Bill Joiner

Transcript

Speaker: Bill Joiner  00:17

An interesting thing to me in doing the research for the book, which was a real in-depth five-year process. One of the things I kept asking myself was, you know, what exactly is developing here.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:37

So, Bill, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? Who is Bill Joiner? And what do you…

Speaker: Bill Joiner  00:50

I can tell you a few things I’ve been up to. So yeah, I got interested in the field of organization development and leadership development, when I was a senior in college, which was a long time ago. And so, I decided to do an MBA, focusing on organizational behavior. And then quickly realized that my aspiration was to become an organization development consultant. And although that was, you know, I learned a lot in the MBA, about business, and about the general field organization behavior, I still didn’t really know how to do anything. How to you know, how to work with clients, and help them change the way they work together. 

So, I entered the doctoral program at Harvard, where that was my focus. And I was fortunate to work very closely with one of the fathers of the field, Chris Arduous. Who is today is no longer with us, but has had a huge impact on the field, particularly in the area of advanced interpersonal skills. You know, he worked a lot with executives, in terms of really improving, say, communication on an executive team. And so, once I had my doctorate, I worked some on my own and some in partnership with other consultants. But basically, I came to have an expertise in three main areas. One was these interpersonal skills that I mentioned. I say that these are needed for pivotal conversations, which are ones where people don’t see eye to eye and they have to resolve their differences to move ahead on important issues. Another area of focus for me over the years has been team development.

 I’ve done a lot of work with teams at various levels, including executive, including even some boards, in helping them work together more effectively. And then the other area has been organization change. And most of my work for the first decade or so in that area was around cultural change. But as I sort of moved on, I began to learn ways to apply this sort of participative approaches that I was helping clients develop with their organizations, to specific things like redesigning a business process. So, a fast, I would say, fairly agile approach to really involving a lot of the people in the organization and determining what the changes should be, and implementing those very quickly because there’s a lot of commitment to them. And I also worked on somewhat similar approach to creating business strategy. So, a kind of creative thinking approach to business strategy. 

So, in a sense, I would say that was my first career or the first you know, major, couple of decades of my career. And then I had been interested really ever since I discovered organization development in this field called stage development psychology, which we can talk more about. But that has to do with how do we as human beings develop our cognitive and our emotional capacities. And I’d always wanted to write a book about this, but never had seemed to find the time. And I had a very synergistic meeting with a man named Steve Josephs, who had newly discovered the field of stage development psychology. And long story short, we went up writing the book together. I mean, he assisted me in a whole bunch of ways, including finding the right kind of leaders for us to interview. And doing some of the interviews himself and doing a lot of line editing that’s needed when I write something.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  05:20

Who came up with the Ed’s concept in the book, chapter two? 

Speaker: Bill Joiner  05:25

Oh, yeah. Well, that was me. That came up at the end, after everything had been written. It was like how to kind of pull all this together, yeah. I remembered that many years ago, before I even was aspiring to write this book, I was talking to a colleague about the whole idea of stage development, and he said, Yeah, well, could you just tell me how a people at different stages would solve the same problem differently. Is that a thing? And what is that? And that really stayed with me, as I was coming toward the end of writing the book. It’s like, oh, we can do that. We can lay out this, you know, fictional but realistic scenario and use a very research-based descriptions of how people at different stages of development would lead in those. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:28

In that specific situation. 

Speaker: Bill Joiner  06:29

In that specific scenario. And that’s turned out to be probably the most popular chapter in the book. You know, anything story based, I think tends to be a little bit more relatable than if it’s a little more abstract.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:46

So, let’s come back to vertical stage development. Could you like for the audience that’s not familiar with that, could you maybe talk about what went in? First of all, what is vertical stage development? And then what went into your book as far as research? You looked at you know, many different frameworks, you selected I believe, four frameworks that you essentially looked at. But if you can first describe vertical stage development, and then maybe talk about what went into your research and the book that you wrote, leadership agility.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  07:26

Okay. Well, what today, in leadership development circles is often called vertical stage development is sort of a new and more relatable name than stage development psychology, which is the academic field that all comes out of. That field began in the early 1900s. Mainly looking at how do infants develop and become adults. And John Piaget, which many people have heard of, or probably, you had something on that in some psychology course, you took at school. He was sort of the father of the field, and he was looking at, you know, at some point, in even early teenage years, people develop the equivalent of the ability to think scientifically. To have, you know, think in terms of hypotheses, and probability and all that. He wanted to trace, mainly, in his case, the cognitive development of kids, as they, you know, grow toward that point in their life. So, he did a lot of experiments where he interacted with kids. Anyway, you know, what he found was that there were major developmental milestones, not just in a quantitative sense of physical development, but at qualitatively different ways of viewing the world, that come online at different stages. And initially, those stages are very related to your age. And then…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:13

