Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Amiel’s new podcast is How My View Grew; check it out at https://howmyviewgrew.com. Details about his coaching work are on his website at https://amielhandelsman.com.

He’s also written several books; Practice Greatness complements this podcast episode perfectly. It’s available in paperback at https://amzn.to/3Wjh6wP and on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3W1JDGS.

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here. Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

– How Missing Ethics Makes a Mess of Organizations with Greg Moran

– Addressing Values Conflicts with John Heiser

– Non-Traditional Leadership Models for Our New Era with Nathan Eva & Nicole Ferry

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Amiel Handelsman is the host of How My View Grew, a podcast that dives deep into humanity’s challenges by looking at big thinkers who have changed their minds. As a writer and podcast guest, he explores the human dimension of complex global challenges like democracy, the Middle East, climate change, the culture wars, and “race.” In his professional practice, Amiel helps executives and teams navigate complexity and grow a bit along the way. His clients use new conversation habits to make clear commitments, deliver what they promise, and do this with more ease. Amiel has written five books including Practice Greatness, Reimagining American Identity, and How to be an Anti-race Antiracist.  He holds an M.B.A. from the University of Michigan and a B.A. in Public Policy Studies from Duke University. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with his wife and two sons.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in this mission today is Amil Handlesman, Elite Executive Coach. Amiel, We’re really glad you’re with us.

Amiel: I’m delighted to be here with you.

Maureen,

Maureen: you’ve worked as an executive coach with global organizations for many years. Let’s take a look at tips you’ve learned in organizations that can be useful in managing difficult conversations. What do you think that you are learning that gives people transferable skills to navigate these challenges that they’re facing?

Amiel: As you mentioned, I’ve been working with companies, universities, foundations, healthcare organizations for quite a while. How I’ve done that has changed. One of the things that I’ve noticed the last 10 years is that the more actionable the work is, the more people say, oh, I know exactly what I need to [00:01:00] do in this meeting at noon today, the more likely it is to produce positive results.

And what people are doing in meetings is they’re talking and they’re listening. So if we’re attempting to build excellence, what we build excellence at is speaking, listening, writing, reading, reflecting. There’s a set of skills. What I’ve done in the organizational context is take some of the best things we’ve learned from sports, music, performing arts, high performers in those areas, lessons run.

Deliberate practice and habit building and say, what would it look like if leaders and teams did these inside of organizations?

Maureen: I love the idea of deliberate practice, and you’ve been championing that for over a decade now.

Amiel: Yeah. It interested me because growing up I learned how to do certain things like track and soccer and math through repetition with a specific goal in mind.

Knowing [00:02:00] what excellence looks like, having a coach or teacher there to observe me and say, okay, that went well. Why don’t you make this slight adjustment? And also when I got older, being challenged to reflect on it and observe my own experience myself. These are the things, some of the things that create excellence in those other domains.

And so I said 10 or 12, whatever it was years ago. Why don’t we try this out in organizations? Then the skills that we’re using in organizations are conversational skills, largely. It’s not all words, it’s body language, email. There’s a lot of different ways we do it, but we’re in conversation. So then. What if we were to create conversational skills practices that addressed the big challenges people have at creating great results?

Maureen: I wanna introduce a little bit of the overlap with our work, which I believe makes. This conversation’s so crucial. We are talking about what leaders need to do well in the age of [00:03:00] ai, and the number one skill is communicating, which is what you’re really talking about, is in the context of dramatic change, whether it’s climate change or threats to democracy, or implementing new systems.

As in ai, the skill of communicating is absolutely more crucial now than it has been in the past for leaders.

Amiel: I think it’s always been important, and yet there’s more pressure. There are more obstacles. The challenges are higher, and so good communication matters more than it ever has in the past. The more I focused on conversational skills, or you could call them communication skills, the more I kind of smile with amusement, looking at leadership instruments that have a hundred skills and communication is three of them, because you show me some of those other skills.

Managing conflict, thinking strategically, I’ll say, how do you put that into action through conversations? So it’s a bit of a joke. I don’t mean to criticize the makers of those [00:04:00] instruments, although, okay, maybe I do like conversational skills, communication skills are really what rule the world.

Maureen: What are you learning about?

What makes it hard to change your mind, and why is it worth doing the effort anyway?

