March 4, 2025 • 51 mins
): Leadership isn’t just about grand gestures—it’s woven into everyday moments. It’s how we connect, communicate, and collaborate in ways that lift others. True leadership is personal, relational, and accessible to all. By shifting our view, we see that leadership happens everywhere, in small yet powerful ways. Tune in to explore how your daily actions shape the lives around you. Guest: Ross Blankenship
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Working on Purpose is broadcast live Tuesdays at 6PM ET and Music on W4CY Radio (www.w4cy.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com). Working on Purpose is viewed on Talk 4 TV (www.talk4tv.com).
Working on Purpose Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The topics and opinions express in the following show are
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make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services,
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comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you
(00:20):
for choosing W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What's Working on Purpose? Anyway?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
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
(00:53):
usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now,
here's your host, doctor Elise Cortes.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program. Thanks for
tuning it again this week. Great to have you. This
program has been brought to you with passion your pride
since February of twenty fifteen. I'm your host, doctor Eleas
corre Test. If we've not met before, you don't know me.
I'm an organizational psychologist, management consultant, lawal therapists, speaker and author.
My team and I at Gusto Now help companies in
live and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high
(01:26):
performance culture and inspirational leadership activated by meaning and purpose.
And did you know that inspired employees outperform their satisfied
peers by a factor of two point twenty five to one.
In other words, inspiration is good for the bottom line.
We've learned more abouts on how we can work together
at gustodashnow dot com or my personal website at leastcore
test dot com. Before we get into today's program, I
am thrilled to announce that registration is open for a
(01:48):
fabulous new conference for women for which I'll serve as
the MC. It's called Thrive in twenty five and said
jam packed a few days in Chicago June twenty fifth,
three and twenty eight, twenty twenty five, and it's designed
to develop women as whole seals from bolstering your mindset
to your financial acumen, to leadership, to incorporating nature and
art into your life to raisee consciousness and much more.
Visit thrive in twenty five for information and to register.
(02:11):
You can use my promo code Gusto all caps to
gain access to free books and programs. I'll be gifting
registers as well. See you there now getting today's program
we have with us today. Doctor Ross Blankenship and organizational psychologist,
executive coach and lecture at the University of Virginia. He's
the founder of the Leadership Coaching and Consulting from two
Sday Advisors, where he coaches a wide variet of leaders
(02:33):
and leadership teams to improve performance, communication, and decision making.
He also advises founders and investors on leadership assessment and
talent strategy. He's the author of Everyday Leadership, a Guide
to developing your mindset as a Leader, which we'll be
talking about today. He joins us from Birmingham, Alabama. Doctor Blankenship,
welcome to working on Purpose.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Hey, thank you for having me.
Speaker 5 (02:54):
Absolutely, it's always wonderful.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
As we were talking about the break before there we
got on just delight in being able to meet people
to come with my podcast toward wouldn't otherwise have any
reason to meet.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
So welcome, Thank you. Yeah, it's fun to be here.
This has been a fun treat of having written a book.
It's being able to go and meet new people and
learn more about the podcast world.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
Oh yeah. I want to first ask why name your company?
Tuesday Advisors? What a fun name?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I get this question a lot, which may not surprise you.
I call it an idea that was in search of
some meaning. But the short answer is I had a
software company from twenty twenty to about twenty twenty two
that was called Leader, but it was spelled l EA
d HR, and everybody called it lead hr, unsurprisingly. And
(03:44):
so when we sold the intellectual property from that and
shut it down and I was starting Tuesday Advisors, I
was working with a designer and told her I needed
something that nobody would ever mispronounce, and she sent me
a list of words, one of which was Tuesday. That
asked her why Tuesdays is like every other day of
the week seems to have something about it except Tuesday.
(04:05):
So I thought, maybe you could like own that space.
What's interesting about that though? Is it actually was like
a precursor idea to the everyday the everyday idea, I
started to think of Tuesday as you know, it's after
the beginning, but before the end is in sight, which
is when we need the most help, of the most support,
And that became kind of an ethos around coaching, and
(04:28):
it was part of where the idea for every day
leadership that title came from.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
I ask so cool, Well, you know I often ask
people because I care very much ross about the world
of work. I believe very strongly in the power of
work to help catalyze us into our higher potential and
to give us a sense of impact and fulfillment. So
that's why an organizational psychologist and not, for example, a
clinical psychologist.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
Or anything like that.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
And of course you know you have a background at
organizational psychology and leadership as well.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
Why choose this field? Why not accounting, architecture or whatever
else there.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Might be out there. Yeah, you know, the short answer
there is I grew up in a family of mental
health professionals. My dad trained as a neuros psychologist, but
after the invention of the cat scan machine, actually his
job was basically assessing evaluating patients in hospitals to figure
(05:25):
out what part of their brain had been damaged, and
the cat scan machine does that, you know, with computer imaging.
So he went through his own kind of career disruption
that way and started working with companies and did organizational
consulting psychology for forty years after that. So I knew
that it was a field which was important. My mom
was a social worker and a therapist. And you know,
(05:49):
the thing that I say about work is growing up,
the thing I heard from my parents when they came
home from work was I met the most interesting person today.
And when I graduated from university and started trying other fields,
I went into insurance, I went into finance. I just
found that I had almost no energy for learning the
mechanics and like the trade of insurance or of I
(06:12):
was on a fixed income trading floor. But I was
fascinated with the people who were there and why they
did what they did. And I had, I like had
a place for that feeling to go, which was my
parents saying, you know, this is a field that you
could go into. And then I just had to work
up the nerve to go into a PhD. M.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Yeah, I can appreciate that. My PhD was really big
response to an early onset mid life crisis.
Speaker 5 (06:35):
That's why I got a PhD.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
No affair at work, no no sports car, no trip
to the outline. Yeah, let's get a PhD. But you know, similarly,
I when I was doing the PhD for my dissertation,
I studied meaning and working identity. I wanted to understand
I was working placing IT people at the time, and
I thought what they were doing was so interesting, right,
I didn't know anything about technology, and I could see
(06:58):
they were changing how we.
Speaker 5 (06:59):
Were community, getting around the world.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Practicing healthcare, and I wanted to know how they were
connected to their work. And so I interviewed twenty five
IT people, and I wanted to understand what is the
relation between meaning and work and identity?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
For you?
Speaker 5 (07:11):
What just work being to you? And I will relate
to your sense of self?
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Because I had people who said to me that they
got into technology because they thought that it would have
the greatest impact on men, coming second only to fire.
And I thought, wow, if you have that kind of
wind in your sales coming into eight o'clock in the morning,
that's pretty powerful. And then other people would say things
like it doesn't matter what kind of work I do,
I am going to imprint it with who I am
(07:36):
and my values. And I thought that's a pretty big
spectrum to populate there, and that's where the interest came from.
But like you, same thing. It's like, this is pretty
cool what these people do. And I never tire of
hearing what people do.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, I agree, it's I think my sense of it
is a little bit of I had a lot of
career in decision coming up as well, which is kind
of funny coming from the background I came from, you know,
with a dad who was doing career assessments, and he
told me early on, like I think you'd enjoy this,
I think you should do this, But I couldn't hear
it from him. Yeah, And so I think having that
(08:13):
experience of not knowing, like what should I do with
my life, that question like occurred to me really really young,
and I think I really identify with people who are
struggling with that question and looking for a meaning in
their life. And I do think I agree that work
can be an incredible place for providing meaning and pursuit
(08:34):
and like all of the things that make make it
possible to kind of manifest your interests, and that is
really interesting to me. I think my interest in leadership
comes from the downstream effect that how we especially in
the workplace, the downstream effect of like how we interact
with other people and the impact that has on their lives,
(08:55):
both in really incredibly positive and horribly negative way.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
No, no question, Ross, and I do want to get
I want to finish with some of that because I
do also believe in the power and the responsibility of
leading people. Before we ever get into that, though, I
do want to first situate you have a very interesting
I think philosophy or framework through which you view leadership.
I think leadership is one of those words that has
(09:21):
become so mainstream that it doesn't really mean anything anymore.
So let's talk about your philosophy, your framework here.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
So you know the framework, such as it is, I
think of it as everyday leadership. I think what was
occurring to me was a couple of things. As this
idea was developing, I was coaching a lot of people
who are in leadership roles and kind of walking with
them through the discomfort of how do I identify with
(09:54):
this idea? And that's at every level from people who
are leading a team for the first time, to people
who are stepping into the CEO role for the first time,
to people who are stepping into a new CEO role
at a different company. There just seemed to be these
events that happened that change the way that we identify
with our work and what it means for me to lead.
(10:18):
And so I started thinking about, well, very practically, people
would say what should I read in this circumstance, And
I found myself referring books to people that kind of
with a caveat, or saying like, read these pages, or
just look at the first half because the last half
is about being a CEO or and I felt like
nothing was really framing leadership up as I saw it
(10:44):
in its most atomic level, like getting to the atomic
parts of what does it mean to lead? And so
I started thinking about that and thinking about if you
start pulling away other psychological constructs from what we associate
with leaders things like authority or power or you know,
in many circumstances like money or just title, if you
(11:08):
start taking those things away, like what's left. And that's
where I arrived at this idea that like, if you
don't think about leadership as emerging in an event or
as part of an endeavor. Then the only thing that's
left is like day to day behavior, and that's incredibly mundane,
but it's really powerful because I think the you know,
(11:29):
the everyday leadership model that I write about in the
book Scales it works at the at the you know,
me and my family level, and it also works at
the person you know creating an electric car company level.
