Jardena London
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:35
Who is Jardena London? What’s been your story?
Speaker: Jardena London 00:40
Well, my story is, I’m an introvert and I studied math and computer science and I thought that I wanted a job where I didn’t talk to the people but then I ended up here in a job where it’s all about people. So what happened was, when I was in college, studying computer science and math, these are smart people, these are the smart people on campus. And then when I got into the corporate world, and found out that the IT departments where all of these computer science and math people ended up, is one of the most hated departments (inaudible 01:11) though it’s better now, years later, thank you to agile, but it was why could we not get software out the door and why could we not seem to cope with the other departments and collaborate and why were we failing with so many smart people? So that was a problem I set out to solve, and ended up finding out that software wasn’t the problem, the human system is the problem to be solved. So I kind of left software behind and moved into business agility and business transformations.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:42
When you say human system, I’m assuming based on your book, it’s the culture kind of its or…
Speaker: Jardena London 01:49
Well, it’s both. It’s the culture and it’s also the processes that we use to be able to do things that are bigger than one person. So you have process, you have structure that brings people together to create something bigger than a one person thing and that’s a human system.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:07
So you have a book called cultivating leadership transformations, reading transformation. How did the book come about? We all have journeys, idea for a book, the first spark, what was your first spark and how did you come up with idea to write cultivating transformations?
Speaker: Jardena London 02:33
So it’s funny, a colleague of mine, Phil Parrington, just based on the consulting that I do, when we were consultants together, he kept urging me to write some of the stuff down that I use in my consulting business. And I was like, I’m busy, I’m busy, no. And then we had the pandemic, and he was like, just write an outline. And I was like, Phil, an outline for exactly what book that I’m not really writing are you talking about? And he was like, come on, just write it and I was like, I’m not writing it. And then two weeks after I had that conversation with him, where I was like, what book are we talking about? I sent him an outline, I sent him a first draft of the book, actually, not just an outline, because, I wasn’t under the impression you were going to write it and I was like, I wasn’t, it just like one day, it just came out. So really, there was some divine intervention, I think, where it was not pushing a rock uphill, I just spit out everything I’ve been doing for 12 years into a book.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:29
Just like that. The book is divided into three parts and you look at it through three different lenses. You described as looking at the organization through three different lenses; me lens, we lens and the system lens. Could you maybe tell us a little bit more about those three lenses? And then maybe we can explore those three.
Speaker: Jardena London 03:49
Yeah, absolutely and I did not invent the lenses by the way, they’re out there and a lot of leadership literature integral theory uses four lenses, but those are three of them. The idea here is that, especially with transformational leadership, and all leadership, if you don’t focus on yourself first and get yourself right, because you have an impact on everything that happens so getting yourself grounded as a leader is the first and most important thing. And then the second, the we is how you interact with other people and how you bring people together. So it’s like that human, how do we create a force greater than ourselves as a leader? And then the third is the system. So what are we creating that lives beyond the people that are there today? That’s the systems that are in place that will keep churning out long after we’re gone.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 04:39
Great and I’m thinking about, like there’s so much stuff in the book as I was going through it, in the sense of practical things and look at each of these sections you kind of summarize here are the things for this. One of the things that stuck out to me in the me section, the first section is grounded leader and I think you said, grounded leaders, talks about self-awareness. So maybe let’s just first explore what does it mean to be a grounded leader and what does it mean to be around leaders who are grounded?
Speaker: Jardena London 05:19
Yeah, let me just address one thing you said, and we’ll get to the grounded leader, about the practical. It’s so important that, I mean, I do feel like we’ve gone through this time period where we have the practical and business results over here and then the feel good, have a nice, a team building or like happiness at work it’s like a whole different section of our world and those two things need to come together because being happy and being productive are not different. Those are not two different things. So to me, those need to be integrated. In terms of grounded leaders, grounded leaders are the people that bring those two things together. I mean, you know a grounded leader and you know an ungrounded leader, when you are working with one. The grounded leader make you feel like, you’re important, and you’re an important part of the team and anything is possible. And they sort of bring people together and it feels energizing and it feels exhilarating to be around a grounded leader that’s kind of pulling people together with some excitement. The ungrounded leader is the one where you don’t feel safe and you feel like you’re always hustling to get approval and to feel like you’re worthy, that’s the ungrounded leader. If we go back to the me and the we, the reason is because they’re not grounded in themselves so how can they give groundedness to other people. It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just they haven’t done their own work, their own internal work (inaudible 06:52)
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:52
It’s almost like going back to, I guess, the integral and kind of the development of me space. You talk also about ego in this chapter. So I’m assuming, the grounded means that having understanding of your ego and not the ego is bad, but like, when we have too much ego, we become ungrounded, right?
