Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

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Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– Leading When We’ve Stopped Thinking: AI’s Red Flag with Srini Koushik

– When Women Lead: Courage, Change, & Representation with Congressperson Joyce Beatty

– To Stop a Tyrant: The Power of Followers with Ira Chaleff

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Greg Moran is a C-level digital, strategy and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience. He led corporate strategy for Ford and designed the plan that Alan Mullaly used to turn around the company. Greg held C-level IT positions in app dev, infrastructure, and core banking applications at Ford, Nationwide Insurance, and Bank One/JPMC, respectively. He began his career in consulting with Arthur Andersen Accenture, working across industries with 100 companies over the course of a decade. He is passionate about leadership and culture, and teaches part time on the topic at Ohio University.

Transcript
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Unknown Speaker 0:08
Hi. Welcome to innovating leadership co creating our future. I’m your host. Maureen Metcalf. I’m the founder and CEO of the innovative leadership institute. I am delighted to have our returning guest, Greg Moran. Greg is a C level digital strategy and change leadership executive with extensive global operations experience. He led corporate strategy for Ford and designed a plan that Alan Mulally used to turn around the company. It’s great to be here again. Maureen, and thank you very much for having me before we begin. You mentioned Ford Motor Company, and I thought I’d just share a funny factoid, Ford has announced its new CEO. His name is Jim Farley, and when I was at Ford, he was the head of sales and marketing. The interesting factoid is Jim Farley, who’s actually Chris Farley, the comedian’s cousin. Oh, really. And actually has very similar facial features. Your listeners can check that out. It’s just a weird coincidence, but he’s a great executive, and I’m sure he’ll do well with Ford. Does he have the same sense of humor? Not in the context that we worked. He may be a very funny guy, but of course, we were working together rather than trying to be funny together. And you know, it really struck me as an interesting way to approach this, to use your leadership framework and go through kind of point by point, and talk about starting with the first one. What does professionally humble really mean? In this context? We are shifting behavior dramatically, and for people who can’t make that pivot, the transition is really difficult, and at the senior executive level, it’s visible. Yes, I when I think of professional humility when you’re working with a leader who is truly an expert in the context that you’re operating in professional humility, to me, looks like somebody who is not condescending about their expertise, but also not ashamed of the fact that they have that expertise and are Happy to use it to help you make good decisions in a short period of time. In this context, everybody knows perfectly well that nobody knows the answers for certain dimensions of what we’re dealing with here, and so somebody coming in and acting like they confidently know the answers in a time like this will come across as disingenuous, it’ll come across as unthoughtful, it’ll come across as really tone deaf, right? So some humility around those dimensions that we’re all going to be learning together plays to your authenticity, plays to your opportunity to learn. I think that is also interesting, as we’ve traveled the time of the pandemic so early on, we were just going home for a few weeks. Now we’re really not going back to the old environment. Now, as a leader, I have to acknowledge I don’t know, and also acknowledge that I can figure it out with the right people in the room. So it’s not I’m clueless. Yes, we’ve never done a pandemic before, but I figured out a whole bunch of stuff I know how to learn. Yeah, and I want you to know that I’m going to be learning with you, and I think it means, in that context, asking the second question, right? It’s a humility around I don’t have a great answer to that question. I have a point of view on it. What are you experiencing? Because that might inform what I ultimately conclude those, I think approaches demonstrate that humility, but not a lack of and we’ll get to this not, not a lack of desire for action, right? But there’s a thoughtfulness that you wrap it in, because the answer is not necessarily obvious, and it may take iteration. And back to your point. If it looks obvious, you’re probably not very thoughtful. This is where the mind of the scientist comes in to me that even the most brilliant executives don’t have the answer, but they have a point of view, and they know how to collaborate to pull those plans forward and test them. And the idea that we make the smallest decision that we can possibly make today, learn from that, and then make the smallest decision we can make tomorrow, and we continue to iterate and get smarter, rather than the old world where I have to wait till I know the answer, I think there’s a process of enlisting that allows you to take bold action in a time like this without appearing to be domineering or presumptive, where you’re in a context where everybody knows you’re an Expert and they’re looking to you to make the call. You really don’t need to enlist people in that moment. If you’re driving in a car with a professional race car driver, and they’re approaching a corner, they don’t really ask you, you don’t really think about I need to be paying attention to how this person is going to drive the car.