Because you're getting down to, like, what are the actual
elements that make up what we call leadership? And I'm
happy to get into that, but I'll pause there.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
Yeah, let me let me first situate before you get
into some of the elements here. Right, One of the
things that I that struck me is interesting and notable
is you say, at the fundamental level, leadershi is a
relationship with other people, and it is a form of
interaction that is accessible to anyone. And this kind of
framing opens the possibility that leadership happens all the time
between and among all kinds of people. And that so
(12:11):
the repeated gestures in our relationships, of practices of communication
and collaboration and the effort we put into the every
day is really what it is. It's not about these big,
grand theories and these really big grand effects, you know,
and I just think that is so accessible for people.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Yeah. Yeah. The way I started thinking about it, even
more recently than that, is like, leadership is not complicated. Yeah,
what is complicated is how I, as an individual relate
to the idea of leadership. And that's where, like all
of coaching exists, at least leadership coaching, and I think
a lot of that's where also a lot of the
(12:48):
kind of confusion and cross wires and discomfort and lack
of confidence or all of that stuff exists there. And
I think it's because I do this when I do
workshops related to the book, which we start by doing
like free writing exercises about what you think of when
you think of the word leadership, Who do you think of?
What does a leader do? What does a leader not do?
(13:09):
To try to draw to the surface what are called
the implicit leadership theories that you kind of carry around
based on cultural impressions or media that can you consume,
life experiences anything like that. I think the more aware
we become of how much we already think about leadership
and have preconceived notions about it, the easier it becomes
(13:31):
to then say, like do I actually believe that. Do
I identify with that or is this kind of implicit
assumption making my ability to think of myself as a
leader harder? So that's where that idea came out.
Speaker 5 (13:44):
I think that's brilliant. I love that practice. I definitely
want to get into a couple.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
I don't know what else you want to say about
the model, but I definitely wanted to have you talk
about what a leader does in terms of the fundamental elements,
the intrecipation, participation, co operation.
Speaker 5 (13:59):
But I wasn't there if you wanted to situate something
before that.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah, you know, anticipation to the point of like, what
is leadership at the fundamental level? It is a social phenomenon,
which means there have to be is among people. You
can't lead on your own, you know. It's just sort
of like if a leader leads in the woods and
there's nobody there to be led, is leadership happening? Kind
(14:25):
of mixed metaphor. And another thing that that kind of
comes up in these conversations is the discomfort that people
have with the idea of taking time to think in
a leadership position. And I think a little bit of
this is cultural, a little bit of it is you know,
like hustle culture, Like if you're not doing something, you're
(14:45):
not you're not doing something, and the idea of thinking
becomes really stagnant. But it's an essential part of what
it means to lead. And so the model is basically
informed by you know, old behavioral psychoology research from the
fifties and sixties that got at the fundamental factors that
(15:06):
make up leadership, behavior or task or behavior, relationship, oring
and behavior, and chang ory and behavior. I started thinking
about that in like how would I actually talk about
that to a person at a bar? This is kind
of the mode that I was writing in, and I
came up with these ideas of anticipation, participation, cooperation, so
that when leadership is happening, somebody is having a thought
(15:29):
about what they can observe and how they might affect
it or change it. They're taking action on that thought,
and they're inviting people into participate in that, and that's
all it is. Like, that is what leadership is. That's
the phenomenon, and that scales, like I say, all the
way from how I think about my family to starting
(15:50):
a company.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
Awesome. I love that.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
So I want to talk more about each of those
because I think it makes sense. But let's grab our
first break and then we'll come to.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
That sounds good.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, who run here, doctor
Ross Blankenship, who's the founder of the Leadership Coaching and
Consulting from Tuesday Advisors, where he coaches a array of
leaders and leadership teams to improve performance, communication, and decision making.
He also advises founders and investors on leadership assessment and
town strategy.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
We've been talking.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
About his book, Everyday Leadership, will be right back talk
next about how to scale leadership.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Doctor Elise Courts has as 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 at least to his to your organization, please visit
(17:02):
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 a lease A Lisee at Eliscortes dot com. Now
(17:25):
back to working on purpose.
Speaker 5 (17:32):
Thanksteresting with us, and welcome back to working on purpose.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
I'm your host, doctor ales Cortes, as I am dedicated
to help and create a world where people realize her
potential at work are led by inspiration leaders that help
them find and contribute their greatness. And we do business
at Betters the World. I keep researching me writing my
own books, so my last one came out in twenty
twenty three. It's called a Great Revitalization. How activating meaning
and purpose can radically and live in your business. I
root to help readers understand how much their workforce has
(17:58):
changed what they need and want from their work, and
then I provide twenty two best practices to help equip
you to provide that for them in their leadership and
your culture. You can learn about my books by going
to Amazon or my website at least qure test dot
com if you are just joining us. My guest is
doctor Ross Blank and Ship, the author of Everyday Leadership,
a guide to developing your mindset as a leader. So
let's start in a little bit here just to kind
(18:19):
of help our our listeners and viewers become more familiar
with those three tasks of leadership that you mentioned before
the break.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
Where do you want to start?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I'm happy to just kind of pick up and chat
about the model itself. The awesome you know. I've struggled
to come up with like a good slide for the model,
and it only occurred to me after the last talk
I gave that a good image in your mind is
like a wheel with three spokes, because I think what
that helps imply is that each of the three pieces
(18:50):
of the model, anticipation, participation, and cooperation have to be
present in order for leadership to occur or to have occurred.
The idea there is you know, anticipation is thinking, so
it requires kind of observing what's going on, having a
thought about how things could change, what you could do,
(19:14):
a company, you could start. You know, it's really kind
of anything. What we usually call that part of leadership
as a vision. Why I don't like that word is
because it feels totally inaccessible to average people. I think
I think that we all do have vision. I think
it just occurs to us more as like expectations or
(19:36):
imagination or even just ideas for how things could go,
what we could do. So there's that fundamental element of
thinking that's required. But if all you do is think,
you know, you may just be daydreaming, you may be wondering,
you may be reading. You know, there's lots of different
ways to interact with that type of behavior that's not
(19:58):
leadership in order for you to get to leadership, Like
think about the next spoke in the wheel would be participation,
which is acting. So you have to do something with
the thought. You know, if you never if you never
act on it, nothing ever happens. And I think what
I what I like about that combo as kind of
(20:19):
on the route to leadership but not leadership, is you know,
if you have an interesting thought and act on it,
you can be writing, you can be speaking. There's a
lot of things you can do there that are not leadership.
I struggle a little bit with the idea of what
thought leadership might be because I think there are ways
of thinking about I'm you know, I'm writing down ideas
(20:39):
that are in theory, like drawing people in too, some
way of thinking about something that could change. But I
think the the others spoke here is cooperation, which is
there is you have to interact with people about your ideas.
You have to you know, either share them, draw people in.
You have to kind of convince them that it's a
good idea, idea. And the outcome of that is that
(21:03):
you're accomplishing something that an individual can't accomplish. And like
that's when leadership has happened, or when leadership is occurring.
And you know, like I've said, the reason I like
that idea is because it strips away all of the
things that we tend to associate with leadership, like having
a big title or having a I mean, in today's age,
(21:24):
it's like having a big audience. You know, you don't
need any of that stuff to do what is leadership.
You can do it in a single interaction in a day.
It doesn't mean that you're always operating in that way,
but it's just a way of interacting. It's a relationship
that you have with other people that is kind of
defined in certain ways. I like it.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
It's just crisp and it is accessible.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
And then I don't know if that if your model
relates to the next to those behaviors you mentioned before
the breaker, if there's another level in there. But if
you could go on to those, the other behaviors of
relationship tasks can change or to be as well.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Yeah. I think what's useful about having both language around
like anticipation, participation, cooperation and the task relationship and change
orient behavior is it gives you like a footbridge into
the research and into things that you encounter in organizations,
like competency models or assessments. You know, I think it's
(22:26):
a little bit easier to think about what is a
task oring and behavior in an organization? What's a relationship
wearing and behavior? Things like setting goals, giving feedback, change
orent behavior could be like setting a strategy. Those are
the types of things that you encounter in competency models.
And what I like about building that bridge is it
(22:48):
gives people a way of inferior at least evaluating what
am I good at, what do I prefer doing, where
do I get a lot of energy, and using that
to then identify like I may not be as good
at relationship or your behaviors, or like where I need
to develop as change or behaviors in order to round
myself out as a leader. I think it then also
(23:09):
opens the door importantly for like what should you go read?
You know what other what other research should you do?
Because all these books that I refer to people, I
still like the books. It's just that I think it
helps to have a little bit of context around like
what is leadership and how do you relate to that
idea and then identifying like, Okay, what I could use
(23:31):
the help with is you know, how to think more strategically,
and there's tons of resources about how to do that,
or how to build better relationships at work, how to
get along with people. You know, there's I think it
creates avenues and like development angles for people who are
looking to grow.
Speaker 5 (23:53):
Very helpful to segment that.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
Now I love the idea of situating the idea of
of scale, and I wasn't sure or you know, when
you talk about how leadership evolves, if you're also referring
to you know, when we get our first supervisory job,
and then we get the management job, and then we
maybe get the director job or whatever, those are all
different levels. And I tend to segment or different shape
management from leadership. But if we talk about how leadership
(24:18):
in general evolves, and I don't know if you have
a perspective or a view on management versus leadership. Let's
start there. I guess that's.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
A good question. I think I do. I don't know
that it's quite as articulate as others you've written about that.