Amiel: Yeah, this is the focus of my new podcast, how my view grew, and as I was putting together a podcast, I was asking myself, and this is a question that all leaders and every person can ask themselves. What would make this meaningful for me?

What would get me energized to get outta bed in the morning? It’s a great question. If you’re focused on engagement in the workplace, as well as engagement in a podcast, and the way I answered it is I wanna work and focus on big, complex issues in the world. Climate democracy, illiberalism AI inequality in a particular way by looking at nuanced thinkers.

Big nuanced thinkers, people who have big ideas, they’re not caught in either or thinking. They’re embracing the complexity of it. And then how do I do that? [00:05:00] I could be another podcast that just does a straight interview, or I could ask myself, well, how did the person get to have that kind of nuanced thinking?

And my own experience as a leadership coach with leaders with nuanced thinking is that they’ve gone through changes. They’ve gone through transitions. What they used to see and how they used to see 5, 10, 15 years ago has changed. What they see and how they see today is very different. And so it’s actually what I’ve learned in organizations that shaped how I decided to frame how my view grew the podcast, which in turn I hope will be useful for listeners in their own experience.

I’m including, I can discuss it, but some very practical ways of doing that in a podcast that most podcasts focus on politics and big issues in the world do not include.

Maureen: Now that you’ve done that, tease, what exactly does make yours different?

Amiel: In each of the interviews that I’m doing, and I should first [00:06:00] say that the first season is 16 episodes, the first episode, which came out.

Was an interview about someone who’s in the sustainability space. He’s actually in the Sustainability Hall of Fame, and the next episode after that is gonna be like a five minute practical tips, but even in the interview episode, which I did with Gil Friend, who as I said is in the sustainability Hall of fame, at the end of it, I said, what are you all learning from this?

Let me share with you my reflections. And then I made some observations on what I had learned about the topic, but also about how he learns and what shifted for him.

Maureen: Let’s jump into then some of the skills and concepts you think are most crucial to help leaders communicate effectively. And the one that I know the least is Man Quiring.

What is Man Quiring?

Amiel: Okay, so this requires a story. First of all, I haven’t yet trademarked this, but I did come up with it, or rather it came to me the very first episode of my old [00:07:00] podcast, which was 10 years ago. I did an interview with an executive coach named Janet Crawford, who in the nineties was talking about brain science.

And how it relates to leadership. Now, everyone’s talking about that today, right? Would you agree, Maureen? It’s big.

Maureen: Yeah, big. Most of my coaching connects back in some way to how the brain works that we didn’t know before, and is driving changes in behavior.

Amiel: It’s had an immense impact on the leadership development field in every field and in the mid to late 1990s, just about nobody was talking about it.

The first person I met who was, was Janet Crawford. So when I started that other podcast in, uh, 2014, I interviewed her. Anyways, the story about Quiring is it was a wonderful interview and part of what she talked about was unconscious bias and how that works in the brain, which I found very interesting.

So I went, as I had learned to do at the time, and I posted it on Facebook. Now, I wasn’t too familiar with. [00:08:00] How images work, like which images get shared on Facebook. So the image that got shared was my image and it said Janet Crawford on, and it had the topic. One of the very first comments was, oh, great, now we have a guy man splinting us about unconscious bias.

And when I first read that, I was angry. What the heck are you talking about? I’ve just sat down and asked questions and listened to this brilliant coach who happens to be a woman, which was intentional. And you’re telling me that I’m mansplaining. My first reaction was anger. By the way, what I’m about to describe is a good practice for anybody.

And then I thought to myself, well, what am I all about here? Rather than just complaining about their complaint, maybe I can offer something new. So I immediately came to me. I wrote back. By the way, I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook these days, but this is 10 years ago. I wrote back, Hey. I can see that you might’ve thought that I was doing all the talking.

Actually, it was me interviewing this brilliant woman. [00:09:00] I wasn’t mansplaining. I was man inquiring as in inquiring as a man, and I felt so much better about myself than that. It was almost like a little bit of a pushback, but it wasn’t mean spirit. It was more lighthearted

Maureen: from that lesson, I’m assuming then the invitation for men is step back from explaining.

I think of one of my colleagues recently was recounting she was buying bras and her husband was trying to tell her how to do it, and it was absolutely the worst of mansplaining, to which I think she responded. The next time you start wearing a bra, you can tell me how to shop for one. And so shifting from.