[unclear 09:13] those pages are almost like, you know, the lenses that you look through to see the world, interpret the world, right. So, it’s in a sense like, I’m not sure. Maybe not I’m sure but just more of a, is that, how would you, yeah, is that how you see it.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  09:31

Let me give you just two concrete examples. The stages that we focus on in our work with leaders we call expert achiever and catalyst. And as you move from the expert stage, to the achiever stage, two prominent things happen among other things. One is that you begin to be able to think strategically, which really was not a capability that you had at the expert level. And the other is that you begin to develop more empathy for other people, including even other people who disagree with you. So that helps. Your ability to frame your leadership initiative strategically is a huge qualitative shift. And your ability to work more effectively with stakeholders because you have this increased interest in understanding where they’re coming from. And you also, you know, another realization that comes about in this particular developmental shift is an understanding that you really need to gain the buy in of other people to be successful at the expert level, you tend to be so identified with your own expertise, that you kind of tend to think and you have assumptions about leadership, that drive you toward sort of a command and control. I have to have all the answers, I have to solve the problem kind of orientation. So, this is sort of an interrelated set of mindsets, I would say at each stage. And that drives a whole way of leading at each stage. So, what we’ve done in the book is we’ve identified for each of these stages, what are the shifts in the leadership repertoire, both internally and behaviorally? In these three areas I mentioned earlier which are pivotal conversations, leading teams and leading organizational change.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  11:42

When you look at today’s fast paced business world, and if we just focus on the three leadership styles or perspectives, the expert, the analyst and sorry, in the order of, the first one is expert achiever and catalyst. Yeah. How do you progress through those? And how does our environment dictate? Which one deals with our environment with the current environment take best? In a sense, we have to show up differently based on our context. Right.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  12:29

Right. Well, an interesting thing to me in doing the research for the book, which was a real in-depth five-year process. One of the things I kept asking myself was, you know, what is exactly is developing here. And ultimately came up with eight interrelated capacities that develop as you move to each stage, and that those are paired with each other. So, there’s sort of four pairs. But beyond all that, like, what did all those have in common? What was the, the essence of what was changing? And the word that finally emerged was agility. And this was before I know about the agile movement, or anything like this. This was just, you know, what is actually happening here, in terms of the leadership and how it’s different at each stage. And so, that is really born itself out because at the core of each stage is a particular form of what I call reflective action. This is how you learn from your experience. It’s something you often focus on the past in terms of understanding yourself or understanding, let’s say a strategic context that you’re operating in, or what’s been going on in the organization, in the past that may need to change. Those are all things that require reflective capacity. But you can also point that into the future, and it becomes strategic thinking. So, it’s sort of as an oversimplified overview. Expert leaders, their reflective action tends to be rather limited in the sense that they tend to focus on, it’s like put a problem in front of me and I will solve it with passion and in isolation from other problems and other issues. So, it’s my ability to step back is, I have somewhat ability, but it doesn’t step back enough for me to really connect what I’m doing to the larger context or other issues. So, to develop to the cheaper level, there are a number of things you can do, and that we teach in our leadership agility coaching program about all these four types of agility I was referring to. But at the core of it, you’re learning to become more reflective, and increasing your ability to make connections between different things. So, for example, as you look at your direct reports, if you’re an expert, just as you focus on one problem at a time, you tend to focus on one direct report at a time. You’re not really trying to develop that group into what we would call a team, you know, that really relies on one another. So, as you develop this reflective capacity, it helps you see connections and sort of see the business system that you’re dealing with. This changes your whole approach to team leadership, for example. So that’s just an example of how the reflective action is at the core. So, if I’m coaching somebody who’s moving from expert to achiever, I’m helping them to develop that particular form of reflective action. And then to go even further to the catalyst level. And remember, it’s important to know that you don’t lose anything as you develop further. So, all the capacities that you had before you, you can always downshift and use those. But at the catalyst level, you develop this additional form of reflective action, which I call reflecting in the moment, which is, allows you to catch things about yourself that you formerly would have missed, like…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  16:44

Those are like a higher just sensible awareness?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  16:47

Yes. It’s an awareness that can now not only look back at something and learn from it, but kind of learn from it while it’s happening. Which makes you much more agile, right? You’re much more able to see what’s going on in this current situation, and sort of mentally step back very quickly, see what’s going on and how you might need to adjust yourself. For example, let’s say you’re leading a meeting that you intended to be highly participative. Well, if you’re at the achiever level reflective action, you’re going to be able, after the meeting to reflect back and go, oh, you know, I see now that I was talking too much, to have a participative meeting, you know. I wasn’t drawing other people out enough. But with Catalyst reflective action, you can sense these things more as they’re happening, make adjustments in how you’re acting, so you don’t have to wait to the next meeting, you can start trying some new things now. So, you know, that just makes you both more agile and more. And back to your question about what is needed in today’s environment, what we find is that these catalysts leaders, are the most effective of the three that I’ve just described. Because they’re, you know, living in a world of continuous change, who have some capacity to continuously change yourself, is a real key factor. And the other thing I’ll add about the catalyst, reflective action is that not only is it capable of kind of catching things as they happen now, but if you look out at the world around you, it gives you a wider lens, and a deeper appreciation of what’s going on so much. Not only focusing on the, what I call the business system, and how that needs to change. The business processes and structures and so on. But the human system that really undergirds that business system, and that often, if that doesn’t change, you’re not going to get the kind of change you want at the business level. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:06