My tendency is to think that management is a little
bit more of a technical process based practice, and leadership
is more of a relational social practice. You know, I
(24:46):
think functionally in talking about how the task of leadership evolves,
it probably is pretty similar to management. And in fact,
a lot of my thinking about this was shaped by
a management philosopher and psychology Elliott Jacks, who's a Canadian
psychologist who passed away a number of years ago. But
(25:06):
he had a theory called stratified systems theory that was
basically like how close is the individual and the work
that they're doing in an organization. Basically, this is a
very simplified version of it, and the idea is like,
as you get higher, you get farther and farther away
from what's happening. And what is interesting to me about
that is it implies that relationship orent behavior is more
(25:30):
important the higher you get, because you have to be
more influential, you have to you know, you get farther
away from the actual doing of the thing, which means
that it's happening through other people. You're having to convince people,
You're having to communicate more effectively. And I think the
other thing that's interesting about that is even just the
(25:50):
idea that the task of leadership evolves should shape how
you think about approaching new jobs. I think there can
be a tendency to think I've learned how to lead,
and so I'm a leader end of growth. And I
think the better way to think about it is this
changes all the time. It may be different day to day.
(26:10):
It's certainly going to be different as you rise up
in an organization or as you work in different types
of organizations. And that's to say nothing of like how
do you actually relate to the task of leadership at
an identity level? You know, one of the things I
talk about is the feeling of being productive will change
as you as the scale of your leadership changes. And
(26:31):
most of us learn how to feel productive by doing work.
You know, a lawyer reviews documents, a psychologist does assessments.
Maybe you know there's an amount of like, I'm doing
the task and the product is done, and I have
the product in my hand. At the very highest level,
you may be doing none of that, and so you
have to kind of rethink what does it mean for
(26:52):
me to be productive here? And probably at the most
senior levels, the most productive thing you can do is
the least tangible. You know, it is influencing people. It's
convincing them of something or getting them on board. So
I think that that kind of changing psychological nature of
leadership is what interests me about that.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
I really like how you how you have elucidated that.
I think that really is it just really does help explain.
And then I think the higher you go, the better
you have to be at uniting people as well, just
the influencer piece of course. Okay, well, so let's go
on here. The next thing that I want to get
into from your book that I appreciated. I mean, what
I try to do is just take a little bit
(27:32):
sub chunction with different chapters that I that I that
I really was connected to. But I like the idea
of you know, learning how your practice leadership of course
is committing that you mentioned earlier, committing to a process
of learning. So let's talk about kind of how you
situate what's involved in learning m.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
You know, It's funny, the more I have taught and
thought about what is involved in learning, the more I
think is just being uncomfortable. I think a lot of
a lot of the conversation are on learning. I think
it brings up the topic of imposter phenomenon or syndrome,
(28:12):
if you want to call it that. You know, I've
started to even think about it just as like imposter
feelings because I think they're so common, and they're especially
common among effective, successful people, which is kind of where
the idea comes from. Is like, you know, you have
impostor phenomenon if you are successful, but you don't feel
like you belong, so there's an amount of of pre
(28:33):
existing evidence that you're wrong. That's related. And I think
if you if you think about kind of the precursors
to that feeling, to feeling like an impostor and the
feelings of learning something new, they're almost the exact same.
You know, it's I don't know enough, I shouldn't be
doing this. This is hard. You know, there's an amount
(28:55):
of general discomfort. One of things I like, I can't
remember who talks about this, but basically it's like, if
you want to get good at anything. The main thing
you need to get good at is feeling bad at it,
because that means you're learning, you know, you're pushing the
boundary of your confidence. The reason I like thinking of
leadership as a practice is because it implies that it's
(29:17):
not an accomplishment. It's not something that you arrive at.
It's something that you're continually thinking about and working on
and evaluating in a process of you know, let me
observe to the extent that I can and maybe even
getting others, you know, in like a three sixty multi
radar feedback type process, where am I what do I
(29:38):
want to be doing? How am I lining up with that?
What do I do to shore up the gap? And
then you're kind of continually doing that, And I think
that's how you can become more adaptable to changing circumstances,
become more adaptable to the changing nature of leadership. As
leadership scals like, all of these things I think are
kind of bake into that idea of you have to
(29:58):
be open to to learning and being uncomfortable in order
to get better at things.
Speaker 4 (30:04):
Yeah, and then they also mentioned situational awareness too, that
is so so important as being able to recognize, you
know what when you walk into a room, for example,
and does everybody stop talking that might tell you something,
you know, or does everybody just immediately, you know, brace
themselves or you look like they're afraid, or are they
(30:25):
leaning in and looking welcoming? Those are all paying attention
to those sorts of things I think is really important.
And then of course you also say and then the
fourth thing that you mentioned was something like improvisation, which
I thought was really interesting if you can stay more
about both the situational awareness and the improvisation.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah, yeah, you know, situational awareness, situational judgment. That's that
also relates idea of like leadership as a practice to me,
which is which is why I push really hard against
like the five practices of every leader, or like the
seven things that you have to do, because it's super
different for each individual and each circumstance that they find
(31:05):
themselves in. And I think what it requires then to
learn what to do is is evaluating the circumstance. You know,
I don't know that I would say the everyday leadership
model works quite like this, but I think even just
thinking like if I walk into a room and everybody
like gets quiet and backs up intense. It's like to
(31:28):
me that says, like what you need to do. You
need to like go through your mental rolodex, like relationship
or your behavior, Like you need to connect right. You know.
It's like if nobody stops talking and everybody's having a
great time, that's great, but like you might need to
get everybody on task. You know. It's sort of a
way of thinking through, like what's the lever that I
need to pull here in order to try to lead
(31:52):
the improv thing. I've come to like that idea more
and more on a see a lot of from listening
to people on podcasts like on Cone O'Brien needs a Friend,
like listening to people who are trained and improblem in
the way that they interact with other people who do improv.
(32:13):
There's an amount of like not having any attachment to
how you think things should go yes, that I think
opens you up to like being more observant to what
is happening. There's sort of like a radical acceptance of
like here is what's happening, and in that circumstance you're
saying like yes and and kind of following the thought
(32:33):
as it goes. I like that idea in the leadership
practice as a way of pushing yourself to be more
open to what is happening and how do you respond
to it, rather than saying like, this is not what
should be happening, what I thought wanted to happen was X,
Y or Z. I think you can get kind of
wrapped around the axle of your expectations in that way
(32:55):
and not attend to the actual needful thing in the moment. Sorry,
go ahead, Oh.
Speaker 5 (33:02):
I was just going to say.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
I've been taking new proquests for a couple of years now,
and for just exactly that reason. It helps me so
much more effective with my own team, much more than workshops.
It just allows me to be able to play with
that which is gets present and served up among the
group that I wouldn't have ever anticipated.
Speaker 5 (33:20):
It's better than that.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely, I think facilitating groups, it's it's
critical to do that because it's usually like the little
random tangents that you pull on that create the better insights. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
Yeah, and it's not it's not you know, something that
is just you know, we I want to say tired,
and you know you play it from all the time.
Speaker 5 (33:40):
It's truly is totally fresh and creative.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Yes, I also like, I just bought this book. I'm
gonna I'm going to blank on the author's name. It's
called Improv Wisdom. It's from the former uh uh. It's
a woman who's a professor at Stanford and she either
taught or teaches an improv class there to like business
school students, and it's a really popular bus. But the
subtitle of the book is don't prepare, just show up.
(34:05):
And I kind of like that too. It's like, just
like strip away all of your preconceived notions and just
show up and go be you know, go be you.
That's another idea that I that is kind of woven
into the everyday leadership ideas. You have to develop sort
of your own theory of what it means for you
to lead. Because the more energy you've been trying to
(34:28):
fit yourself into a model that you've either like adapted
or acquired or passively accepted or whatever, the less sustainable
it is every time. And I will tell you from
having coach leaders who are in very high level jobs,
it is incredibly stressful. And if you're wasting energy trying
to do it in a way that you think it
(34:49):
should be done rather than just how you do it.
You're going to run out of energy, you know, you're
going to burn yourself out, or you're going to just
do it in a way that's you know, it comes
so unnatural that people experience that, and it makes it
harder to connect.
Speaker 4 (35:05):
Love the conversation. Here we are, let's grab our last break.
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes on air with doctor
Ross Blankenship, the founder of the leadership coaching and consulting
firm Tuesday Advisors, where he coaches a wide array of
leaders and leadership teams to improve performance, communication, and decision making.
He also advises founders and investors on leadership assessment and
talent strategy. You're talking about his model and some of
(35:27):
the elements of what he believes are the critical behaviors
of leadership. After the break, we're going to dive into
the idea of how at tension shapes our behavior.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Doctor Elise Court has as 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 Alease to speak to your organization, please visit her
(36:15):
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 Lise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to
(36:39):
working on Purpose.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
Thanks for sting with us, and welcome back to working
on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor release Cortes. I mentioned
in the last brink that my book came out to
great vialization. What I did for you is I created
a very simple three page organizational assessment that you can
pull off my website gusterdashnal dot com, and it will
help you ascertain the extent to which your current culture
really meets the needs and wants it today's discerning workforce.
(37:06):
You can find it at gustodeshnow dot com. If you
are just now joining us. My guest is doctor Ross Blenkinship,
the author of Everyday Leadership, a guide to developing your
mindset as a leader, So getting into this idea, this
and this makes complete sense to me as well. You
talk about how attention shapes behavior, and of course you're
interested in the voluntary kind, how we direct our attention
(37:27):
and to decide what to focus on. Talk to us
a bit about the power of attention.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, yeah, you know, attention is interesting. It's especially interesting
in this kind of cultural moment that we live in.