Offering to be helpful to offering questions that might lead someone to what you’re trying to observe.

Amiel: First of all, I’m still recovering from that story. About what the man did. Uh, but to, to answer your question, yes, I entered that interview not knowing 10% as much about brain [00:10:00] science as Janet and wanting her to explain to me and guests all about it.

Ditto for unconscious bias. But the important point here about mansplaining and man quiring is that it’s an example when people say, stop mansplaining. They’re saying, stop using that old habit. They’re saying, stop that. What we know from the study of habit formation, Charles Duhig covered this in his book.

The Power of Habit is that in order to change a habit, you can’t just stop doing the old one. You need to have a new one in its place. So this is a challenge to men to include more inquiry, not only inquiry, it’s not shut up, never share your opinion. You don’t deserve to speak when women are around. That would be the opposite, right, Maureen?

Maureen: Absolutely. Yeah. And I don’t think any of those of us who truly value the opinion of people we choose to be around want half of them to be quiet.

Amiel: Yeah. That’s boring and unhelpful. ’cause then you’re guessing the whole time or there’s a lot of other reasons. The idea though, is that in general [00:11:00] US men could learn to inquire more.

So the challenge to men is let’s advocate, let’s frame, and let’s ask questions and listen and be curious. The notion of man Quiring is also a challenge to a subset of women who complain about mansplaining and yet almost assume it’s gonna go on forever in what I’d call a mood of resignation. It’s never gonna change, so I’ll just complain about it.

The notion of man quiring is maybe we all ought to take seriously the possibility that men can improve, give a name to it, and create space for it.

Maureen: I love the idea, and you and I have done this in the competing commitment work, that if I complain about something, I actually care about it, where I wouldn’t waste the time.

So if I can offer an alternative, I don’t like this, I’m committed to positive conversation with the people with whom I work and hang out and shop with. And here is an alternate behavior that will [00:12:00] shift our relationship constructively.

Amiel: Yes. And it always takes two to tango. So if I’m with someone and they’re doing all the speaking and they never ask questions, I might feel there’s nothing I can do here.

It’s just them. In some cases it is very hard, right? It’s very hard, and yet everyone plays a part in this. If we’re in relationship with each other, we can speak into our experience and what you and I are adding in Maureen, is that we’re speaking in not just with a complaint. We’re speaking in with some declaration of what we care about.

It’s really important to me to have a voice in this conversation. I wanna do my part of that. Here’s what I need from you. Get your man quiring game on man,

Maureen: and as a woman who often jumps in and offers to help even when uninvited. I can start, man. Quiring too. Evidently

Amiel: you can inquire. You already do inquire.

You’re inquiring today, aren’t you?

Maureen: I am. And at my best. That is exactly what I do, and not everybody is my best.

Amiel: Same here.

Maureen: So let’s go on to another one, then. [00:13:00] Owning your own emotions and not owning others’ emotions. This is more complex idea. One, I have to be aware of my emotions and I have to also know where mine stop and someone else’s starts.

Amiel: This practice of owning your emotions comes from Robert Keegan, the adult development expert at Harvard. He describes it not as a skill, a horizontal skill, something that you can just practice for certain number of times and then get, but as a capacity that all of us grow into as adults, we have the opportunity to grow into it.

It is an expression of what. Is the self-authoring mind. When we are in our late teens and early twenties, we grow into a prior way of making meaning of our experience, which is the socialized mind, which is an achievement. ’cause we start to care about other people. We internalize their feelings. One of the things that happens when we internalize their feelings is we take responsibility for their feelings.

AKA, own their emotions. [00:14:00] The next thing is to learn, well, this is great. I’ve learned to own other emotions. The world isn’t just about me. But now. Can I go? I can realize they have emotions, but they generate them and I generate my own emotions. So that’s sort of where it comes from and why that matters is it’s not something you can develop overnight.

It’s more like learning to, in my case, touch a basketball hoop rim, learning to jump high enough so that I could touch it. That may never happen. It’s possible, but it may never happen. But it’s something that’s worth moving towards. And maybe the basketball example is not so great because this is way, this is way more important to people,

Maureen: and yet it makes the point that this is an aspiration.

The distinction is it’s more important for me as a leader to be able to do it, but it’s an aspiration that I should continually work for or work toward.