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Hmm, they’re an expert, right? But put them in an airplane, right? And we’re together. And now you’d want to have some enlistment going on, and so I think about it the same way. Is in this context, you might say, here’s what I’m thinking about, and I’d like to act on this. Are you all in with me? Or what am I missing? You can start with the What am I missing, and if I am missing something, let me know what it is. But once we’ve iterated through and then it’s a matter of, okay, are we in this together? Let’s try. Are we willing to do this together? And now you’ve enlisted people because they feel ownership in the action with you. And what’s the duration of that I’m enlisted, right? So for the next week or the next month, we’re going to stay this course. We’re going to learn what we can learn, and then we’ll iterate. So it’s not I’m committed forever, right? And then people feel ownership for the solution that for me, both in my own work and what I see with clients, has been really important. I’m not committing forever. I’m committing to this experiment for this period of time, and then we recalibrate Absolutely. So we talked about being professionally humble. The second of seven is unwavering commitment to right action. Yeah. So as we talk about unwavering commitment to right action, I spending a lot of my career in it. I’ve been in a lot of crisis situations, and if I’ve learned anything from dealing with massive it outages at Ford, we had a big power outage on the east coast in the 2000s and it shut down the company for four days, and shut it down on a global basis because took down our main data center, etc. And I can tell you, the worst thing you can do in a crisis is stand still. So this commitment to action is absolutely essential. You do have to be moving. You do have to be making decisions. And by the way, not all of them will be right, but you bring together humility, curiosity, learning, directionally correct, the mind of a scientist, and then saying, Okay, I’ve got enough. We’re going to make a decision and we’re going to try it, and then time box that see where you stand, reassess and make another decision, and we talk about right action being based on the principles and the mission of the organization. So to your point, we’re going to learn every day, especially during things like a pandemic and whatever the next crisis is that organizations face, but we know if we are making decisions based on our principles, we will certainly be directionally slightly off. You’re a cyclist. It’s the dynamic searing. If you hold your bicycle completely straight, you fall off. You’re constantly course correcting, same with driving a car. This to me, the unwavering commitment to right action is, of course, I’m doing minor course corrections, but I know my mission, and I know who I am and what I stand for, and with those as my guide, I will be making generally decent decisions. Yes, in this particular crisis, I do think say crisis, it’s not that word is a dangerous word, because people interpret it their own way, but it certainly is a disruption, a massive disruption, and it has had it’s been combined with simultaneous other disruptions, like social unrest surrounding police brutality and translating that into then the potential discussion around racism. There’s a lot seething in our society right now, and there’s intersectionality between these things. Oh yeah, if you’re running a large police organization, you’ve got a double whammy going on right now, right maybe a triple whammy going on right now. And if you’re in a big retail organization, some retail organizations This is a big win for and they’re dealing with a completely different type of problem than other retail organizations for whom this has created a vacuum. Yeah, the number of bankruptcies we’ve seen in the retail space is significant, and companies like auto parts, stores like Home Depot, they’re killing it. Yeah, they’re killing it right now. Obviously, Amazon’s doing very well, not just mail order, though. Some storefronts, a lot of people are taking this time to do projects on their home, on their home. Go try and buy a tool at Home Depot right now. There’s not many on in stock. Yeah, I spend a bit of time at Lowe’s, so I do know that I hear executives saying my people can’t be that busy if the sales at Lowe’s are this high. And I realize it’s a that’s not a reasonable and it’s easy to forget the people in a lot of cities have been given back three to four hours a day minimum of time that’s now available to them that they could spend on work, but some of them are spending some of that time, at least on projects around the house, gardening, right? If you don’t have to get up, shower, put your makeup on, drive an hour into the office.