There's a lot of even recently books coming out like
Chris Hayes's new book or Sole and Focus. There are
lots of books that talk about how much, especially social
media kind of creates this addictive pattern for drawing our
(37:58):
attention in some places. It's interesting even rereading the little
segment about voluntary versus involuntary attention and thinking about social
media and starting to wonder, like, how much voluntary attention
do we actually have? But I think, you know, the
thing that is interesting to me about that is also
(38:19):
tied up in the everyday noss of this idea, which
is you have a limited amount of time and kind
of attention in a day to sit down and do
whatever it is you're going to do. And if the
thing you're doing is you know, doing work at your
(38:39):
desk rather than going and talking to people. You will
probably accomplish something, but you have to evaluate, like how
much of what am I I'm accomplishing is helping my
group or my organization or whatever get towards the goal
that we're trying to accomplish together. And I think the
reason I like attention in this context is it's so individualistic.
(39:05):
You know, we all know that feeling of being drawn
in by something or or the task of trying to
train your attention on something. But I think it implies
at the very kind of day to day, moment to
moment level where this occurs, this idea of you have
to train your attention on the thing that you're trying
(39:26):
to pursue, where you can't like create anything. You know,
the you can relate to this, and this is the
way that it occurs to me as somebody who's written
a book, so much of the work is just sitting
down to do it without overthinking, like what am I
going to do when I sit down, Like you just
(39:47):
have to get to the desk and like train your
attention on it, and you know, over time it becomes
a book. But if you can't sit down and do it,
it will not. And I think a little bit of
that is related to probably think about leading other people
and being a social phenomenon. You know, this comes out
in the research as people who are extroverted tend to
(40:08):
be tend to over represent people in leadership positions. I
think a little bit of that is just people who
are extroverted enjoy being around other people and get energy
from that. It has nothing to do with being extroverted
meaning that you're a better leader. But I think what's
helpful in thinking about that in this context is you know,
(40:30):
if being around people and having conversations all the time
is exhausting and you don't enjoy it, then leading in
some circumstances is going to be exhausting and you want
enjoy it. And so I think, you know, the more
that you can boil down, like what is the actual
task and what I'm trying to accomplish related to what
do I want to attend to during the day, it
(40:51):
can be a really helpful way I think of directing
your energy in a way that will help you be
either kind of deductive in a way that you want
to be in order to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish.
Or not.
Speaker 4 (41:05):
And I think we can extend this conversation about attention
here in terms of what are you trying to accomplish?
I really like your three frames of pragmatic, strategic, and existential.
We've got to talk about those for us.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
So this is a model that I call thinking in frames.
I think this kind of emerged out of helping people
think through career decisions, where the so at the fundamental
kind of day to day level, there's the pragmatic level.
I think of the strategic level as kind of the
(41:40):
next level of the how am I thinking about the future,
and that can be anywhere from tomorrow to three years
from now plus and then the existential is kind of
the broadest, you know, basically like what does my life mean?
What do I want it to mean? How do I
want to spend my time on earth? You know, getting
(42:02):
out into the broadest possible philosophical context of like what
does it mean to be a person? What does it
mean to know things? In like a more pragmatic way,
in a more kind of academic way. I think of
this as an approach to coaching that's basically like cognitive
behavioral coaching with an existential rapper because you know, I
(42:27):
think cognitive behavioral methods can be incredibly powerful and useful,
and they all have a limit. You know, if you
if you get all the way out to the edge
of like what you can think and do and feel,
inevitably you encounter things like theology and spirituality and questions
about what does any of this mean. You know, you
(42:50):
can help somebody be incredibly successful in the profession, and
frequently what happens is if they achieve a very tangible
goal that they've been pursuing for a long time, it
is either a relief because they've been after it for
so long. This is there's research about Olympians don't feel joy.
(43:12):
Typically they feel relief when they win a medal and
it lasts, you know, a couple of days. There there's
an article I think it was in The New Yorker
about like the Therapists to the Stars, who said, you know,
I typically don't hear from my Oscar Winter clients for
about three weeks, but it wears off and then you realize, like, oh,
(43:35):
achieving that didn't change like how I feel about things
or the fact that I'm still me, And those questions
are all existential questions. They are not you can't quite
get at them. I think in the same kind of
comitive behavioral way. So this thinking in Frame's idea is
how do you shift from the very pragmatic what can
I do today? What do I have control over to
(43:57):
the extent that I have control over things. The strategic
level then is like what am I willing to do
today in order to make something happen in the future,
So that could be I'm going to go to business
school because it's going to set me up two years
from now to be able to do, you know, consulting
or something. And then the existential level is and how
do I want to spend my time? You know, what
(44:19):
does it mean to be a person? What do I
want to accomplish in my life, not just in my profession.
And the kind of method there is is not planting
yourself in any one of those brains, but it's cycling
through them. So really simple example could be I'm going
to change jobs to get a raise. You know, at
(44:40):
the pragmatic level, you might say, like we need more
money to support our family. Strategically, you might say this
is going to put you in like a different career trajectory.
Is that were the direction you want to be going,
and existentially you might say it's going to require a
lot more time, and what I really want to do
is spend time with my family. So it's a way
of kind of figuring out what are the parameters that
(45:01):
you're solving for and how do they impact ultimately, like
your values, you know, and what you want to prioritize
in your life.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
I really like that, again, very accessible. We're coming close
to the very end of the show here. We have
a couple of minutes left here. I want to finish
with where we kind of started ross and that was
what do we owe the people we lead?
Speaker 5 (45:23):
You know?
Speaker 2 (45:23):
It's it's an interesting question that I got past the question.
I kind of I kind of like it just as
a question rather than something that I feel equipped to answer.
You know. The short answer I think would be, we
owe something to the people that we lead. You know,
(45:44):
I kind of end the book on the impact that
we have on the people around us, and especially you know,
to get back to where we started, especially in leadership positions,
because you may have an amount of authority or control
or power or whatever over somebody else's life and the
way that you interact with them. Absolutely goes home with
(46:06):
them through the door. You know, this is the idea
that I kind of think of as the leadership commons,
Like what does it mean to have an impact as
a leader for the common good of the people around you?
Which is to say, you are having an impact, whether
it's good or bad, whether you're aware of it or not,
whether you're trying to be intentional about it or not,
(46:28):
the impact is happening. You know, there is no neutral here,
and I think you know in that way, you have
a responsibility in a leadership role to be mindful of that,
you know, to at least consider the question what do
I owe the people that I lead? Yeah, you know,
I attempted to kind of get into the philosophy of
(46:50):
like like what do we owe other people? Which is
a really rich philosophical stream that I'm kind of ill
equipped to navigate solo, I think, and I kind of
wound up just leaving it as an open question in
the book because I think it raises so many other
important questions that I think can bring people into other
(47:11):
areas of their life that they tend to court an
off for work in a useful way, Because ultimately, I
think you have to kind of show up as a
leader in the kind of fully individualized way that you
can in order to be as effective as you can
be as yourself. I like the.
Speaker 4 (47:33):
Questions that you ask in that particular chap, and what
kind of impact are you having? Are you grinding people
down or building them up? Are you holding them accountable
by letting them know only when they fall short or
given them the feedback showing them how to improve and
teach them how to excel? Are you infusing positivity or
injecting negativity into leadership comments? I think those are valuable questions,
(47:53):
and I can tell you I mean in the work
that I do in organizations. You know, leadership is such
a personal thing. As you say in your can I agree,
And oftentimes leaders are not aware of the impact they
have on the people, for better or for worse.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Yeah. Yeah, I've experienced that directly and I've observed it
indirectly as well. It is an unfortunate reality.
Speaker 5 (48:15):
Yeah, which is why why we exist.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Right.
Speaker 5 (48:18):
So we've come to the end of the show here.
Speaker 4 (48:20):
While this shows us some of my people around the
world that care about improving their own connection to their work,
becoming a better leader, and trying to build organizations that
really aren't doing things that better the world?
Speaker 5 (48:30):
What would you like to leave them with?
Speaker 2 (48:34):
The question that I always come back to in my
own mind and in my work with people is what
are you trying to accomplish? You know? I had a
client yesterday say, I you asked me that question, and
I've been thinking about it and I can't sleep because
if you really ask yourself the question, I think there's
an easy answer, like I'm trying to grow my company,
(48:56):
you know, But if you really ask it at the
broadest possible level, zoom all the way out to the
existential level, like what are you trying to accomplish? It
can have a reorienting effect on your whole life, and
I think a really positive way, And it's a it's
a powerful question to ask in any circumstance, what are
you trying to accomplish?
Speaker 4 (49:15):
Yeah, beautiful us very happy to know you, to learn
from you, and if not be connected with you.
Speaker 5 (49:21):
Thank you for being on working in a purpose and
sharing your heart and your soul. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
My closure, Thanks so much for having me les.
Speaker 5 (49:27):
Very very welcome listeners.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
In a fewers you were going to you want to
learn more about doctor Ross Blankenship, the work he does
at Tuesday Advisors and his books. You can start by
visiting a couple sites. His personal site is Ross Blankenship
dot io, So Blankenship b l A N K I
N s h I, P Ross Blanketship dot io or
his company site Tuesday Advisors dot com. Last week, if
(49:51):
you missed the live show, you can always catch up
you recorded podcast. We were on air with Monica Mitchell,
who was built a thirty year career at AT and
T where she has moved seven times. Today she leads
an organization of one hundred and twenty employees and manages
a three billion dollars software development portfolio. We talked about
how the workforce has changed in the last few years
and how we can design a workplace that meets the
needs and wants of today and tomorrow's workforce. Next week
(50:14):
will be on the air with Toneil Miller talking about
her book The Flourishing Effect, Unlocking Employee thriving and high
Performance as your competitive Advantage. See you there, Remember that
work as one of the best adventures and meanings and
realizing our potential and making the impact we crave and
can give us the opportunity to do business in a
way that betters the world.