Amiel: Yeah, absolutely. If I want to be able to be skillful in [00:15:00] difficult conversations. If I want to build trust in other people’s trust that I care about them, that I’m competent at leading.

So if I care about certain things, if it matters to me, then I will focus on this capability because it is a hard capability to build. And this is just a side point for any of these skills or habits that we’re talking about. It’s really important that we know why we care about them. Why does this matter to me?

And so I think many listeners probably, it wouldn’t take them long. To answer the question, why does being good at difficult conversations matter to me? It matters to your work. It matters to your home. It matters to you in your friendships.

Maureen: Can you do an example? You and I are having a conversation and I’ve just done something that grates on your nerves.

This idea of then owning your own emotions, and maybe it’s because I am asking you to help me with something that’s really mine to do and you can tell that I am. I’m worried I may even think that keeping my job depends on you [00:16:00] helping me. And so now I’ve tried to make you responsible for my success and you’re my boss and you’re a really good boss, and you want me to thrive?

How do you own this and encourage me to own what’s mine?

Amiel: Because I respect you so much. I was thinking at the beginning that you were my boss, but okay, I’m your boss. Fine, we can do that. It’s sort of an upward delegation, and I think that’s a great example and everyone has their own example of something someone else does, so I just wanna generalize this and then I feel,

Maureen: eh,

Amiel: angry, frustrated, whatever it is.

So the first step is to name it. To name that I’m having a strong emotion. I might not know what it is, but over time, if I’ve noticed this, I go, oh, my stomach is tight, or my hands are sweating, or I can just tell that I’m really angry. My jaw’s tight. So part of owning my own emotions is being able to name that I’m having an emotional experience.

That doesn’t mean I say, Hey, Maureen, I’m having an emotional experience. A lot of this is [00:17:00] non-verbal. It’s just. Okay. I am having a reaction here, and then I get curious about what’s going on. And one of the ways to not hold you responsible for my emotions is to see where it’s generated in me to see like, oh, something’s happening in my throat.

Yeah, that feels really strong. Or I’m clenching my fists. I’m doing something right now. So I’m starting to own the physical, which is nothing is more practical than the body. The body dimension of my emotions. I’m starting to own it. It’s about me. It’s not about Maureen. Now I can own my emotions and still think, what is she doing?

This is her job. I’m the manager. I’ve developed her. I’ve trained her. She knows how to do this. But I’m not blaming you for my emotions. I’m like, okay. I’m feeling upset now given that. I calm myself and there’s a variety of other things we can do to calm ourselves, and then I can have a more reasonable conversation with you because the conversation is gonna be different.

If I’m blaming you versus not blaming you, would that match your [00:18:00] experience, Maureen?

Maureen: It does, and boy, to your point, it’s hard because when I’m feeling. Angry or frustrated or at risk. We’re working on this big project and someone’s doing something that I think jeopardizes the project. I also go into my own set of emotions and I’m working with people who are having their emotions.

How crucial it is for us to be able to take a breath, step back and ask What’s going on for me in this moment? And then this overlaps with another one. That idea of taking a pause and asking what needs to happen right now, what’s the best possible outcome, and who do I need to be to create that outcome?

Amiel: Yeah. So you’re referring to a practice called the Pause. A Pause can be something that I unilaterally declare. It can be something that I ask the other person to do and they agree to. A pause can also be something that I just take myself as I slow myself [00:19:00] down. Let me do the easiest one. The easiest way to pause that doesn’t require anyone else’s permission is just to say, yeah, you know what?

Let me say that a little bit differently. Or, you know what? I think my blood pressure’s getting kind of high here. Let me just take a moment and even those couple seconds of pause. Where you’re buying yourself time gives your body a chance, your nervous system, a chance to calm down your prefrontal cortex, a chance to come back online.

So the simplest version of the pause is that I do it myself in speaking more slowly, feeling my breath, and so on. Another version of the pause is where you actually say, you know what? I suddenly have a terrible headache and this is an important conversation. Could we come back in five minutes or I need to bio a break.

So you can pause by naming your own experience as being the reason saying, my blood pressure’s getting pretty high is another Googling. ’cause people, everyone kind of understands what that [00:20:00] means and you’re not blaming the other person. Now you can also second way to take a pause to say, you know what?