Is that more like, you know, what we call like an agile, you know, doing agile, being agile, we focus so much on the doing and the systems that we can see, but not on the people systems?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  19:17

Yeah, absolutely. So, I think this is, so from my point of view, agile leadership, which you know, most people today recognize. That’s not just using certain agile procedures, it’s as you say, being agile, and having an agile mindset. Now, in my view of adopting an agile mindset is not too hard to do. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  19:47

What’s an agile mindset in your opinion? Because I mean, in agile community we take old things and we just put agile word to it and all of a sudden, agile this, agile that.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  20:00

Well, yeah, I once tried to get an overview of all the different definitions of agile mindset in the Agile community and I sort of gave up, there were so many of them.  At the core I think it has to do with two things, at least from my perspective. One is this sort of commitment to continually scanning the environment and making adjustments, and doing that fairly frequently. So, they think that’s one aspect of it. The other is recognizing that all of these iterations, where you’re learning as you go along, are done collectively. And so, part of agility is not just, I mean, many people think of agility is just like, going faster, or having only to do with the demand of, the change aspect of the environment that we live in that it’s so fast paced, which of course, is a big part of it. But the other part, I believe, is that the world is becoming more interconnected. And not only the world, our organizations and our need to work collaboratively with other departments, break down silos, and all of that. And in doing that, we need to be able to coordinate our perspectives with other peoples, you know. People who are incentivized to focus on different kinds of outcomes that we may be, right. It’s all supposed to work together. We’re all supposed to integrate our perspectives. But that’s easier said than done.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  21:42

And would you say that, like, you know, we talk about like ego, but as you move, you know, I talk about it all the time, and now I’m talking to you, and I can so it’s one of those weird things. Expert achiever and catalyst, my understanding is that they will let go, as we progress cognitively, through each of those stages, we let go a little bit of ego and we care more about, you know, our teams, our organization. Our ego is not as dominant at the catalyst level as it is, at achiever level and expert levels.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  22:35

Yeah. It’s kind of going through different stages of getting over yourself. But, it’s really, in my view, the level of reflective action, that is a byproduct of a kind of action, because it’s the more perspective you have on yourself. And on other people around you and so on. These how are this is going to be to get beyond yourself and understand other perspectives. Take them in, doesn’t mean you have to agree with them, but you seriously consider them. And, yeah, your circle of concern, expands. And as you go into the catalyst level, you’re starting to see that everyone you’re working with is, yeah, you know, they’re an engineer or whatever, they have this training, their background, there’s personality, blah, blah, blah, all important. But at the end of the day, these are human beings I’m interacting with and to sort of be able to bring that perception to difficult conversations. To what does my team need from me? What does my customer need from me? All helps you to just kind of come at things from a larger perspective, that’s more in general, more collaborative.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:15

And if we look at the research, I know it based on your data too, most of the leaders or people with authority, maybe but you know, most of them operate from that expert and achiever level. And yet, you’re saying in order to deal today with the environment and complexity of today’s world, we need catalysts. So, there’s a gap, right?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  24:44

There’s definitely a gap. I mean

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  24:47

And it’s not a small gap. It’s a big gap.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  24:50

No, it’s a serious, big gap. And I think most of us sensed there is a gap there. But what I’m trying to do is to put some help us really understand what is that gap and what does it take to close it. So, you know, I think another thing might be worth saying right now is that, although in many respects, you sort of take this framework, and you sort of see where we are, and where we need to be in terms of leadership development, you know, let’s help everybody become a catalyst. And if you could wave a magic wand, that would be a great idea, it doesn’t, because a fully developed catalyst is somebody who really can operate at any of these three levels, when the situation calls for it. So, this is back to what I was saying about, you don’t lose what you used to be able to do. If you’re a catalyst, and you’re changing the organization, the chances are that you’re setting out not only to achieve a set of strategic objectives as a, as an achiever would do.