Speaker: Jardena London 07:18
Right. Yeah, of course, ego and I don’t mean to ever say that ego is bad because, of course, if you’re not you who are you, you’re somebody, you’re not completely selfless, you do have to live with yourself. But when our ego is taking center stage and the people that we’re leading are pandering to our ego, for example, or it’s all about us looking good. That’s when ego really gets in the way, because we lose sight of what the real purpose is. So when people tell me, I want to have a role as a transformation lead so that I can get promoted, that’s one of those things where it’s like, yep, maybe that’s not the most important thing, hopefully, you do get promoted and go on to do wonderful things but if that’s your reason, then your ego’s taking a front seat.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 08:11
You also talk about self-awareness. In the book, you say the more self-awareness you gain, the more you realize how much you lack. Let’s talk about this and then I would like to kind of look at the me space in general, and talk about what leaders need to do, because essentially, the me part of the book, which is I think, first third of the book, is really about working ourselves as leaders. And this is also going based on all the research over the last probably 10 years. This is the biggest impediment to organizational transformations. So let’s talk about self-awareness and then we’re going to talk about in general the me space. Could you elaborate on that?
Speaker: Jardena London 08:55
Well, so first of all, you hit on it, I mean, it is a paradox, the more self-awareness you gain, the more you realize how much you lack because you’ve opened up whole new doors to big areas that you may have been blind to. But self-awareness is really just about understanding the impact that you have. So I’ll tell you a story. When I was younger, I went to a client and when I was developing software, not so much in this space, and I was right and I told him whatever the thing was, and he was getting mad. And so I said it again, and maybe with slightly different words, but I said it again and he was getting madder and then I said it more and he got even madder. And when we left my colleague said to me, did you notice that he was getting mad? And I was like, Yeah, but I was right. And he was like, but when someone’s getting mad, you might want to consider changing your approach. And honestly, as an introverted techie that just never occurred to me, just never occurred to me. So with that, I lacked self-awareness. I wasn’t paying attention to his reaction. I was only paying attention to the facts.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:01
I’ve done the same thing and I think which is related to this, it’s like, it’s part of your identity. It’s like you’re not willing to change your perspective, or it’s almost like self-feeding, feeding the ego because, I know I’m right, I know you’re wrong. If I say you’re right, or if I change my stance, I’m going to look weak, so I’m not going to look weak. At least that’s been my perspective in the past and when I reflect back on it, it was really my ego that was holding me back in my identity. And I think a lot of times, when we look at that me space in developing ourselves, is willing to let go of our perspectives and our strong identity that we cling to. Do you think…
Speaker: Jardena London 10:47
What’s important, (inaudible 10:51) like in relationships, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? So it’s placing that relationship above the facts that I was really trying to make sure that we got the facts right. I don’t even know if it was about my ego or it was just the facts were the facts and why are you mad about the facts?
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:10
Which is interesting, because, like you said, in relationships, in your personal relationship, work relationship, it is all about coming from a perspective that the other person is coming with positive intentions. It’s just that the way that they see it, might contradict your perspective but most of the time, people are not out to screw you over or to make your life miserable. It’s just from their perspective, similar how you were thinking like in that situation, you were thinking probably you were doing the right thing. But from that other person’s perspective, probably didn’t look always since they were getting frustrated. So when it comes to developing ourselves, and maybe even to awareness, you talk about there are two parts to awareness but why is this from your perspective and what are some of the tips that you share in your book that you would maybe like to highlight around developing the me space and looking at things from me lens?
Speaker: Jardena London 12:14
We just talked about knowing your impact and knowing that you have one, I think I wasn’t always aware that when I walked into a room that my impact mattered. And no matter whether you say a word or not, when you walk into a room, virtual or otherwise, because we’re not walking into rooms lately, but you have an impact, when you show up on a zoom call, you have an impact whether or not you say anything. And knowing that is important, and knowing how your energy is. So if you’re sitting on a zoom call, and you’re multitasking, or it kind of look like you’re not paying attention, that has an impact on everybody else on that call and realizing that, that’s the self-awareness of your impact is so important. And then the other piece that I think is huge, I mean, there’s so many things, we could talk about with the me space. But the other thing that I think is huge is emotional literacy. So most humans can identify three emotions, the mad, sad, glad, which is of course, we love that in Agile, but to understand the subtleties and the nuance with different emotions and what mad really is, sometimes mad is afraid, and sometimes mad is nervous, and sometimes mad is feeling unsafe. There’s a lot of different subtleties to why these emotions show up. And one of the things we’ve said in traditional leadership is, you have to manage your emotions. I don’t know about manage, but knowing them, the information and then what I talked about is transformational leaders can identify the emotion and then decide what to do with it, rather than letting it take over. So I guess you can call that managing emotion, but it’s not suppressing it. It’s just using it intentionally and that for a leader is humongous.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:05
Because you can use that to motivate yourself, it’s that EQ in a sense and goes back to awareness. The more that you’re aware, the more that you can observe. It’s almost stepping out of your body observing your reactions to a specific event, rather than just being in and reacting to it.
