things that I loved about working with these physicists, these NASA scientists, we got a couple out of NASA,

we also lost a couple back to NASA, was the ability for them to show me how you see things differently. And I'm definitely not, as I mentioned, I'm a historian, my brain doesn't work like their brain. But the way that I kind of read what they were talking to me about was when they see patterns in the chaos, for them, the points of darkness are the patterns. A lot of people look at chaos, let's say stars and the universe and the planet, that could be seen as a random smattering of rocks floating around in space. What we tend to do is we look at the stars, we look at the points of light, and we create constellations out of those, right? We draw little stories and little pictures out of those. Now, when there's not enough pattern in those points of light, they taught me that you have to look at the dark spots.

And in the dark spots, there are greater patterns available, but we tend to get distracted by the bright stuff. but we tend to get distracted by the bright stuff. And that kind of links me back to how I look at ambiguity. You know, what sits behind the shape that allows you to see the shape more clearly? So for me, there was actually a personal learning of looking at the world through the opposite lens, as well as the enormous joy of working with these much more introverted, much more deep thinking people

and allowing them to work in spaces that they'd never considered working in before and bringing some real science to the idea of how capital markets work. It was one of the most fun periods of my life. I really enjoyed it. That's such a fascinating takeaway as well. I really, really liked that. Well, Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me today. Before I let you go, can you just let our audience know where they can learn more about you and the work that you do? I would love them to simply come to boldhr.com and say hi. All right. Sounds good. Well, thank you so much again for everybody listening at home. We appreciate you listening. We'll catch you on the next episode. Cheers. You've been listening to L&D in Action,

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