Speaker 5 (50:31):
So let's work on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
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 C. Why 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
(50:56):
on Purpose.
The topics and opinions express in the following show are
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(00:20):
for choosing W FOURCY Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
What's Working on Purpose? Anyway?
Speaker 3 (00:30):
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
(00:53):
usher in this world we all want Working on Purpose. Now,
here's your host, doctor Elise Cortes.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program. Thanks for
tuning it again this week. Great to have you. This
program has been brought to you with passion your pride
since February of twenty fifteen. I'm your host, doctor Eleas
corre Test. If we've not met before, you don't know me.
I'm an organizational psychologist, management consultant, lawal therapists, speaker and author.
My team and I at Gusto Now help companies in
live and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high
(01:26):
performance culture and inspirational leadership activated by meaning and purpose.
And did you know that inspired employees outperform their satisfied
peers by a factor of two point twenty five to one.
In other words, inspiration is good for the bottom line.
We've learned more abouts on how we can work together
at gustodashnow dot com or my personal website at leastcore
test dot com. Before we get into today's program, I
am thrilled to announce that registration is open for a
(01:48):
fabulous new conference for women for which I'll serve as
the MC. It's called Thrive in twenty five and said
jam packed a few days in Chicago June twenty fifth,
three and twenty eight, twenty twenty five, and it's designed
to develop women as whole seals from bolstering your mindset
to your financial acumen, to leadership, to incorporating nature and
art into your life to raisee consciousness and much more.
Visit thrive in twenty five for information and to register.
(02:11):
You can use my promo code Gusto all caps to
gain access to free books and programs. I'll be gifting
registers as well. See you there now getting today's program
we have with us today. Doctor Ross Blankenship and organizational psychologist,
executive coach and lecture at the University of Virginia. He's
the founder of the Leadership Coaching and Consulting from two
Sday Advisors, where he coaches a wide variet of leaders
(02:33):
and leadership teams to improve performance, communication, and decision making.
He also advises founders and investors on leadership assessment and
talent strategy. He's the author of Everyday Leadership, a Guide
to developing your mindset as a Leader, which we'll be
talking about today. He joins us from Birmingham, Alabama. Doctor Blankenship,
welcome to working on Purpose.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Hey, thank you for having me.
Speaker 5 (02:54):
Absolutely, it's always wonderful.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
As we were talking about the break before there we
got on just delight in being able to meet people
to come with my podcast toward wouldn't otherwise have any
reason to meet.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
So welcome, Thank you. Yeah, it's fun to be here.
This has been a fun treat of having written a book.
It's being able to go and meet new people and
learn more about the podcast world.
Speaker 5 (03:16):
Oh yeah. I want to first ask why name your company?
Tuesday Advisors? What a fun name?
Speaker 2 (03:24):
I get this question a lot, which may not surprise you.
I call it an idea that was in search of
some meaning. But the short answer is I had a
software company from twenty twenty to about twenty twenty two
that was called Leader, but it was spelled l EA
d HR, and everybody called it lead hr, unsurprisingly. And
(03:44):
so when we sold the intellectual property from that and
shut it down and I was starting Tuesday Advisors, I
was working with a designer and told her I needed
something that nobody would ever mispronounce, and she sent me
a list of words, one of which was Tuesday. That
asked her why Tuesdays is like every other day of
the week seems to have something about it except Tuesday.
(04:05):
So I thought, maybe you could like own that space.
What's interesting about that though? Is it actually was like
a precursor idea to the everyday the everyday idea, I
started to think of Tuesday as you know, it's after
the beginning, but before the end is in sight, which
is when we need the most help, of the most support,
And that became kind of an ethos around coaching, and
(04:28):
it was part of where the idea for every day
leadership that title came from.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
I ask so cool, Well, you know I often ask
people because I care very much ross about the world
of work. I believe very strongly in the power of
work to help catalyze us into our higher potential and
to give us a sense of impact and fulfillment. So
that's why an organizational psychologist and not, for example, a
clinical psychologist.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
Or anything like that.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
And of course you know you have a background at
organizational psychology and leadership as well.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
Why choose this field? Why not accounting, architecture or whatever
else there.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Might be out there. Yeah, you know, the short answer
there is I grew up in a family of mental
health professionals. My dad trained as a neuros psychologist, but
after the invention of the cat scan machine, actually his
job was basically assessing evaluating patients in hospitals to figure
(05:25):
out what part of their brain had been damaged, and
the cat scan machine does that, you know, with computer imaging.
So he went through his own kind of career disruption
that way and started working with companies and did organizational
consulting psychology for forty years after that. So I knew
that it was a field which was important. My mom
was a social worker and a therapist. And you know,
(05:49):
the thing that I say about work is growing up,
the thing I heard from my parents when they came
home from work was I met the most interesting person today.
And when I graduated from university and started trying other fields,
I went into insurance, I went into finance. I just
found that I had almost no energy for learning the
mechanics and like the trade of insurance or of I
(06:12):
was on a fixed income trading floor. But I was
fascinated with the people who were there and why they
did what they did. And I had, I like had
a place for that feeling to go, which was my
parents saying, you know, this is a field that you
could go into. And then I just had to work
up the nerve to go into a PhD. M.
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Yeah, I can appreciate that. My PhD was really big
response to an early onset mid life crisis.
Speaker 5 (06:35):
That's why I got a PhD.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
No affair at work, no no sports car, no trip
to the outline. Yeah, let's get a PhD. But you know, similarly,
I when I was doing the PhD for my dissertation,
I studied meaning and working identity. I wanted to understand
I was working placing IT people at the time, and
I thought what they were doing was so interesting, right,
I didn't know anything about technology, and I could see
(06:58):
they were changing how we.
Speaker 5 (06:59):
Were community, getting around the world.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Practicing healthcare, and I wanted to know how they were
connected to their work. And so I interviewed twenty five
IT people, and I wanted to understand what is the
relation between meaning and work and identity?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
For you?
Speaker 5 (07:11):
What just work being to you? And I will relate
to your sense of self?
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Because I had people who said to me that they
got into technology because they thought that it would have
the greatest impact on men, coming second only to fire.
And I thought, wow, if you have that kind of
wind in your sales coming into eight o'clock in the morning,
that's pretty powerful. And then other people would say things
like it doesn't matter what kind of work I do,
I am going to imprint it with who I am
(07:36):
and my values. And I thought that's a pretty big
spectrum to populate there, and that's where the interest came from.
But like you, same thing. It's like, this is pretty
cool what these people do. And I never tire of
hearing what people do.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, I agree, it's I think my sense of it
is a little bit of I had a lot of
career in decision coming up as well, which is kind
of funny coming from the background I came from, you know,
with a dad who was doing career assessments, and he
told me early on, like I think you'd enjoy this,
I think you should do this, But I couldn't hear
it from him. Yeah, And so I think having that
(08:13):
experience of not knowing, like what should I do with
my life, that question like occurred to me really really young,
and I think I really identify with people who are
struggling with that question and looking for a meaning in
their life. And I do think I agree that work
can be an incredible place for providing meaning and pursuit
(08:34):
and like all of the things that make make it
possible to kind of manifest your interests, and that is
really interesting to me. I think my interest in leadership
comes from the downstream effect that how we especially in
the workplace, the downstream effect of like how we interact
with other people and the impact that has on their lives,
(08:55):
both in really incredibly positive and horribly negative way.
Speaker 4 (09:00):
No, no question, Ross, and I do want to get
I want to finish with some of that because I
do also believe in the power and the responsibility of
leading people. Before we ever get into that, though, I
do want to first situate you have a very interesting
I think philosophy or framework through which you view leadership.
I think leadership is one of those words that has
(09:21):
become so mainstream that it doesn't really mean anything anymore.
So let's talk about your philosophy, your framework here.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
So you know the framework, such as it is, I
think of it as everyday leadership. I think what was
occurring to me was a couple of things. As this
idea was developing, I was coaching a lot of people
who are in leadership roles and kind of walking with
them through the discomfort of how do I identify with
(09:54):
this idea? And that's at every level from people who
are leading a team for the first time, to people
who are stepping into the CEO role for the first time,
to people who are stepping into a new CEO role
at a different company. There just seemed to be these
events that happened that change the way that we identify
with our work and what it means for me to lead.
(10:18):
And so I started thinking about, well, very practically, people
would say what should I read in this circumstance, And
I found myself referring books to people that kind of
with a caveat, or saying like, read these pages, or
just look at the first half because the last half
is about being a CEO or and I felt like
nothing was really framing leadership up as I saw it
(10:44):
in its most atomic level, like getting to the atomic
parts of what does it mean to lead? And so
I started thinking about that and thinking about if you
start pulling away other psychological constructs from what we associate
with leaders things like authority or power or you know,
in many circumstances like money or just title, if you
(11:08):
start taking those things away, like what's left. And that's
where I arrived at this idea that like, if you
don't think about leadership as emerging in an event or
as part of an endeavor. Then the only thing that's
left is like day to day behavior, and that's incredibly mundane,
but it's really powerful because I think the you know,
(11:29):
the everyday leadership model that I write about in the
book Scales it works at the at the you know,
me and my family level, and it also works at
the person you know creating an electric car company level.
Because you're getting down to, like, what are the actual
elements that make up what we call leadership? And I'm
happy to get into that, but I'll pause there.