This conversation is feeling really heated. There’s a lot of energy here. I think I just need to take a step back so I can do this well, and you declare it. And the third option is you say, I wanna propose that we take a pause. Give the same reasoning. Would that work for you? Why would you wanna do that?

Because if you’re in a tense conversation and you unilaterally do something, the other person might get even matter. What are you ducking out now for? I was just about to give you that counter argument that was gonna really win the day, and now you’re ab ducking it. So you give the person an opportunity to say, yeah, let’s take a break.

And then it’s a shared agreement.

Maureen: So for me, that would probably look like I need to refill my coffee, which is a common thing. I say without alerting everyone that my head’s gonna explode, but just,

Amiel: yes, that’s the easiest.

Maureen: It’s a good time to refresh our coffee. Take a restroom break and we can come right back.

Amiel: That saves face. It is unthreatening and it’s [00:21:00] honest. And so it’s good to have a lot of little things you do in your life that aren’t necessarily adding value to the business, but that you can use as an excuse to take a break.

Maureen: Well, and then during that break, let’s carry this thread through. My question to myself would be, what’s the end in mind for the rest of this conversation?

This person’s just expressed a desire for me to do something that’s not mine, or they’ve made me emotionally responsible for them. I’ve now declared a break or invited a break. What’s the end in mind for the rest of the conversation?

Amiel: Well, I may decide I’m not ready to do this today. Let’s continue this another time, and yet the first thing I might wonder is if I feel like I’ve calmed myself down after the cup of coffee, in your case, Maureen, then it’s helpful to use another habit.

Or practice, which is paraphrasing. So I say, Maureen, what I’m hearing is that you would like me to take on [00:22:00] this particular project. Now, did I hear you correctly? Or I could say, Maureen, let me make sure I’m understanding you. I can’t tell whether you’re saying you want me to advise you on this or you want me to own the project.

There’s a variety of ways that I paraphrase and then ask a clarifying question before I respond. Hopefully I would’ve done this already, so it’s a great lesson when we hear something that we go, oh God, how could they say that? Right. Everyone has this experience.

Maureen: As you’re paraphrasing, are you also deescalating the energy or are you exact paraphrasing?

Amiel: Well, whether it’s exact or somewhat close. I’m trying to capture what they said and I’m wanting to learn, did I hear what they said correctly? And second of all, what is the meaning behind it? Those are two different parts. There are many things you could clarify. Those are two parts. When you said you wanted me to do [00:23:00] this, did I hear that correctly?

Ah, and you want me to start today? Did I get that right? Yes. Oh, what makes this important to you? How did you come to this? That’s a second set. That’s a, that’s a clarifying question, and I imagine you must have given this some thought. Now in the back of my head, I’m saying, because obviously you know I have a lot to do,

Maureen: that was exactly the thought going through my mind.

So I should quit my job so I can do yours. Very snarky response.

Amiel: Yeah. So the 13-year-old snark artist will always be there. What we wanna do is be aware of them and not necessarily have them dominate

Maureen: and hopefully I have. Again, in my better moments, gotten good at saying, it sounds like you are really concerned about this.

It’s a high priority, and you’re asking for my help, not you want me to quit my job and do your work.

Amiel: Yeah. I like the way you said that, Maureen, that honors the other person, perhaps even better than what I had said, which is that you, in my case, I’m saying you, Maureen, you know how important this is [00:24:00] and it’s so important to you to get this done that you wanna make sure it happens.

That’s a great way to frame it. The key in paraphrasing, you can paraphrase and not ask a clarifying question and that’s fine. There’s a benefit to actually ending in a question in inquiring, did I hear you correctly or did you mean something different? Is often a good way to do it. Not just, yes, no, did I hear, but did I hear that correctly?

Or would you put that differently? Because then the other person doesn’t have to say no. Which can create a charge. They can say, oh yeah, there’s this other thing that I meant by that, and it gives them some access to it. Now, there’s another really important reason why we ask clarifying questions is that sometimes the other person actually didn’t mean to say what they said or didn’t mean what any reasonable person would interpret from what they said.

And so it gives them a chance to say, oh, I’m Miel. You know, as you ask that question. I realize that what I’d actually like to do is ask if you could take something else off of my plate or [00:25:00] change the deadline on something else, Amil, so that I can do this by the required deadline. That’s one option. Or I’m realizing my plate is over full and I don’t wanna ask you to do this.