 But you’re also simultaneously trying to develop an organization that can deal with any strategic challenge that might come along. And in our terms, that would be an agile organization. Realizing that the leadership and culture are really central to being able to do that, something I think the Agile community has really discovered, you know, it’s become pretty clear in the last several years if that’s the case. But they’re able these catalyst leaders are, among other things, very much focused on creating certain kind of culture that’s very participative, empowering collaborative. So, you know, at the same time, they want to make sure that their achiever level strategic objectives are being achieved. So, it’s not a matter of floating off into the stratosphere, into some sort of long-term ivory tower. It’s just being able to shift gears in terms of how much you want to step back and look at the larger picture and shape that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  27:18

And I think, yeah, that’s important. And just to maybe like, you know, I was thinking about actually this the other day, and I was reflecting. We moved from California back to Portland, Maine, and I drove by the high school. You know, I played soccer all my life very much through college. And I was thinking like, you know, when I was in freshman, I made varsity. And it was all about me scoring goals and proving myself, right. And then I realized that a lot of times, I tried to score and try to be the top scorer. But I realized later on, I need to pass the ball sometimes in order, you know, somebody was in a better position. And by the time I was a senior, I realized that, I started coaching or mentoring younger kids. And I started looking at the whole system as a soccer team and started saying, well, this is kind of like I had much bigger perspective, what it takes to win championships and what it takes to get the whole team involved because we’re essentially a system that plays together. A system of agents, I guess, that plays together to try to win a game. And I thought that’s, you know, in a way, similar here move. From an expert to achiever to catalyst. As far as that’s how your perspective changed, and what’s important to you, right. First scoring goal was important to me. And by the time I was senior, it was important that we as a team win championships.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  29:03

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great example right there. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:10

So how do we I mean, like, you know, that was mine but, how do you know, how do you help organizations and leaders? For me, it was experience, right. So, nobody could have told me Miljan, do this, do that, do this. Like it was just naturally happening as I, maybe I don’t know if you want to say, grew up. But what is your thought on, how do we go through these stages?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  29:36

Yeah. Well.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  29:40

Obviously, reflection. I know you’re saying, ability to reflect. But any other tips or thoughts on…

Speaker: Bill Joiner  29:48

Well, you know, I mean, I can start by saying what we’ve been doing at change wise the last 10 years since developing this framework, which is basically converting all of the previous workshops, you know, workshops and pivotal conversations, for example, to bring in this framework, team development workshop. It has [unclear 30:12] changed lab to help people develop greater agility by working directly on a real change that they’re working on. So, sort of setting the context for that change in a broader, deeper way, and then working more fully with stakeholders, etc., etc., suite. We have workshop format, but we can really get down to the nitty gritty in a way. We have a coaching system and we have a program called Leadership agility coaching, which is a three and a half month online learning process, with a group of other coaches, usually from around the world. And you know, we’re working well, how do you help, you know, one of the sessions is on reflective action. You know, what kinds of questions help experts start thinking like achievers, and achievers think like catalyst. And then we have these four pairs of capacities that I mentioned earlier, we call the leadership agility compass. And so, we have their specific methods for example, helping an expert to frame an initiative they’re taking to set the context for that initiative, at more of an achiever level, so they’re set up for greater impact and success. Other session on stakeholder agility. How do you help leaders develop that empathy? And then the even deeper level of empathy that comes with the catalyst level? And how do you help them with what we call a power style, which is a key part of stakeholder agility, and it has to do with in any particular situation, how do I balance my assertiveness and my receptivity? When say, you and I are trying to work through a difference, you know, if we were business partners or something, we had to come to a meeting of the minds but we didn’t start with a meeting of the minds. How do I balance my assertion of my views about where we should be going with the business with my receptivity to yours, realizing that we’re in this thing together? And so, Power style is a really, really important thing to be able to see and work with in this developmental process.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:53

Just looking at like thinking about what you just said, power styles, would you say it’s true that expert and achiever look at, you know, his differences in power styles and catalyst sub races. Those two, they see the difference. And perhaps the achiever and expert, you know, they only care about their own power styles. And the catalysts actually recognizes that there’s a difference and embraces those two, do you think that’s true?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  33:28

Between my view and your view? And…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  33:30

Yeah. And it seems like because you’re looking from a different perspective, generally speaking at that development stage, you’re aware of your own. Essentially, you can step at that point. You understand what you’re stepping into, and you’re aware of different power styles. Were at expert and achiever, you’re only aware of your own or maybe you’re more biased towards your own work. Where catalysts might be able to this is kind of what I wanted to talk about, the shift between levels right, based on the context.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  34:04

Well, here’s how I will put it. Generally speaking, if the leaders operating at the expert level in their power style, what we’re going to see is either somebody and this is in the context of these pivotal conversations I’m talking about right. What we’re going to see there is likely to be highly assertive behavior, or highly accommodative or receptive behavior, at least outwardly. So, experts tend to be fairly opinionated. But sometimes in a pivotal conversation, you know, we would expect that mainly to come out as being very assertive. But there are quite a high percentage of other experts who tend to avoid conflict. At least outwardly acquiesce to the other person’s point of view, even if they don’t really feel all that committed to it. So obviously, neither one of these styles is all that effective by itself. And the tendency is to sort of flip flop back and forth between this highly assertive and highly receptive, as if they are irreconcilable opposites.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  35:20