Speaker: Jardena London 14:28
Your emotional twinge that’s in the back of your neck or in your stomach is telling you that something’s not right but you haven’t quite identified what that is yet. So it’s a ton of information that you can use, but it’s just not to react immediately.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:44
Yeah, and maybe just to kind of conclude on this part as far as the me space, there are assessments out there like a leadership circle, obviously, you can do coaching. Coaching can help develop in this space. What else do you think is helpful for individuals, leaders, coaches, consultants, that really want to work on themselves and I guess the me space or really the mindset, the me is really the individual mindset. What other recommendations do you have on helping develop in this space?
Speaker: Jardena London 15:24
Any of the things that you can do and there’s a lot of self-help books out there and they’re all really good, actually but anything that you can do to peel back some of those layers. Brene Brown talks about armored leadership versus daring leadership and so the book dare to lead by Brene Brown is great, after you’re done reading mine of course, but that’s a great book, because what it talks about is peeling back those layers of armor. So we talked before about my lack of self-awareness. So armor for a lot of people especially in the technology field is knowledge, or knowledge is armor. So in that example, I was using my knowledge as armor. If I can know everything, then no one can ever say anything about me, I can use that to protect myself. And so peeling away all of those layers of armor that you’ve built to protect yourself, that you maybe don’t need anymore, that’s another great thing but it requires a lot of introspection and self-examination. Coaching helps because you have somebody that can hold it right up to your face. There’s a tool also called the Johari Window, and it’s free online, where you can actually put kind of what you think about yourself, and then you send it out to a bunch of people who know you, and they put what they observe about you and you can then see what are you not seeing about yourself.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:43
It’s essentially exposing your blind spots to you.
Speaker: Jardena London 16:48
Good and bad, there may be good things about you that you’re not aware of.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:52
I also like the Johari Window, just to explore the unknown things that other people don’t know and you don’t know and this is where you ask yourself a question, what type of experiences do I want to create in order to expose these areas? And I know, for instance, a lot of times for coaches, trainers, I know for me, originally was training. That was something that I didn’t know, I never trained, at one point, and just actually doing it, I realized I actually like it but I suck at it so I need to develop skills in order to do it but it was good to at least explore and then realize, yeah, this is something that I definitely enjoy. It’s just like anything else that you start with. You’re going to have to develop the skills in it but they’re just actually (inaudible 17:45)
Speaker: Jardena London 17:45
That’s great awareness. There’s a great book by Gay Hendricks called The Big Leap and he talks about the different levels of competence but it just talked about the two top levels. There’s the levels of incompetence that, of course, we don’t want to be incompetent, we don’t want to just be competent at things that nobody cares about. But the third level he talks about is your zone of competence, stuff that you are really good at. People keep coming to you and you keep getting opportunities in that space, but it’s not your zone of genius. So the top level is your zone of genius that you love, and you’re in flow and that energizes you and the trap is not to get stuck in your zone of competence, and not make it to your zone of genius. So trying things where it’s like, I love this, I need to build some skills, but it’s my zone of genius versus I’m really good at spreadsheets, everyone comes to me for a spreadsheet and I’m going to keep doing that even though it doesn’t really energize me.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:43
Energize me. Yeah, it goes back to having fun and enjoying what you’re doing. Let’s move to the we lens or let’s look through we lens. Could you maybe describe the lens and I want to talk about a couple of topics there.
Speaker: Jardena London 19:01
Yeah, I mean, the we lens is about being able to bring people together, that’s mobilized, well, that’s what a leader does. I think there’s some quotes about if you call yourself a leader, and you turn around and no one’s following you, you’re not a leader. It’s being able to bring people together and create energy for groups. But also being able to connect one on one with other people, which you’ve now prepped yourself for, by working in the me space.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:28
You talked about the we space about leader as organizational healer, could you maybe elaborate on what is an organizational healer?