I want to ask you which one is more important or what are the timelines on this?

Maureen: I love that because I think of even just an email. I use Grammarly now and I, and so it corrects. Every sentence I write, and when I go back and look at it, it’s amazing how what has come out in writing doesn’t match what I intended to say.

Not just that the grammar’s wrong, but the whole thing. Like I don’t do this while I’m stoned, but when I reread what comes out, it looks like my brain is not fully present. My assumption is in conversation that is also happening. And so the gap between what happens between my ears, what I speak, what you hear, the meaning you make of it could be a pretty significant gap.

And so I love the idea that part of the [00:26:00] paraphrasing is to confirm, is this what you’re intending to ask? And is it complete?

Amiel: Yes. Is it complete? Is there more? What else? Let me add one more benefit to this that is perhaps a little bit less obvious, but it came up in one of the interviews for how my view grew.

One of the benefits of asking a clarifying question is that what the other person cares about, wants to have happen, surprises you. In other words, you actually are hearing them correctly. I mean, you ask them to tell you more, they give you the real dirt, and then you might say, wow, we’re even further apart than I thought.

The result isn’t always coming to some alignment, but sometimes you can realize, to give a example in the workplace, this person is a flight risk, and the only way I learned that is by asking a clarifying question or to give another example. What this person is actually telling me is that they’ve been the target of sexual harassment, and I didn’t know until I [00:27:00] asked a clarifying question, wow, there’s something that I didn’t know that was happening here that I have to take seriously.

Or that the results, the financial results aren’t what they seem. And we can all fill in these examples. So it’s a way to actually dis-confirm the way we think that the world is and take a more sober approach.

Maureen: Beautiful. I love conceptually. I’m not sure I will love the content, but conceptually I love the idea that this is an opportunity to really align or uncover misalignments that are crucial to address.

Amiel: To uncover misalignments. Absolutely.

Maureen: So I wanna go into one of the other competencies or skills before you lean in, own your space. That feels like it may be similar to owning your emotions, but not the same.

Amiel: Right? It’s quite similar. The phrase Lean In was a direct reference to Sheryl Sandberg’s book. So I wrote this when that came out, whenever that [00:28:00] was, but I was using that metaphorically.

Leaning your body into a career, into a job, into a conversation like bringing yourself forward works better when you go this space around me. I own this space. This is my space. In other words, I’m claiming some power of the space around me. I certainly heard a lot of my female clients over the years talking about people getting in their space, men getting in their conversational space, men getting in their physical space.

So this was speaking to women and to men who have a difficulty with personal power, which I myself had a big difficulty with for many, many years and was something that I dedicated myself to developing. So the idea here is that literally the 6, 8, 12, 18 inches around me, that’s my space and I can feel it even when the person is 10 feet away.

I can feel like. This is me over here. I got some power. My power goes beyond my [00:29:00] body and that that is a significant thing to do before I start to lean in.

Maureen: I wanna unwind that a little bit ’cause my mind goes to several different places, especially as we talk about gender, that stereotypically men take up more space.

They sit with their legs apart. Women cross their legs that, you know, on an airplane we observe people irrespective of physical size taking up more space. I’m thinking also conceptually where I will cross my legs. I also don’t necessarily claim in myself my competence. I may underestimate myself. And so leaning in doesn’t make sense until I accurately estimate myself, and I also shouldn’t lean into things I don’t have any skills in.

Amiel: So part of what I’m hearing you say is that you make an assessment of where do you wanna lean in, where you have skills, where it matters to you, and then you’re also noticing some [00:30:00] ways that men and women tend to be different. Now, I wanna add in another example, which I wrote about in this piece that I’m referencing here.

Which is a habit of many women. Tell me if you’ve noticed this too, and some men to apologize simply because someone else is near them or bumping into them.

Maureen: So Amel, there was one final practice that I wanna ask you before we wrap up, and it’s what you call my assessment. Your assessment and related skill of grounding assessments.

What does that mean?

Amiel: This is a really important one, and it’s another one that’s hard. A lot of times in organizations and in families and in friendships, we get into arguments about what’s true as a speech act. An assessment can’t be true or false. It can only be grounded or ungrounded. Just to give you an example, when I say the temperature in here is 75 degrees, that’s an assertion of fact.