And the leadership agility, right?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  35:23

Yeah. And that definitely affects your agility as a leader. And then at the achiever level, what we see is a somewhat more balanced power style, that people tend to either have a tendency to be mainly assertive, but they can also ask good questions, you know, like, if you think of a good salesperson, who is, you know, bent on persuading you, but they know to ask the right question, so they can target their persuasion to what you might actually need. That would be as a sort of achiever approach. But there are other achievers, and there’s an example of one in our book, that tend to be more on the receptive side. So, what they will tend to do is, they might get a whole group of people together to talk about an issue with the hope that their involvement will lead to their buying in to what you want to do. Now it’s a little tricky, because when we get to the catalyst level, what we see is somebody whose preferences highly participative discussion.

 But it is different than the receptive achiever because it is really more genuinely open to other viewpoints. But we also see something at the catalyst level, that’s I think, ties in with what you were saying, which is sort of like, well, I can be assertive, if that’s what’s going for or I can be receptive, if that’s what the situation calls for. And I can also really balance these kinds of in the moment, in the sense of one version of it would be to say, well, here’s, here’s the direction I think we should be going in our business. And here’s why I think that, what do you think, and you know, tell me, give me the logic behind your thought process. So that’s kind of moving immediately from asserting something to inviting another person, of course, you have to follow through on that and actually listen and take it seriously before it becomes a real balance power style. But if I sort of develop the ability to be any place on that spectrum of assertive and accommodative or receptive, and then I can do that sort of turn on a dime thing, which we saw, I mean, that’s something we train in our people conversations, workshops. But we found that in sort of minute step by step interviewing of catalyst leaders, and we looked at how they did their pivotal conversations, they often just did this naturally. So that’s a little, little quick [unclear 38:10]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  38:10

I’m assuming that comes with experience, it’s not something that they’re born with, but it’s just you grow into that.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  38:17

I think it’s a developmental thing. So, it’s like, you know, the way I look at this is, nobody is sort of inherently born with a destiny of arriving at only at a particular stage of development, right. It’s like, we live in a society that has lots of support for expert and achiever stage development, you know. You go to college; you have a lot of support for achiever thinking and sometimes beyond that. Most leadership development programs, focus on achiever level, capacities and behaviors, most 360s focus on those. And most of the role models that we see at the executive levels are like that. So that sort of creates like sometimes called, leadership culture. That kind of gives the impression that achiever is the ultimate in leadership, competence. So, I think it’s requiring, you know, sort of a special focus to have that’s why we created a 360, that includes the catalyst level. And the coaching approach that also does that, and the workshops and so on, because we feel that’s kind of a scaffolding that’s needed.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:49

What’s the process that goes into developing these assessments? You’ve obviously spent many years in research, you’ve evaluated other assessments. What is the you know, for somebody that’s not in that field, what goes into developing an assessment that like you have for 360? Agility 360 and similar assessments.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  40:12

Right. Well, we were very fortunate to be able to partner in creating the assessment with a company called Cambria consulting. We both have them be in the Boston area. And I’d say they’re the, at least in the top ten of talent development firms in the country. So, they brought to our joint creation of this tool, a ton of experience with creating 360s for Fortune 500 Companies, among other things. What they saw with this framework, because we said, you know, we were used to doing 360s, you know, other 360s in our work, and had sort of our pet peeves and our things about them we really liked. But this was going to be an unusual thing. Usually, when you create a 360, you’re trying to sort of identify traits that correlate with leadership success, and you wind up with a number of pretty abstract traits, you know. Plays well with others. And they’ve choosing on a scale of one to five, one to seven. So, you wind up, and that’s one of my pet peeves and just many times, wound up looking with a client at their 360 feedback. And we’re both trying to figure out what the hell it means. I mean, what

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  41:55

Because you’re trying to, you can’t look at the mindset, so you look at the behaviors and try to align behaviors with the mindset. And sometimes there’s [unclear 42:05]

Speaker: Bill Joiner  42:05

Well, yeah, you’re right. I mean, 360 feedback is of course, only about behavior. And if it’s trying to do more than that, you’re going to get some distortions. So, it’s just like, what have you observed about this person. But when it’s as abstract as it is, for most, in most 360s, then it can be genuinely difficult to figure out what to do with it. So, a couple of things that we did, we took, and Cambria said, you know, we actually just created a 360 that was kind of like this, used a framework kind of like yours, you know. The fact that is developmental, and we want to have each item, you know, an option for the expert behavior, the achiever behavior, and the catalyst behavior. That’s not the way most 360s are laid out, but they were able to help us create a really high-quality tool that is able to discern where, at least in terms of people’s perceptions, which is all you have with a 360, you know. Not only their level of leadership agility, which is what we call when somebody puts, their stage into action, and you see the behavior that matches what’s going on inside them, we call that a leadership agility level. So, we talked about the expert achiever catalyst level of leadership agility. 