Speaker: Jardena London 19:41
If we look at a lot of organizations today, the organization is in pain. The organization may have toxicity, there’s some kind of pain there. Not all organizations but many, and even ones that don’t, can probably still use some, everyone can use some healing right? So it is about healing that pain because really to move into transformation, you can’t move into transformation for an organization that’s in pain. A lot of organizations I go into, they’re just working on too many things, and everyone’s overcapacity, and they’re not managing priorities and that’s causing people pain, people are over capacity. That might be pain, it might be a toxic culture that’s causing pain, it’s different but until you address that, that you’re not doing business transformation, you can’t build it on top of pain. So you need to heal that pain first.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:34
When I think about healing pain or organizational healer, it’s also being there for the people. A lot of times leaders are imposing things, rather than co-creating with people. And I think when we impose stuff as leaders, we are actually adding to the pain and when we try to be more involved and try to co-create with people being there for the people, I think that’s more being a healing leader, right?
Speaker: Jardena London 21:05
Yeah. And there’s a lot of talk now about empathy, is a big thing in a lot of organizations now and I think it’s great, because being empathetic to how people feel is really important.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:18
Empathy is about, I tell people at least from my perspective, it’s suspending your own beliefs and suspending your own kind of identity. Even if I really want to empathize with Jardena, I will suspend my beliefs, I will suspend what I believe is true and then try to look at it from your perspective, what you see and how you see the world how you like all of your senses. Because only then can we actually empathize with somebody. And I think it’s a tough skill to develop but it’s also tough to do when we’re all so busy, especially the higher that you go up, the more it’s like, let’s just get it done rather than let’s take the time to truly understand and empathize with people.
Speaker: Jardena London 22:05
I think one of the life changing moments for me, and again, it was Brene Brown that said this was that empathy is not about seeing their perspective on the situation, it’s about understanding how they feel. Again, when I say it, it sounds so obvious now, but I was trying to understand the situation, and I couldn’t. But can you understand someone being frustrated? Yeah. Can you understand someone being sad? Yeah, I can’t understand the story you just told me or why you would do that but I understand that you feel frustrated. And that was really life changing for me to try and understand their emotion and not their situation.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 22:43
Situation. Which is also another thing that you talked about in the book, about doing the impossible and how the first step of doing the impossible is shifting from problem first mindset into a possibility first mindset. Tell us a little bit more about that.
Speaker: Jardena London 22:58
I still get trapped in this because as any kind of technologist and mathematician, of course, problems are front and center, right. Our world is math problems. It’s technology problems, we love that. The thing about problems is that, it puts you into a box pretty quickly. There’s a great example. I’ll give you an example of what’s happening right now, we have this thing, the great resignation where a lot of people are leaving their jobs. So companies are looking at that with a problem first mindset of how can we keep people, the problem that they’re saying is, how do we keep people, we’ve narrowed that problem down to this tiny box? But the possibility first mindset would be, we have a lot of people, we’re seeing a lot of turnover in jobs, what’s possible now? When I say what’s possible now, it’s like, well, how might we take advantage of the fact that we can now get new talent? How can we create systems that allow for turnover, and take advantage of that cross pollination that we’re getting? And maybe we can create a situation where we need less people to do some of the work or we can shift how to work is. There’s all kinds of possibilities if you look outside of the key people box.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:10
That’s exactly and I think I’m working with a client. And this has been in general, clients have been around for longer, they have too many products. It’s hard to say no to products and I say this is opportunity, also, like you said, not just think about how to create happier places to work and happier employees, but also to look at your whole organization and say, what else could we change and improve? How else can we align and having that you talk about systems thinking and systemic view in your book, it’s also about that systemic view about the whole organization, not just like you said, focus on this specific problem.
Speaker: Jardena London 24:52
Because everything’s connected so if you look at things in isolation, you miss the whole system. But I love what you said there too about working on too many things, and what can we let go? Corporations, companies are historically horrible at ever letting anything go. I mean, we are great at starting, we are not great at stopping.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:16
Well, it’s the general idea of entropy, like, the older you are, the bigger you are, you moving towards higher complexity and chaos. So I think, as a leader understanding that and saying, well, who has the authority to change the system and maybe this is a good segue into the system. Who has the authority to change the governance structure, how we budget or structure. So let’s maybe move into the third lens, which is the system. Give us an overview and then I have some things that I’d like to explore.
Speaker: Jardena London 25:57
As leaders move into becoming a transformational leader, it’s less about managing the work, and more about creating conditions for a healthy organization, a healthy system, so it’s that systems thinking. So there is a shift there a shift in how we spend our time to building structures, to building channels for communication to building competencies. It’s not just org chart when I say structure, it’s all kinds of things that feed into the way the organization works and that is a shift for a lot of leaders.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:31
How the value flows through the organization, right?