That can be true or false. You can verify it and go, this is true or false. But if I say I’m warm, [00:31:00] there’s no way objectively to verify that. But I can ground it by saying, well, I’m sweating. My forehead feels hot. I’m grounding the assessment and so many times in teams we argue about things and debate each other and try to persuade each other about who’s right and who’s wrong, what’s true and what’s false when what we’re actually doing is talking about assessments.

And so once we say these are assessments that can be grounded or ungrounded with evidence and explanation, then our task is different. It’s not arguing true or false, it’s, I’m gonna ground my assessment and could you ground yours for me? Help me understand. I’m sure you’ve given a lot of thinking to this.

Could you tell me what’s behind that? Let me do the same for me. And so my assessment, your assessment is, it’s actually kind of a complex practice, but at the beginning of the conversation, you announce it as. What I’d like to do is this particular issue. I’d like to hear your assessment and what’s behind it, and then I’d like to tell you my assessment and what’s behind it.[00:32:00]

And what you’re doing at the very beginning is you’re signaling that this is not about who’s right or wrong, what’s true or false. It’s about understanding each other’s assessments and what’s behind them, and you’re also signaling that two get to play.

Maureen: I wanna give an illustration of this and have you comment.

I was recently working with a client, the senior executive having health problems. So we’re looking at who else steps up. We evaluate the logical successor and someone else. And we both talk about the readiness, not readiness, and these are the things I observe and I also hold out judgment. And then we select a course of action based on everyone’s assessment that I expect to be different because we sit in different places in observing the individual.

Is that an example of where it worked?

Amiel: It’s a great example. It’s a common example and it’s excruciatingly important who you have on the bus. Jim [00:33:00] Collins matters so much and who you have in different roles going into that with acceptance, that it’s about assessments. Sometimes I call it my side of the story, your side of the story.

If all parties can agree that that’s the conversation we’re in, it’s more likely that we’re actually gonna have that type of exploration together. And then I wanna just mention when we have different assessments. Why is that? One reason is that we see different things. We’re aware. We’ve had different experiences with that candidate, with that employee.

We’ve read different things about them and so on. And so when other people tell us their experiences, then we can take that in and potentially reground our own assessment. Or maybe we’re doing the same for them. They go, oh, I wasn’t aware of that. I didn’t realize they did that project to an A level.

Thanks for telling me that. There’s a second thing which is overlooked, which is that we have, every assessment is up to a standard. There’s substandard of what Excellence or great or ready looks like. [00:34:00] Part of what we can learn about, well, what is your standard when you’re deciding who to put in this role, what are you looking for?

That’s different question than what evidence do you see that the person has it? And so we separate those two things out in the My assessment. Your assessment conversation. What does excellence look like or what is the standard and then what are you seeing that tells you whether that person has has gotten there?

If we can tease those two out, we can understand where we’re aligned and where we’re different.

Maureen: That’s a crucial point because I’m looking through the lens of things like developmental psychology. Somebody else may be looking through the lens of how did they calibrate a machine. And what did they do when it didn’t work, which may be a chemistry example, not a behavioral example,

Amiel: right?

Absolutely. The experience I had at this that told me that it worked was about 15 years ago, and I was working with a leader in a high tech company who had a really big job and had a [00:35:00] difficult relationship with someone in another part of the company. And the person that I was working with was wired to see things in terms of right, wrong, true, and false.

And I helped him learn to use the language of assessments or take, here’s my take. What’s your take? And it took a while, but he eventually learned it. The reason I know that this was so valuable is that I ended up interviewing the woman who he was interacting with, and she told me how much better the relationship was, and she mentioned how my client was using the phrase assessment and she was so happy she then hired me.

Maureen: Beautiful. Can you share for our listeners where they can reach you and the name of your podcast?

Amiel: Absolutely. The podcast is how my view grew. And I have a website for it, which is how my view grew.com, which will then give you a way to access it through whatever podcast apps that you use. So in addition to my podcast, I have [00:36:00] done a lot of writing over the years.

Much of it about conversational habits, and you can find that at my website, amiel handlesman.com. There’s a dropdown for writings and podcasts, and then it’s organized by subject. You’ll see a number of different topics.

Maureen: Thank you Amiel, for sharing your wisdom with us today, and thank you to our listeners.

We hope that Amiel’s wisdom and experience have you become a better future ready leader. Please do like us and share us on your favorite podcast platform.