So, although our 360 will identify where you are on that, not only overall but in these three specific arenas of pivotal conversations, leading teams and leading change. It also just gives you a lot of, you know, written feedback, but in those three areas, so that the feedback is much more context specific, right. Rather than place well with others, it’s like, you know, specifically how do you interact with stakeholders when you are leading organizational change or when you have a pivotal conversation. And because the tool also includes, I mean most people do not wind up very far into the catalyst dimension of this because that’s just not where they are. It provides them with kind of a roadmap that says, okay, if I was going to up my leadership agility in this particular area, what would that look like? And then we in our 360 certification workshops, we train coaches to know sort of what’s below the tip of the iceberg. If that’s, you know, a brief behavioral description like you would find in a 360. What does that really mean? What does that next level really look like in practice? So, they can work with leaders and helping them to develop further in those particular areas that are of concern to that.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:19

And something that we didn’t talk about, which is that you can’t skip levels, right, it’s a growth. So, that gives you a little bit more insight to that, you know, if certain data points to, you know, expert, you know, and all the data points that they might exhibit some of the catalyst traits, but, you know, they probably haven’t grown through achiever, right. What is the issue if, you know, as we progress, similar, like when, you know, I tell people, like, you know, growing up in Bosnian, and I’d bring this up a lot, I had to grow up fast. My dad was in [unclear 46:01] camp, you know. And I don’t know, like, if that had any side effects or not, but I had to grow up fast, in a sense, in many different aspects. When I came to United States, I was 13, and things that I was thinking of about is definitely not what my peers were thinking about, right. From your perspective, is there any challenges or issues with trying to go and grow too fast through a certain stage. Or is it just the environment? Sometimes we can grow faster, depending on environment. Like, what are your thoughts on just how quickly we move through these cognitive stages?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  46:47

Yeah. Well, I have not so far seen anybody move too fast. I mean, I think we tend, you know. First of all, if you’re just thinking of it as somebody who’s just kind of growing up and living their life, and they’re not being coached or anything, you know, different people do wind up kind of plateauing at different stages. And I think it has a lot to do with environmental influences. Sort of what seems possible to you out of that? What your internal interest in is? Do you have something of a growth mindset, that makes you curious about how you can develop further? But that’s kind of what the academics were studying back in the day, when they were, you know, validating these different stages, and so on. Nobody initially was trying to help anybody develop, or use this framework as a way to, you know, developmental framework like this to help people develop. So, it’s just the past several decades, I guess, or no. It’s probably three, at least three decades. At least some people have been trying to help others develop through coaching or workshops and things like that. It always has to be totally at the choice of the client. So, it’s more process of helping them simultaneously work on. You know, like, I have a meeting coming up, and, you know, a lot at stake and there may be some conflict, and how am I going to handle that. So, helping somebody with a very specific challenge, but having in the back of your mind as a coach, what the developmental dimension of this is. 

So how can we, you know, if this is somebody going from expert to achiever, in the preparation for the meeting, or things to do in the meeting, can we help activate more of this achiever reflective action? And what I find is that as people do that, and they do it in the context of real-life challenges, they begin to develop the cognitive and emotional capacities of the next stage and their development. And it’s a very natural process. It can be, you know, two steps forward, one step back. You know, there’s certain situations that are still particularly difficult even though you’ve sort of mastered most of them. In the area that you might be focusing as a coachee.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:01

What’s the connection? You mentioned emotional, intelligence and cognitive capacity. I’m assuming as you cognitively develop your emotional intelligence is higher, I guess. But how do you see the correlation between emotional intelligence and cognitive capacity?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  50:25

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I think. On the one hand, I think it’s true that when we look at these four sets of capacities that I’ve been referring to, context setting, stakeholder creative and self-leadership, agility. The context setting and the creative, which is more about how you go about solving problems are a bit more tilted toward the cognitive. The self-leadership, which is about how you develop yourself. And stakeholder agility, other people, has a more salient emotional dimension, but they both have some of each. And the interesting thing is in stage development, cognitive and emotional capacities are developed simultaneously. So maybe just give one example. So, I was talking to you earlier about achiever reflective action helps you develop strategic thinking, which is context setting, and empathy, which is stakeholder agility. So, you think of strategic thinking is more of a thinking process. And empathy is more of a form of emotional intelligence. But both of them involve this ability to kind of step back from what you are glommed on to which you’re focused on. And either taking the larger context, or taking more of the other person. And so, I think it’s that form of reflective action that, depending on where you’re focusing larger context and other people, it sort of brings out what’s most appropriate for that relationship.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  52:21

Yeah. I was thinking about, it does and like just trying to think about it, because, you know, the questions I’m asking is the questions I’m thinking about, right. And, you know, going back to my soccer thing, I used to, like, I used to get pissed the referees, I would yell, and I would swear. And I would swear in English, and they would say, like, swear in Serbo-Croatian, because nobody understands you. And I’m like, what’s the point? 