Speaker: Jardena London 26:34
Yep, yep. So it’s looking at the flow, tweaking that flow.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:39
Also, you talked about shifting and this has been said for a long time, you’ve reinforced it in the book as well, about shifting from the organization as a machine type of metaphor, to more organization as a complex living system. Could you give us overview of what you mean by that, when you say, we should treat our organizations as living systems?
Speaker: Jardena London 27:07
Yeah, sure. It all comes together there and we’ve done this for so many years, we say like the IT factory, we say what is our (inaudible 27:16), I know all these words about it being a factory, and resources and all those things, but those are just all factory words, industrial revolution words. But when you look at a machine or you think about designing a machine, the machine only does mostly for the most part, what you’ve designed it to do. But when you think about a living system, and you’re creating conditions, you’re planting seeds, that system can do more and adapt and do more than you designed it to do. It grows in ways that you haven’t planned and it can surprise you, it can do things that you didn’t want it to do, it can adapt in ways that you really don’t have to manage. When you create a machine every time there’s a change in the market and there’s a change in the ecosystem, you have to rebuild that machine or add on to that machine, but the living system, you don’t, you may change the conditions, but you don’t have to rebuild the whole machine. So that’s kind of what we mean when we talk about living systems.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:13
I think one thing that comes with the living systems is emergence, which you usually don’t have with traditional way of looking organizations. As we look at organizations, they’re looking to innovate more and more to figure things out to help them solve the problems and the challenges that they’re facing and the property of a living system and looking at organizations as living systems gives you that advantage, I think of embracing that emergence, and what’s possible.
Speaker: Jardena London 28:48
I love that emergence and that adaptability that you just don’t get from a machine. And the other thing to understand is we’ve treated organizations like machines all these years, we’ve tried to turn our organizations into kind of assembly line factories. And every time something breaks down, we go oh, it was just human, there was human problem, no, the machine’s fine, the humans ruined it. But if that happens every time, we need to acknowledge that it wasn’t a machine in the first place. It never was a machine.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:17
Who’s designing the machines?
Speaker: Jardena London 29:21
Just humans.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:24
You also talk about natural hierarchy. If you look at the scaling frameworks, if you look at everything is moving towards end to end, less hierarchical structures in the sense like value streams. But let’s first talk about hierarchy. People think hierarchy is bad, you have hierarchy and everything. I think what I like about what you put in your book is natural hierarchy. What is your perspective on hierarchy? How do you see it and what is natural hierarchy?
Speaker: Jardena London 30:06
I think hierarchy has gotten a bad rap and it’s kind of bad rap because we’ve seen it used so much for superiority for like, just because I’m above you in the organizational hierarchy, I’m better than you or I can tell you what to do and now I have power over you. So I talk about a tree, if you think about a tree, a tree has hierarchy, but it’s not like the leaves are the boss of the trunk, or the trunk is the boss of the leaves and the roots, there’s no boss, there’s no superiority, there’s no power over but there is a hierarchy. When we think about organizations, the flattening of the hierarchy is not a terrible thing, because it was used, first of all for superiority but also there were too many handoffs, there was too much up the chain down the chain approval. But getting rid of making things flat, is unrealistic because it’s the scope of work, the same with a tree. You have different functions. There are different functions at different levels. There’s no reason to get rid of that. And when you look at some of the frameworks that claim to be flat, they’re not, no, they’ve turned squares into circles, but they still have a hierarchy. They just call it different and they don’t have superiority.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 31:21
Exactly. And to me, it’s understanding contextualizing things. Sometimes things could have a lot of hierarchy and that might make sense and sometimes they don’t. Naturally large organizations that have 1000s and 1000s of people will have to think about how do we actually design these systems, so they do embrace some of these properties of learning systems, and how do we continuously design and create guardrails? I think that this is another thing with hierarchy in general in organizations. It really goes back to complexity management. If you look at it from how do we design these guardrails or boundaries? Every system has some type of boundaries, how do we design organizational structures and governances with boundaries that we can keep an eye on and change them, as is needed based on the purpose of the system. So system could be our product line or whatever it is. And I think that’s something that it feels like we’re 20 years away from organizations understanding that. I don’t know if you feel that way but when I coach and consult, that’s what it feels like.