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Us go to Starbucks, get the coffee, blah, blah, blah, all the things you’ve had a lot of time back, yeah, and I think people are taking advantage of that, and also it just helps you feel like you’re making a difference, right? You’re doing something worthwhile. But my point was that you’re seeing a ton of cross impacts, and so there’s a lot to be absorbed here, and that’s really a great transition to your next framework, which is a 360 degree thinker, really looking systemically at all the impacts that are occurring inside of your organization simultaneously. I think is required if you want to be thoughtful about defining the right actions that you want to take we all. We’ve agreed standing still is not the answer, and as we look at things like social unrest and racial equality, for most of us, that means really rethinking and examining ourselves. I didn’t think I did anything that was racially and inappropriate, but as I look at some of my behaviors, I have this similar implicit bias to what others do, and I really need to rethink and that ripples through the decisions I make across many vectors, and that’s just one thing I’m thinking about, the working from anywhere. How do I navigate speaking at conferences? How am I pricing my time these disruptions that are intertwined right now, at least for me? And so there is no single thread that I can pull that doesn’t unravel a bunch of other stuff, absolutely, and I think we’ve talked together about diversity in the past, and this is a clear example of where running to diversity will help you as a leader and a big D diversity in every sense of the word, really think about what it would be like for somebody in a work from home world or a work from anywhere world that has a different personality type than you, and go talk to them about it. If you’re a leader, you’re going to be dealing with people with different personalities than yours. And seek out the opportunity to if you’re an extrovert, talk to one of your peers or one of your team that’s a profound introvert and really see if you can one on one, because they’re not going to want to want to do it in public. They’re an introvert, right? Get inside their head somewhat and see how they’re processing this experience for themselves and what’s working for them and what’s not by the same token as you were just alluding to when you think of the situation we have around the social unrest, and what it means in terms of social justice and potential racism in our country, we now have the permission to ask questions that we probably would have been frowned on for asking six months ago. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of that? You now have an opportunity, regardless of what your particular race is to ask questions of people that are different than you that you wouldn’t have been able to appropriately ask even a few months ago. And I think that’s an opportunity for learning. For me, one of the things that’s been interesting is who is willing to give me feedback, and so I ask for and expect someone who’s close to me, not a passer by on the street to if I say something that is racially tone deaf, to say that required at that moment. Why’d you do that, not in a way that smacked me upside the head, but to help me become more aware? And so the idea and we’ll get into collaboration later, but that each of us are trying to learn, or many of us are trying to learn, I realize not everyone, and to extend grace to those of us who do it poorly, and to have the courage to give feedback, which I realize takes a lot of courage, unless you’re invited, and even still, it takes a lot of courage, but all of that shapes our thinking. I do think it’s really important for leaders at this time to set a context that allows people to learn. I think the concept of the cancel culture and dredging up somebody’s statements from 10 years ago is really rarely going to be helpful to the problem. First of all, we should start with the assumption that if people sincerely express the desire to change and learn, we should take them at their work and give them the opportunity to do so. I think having leaders set a context that says we’re going to start with the premise that everybody can and will and wants to learn. When we find people that don’t, we’ll handle that appropriately, but our position as a company, as an organization, as a team, is that we want to grow together, and that means learning, that means grace, that means forgiveness, that means we give opportunity to people to expand, to grow.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Go and to learn which is our next topic is intellectually versatile, and you’ve just described that as we are learning beyond our traditional lane. So if I think of the area where I was previously an expert, that’s insufficient. Now, I believe that I need to understand more about social justice that wasn’t my lane. I may not need to be an expert in it, but I need to know more than I did. Find your new home in Marysville at Cook’s point or Kenmore place, two amazing, ardent communities now offering free rent for two months. Choose from spacious apartments with luxury touches like walk in closets, modern kitchens and private patios or balconies, plus you’ll love the community perks like a 24 hour fitness center, resort style swimming pool and beautifully landscaped grounds. Move in today and live rent free for two months to schedule a tour or get more info on rent specials, call or visit ardent communities.com.