Speaker 4 (11:50):
Yeah, let me let me first situate before you get
into some of the elements here. Right, One of the
things that I that struck me is interesting and notable
is you say, at the fundamental level, leadershi is a
relationship with other people, and it is a form of
interaction that is accessible to anyone. And this kind of
framing opens the possibility that leadership happens all the time
between and among all kinds of people. And that so
(12:11):
the repeated gestures in our relationships, of practices of communication
and collaboration and the effort we put into the every
day is really what it is. It's not about these big,
grand theories and these really big grand effects, you know,
and I just think that is so accessible for people.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Yeah. Yeah. The way I started thinking about it, even
more recently than that, is like, leadership is not complicated. Yeah,
what is complicated is how I, as an individual relate
to the idea of leadership. And that's where, like all
of coaching exists, at least leadership coaching, and I think
a lot of that's where also a lot of the
(12:48):
kind of confusion and cross wires and discomfort and lack
of confidence or all of that stuff exists there. And
I think it's because I do this when I do
workshops related to the book, which we start by doing
like free writing exercises about what you think of when
you think of the word leadership, Who do you think of?
What does a leader do? What does a leader not do?
(13:09):
To try to draw to the surface what are called
the implicit leadership theories that you kind of carry around
based on cultural impressions or media that can you consume,
life experiences anything like that. I think the more aware
we become of how much we already think about leadership
and have preconceived notions about it, the easier it becomes
(13:31):
to then say, like do I actually believe that. Do
I identify with that or is this kind of implicit
assumption making my ability to think of myself as a
leader harder? So that's where that idea came out.
Speaker 5 (13:44):
I think that's brilliant. I love that practice. I definitely
want to get into a couple.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
I don't know what else you want to say about
the model, but I definitely wanted to have you talk
about what a leader does in terms of the fundamental elements,
the intrecipation, participation, co operation.
Speaker 5 (13:59):
But I wasn't there if you wanted to situate something
before that.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yeah, you know, anticipation to the point of like, what
is leadership at the fundamental level? It is a social phenomenon,
which means there have to be is among people. You
can't lead on your own, you know. It's just sort
of like if a leader leads in the woods and
there's nobody there to be led, is leadership happening? Kind
(14:25):
of mixed metaphor. And another thing that that kind of
comes up in these conversations is the discomfort that people
have with the idea of taking time to think in
a leadership position. And I think a little bit of
this is cultural, a little bit of it is you know,
like hustle culture, Like if you're not doing something, you're
(14:45):
not you're not doing something, and the idea of thinking
becomes really stagnant. But it's an essential part of what
it means to lead. And so the model is basically
informed by you know, old behavioral psychoology research from the
fifties and sixties that got at the fundamental factors that
(15:06):
make up leadership, behavior or task or behavior, relationship, oring
and behavior, and chang ory and behavior. I started thinking
about that in like how would I actually talk about
that to a person at a bar? This is kind
of the mode that I was writing in, and I
came up with these ideas of anticipation, participation, cooperation, so
that when leadership is happening, somebody is having a thought
(15:29):
about what they can observe and how they might affect
it or change it. They're taking action on that thought,
and they're inviting people into participate in that, and that's
all it is. Like, that is what leadership is. That's
the phenomenon, and that scales, like I say, all the
way from how I think about my family to starting
(15:50):
a company.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
Awesome. I love that.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
So I want to talk more about each of those
because I think it makes sense. But let's grab our
first break and then we'll come to.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
That sounds good.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, who run here, doctor
Ross Blankenship, who's the founder of the Leadership Coaching and
Consulting from Tuesday Advisors, where he coaches a array of
leaders and leadership teams to improve performance, communication, and decision making.
He also advises founders and investors on leadership assessment and
town strategy.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
We've been talking.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
About his book, Everyday Leadership, will be right back talk
next about how to scale leadership.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
Doctor Elise Courts has as 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 at least to his to your organization, please visit
(17:02):
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 a lease A Lisee at Eliscortes dot com. Now
(17:25):
back to working on purpose.
Speaker 5 (17:32):
Thanksteresting with us, and welcome back to working on purpose.
Speaker 4 (17:34):
I'm your host, doctor ales Cortes, as I am dedicated
to help and create a world where people realize her
potential at work are led by inspiration leaders that help
them find and contribute their greatness. And we do business
at Betters the World. I keep researching me writing my
own books, so my last one came out in twenty
twenty three. It's called a Great Revitalization. How activating meaning
and purpose can radically and live in your business. I
root to help readers understand how much their workforce has
(17:58):
changed what they need and want from their work, and
then I provide twenty two best practices to help equip
you to provide that for them in their leadership and
your culture. You can learn about my books by going
to Amazon or my website at least qure test dot
com if you are just joining us. My guest is
doctor Ross Blank and Ship, the author of Everyday Leadership,
a guide to developing your mindset as a leader. So
let's start in a little bit here just to kind
(18:19):
of help our our listeners and viewers become more familiar
with those three tasks of leadership that you mentioned before
the break.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
Where do you want to start?
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I'm happy to just kind of pick up and chat
about the model itself. The awesome you know. I've struggled
to come up with like a good slide for the model,
and it only occurred to me after the last talk
I gave that a good image in your mind is
like a wheel with three spokes, because I think what
that helps imply is that each of the three pieces
(18:50):
of the model, anticipation, participation, and cooperation have to be
present in order for leadership to occur or to have occurred.
The idea there is you know, anticipation is thinking, so
it requires kind of observing what's going on, having a
thought about how things could change, what you could do,
(19:14):
a company, you could start. You know, it's really kind
of anything. What we usually call that part of leadership
as a vision. Why I don't like that word is
because it feels totally inaccessible to average people. I think
I think that we all do have vision. I think
it just occurs to us more as like expectations or
(19:36):
imagination or even just ideas for how things could go,
what we could do. So there's that fundamental element of
thinking that's required. But if all you do is think,
you know, you may just be daydreaming, you may be wondering,
you may be reading. You know, there's lots of different
ways to interact with that type of behavior that's not
(19:58):
leadership in order for you to get to leadership, Like
think about the next spoke in the wheel would be participation,
which is acting. So you have to do something with
the thought. You know, if you never if you never
act on it, nothing ever happens. And I think what
I what I like about that combo as kind of
(20:19):
on the route to leadership but not leadership, is you know,
if you have an interesting thought and act on it,
you can be writing, you can be speaking. There's a
lot of things you can do there that are not leadership.
I struggle a little bit with the idea of what
thought leadership might be because I think there are ways
of thinking about I'm you know, I'm writing down ideas
(20:39):
that are in theory, like drawing people in too, some
way of thinking about something that could change. But I
think the the others spoke here is cooperation, which is
there is you have to interact with people about your ideas.
You have to you know, either share them, draw people in.
You have to kind of convince them that it's a
good idea, idea. And the outcome of that is that
(21:03):
you're accomplishing something that an individual can't accomplish. And like
that's when leadership has happened, or when leadership is occurring.
And you know, like I've said, the reason I like
that idea is because it strips away all of the
things that we tend to associate with leadership, like having
a big title or having a I mean, in today's age,
(21:24):
it's like having a big audience. You know, you don't
need any of that stuff to do what is leadership.
You can do it in a single interaction in a day.
It doesn't mean that you're always operating in that way,
but it's just a way of interacting. It's a relationship
that you have with other people that is kind of
defined in certain ways. I like it.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
It's just crisp and it is accessible.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
And then I don't know if that if your model
relates to the next to those behaviors you mentioned before
the breaker, if there's another level in there. But if
you could go on to those, the other behaviors of
relationship tasks can change or to be as well.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Yeah. I think what's useful about having both language around
like anticipation, participation, cooperation and the task relationship and change
orient behavior is it gives you like a footbridge into
the research and into things that you encounter in organizations,
like competency models or assessments. You know, I think it's
(22:26):
a little bit easier to think about what is a
task oring and behavior in an organization? What's a relationship
wearing and behavior? Things like setting goals, giving feedback, change
orent behavior could be like setting a strategy. Those are
the types of things that you encounter in competency models.
And what I like about building that bridge is it
(22:48):
gives people a way of inferior at least evaluating what
am I good at, what do I prefer doing, where
do I get a lot of energy, and using that
to then identify like I may not be as good
at relationship or your behaviors, or like where I need
to develop as change or behaviors in order to round
myself out as a leader. I think it then also
(23:09):
opens the door importantly for like what should you go read?
You know what other what other research should you do?
Because all these books that I refer to people, I
still like the books. It's just that I think it
helps to have a little bit of context around like
what is leadership and how do you relate to that
idea and then identifying like, Okay, what I could use
(23:31):
the help with is you know, how to think more strategically,
and there's tons of resources about how to do that,
or how to build better relationships at work, how to
get along with people. You know, there's I think it
creates avenues and like development angles for people who are
looking to grow.
Speaker 5 (23:53):
Very helpful to segment that.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
Now I love the idea of situating the idea of
of scale, and I wasn't sure or you know, when
you talk about how leadership evolves, if you're also referring
to you know, when we get our first supervisory job,
and then we get the management job, and then we
maybe get the director job or whatever, those are all
different levels. And I tend to segment or different shape
management from leadership. But if we talk about how leadership
(24:18):
in general evolves, and I don't know if you have
a perspective or a view on management versus leadership. Let's
start there. I guess that's.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
A good question. I think I do. I don't know
that it's quite as articulate as others you've written about that.
My tendency is to think that management is a little
bit more of a technical process based practice, and leadership
is more of a relational social practice. You know, I
(24:46):
think functionally in talking about how the task of leadership evolves,
it probably is pretty similar to management. And in fact,
a lot of my thinking about this was shaped by
a management philosopher and psychology Elliott Jacks, who's a Canadian
psychologist who passed away a number of years ago. But
(25:06):
he had a theory called stratified systems theory that was
basically like how close is the individual and the work
that they're doing in an organization. Basically, this is a
very simplified version of it, and the idea is like,
as you get higher, you get farther and farther away
from what's happening. And what is interesting to me about
that is it implies that relationship orent behavior is more
(25:30):
important the higher you get, because you have to be
more influential, you have to you know, you get farther
away from the actual doing of the thing, which means
that it's happening through other people. You're having to convince people,
You're having to communicate more effectively. And I think the
other thing that's interesting about that is even just the
(25:50):
idea that the task of leadership evolves should shape how
you think about approaching new jobs. I think there can
be a tendency to think I've learned how to lead,
and so I'm a leader end of growth. And I
think the better way to think about it is this
changes all the time. It may be different day to day.