Speaker: Jardena London 32:45
I think that we have not yet cracked the code on how to organize large groups of people to get worked on. We still have the Dunbar number of 150 and we haven’t really quite cracked the code on how to get beyond that. But you’re right about the boundaries. I mean, of course, and living systems have boundaries, like a cell is bounded, it’s not just this flat. So I always say, it’s not like if you take your water and pour it on the table that’s like a flat organization, it needs to be in a glass.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 33:19
Another thing I found interesting is the way they you talk about common organizational tensions. Could you maybe talk about those and how you address those? What are the common tensions?
Speaker: Jardena London 33:36
We identified 10 core tensions but each one can show up differently in different organizations that I’ve kind of shared. If you look at my white paper on structural agility, I break it down into different, each one has different ways it might show up but there’s 10 core tensions that show up. When I say tensions, a lot of people use the term polarity, or paradoxes but these are two opposing forces that are not, not opposing forces, seemingly opposing forces, but that can actually work together. So they can be destructive, and they can be generative. So a couple of the ones that show up, and especially in the Agile transformation space, if you think about stability and change, so we say we’re disrupting things, we’re changing things but there’s some legacy business there that’s stable, and providing the revenue to fund this transformation so those two things need to work together. I’ve seen companies separate the two, like there’s the wrong people and the transform people but those two things, they need to work together. They’re generative. They’re not opposites. The other big one in the transformation space is structure and flow. So we just talked about that a little bit, but we need just enough structure to be able to get work moving and value flowing, but not so much structure that you’re stopping it, but your structure creates flow. I mean, these two things need to work together. Again, they’re not at odds with each other.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:05
Exactly. And I think that goes for a lot of things in life. I think we look at things as opposites, but it’s just a spectrum and that spectrum needs to be decided based on context not that one is bad, the other one is good, which we a lot of times tend to look at.
Speaker: Jardena London 35:23
And it’s also not a compromise. It’s not like, well, let’s meet halfway, it’s no, how can we actually leverage each other for more possibility not less possibility.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:37
Yeah, I mean, it’s almost like in the Agile Manifesto, individuals and interactions over processing tools is a good example. It’s not one or the other. Those are tensions. And if we take it too far, we can definitely improve interactions and how we do things, if we have the tools, right tools, and the right processes.
Speaker: Jardena London 36:01
That’s a great example. That’s structure and flow. So individuals and interactions over processes and tools is structure and flow. So the tools are a structure and the human interaction is flow. And again, the manifesto doesn’t say no tools, of course, we need tools to help us with our interactions.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:19
What do you think is the correlation between especially the me lens and the system lens? Specifically, what I’m asking, and I don’t know, we haven’t talked about vertical development by (inaudible 36:38), Michael Spade, on the context of developing both vertically as well as horizontally. So vertical development is working really on me, in the sense of working on my self-awareness, working on my emotional intelligence and then the horizontal development would be like learning how to be a better coach, learning coaching skills, like listening might be something. So what do you think is the correlation between the me lens or me space and system space? Is there any preference, I guess any, it’s all intertwined but from your perspective, is there any connection?
Speaker: Jardena London 37:26
Well, we’re seeing that there’s a lot of talk right now about the human bias that shows up in AI. That’s an example of where, if you’re not grounded in your me, it’s going to show up in your system. I worked with an organization that, we estimated that probably 90% of the productivity went into what they call feeding the beast. So PowerPoints approvals for all internal stuff, that was non value add to the customer in lean terms. So that is, if we’re pandering to the preferences of a leader who’s ungrounded, that means that the system is now built around satisfying and pandering to leaders, that’s what it is. So your system is going to reflect your biases.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:19
Exactly. And I think that’s a really important topic, too. I think this is why we’re seeing more and more leaders that are diverse, like in a woman, people from other backgrounds. Because I think generally, if we look at over the last 20-30 years, we had leaders in organizations that, I would say not very grounded, like you said, and that they were ego driven. So you get the type of structures, you get silos, you get functions in organizations, you probably work and still the case. Are my authorities determined by how many people I have reporting to me, so people fight over that, to make sure that hey, I don’t want to lose any of these and I’ll take more work on just so I have more people, so I have more authority. So the ego and the me is feeding and influencing a lot the system, which is the structure.
Speaker: Jardena London 39:20
And what about the forced ranking, which is like my other favorite process. Managers get together and duke it out of whose people are better. So if your manager is not good at fighting with their peers, you’re not going to get as much of a bonus or promotion or whatever the case may be. I mean, if that’s not about ego influencing the system, I don’t know what it is.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:45
And that’s also a polarity in a sense, that’s not necessarily completely bad, like having that competition could be very healthy, but unchecked and unbalanced, can create a culture that’s very toxic.