Speaker: Bill Joiner  52:44

Really. I’m trying to try to have an impact here.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  52:47

Yeah. My wife too, you know, over the last, I don’t know how many years. We’ve known each other for 12 now, and she’d like, you’ve changed in that sense, like, I’m not emotionally, and I don’t know, if it’s emotional growth, or what it is. But I see, like things I used to get all fired up, you know, about, I’m, like, you know, how stupid was I, you know, to you know, get all emotional. And, you know, one of the things I definitely know is that, at that point I wasn’t even aware of, I wasn’t even able to realize what was going on, and how I was experiencing these emotions. And again, like a lot of these things that we talk about, I’m trying to reflect in my life and see, you know. But I can definitely see just, what’s important to me, and what I care about has changed. And how I react to it.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  53:52

And my guess is that somehow in different ways, you have gained more perspective on your life, as you, you know, grown and matured.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  54:04

And I think how fast life flies by I’m like, yeah. It’s, it’s interesting. Because it’s in those situations, when you apply a lot of these theories, in a sense, to your life, then you start seeing the connection. And I remember, you know, something that you shared with me that had a quote, I don’t know from who but had a quote about theory. Do you remember? There’s nothing more useful than a, you know the quote I’m talking about.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  54:39

It is a pair of quotes that I like, in thinking about this framework. The first one actually is, the map is not the territory. I forget the name of the gentleman who came up with that one. But we all know that any kind of conceptual framework or 360 Feedback tool, or whatever kind of framework can be illuminating, but it’s also not the real thing. You know, it’s just sort of like, as I’m talking along about the framework, you’re relating it to the real thing to your real life. Right. And so, my map is not your territory. But the other quote is, there’s nothing so practical is a good theory. And that’s from Kurt Lewin, who is probably the great grandfather of the field of organization development. And so, you know, he was a guy who created action research. So, he was interested in, you know, how can you look at a social situation or organizational situation, and you know, learn from what’s going on, and put that into action. And that’s the kind of theory he’s talking about. A practical theory that can help you become more effective in your action. So, it’s a paradox, in a sense, right. It’s like, well, this is not the territory, but we’re going to try to make it as useful a theory as we can. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  56:26

I really liked that when I saw it. And I was like that really resonated with me. Obviously, you know, the Agile community kind of pulled Julian, in a sense, because we, at least some of us in the Agile what we call Agile community, resonated with your work. What do you think the Agile community still, I know you’re not involved much in it, maybe you are. But what do you think we kind of need to work on? What is it that we, you know, focus on more on than, you know, or maybe what is it really the we should focus on more on as an Agile community? What are we missing?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  57:13

Yeah, right. So, I don’t like do Agile consulting projects, per se, although we can do the, the leadership and culture change aspect. And we do have companies coming to us saying, we’re trying to create an agile organization, we realize we need agile leadership. Tell us about your approach. And so, we get involved in that way. We have lots of agile consultants, and coaches who come to our 360-certification workshop and our leadership agility coaching program. You know, those skewed toward the Agile enterprise coach or the equivalent, you know, so there are people, for the most part, who are working with leaders in the organization, and not just with scrum teams. And I think these are by and large, people who realize what, you know, I have spoken at quite a number of agile conferences, and I’ve been in an agile think tank, a couple of those. You know, what I’ve kept hearing over the past, whatever four years is just the importance of leadership and culture. You know, it’s just kind of a matter of putting the whole organization together, if you’re focused on structures and processes and procedures. And there’s a whole much more agile way to do those, that’s very powerful. And that can have some impact on the culture. But if you’re not also working more directly on the culture, and the leadership and helping them become more agile, I think, in the way that I’m talking about, not just adopting a mindset, you know. I mean, we probably all know Agilus who, I’m thinking of a particular one who worked in a company that I was consulting too. You know, I’m a servant leader. And I think in terms of mindset and intention, that was true. In terms of behavior. It was a lot of expert leadership happening from that person., I mean, I guess you wouldn’t be surprised I think the more, the Agile community as I see, it has been sort of rediscovering the field of organization development, which is the field that I grew up in, you know. The importance of culture, and team building, and education and all these things. And I think, the great thing about Agile is that it sort of, you can intervene, right where the real work is happening and start having pretty immediate impacts on organizational outcomes. But then, of course, there’s always that ceiling you run into. You know, there’s a kind of invisible, not impermeable, but a bit of a ceiling, with achiever leadership. And, you know, where I feel like the true spirit of Agile is embodied by the catalyst leader. So, I think the more that Agile community can explore.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:00:57

Do you think we focus enough on psychology and understanding people, understanding cultures, as a community, or?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  1:01:05