(26:10):
It's certainly going to be different as you rise up
in an organization or as you work in different types
of organizations. And that's to say nothing of like how
do you actually relate to the task of leadership at
an identity level? You know, one of the things I
talk about is the feeling of being productive will change
as you as the scale of your leadership changes. And
(26:31):
most of us learn how to feel productive by doing work.
You know, a lawyer reviews documents, a psychologist does assessments.
Maybe you know there's an amount of like, I'm doing
the task and the product is done, and I have
the product in my hand. At the very highest level,
you may be doing none of that, and so you
have to kind of rethink what does it mean for
(26:52):
me to be productive here? And probably at the most
senior levels, the most productive thing you can do is
the least tangible. You know, it is influencing people. It's
convincing them of something or getting them on board. So
I think that that kind of changing psychological nature of
leadership is what interests me about that.
Speaker 4 (27:11):
I really like how you how you have elucidated that.
I think that really is it just really does help explain.
And then I think the higher you go, the better
you have to be at uniting people as well, just
the influencer piece of course. Okay, well, so let's go
on here. The next thing that I want to get
into from your book that I appreciated. I mean, what
I try to do is just take a little bit
(27:32):
sub chunction with different chapters that I that I that
I really was connected to. But I like the idea
of you know, learning how your practice leadership of course
is committing that you mentioned earlier, committing to a process
of learning. So let's talk about kind of how you
situate what's involved in learning m.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
You know, It's funny, the more I have taught and
thought about what is involved in learning, the more I
think is just being uncomfortable. I think a lot of
a lot of the conversation are on learning. I think
it brings up the topic of imposter phenomenon or syndrome,
(28:12):
if you want to call it that. You know, I've
started to even think about it just as like imposter
feelings because I think they're so common, and they're especially
common among effective, successful people, which is kind of where
the idea comes from. Is like, you know, you have
impostor phenomenon if you are successful, but you don't feel
like you belong, so there's an amount of of pre
(28:33):
existing evidence that you're wrong. That's related. And I think
if you if you think about kind of the precursors
to that feeling, to feeling like an impostor and the
feelings of learning something new, they're almost the exact same.
You know, it's I don't know enough, I shouldn't be
doing this. This is hard. You know, there's an amount
(28:55):
of general discomfort. One of things I like, I can't
remember who talks about this, but basically it's like, if
you want to get good at anything. The main thing
you need to get good at is feeling bad at it,
because that means you're learning, you know, you're pushing the
boundary of your confidence. The reason I like thinking of
leadership as a practice is because it implies that it's
(29:17):
not an accomplishment. It's not something that you arrive at.
It's something that you're continually thinking about and working on
and evaluating in a process of you know, let me
observe to the extent that I can and maybe even
getting others, you know, in like a three sixty multi
radar feedback type process, where am I what do I
(29:38):
want to be doing? How am I lining up with that?
What do I do to shore up the gap? And
then you're kind of continually doing that, And I think
that's how you can become more adaptable to changing circumstances,
become more adaptable to the changing nature of leadership. As
leadership scals like, all of these things I think are
kind of bake into that idea of you have to
(29:58):
be open to to learning and being uncomfortable in order
to get better at things.
Speaker 4 (30:04):
Yeah, and then they also mentioned situational awareness too, that
is so so important as being able to recognize, you
know what when you walk into a room, for example,
and does everybody stop talking that might tell you something,
you know, or does everybody just immediately, you know, brace
themselves or you look like they're afraid, or are they
(30:25):
leaning in and looking welcoming? Those are all paying attention
to those sorts of things I think is really important.
And then of course you also say and then the
fourth thing that you mentioned was something like improvisation, which
I thought was really interesting if you can stay more
about both the situational awareness and the improvisation.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
Yeah, yeah, you know, situational awareness, situational judgment. That's that
also relates idea of like leadership as a practice to me,
which is which is why I push really hard against
like the five practices of every leader, or like the
seven things that you have to do, because it's super
different for each individual and each circumstance that they find
(31:05):
themselves in. And I think what it requires then to
learn what to do is is evaluating the circumstance. You know,
I don't know that I would say the everyday leadership
model works quite like this, but I think even just
thinking like if I walk into a room and everybody
like gets quiet and backs up intense. It's like to
(31:28):
me that says, like what you need to do. You
need to like go through your mental rolodex, like relationship
or your behavior, Like you need to connect right. You know.
It's like if nobody stops talking and everybody's having a
great time, that's great, but like you might need to
get everybody on task. You know. It's sort of a
way of thinking through, like what's the lever that I
need to pull here in order to try to lead
(31:52):
the improv thing. I've come to like that idea more
and more on a see a lot of from listening
to people on podcasts like on Cone O'Brien needs a Friend,
like listening to people who are trained and improblem in
the way that they interact with other people who do improv.
(32:13):
There's an amount of like not having any attachment to
how you think things should go yes, that I think
opens you up to like being more observant to what
is happening. There's sort of like a radical acceptance of
like here is what's happening, and in that circumstance you're
saying like yes and and kind of following the thought
(32:33):
as it goes. I like that idea in the leadership
practice as a way of pushing yourself to be more
open to what is happening and how do you respond
to it, rather than saying like, this is not what
should be happening, what I thought wanted to happen was X,
Y or Z. I think you can get kind of
wrapped around the axle of your expectations in that way
(32:55):
and not attend to the actual needful thing in the moment. Sorry,
go ahead, Oh.
Speaker 5 (33:02):
I was just going to say.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
I've been taking new proquests for a couple of years now,
and for just exactly that reason. It helps me so
much more effective with my own team, much more than workshops.
It just allows me to be able to play with
that which is gets present and served up among the
group that I wouldn't have ever anticipated.
Speaker 5 (33:20):
It's better than that.
Speaker 2 (33:21):
Yes, yes, yes, absolutely, I think facilitating groups, it's it's
critical to do that because it's usually like the little
random tangents that you pull on that create the better insights. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
Yeah, and it's not it's not you know, something that
is just you know, we I want to say tired,
and you know you play it from all the time.
Speaker 5 (33:40):
It's truly is totally fresh and creative.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Yes, I also like, I just bought this book. I'm
gonna I'm going to blank on the author's name. It's
called Improv Wisdom. It's from the former uh uh. It's
a woman who's a professor at Stanford and she either
taught or teaches an improv class there to like business
school students, and it's a really popular bus. But the
subtitle of the book is don't prepare, just show up.
(34:05):
And I kind of like that too. It's like, just
like strip away all of your preconceived notions and just
show up and go be you know, go be you.
That's another idea that I that is kind of woven
into the everyday leadership ideas. You have to develop sort
of your own theory of what it means for you
to lead. Because the more energy you've been trying to
(34:28):
fit yourself into a model that you've either like adapted
or acquired or passively accepted or whatever, the less sustainable
it is every time. And I will tell you from
having coach leaders who are in very high level jobs,
it is incredibly stressful. And if you're wasting energy trying
to do it in a way that you think it
(34:49):
should be done rather than just how you do it.
You're going to run out of energy, you know, you're
going to burn yourself out, or you're going to just
do it in a way that's you know, it comes
so unnatural that people experience that, and it makes it
harder to connect.
Speaker 4 (35:05):
Love the conversation. Here we are, let's grab our last break.
I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes on air with doctor
Ross Blankenship, the founder of the leadership coaching and consulting
firm Tuesday Advisors, where he coaches a wide array of
leaders and leadership teams to improve performance, communication, and decision making.
He also advises founders and investors on leadership assessment and
talent strategy. You're talking about his model and some of
(35:27):
the elements of what he believes are the critical behaviors
of leadership. After the break, we're going to dive into
the idea of how at tension shapes our behavior.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
We'll be right back.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Doctor Elise Court has as 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 Alease to speak to your organization, please visit her
(36:15):
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 Lise at elisecortes dot com. Now back to
(36:39):
working on Purpose.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
Thanks for sting with us, and welcome back to working
on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor release Cortes. I mentioned
in the last brink that my book came out to
great vialization. What I did for you is I created
a very simple three page organizational assessment that you can
pull off my website gusterdashnal dot com, and it will
help you ascertain the extent to which your current culture
really meets the needs and wants it today's discerning workforce.
(37:06):
You can find it at gustodeshnow dot com. If you
are just now joining us. My guest is doctor Ross Blenkinship,
the author of Everyday Leadership, a guide to developing your
mindset as a leader, So getting into this idea, this
and this makes complete sense to me as well. You
talk about how attention shapes behavior, and of course you're
interested in the voluntary kind, how we direct our attention
(37:27):
and to decide what to focus on. Talk to us
a bit about the power of attention.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Yeah, yeah, you know, attention is interesting. It's especially interesting
in this kind of cultural moment that we live in.