Unknown Speaker 15:57
I need to understand more about health care. I may never be an expert in that space, but all of these are interconnected, and back to the 360, degree thinker. I can’t make good decisions if I don’t expand my aperture. Absolutely and intellectual versatility is something that has to be, I think, expressly tapped into leaders. To some degree, there’s a good leaders. There’s a pattern around intellectual versatility. They’ve often done more than one thing, right? They’ve I always talk about the value of having proven that you can go deep in a content area, right? Gives me the confidence when I’m evaluating you, that you could go deep in another one. And because you’ve proved how to learn and that you’re disciplined and you have some characteristics that are likely to make you successful, regardless of the hat we put on you for a given role. However, there is, I think, a natural human tendency to be lazy intellectually if you’re winning, you tend to assume that you don’t need to be as intellectually versatile as you needed to be to get into the position of winning. And to your point, this is the time to exercise that and be intentional. And say, I’m tapping into the assumption that there’s a lot of things I don’t know. And I’m going to put that part of my intellectual versatility that’s all about learning into full exercise mode, and this is, I think could also be called, the growth mindset. At this point in time, there’s a lot all of us need to know. And we started with the work from home. How do we how or work from anywhere? How do we as leaders, think about ensuring our people are engaged, ensuring that the tools they need, ensuring they’re productive. If any of us thinks we know everything that needs to be known in this environment, we are missing the opportunity to really expand our thinking. And I’d go further with that and say we need to explore new ways of learning. I don’t think we fully understand how much learning we gave up when we all walked out the door that last day and went home. Say more about that? The interaction that we have with people at the office, the human interaction, the face to face interaction, there’s a huge amount of learning that goes on in that, and the learning is not just content. There’s a lot of that right where you’re just like, hey, Joe or Steve or Susan or whoever. What can you tell me about this? And it might be a 32nd interchange, but you get this one nugget, right that’s valuable to you. What are the ways we’re transferring information now, right? It isn’t the same as passing somebody in the hallway, right? So there’s a formality to how we’re interacting with each other right now, that may be taking away a lot of that informal opportunity to learn, or it’s moving to other modes in media that you may need to be engaged with. As I mentioned at the top of the show, we’ve got huge increases in collaboration messaging. There’s a lot of content in that, right? Yeah, I’ve worked with a couple organizations that use Slack, and it is the primary mode of communication other than video conferencing. And to your point, a lot of us can’t do another 12 hour day of videos. The asynchronous is also a really valuable way to connect Absolutely and it can happen at the same time. So be exploring different ways to learn beautiful. So the next topic is highly authentic and reflective. And for me, that’s one that is just so foundational that as leaders, specifically, we must always be thinking about what we’re trying to accomplish and being authentic with ourselves, Am I doing what I believe I should at my best level, and if not, how am I course correcting myself? Because not only am I course correcting the company, I’m course correcting how effective I am at leading the people who count on.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Me, yeah, so I think, first of all, I agree with you, authenticity starts with being authentically yourself. And honestly. I reflect on my career, and I can think of at least a handful of relatively successful leaders who were also not themselves, and it ultimately, I think pay it took a huge toll on them the level of effort it takes to maintain an avatar of yourself. It’s not actually you, and probably most of us have done that at points in time, for brief periods, but it’s not a sustainable leadership model. And so I agree with your advice, start with yourself and make sure you’re being honest with yourself in the situation you’re in, and then I think it’s about letting that shine through, recognizing that the tools you have available for that to shine through are now different, and they are meaningfully different expressing empathy in person, where you have access to your full body language, to your full range of emotions, and those emotions come through in the millisecond that you’re talking to somebody does not translate to a zoom call, which is close to real time, but it’s not real time. That millisecond makes a difference, and you’re not seeing that expression on somebody’s face in time for you to really have it translate fully into an authentic experience. Plus it’s an image. You’re not seeing the emotion come through in somebody’s eyes. You’re not feeling the feeling the emotion in their voice, because it’s being electronically transferred, and it is not the same thing. You’ve also lost 90% of body language. We’ve all gotten used to the weird zoom wave where you hold your hand up in the air next to your head and wave to somebody. That’s not how we would normally do that, and it doesn’t have the warmth of how we would normally sign off with somebody or sign on with somebody. And I would challenge people to really think through what do you need to do to expose that authentic you in the context that you’re now operating just happens in a one on one conversation doesn’t translate well to speaking on stage in front of 3000 people, and you have to learn how to express yourself on stage in the same way to people, which looks mechanically very different than If you were just having a one on one conversation. Hand gestures in a one on one situation are really small. When you’re on stage, they have to be huge or the audience doesn’t even see them. It’s very similar to that kind of translation where we’re using different modes in media. And think about the written word. We’ve got direct messaging up by tripling almost in in the workplace. This is not email. This is like texting. What does that look like? And how can you be authentic in that context, and appropriate as a leader? Yeah, I was gonna say the authentic and appropriate is an interesting combination. Let’s hit one more on this and then go to the next what do you do to convey who you are authentically in a work, physically separate from people environment? Yeah, one of the things I’ve done is really increase the frequency of one on one meetings that I’ve had with people on our team, and I’ve done that very specifically to give them more time, give us more time to really can act as individuals, which is harder to do when you don’t get that five minute interaction at the office where you can just sit at the lunch table with somebody and say hi. The second thing I do is start all of those meetings by talking about stuff that’s not work related. Let’s start this meeting by talking about you and how you’re doing, and then I authentically talk about how I’m doing and what’s going on in my life. So there’s this sense of this still, we’re both in the human experience. We’re not just TV personalities on different planets interacting with each other, right? And so I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that’s really helpful to people, and has, I think, helped maintain that authentic connection that’s so easy to do in the office when you can just walk up to somebody’s desk with their favorite drink and go, Hey, I got your coke and a