No, I think. Now that you asked. I think it’s a really important dimension, and certainly an important dimension of our work. Of course, it has to be integrated with real organizational life and business pressures, and all of that. So, it’s not just something that float out there by itself. But you know, all of the stuff about cognitive and emotional capacities and reflective action, all this stuff, this is really in the realm of psychology. Not meaning that we have to psychoanalyze people.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:01:41

Just be aware of it, be understanding right.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  1:01:43

Understand that we’re all animated. You know, what you see us doing has a lot to do with what’s going on inside us. And if you can work with what’s going on inside someone in a respectful, skillful way, where you have some, you know, you can be a guide in the sense that you’ve been over this territory. You know, they’re making a unique journey, but it’s over. Sort of a ground that we’ve been over before in different ways. You know, I think that helps a lot.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:02:21

Maybe is the last question here. A lot of times we talked about, not just in Agile, but outside, like, we have to change the culture, right. We have to change the culture, we have to change the mindset, when it comes to change the culture, like how do you define the culture? And maybe just, you know, in short, what does it take to change the culture? So how do you define the culture? And then what does it take to change it?

Speaker: Bill Joiner  1:02:45

Alright, well, how much time do we have?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:02:48

Let’s say five minutes.

Speaker: Bill Joiner  1:02:51

It’s a big topic. So, here’s what I would say. I mean, I think most of us know, what organizational culture is. That it’s sort of the invisible norms that people adopt in a particular organization. We’re talking about organizational culture, to analogous to, you know, different cultures that you might find in different parts of the world. But, you know, and ideally, you want a culture. And it’s sort of driven by symbolic acts, by stories that are told, who’s rewarded, you know, who’s held up as the valuable contributor. Now, at the achiever level, if there’s a focus on culture, it tends to be like this. And there are many books and consulting approaches about it. It’s like, okay, let’s look at our current strategy. And that’s a real line in our culture, so that it supports that strategy. Right. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:03:54

So, change the system. 

Speaker: Bill Joiner  1:03:56

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But it’s all in the service of a particular strategy and strategic set of objectives. What the catalyst leaders that we studied and worked with, what they do is, they’re trying to create a particular kind of culture that is sort of more generic than what you might say, well, we’re in this industry so we need this culture, we have the strategy, we need this culture. It is a culture of high participation, empowerment, collaboration, straight talk. And why are they so intent on creating this culture? It’s because they believe that it creates an organization that has a better chance at sensing and responding to any strategic challenge that’s going to come along in the future. So, when we finish achieving this set of strategic objectives in this uncertain environment, we probably don’t know what the next challenge is going to be. So, we need to have the capability to identify it quickly, to mobilize to respond. And so, they feel like that’s the kind of culture they need for that purpose.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:05:10

So, it’s almost like at the catalyst level, and maybe looking through the lens of like integral lens, you know, from integral theory like that achiever maybe level, you’re looking only in the right side and thinking about just the systems in the doing Agile, and then that’s what we see. Change the structure, you better change the culture. Where at the catalyst level, you’re looking at all four quadrants, you’re looking at doing agile, being agile, and then embracing, you know, what’s there. Would you say that’s true or along the lines? 

Speaker: Bill Joiner  1:05:48

Yeah. I mean, I think that achiever approach to culture I talked about it does deal with culture. And so, you’re starting to deal with to some extent, but the depth of that you’re going into there, and the purpose of it is different. I would also add that, the sort of most common achiever approach to changing culture is you bring in a consulting firm, or you have your HR department help create a set of values that you want to govern the culture that you’re in, and you need sort of try to roll that out. And there’s more and less effective ways to do that, and to the reinforce it. What the countless leaders tend to do, they may wind up doing what I just said as part of it. But the starting point is to create on the senior team that’s trying to do the cultural change, to create that culture in their own team. That’s what a catalyst leader will start by doing. And they realize that, that’s not going to work unless they change, unless they are part, unless they are role modeling the kind of culture that’s needed. So, they tend to have to be proactive and asking for feedback along those lines. And as that develops, then, of course, they’re in a better position. They have become a more cohesive team, which makes them more effective in leading the culture change. So, they don’t just delegate, you know, sometimes you see, you know, an executive goes to HR and say, we need a culture change here. So, yeah. While you’re doing that, we’re going to run the business. You know, and that [unclear 1:07:39], all kinds of problems.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  1:07:42

Yeah, I just had an aha moment, because I talk about it a lot. But it’s like any pilot, like once you see what good looks like, right, you want to create more of it. How can we talk about changing agile if you don’t even know what you’re asking people to do? So, if I, at this executive level can actually experience it with my team, then I know what it takes to well, at least I’ll have much better understanding what it takes for the rest of the organization,

Speaker: Bill Joiner  1:08:11

And you’ll be so much more credible, right? It’s not that oh, everybody else needs to change approach that we see a little too often from executive teams.