There's a lot of even recently books coming out like
Chris Hayes's new book or Sole and Focus. There are
lots of books that talk about how much, especially social
media kind of creates this addictive pattern for drawing our
(37:58):
attention in some places. It's interesting even rereading the little
segment about voluntary versus involuntary attention and thinking about social
media and starting to wonder, like, how much voluntary attention
do we actually have? But I think, you know, the
thing that is interesting to me about that is also
(38:19):
tied up in the everyday noss of this idea, which
is you have a limited amount of time and kind
of attention in a day to sit down and do
whatever it is you're going to do. And if the
thing you're doing is you know, doing work at your
(38:39):
desk rather than going and talking to people. You will
probably accomplish something, but you have to evaluate, like how
much of what am I I'm accomplishing is helping my
group or my organization or whatever get towards the goal
that we're trying to accomplish together. And I think the
reason I like attention in this context is it's so individualistic.
(39:05):
You know, we all know that feeling of being drawn
in by something or or the task of trying to
train your attention on something. But I think it implies
at the very kind of day to day, moment to
moment level where this occurs, this idea of you have
to train your attention on the thing that you're trying
(39:26):
to pursue, where you can't like create anything. You know,
the you can relate to this, and this is the
way that it occurs to me as somebody who's written
a book, so much of the work is just sitting
down to do it without overthinking, like what am I
going to do when I sit down, Like you just
(39:47):
have to get to the desk and like train your
attention on it, and you know, over time it becomes
a book. But if you can't sit down and do it,
it will not. And I think a little bit of
that is related to probably think about leading other people
and being a social phenomenon. You know, this comes out
in the research as people who are extroverted tend to
(40:08):
be tend to over represent people in leadership positions. I
think a little bit of that is just people who
are extroverted enjoy being around other people and get energy
from that. It has nothing to do with being extroverted
meaning that you're a better leader. But I think what's
helpful in thinking about that in this context is you know,
(40:30):
if being around people and having conversations all the time
is exhausting and you don't enjoy it, then leading in
some circumstances is going to be exhausting and you want
enjoy it. And so I think, you know, the more
that you can boil down, like what is the actual
task and what I'm trying to accomplish related to what
do I want to attend to during the day, it
(40:51):
can be a really helpful way I think of directing
your energy in a way that will help you be
either kind of deductive in a way that you want
to be in order to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish.
Or not.
Speaker 4 (41:05):
And I think we can extend this conversation about attention
here in terms of what are you trying to accomplish?
I really like your three frames of pragmatic, strategic, and existential.
We've got to talk about those for us.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
So this is a model that I call thinking in frames.
I think this kind of emerged out of helping people
think through career decisions, where the so at the fundamental
kind of day to day level, there's the pragmatic level.
I think of the strategic level as kind of the
(41:40):
next level of the how am I thinking about the future,
and that can be anywhere from tomorrow to three years
from now plus and then the existential is kind of
the broadest, you know, basically like what does my life mean?
What do I want it to mean? How do I
want to spend my time on earth? You know, getting
(42:02):
out into the broadest possible philosophical context of like what
does it mean to be a person? What does it
mean to know things? In like a more pragmatic way,
in a more kind of academic way. I think of
this as an approach to coaching that's basically like cognitive
behavioral coaching with an existential rapper because you know, I
(42:27):
think cognitive behavioral methods can be incredibly powerful and useful,
and they all have a limit. You know, if you
if you get all the way out to the edge
of like what you can think and do and feel,
inevitably you encounter things like theology and spirituality and questions
about what does any of this mean. You know, you
(42:50):
can help somebody be incredibly successful in the profession, and
frequently what happens is if they achieve a very tangible
goal that they've been pursuing for a long time, it
is either a relief because they've been after it for
so long. This is there's research about Olympians don't feel joy.
(43:12):
Typically they feel relief when they win a medal and
it lasts, you know, a couple of days. There there's
an article I think it was in The New Yorker
about like the Therapists to the Stars, who said, you know,
I typically don't hear from my Oscar Winter clients for
about three weeks, but it wears off and then you realize, like, oh,
(43:35):
achieving that didn't change like how I feel about things
or the fact that I'm still me, And those questions
are all existential questions. They are not you can't quite
get at them. I think in the same kind of
comitive behavioral way. So this thinking in Frame's idea is
how do you shift from the very pragmatic what can
I do today? What do I have control over to
(43:57):
the extent that I have control over things. The strategic
level then is like what am I willing to do
today in order to make something happen in the future,
So that could be I'm going to go to business
school because it's going to set me up two years
from now to be able to do, you know, consulting
or something. And then the existential level is and how
do I want to spend my time? You know, what
(44:19):
does it mean to be a person? What do I
want to accomplish in my life, not just in my profession.
And the kind of method there is is not planting
yourself in any one of those brains, but it's cycling
through them. So really simple example could be I'm going
to change jobs to get a raise. You know, at
(44:40):
the pragmatic level, you might say, like we need more
money to support our family. Strategically, you might say this
is going to put you in like a different career trajectory.
Is that were the direction you want to be going,
and existentially you might say it's going to require a
lot more time, and what I really want to do
is spend time with my family. So it's a way
of kind of figuring out what are the parameters that
(45:01):
you're solving for and how do they impact ultimately, like
your values, you know, and what you want to prioritize
in your life.
Speaker 4 (45:09):
I really like that, again, very accessible. We're coming close
to the very end of the show here. We have
a couple of minutes left here. I want to finish
with where we kind of started ross and that was
what do we owe the people we lead?
Speaker 5 (45:23):
You know?
Speaker 2 (45:23):
It's it's an interesting question that I got past the question.
I kind of I kind of like it just as
a question rather than something that I feel equipped to answer.
You know. The short answer I think would be, we
owe something to the people that we lead. You know,
(45:44):
I kind of end the book on the impact that
we have on the people around us, and especially you know,
to get back to where we started, especially in leadership positions,
because you may have an amount of authority or control
or power or whatever over somebody else's life and the
way that you interact with them. Absolutely goes home with
(46:06):
them through the door. You know, this is the idea
that I kind of think of as the leadership commons,
Like what does it mean to have an impact as
a leader for the common good of the people around you?
Which is to say, you are having an impact, whether
it's good or bad, whether you're aware of it or not,
whether you're trying to be intentional about it or not,
(46:28):
the impact is happening. You know, there is no neutral here,
and I think you know in that way, you have
a responsibility in a leadership role to be mindful of that,
you know, to at least consider the question what do
I owe the people that I lead? Yeah, you know,
I attempted to kind of get into the philosophy of
(46:50):
like like what do we owe other people? Which is
a really rich philosophical stream that I'm kind of ill
equipped to navigate solo, I think, and I kind of
wound up just leaving it as an open question in
the book because I think it raises so many other
important questions that I think can bring people into other
(47:11):
areas of their life that they tend to court an
off for work in a useful way, Because ultimately, I
think you have to kind of show up as a
leader in the kind of fully individualized way that you
can in order to be as effective as you can
be as yourself. I like the.
Speaker 4 (47:33):
Questions that you ask in that particular chap, and what
kind of impact are you having? Are you grinding people
down or building them up? Are you holding them accountable
by letting them know only when they fall short or
given them the feedback showing them how to improve and
teach them how to excel? Are you infusing positivity or
injecting negativity into leadership comments? I think those are valuable questions,
(47:53):
and I can tell you I mean in the work
that I do in organizations. You know, leadership is such
a personal thing. As you say in your can I agree,
And oftentimes leaders are not aware of the impact they
have on the people, for better or for worse.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Yeah. Yeah, I've experienced that directly and I've observed it
indirectly as well. It is an unfortunate reality.
Speaker 5 (48:15):
Yeah, which is why why we exist.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
Right.
Speaker 5 (48:18):
So we've come to the end of the show here.
Speaker 4 (48:20):
While this shows us some of my people around the
world that care about improving their own connection to their work,
becoming a better leader, and trying to build organizations that
really aren't doing things that better the world?
Speaker 5 (48:30):
What would you like to leave them with?
Speaker 2 (48:34):
The question that I always come back to in my
own mind and in my work with people is what
are you trying to accomplish? You know? I had a
client yesterday say, I you asked me that question, and
I've been thinking about it and I can't sleep because
if you really ask yourself the question, I think there's
an easy answer, like I'm trying to grow my company,
(48:56):
you know, But if you really ask it at the
broadest possible level, zoom all the way out to the
existential level, like what are you trying to accomplish? It
can have a reorienting effect on your whole life, and
I think a really positive way, And it's a it's
a powerful question to ask in any circumstance, what are
you trying to accomplish?
Speaker 4 (49:15):
Yeah, beautiful us very happy to know you, to learn
from you, and if not be connected with you.
Speaker 5 (49:21):
Thank you for being on working in a purpose and
sharing your heart and your soul. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
My closure, Thanks so much for having me les.
Speaker 5 (49:27):
Very very welcome listeners.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
In a fewers you were going to you want to
learn more about doctor Ross Blankenship, the work he does
at Tuesday Advisors and his books. You can start by
visiting a couple sites. His personal site is Ross Blankenship
dot io, So Blankenship b l A N K I
N s h I, P Ross Blanketship dot io or
his company site Tuesday Advisors dot com. Last week, if
(49:51):
you missed the live show, you can always catch up
you recorded podcast. We were on air with Monica Mitchell,
who was built a thirty year career at AT and
T where she has moved seven times. Today she leads
an organization of one hundred and twenty employees and manages
a three billion dollars software development portfolio. We talked about
how the workforce has changed in the last few years
and how we can design a workplace that meets the
needs and wants of today and tomorrow's workforce. Next week
(50:14):
will be on the air with Toneil Miller talking about
her book The Flourishing Effect, Unlocking Employee thriving and high
Performance as your competitive Advantage. See you there, Remember that
work as one of the best adventures and meanings and
realizing our potential and making the impact we crave and
can give us the opportunity to do business in a
way that betters the world.
Speaker 5 (50:31):
So let's work on Purpose.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
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 C. Why 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
(50:56):
on Purpose.
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