Speaker: Jardena London 40:00
Absolutely and we’ve seen that.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:02
What are soulful organizations?
Speaker: Jardena London 40:06
Yeah. So I think the easiest way to think about soulful organizations is to think about what is it like when they’re soul crushing, it’s much easier to, because we know what that feels like. So it’s a place where we don’t feel safe, we don’t feel like our contribution is valued or it may be shot down, or ideas might be shot down, where we feel like our energy is sucked out of us when we walk into the workplace. And when we say, you kind of check your soul at the door when you walk in, and you’re just there to make the money, so that’s so less. Soulful is, you go to work, and it’s as energizing as when you’re not at work. I don’t know why those two things need to be different. I love my work so I want the whole world to feel like that about their work. But we talked about there’s this phrase that I just really despise is work life balance, and now they’re calling it work life integration. But I still don’t understand why work and life are two separate things, are you not living when you’re at work, are you not alive? The soulful workplace is a place that’s, it’s part of your life that you enjoy just as much as the part that you’re not working.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 41:17
And I could relate a lot to what you wrote in your book about your experience. I started a company, software development company in college and had similar experiences, where early in my life, I tasted what it is to work for yourself, then I went back and work inside organizations where they’re soul crushing and then coming back again, working for myself, and I’ve done that several times. And it is very interesting to see how the me space or the mindset have been shaped for people that have been working in a single company for 20-30 years and when they check in, they are different people. And so with some of these people I’ve developed relationships where I’ve gotten to know them outside of work and especially the leaders. I mean, it’s crazy with leaders, like they have to show up certain way at work. And I remember one guy that he was actually from back home, and he was a COO of a large publicly traded company and we developed this relationship in a sense, where we became friends and he was saying, Milan, I have to show up a certain way, it’s almost like the pressure of looking and behaving certain way, that was a burden. But in his belief, that was the only way to portray confidence to essentially do his job. And you can’t do that, like you said, if you’re going to think about the whole work and your life is just one thing that, the way that Milan shows up to work the same way they show up with my friends, that takes some courage coming back to courage to be vulnerable, courage to actually let go of that, or take off that shield and that’s tough. And it’s easy to say, but I think for people that haven’t experienced that, that’s a tough thing to do. So as a coach, maybe I have couple of things but what do you do in that situation if you’re working with executives like that? What do you do to help them kind of take off their shield?
Speaker: Jardena London 43:52
So I was going to say it, it’s exactly about that. It’s about peeling back that armor, and being aligned with your values. Knowing your values is super important, because until you know them, it’s hard to stand up for them. But working in a place that doesn’t align with what you believe in, is this great resignation , I think that’s a lot of what’s driving it, people are realizing that they’re working in a business that doesn’t align with their values. I know somebody who turned down a job recently at a company that produces confectionery, but their job was going to be to promote it, so that more people eat more sugar and more children in particular, but there’s nothing wrong with the company, I buy things from this company of course, but their values didn’t align with promoting sugar. So it’s just being aligned with your values every day. And the same values that you have at home are the same values you have at work. It doesn’t have to be like I’m going to be all crazy at work now because I’m like, I go out drinking with my buddies, now I’m going to have to go out drinking at work. It doesn’t have to be like that.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 45:01
Yeah, no, I agree. And I don’t want to go down this rabbit hole of values but I think it’s also important for people first of all know your values, and also be open to question your values. The only way to grow through the me space is actually to understand what your values are, and then saying, okay, how can I transcend and include these values but how can I see things from a different perspective. And when I work with leaders, that’s one of the things that, first exposing and making sure that we understand and we’re clear about what our values are, but then also not clinging to those values in a way that if they show up or influences us towards that more destructive or negative side, given the circumstances. But we’ll leave that maybe for another time. What about the role of finance and HR? Because usually, they’re the last ones to go in organizations and it seems like they should be the first ones to go, in a sense when it comes to transforming and coming back to the title of your book, cultivating transformations, what is your thought on…?