Unknown Speaker 24:10
coffee. Yeah, how’s your day going? So making sure that you actually build time in it and it’s in it is it feels like overhead. At first, you’ve added work to your day, and to some degree you have because the work of leadership has changed in this context. The question I like is not just how are you doing, but how are you being? How are you showing up authentically, genuinely? What do you share? It’s different. I share differently now, yeah, and I think we’re seeing that pattern, and I think giving people permission to even talk about it is a piece of this story, right? Just saying, like it is okay for you to talk about what’s stressful for you in this environment, right? Within reason in a professional environment, but it’s required Absolutely. It actually goes really well to the next one, which is about inspiring followership and how you.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Really have to amplify your efforts on engagement. A lot of what I was just talking about is engagement, right? And it does mean that you may have to reprioritize your time, and you may have to delegate different things than you were delegating before, and take on some different things than you were taking on before, because the context has shifted. And so I think being thoughtful about that, as I said, do a lot more one on ones. Don’t rely on peer pressure in your organization to get people to come along on the ride with you, right? You’ve got to be more explicit. I think peer pressure is harder to engender inside of a zoom call, because there is isolation. It’s a hopefully less dangerous version of that human phenomenon that we see like in road rage, where somebody feels completely empowered to drive like a maniac scream at other drivers in their car, right? Simply because they’re isolated from them. There’s a little bit of isolation here, and people feel empowered in that scenario, right? It’s just like you see on social media, I can say whatever I want to on social media. You don’t even know what country I’m in, right? And so we do have to watch for that, because I think people are to some degree, feeling more independent in this environment. And so inspiring followship means deeper engagement, right? Yeah, and again, it’s the deeper questions. It is, how do we really build a deep sense of both independence? I’m working from home, and I have a lot of things that have to be done now that I didn’t have to do when I was in the office, like taking care of either parents or children, and yet, how do I feel that deep sense of connection that work has filled, or the sense of working on an important mission that reminding people this is the impact, this is what our clients are experiencing because of our work. Coming back to I finished my tasks, but let’s talk about the people that those tasks impacted, and how did it improve their lives to accomplish something that they fundamentally require from us absolutely and the work of senior leadership, particularly in a larger organization, is rarely the work that gets done in your organization. Because if we’re honest, when I was a CIO of 5000 person organization, I was irrelevant to the day to day work that wasn’t my job for and that focus on, what do we do for the organization that enables it to do what it’s supposed to be doing, whether it’s serving Customers, writing software, whatever it might be, right? That work has changed, and we need to embrace that change, and it may require a prioritization. And I think that leads really nicely into the last one, which is about innately collaborative, right? And that’s really what we’re talking about here. And I think that’s going to be about being flexible in the modes and media that you’re engaging with your team in. And we talked about this as we started the conversation that some of our work is dramatically different and some is relatively unchanged, and we need to, as leaders, figure out what we need to change. And back to the scientist who do I work with to ensure that that we are changing appropriately, so that our businesses or our organizations can meet their missions and serve their clients. Yes, and I think it’s important for leaders to embrace the reality of the change and be a sponsor, be an experimenter, be a model, yeah, have your team recognize that you aren’t the person looking in the rear view mirror saying, Boy, I wish it would go back to the way it was. Yeah, be the leader that says it’s not the way it was. I feel like we’re using teams a lot. And create a working group on teams and be a model for how you can use teams effectively to collaborate. One of the things that’s really inspiring to me right now is the John Lennon song. Imagine, for many of us, there were things that have needed to change in our environments, whether it’s how school is run, or parts about how business is operated, or how healthcare is delivered, that the disruption lasting long enough unplugs us from some of the old paradigms that really could benefit from shifting. What can we create in our world right now that makes lives significantly better? I think yes, we people are suffering in a major way, and yet, how do we use all of that as a springboard to create something that is much better for many people. Couldn’t agree more, and sadly, every market disruption of any kind does not equally impact the populace, but over time, we can use them as springboards to learning and.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
Improvement. Thank you and to our listeners, thank you for joining us. Thank you for engaging with us and for the important work that you’re doing in your lives to move our society forward, to keep people safe and to create a future that we all want to live in. We look forward to joining you again soon. You

Unknown Speaker 30:20
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Unknown Speaker 30:29
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