Speaker: Jardena London 46:16
Well, so I’m just going to quote from Evan Leybourn from the business agility Institute “you’re only as agile as your least agile department”. You talked about what is the role of finance and HR, it’s similar to the role that they’ve always had. Well, we’ll talk about HR, but finance, the role is the same. It’s all about the how, and it’s about the structure and flow. It’s about creating a structure that will allow for flow. So I worked with a client where product development was producing all these products, and they were getting stuck at finances door, because finance had trouble being able to charge clients for them, like we couldn’t quite figure out how to bill for these products. So the products are, it’s like having these cars come off the line and sitting on the lot rates basically. So that alleviating some of those that friction, so that things can get out the door and money can flow through the organization to produce some value is important. The budgeting process is important, like how are we making sure that money is where it needs to be to maximize value and not stopping value. From an HR perspective, though, I do think that there may be a role change in some organizations, because HR in a lot of organizations is looked at as compliance. It’s about compliance and it’s about protection and it’s not about maximizing the value of the human system. There may be a shift there for some organizations, some organizations maybe it’s just about knocking down obstacles.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:47
One organization that comes to mind, had friends at work that worked with a little bit is Vistaprint. And for instance, how they looked at HR, what does HR stand for? How do we enable other people in our organizations? What policies are too strict? Why are we actually creating bottlenecks because of our HR policies? And I think that comes to finance as well, which how do we budget for things? Is it by cost centers and are we actually reinforcing this silos and functions or should we be looking at things more holistically from a customer product? And then they say one is better than the other, obviously, context matters, but just even being willing to question the status quo, and say, how do we take that systemic view is important. And that’s something that is becoming more common, but it’s still not the norm in most of the organizations.
Speaker: Jardena London 48:53
You know, we talked before about the feeding the beast, about doing internal? Well, so two things. So budget planning, that takes a whole year to do for a year. I mean, that’s just a lot of energy in an organization that could be spent on value and then the other one is performance reviews. If you’ve been a manager in an organization, it feels like you’re always assessing and judging performance and to what end? It doesn’t improve performance, we’ve shown that. It is so that we can know about promotions and bonuses, but other than that, a lot of energy goes into performance reviews that you don’t get back, you don’t get the ROI. So those are some of the blockers that maybe can be alleviated.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 49:38
There’s so many things that are wrong, especially performance reviews is one, which is feedback loop. In a sense, how quick is the feedback loop, having more of a quicker immediate feedback loop? I know when I worked in organizations, I used to get fired up because it’s like, oh, here’s what you did two months ago and now I’m telling you about it. I remember first time I realized, when the manager told me, well, I can’t put you on a high performing, or I have to put somebody else this year, when I started realizing what does it mean? What does that mean? Everybody takes their turn because you can put everybody on that scale.
Speaker: Jardena London 50:25
So that’s one of the things that cracks me up. A lot of things about companies crack me up, but the one where it’s like, I can only have one person that exceeds expectations. And I was like, you just said you can only have one person that exceeds expectations so you don’t want the rest of us to exceed your expectations?
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:42
That type of policy reinforces individual, or maybe not even individual versus where HR could look at and say, how do we look at motivating and reinforcing individual behaviors and individual motivations, but also, at the team level. It’s almost like how sports teams like hey, if you know how many points you score, versus how many games you win as a team, and how many assists you have whatever that is. So it’s a more holistic view on this and you don’t take away the individual performance, but you also incorporate into a team performance.
Speaker: Jardena London 51:21
And it’s also promoting scarcity. So it’s promoting that scarcity and fear instead of abundance, like why can’t we all be great, but I think you hit on an important point and Agile has been so great for this in companies is, we spend a lot of time developing individuals, but we haven’t spent a focus on developing teams and I think you need both. Some agile coaches would say, let’s focus on the team and not the individual but I think it’s both but I think putting some effort into developing teams is important too.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:52
I agree. Again, it’s taking that holistic view and also looking at the me space, or the me lens, look into the me lens, different people are motivated differently. I’ve worked with people that are close to retirement, they don’t care about climbing the corporate ladder, they’ve done that. They’ve seen it, it’s more like, okay, I just want to enjoy life right now, I would love to mentor somebody and share what I know. And then you might have people that are coming out of college or younger, that have more desire or making more money or climbing and you have to respect both perspectives, and both needs rather than just one. We’re almost out of time. What are some of the things maybe I didn’t ask you or things you would like to share with the audience?
Speaker: Jardena London 52:47
We’ve talked about so many interesting things. I just think the importance of focusing on, we talked about the me, but I talked about resonance and dissonance in the book as well and that’s such a key concept of how am I, it’s about self-awareness too but is my message actually resonating? Am I on the same wavelength as the organization and it sounds kind of woowoo but we know what it’s like when we feel it and we know what it’s like when we don’t. But as a as a transformational leader, you’re creating some dissonance, of course you are you have to, but you need to bridge that with enough resonance so people can hear you. And I think that’s a key piece is that we have some disruptive leaders that are so disruptive, then they either get fired, or they’re just ineffective. So you need to really carefully walk that balance between dissonance and resonance. I think that’s a key thing to remember.
