four people cabled together hiking a mountain
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Conversations With Roy: Love Your People. Lead With Purpose.

We know exceptional leadership when we see it. And in the coming months, we’re inviting the voices of more exceptional leaders onto our blog, to share what they think is important to focus on now.

In this edition of Conversations with Roy, we sat down with WildPlay Element Parks CEO and co-founder Tom Benson. Tom cut his teeth in mountain guiding back in the 80s and 90s, managed a division of a software startup and then, with a couple partners, started a poky little adventure park company in 1994. The WildPlay empire has since expanded across North America, offering ziplines, bungy jumping, adventure courses, freefall jumps and axe throwing.

But it’s not all about the rush. What particularly impresses us is the cohesive nature of WildPlay’s culture. So we invited Tom in for an interview.

Here, Tom talks about the value of leading through principles, finding the levers for big change, how to know when fear is operative on your team, and — most exciting for us — what happens when you build a culture of playing for each other.

* * *

The pandemic presented remarkable challenges to your company and your industry.

Sure, closing our parks and pivoting and moving into a whole new realm of safety processes. But that’s not the story. The story is: it’s been an opportunity to make sure that what I believed is true, in terms of leadership, culture, team, and the robustness that you need to go forward in business.


Okay, unpack that.

It feels like this time is what I was made for. It’s what I prepared my whole life for, all this stuff that’s here right now. I look at what’s happening in the world, and the relationship between what I believe for myself to be true and how I relate to the others around me, and the work of building leadership — like, actually actively and consciously focusing on helping other folks get to that place where they are empowered and powerful to do what the world’s going to need them to do. That’s really where I’m at.


You’re crossing that threshold from leadership into mentorship.

The greatest challenge for me is: How can I do as much of that as possible? Is it through my business? Is it through something else that I don’t know yet?


Like, what are the levers?

What are the levers? What are the mechanisms to make the greatest difference? Generally, people don’t do amazing things based on fear. They do amazing things based on love. They do amazing things based on a sense of possibility, right? People with a sense of impossibility aren’t doing the amazing things. So how do you open up the world of possibility? It’s been interesting some of the discussions we’ve had in WildPlay about leadership. Oftentimes what I find is people get confused between management and leadership. And they’re not the same thing. I think it was Peter Drucker who said way back when, “Leaders know the right things to do, and managers know how to do things right.” I use that now to help the team understand, Hey, are we looking at a management thing or are we discussing leadership here? Because they aren’t the same thing.


Do you always want people to reach for the leadership approach or is it often useful to take the management approach?

For the practical part of what I do, the management acumen has to be there. But I focus on leadership as the core thing. WildPlay is trying to create a culture that is around growing leaders, growing that culture, growing our influence and changing the world. That doesn’t happen from managers. That happens from leaders. And not just the ones internally, in our ranks.


You want to help people get to that level where they’re tapped into their power and are using their energy to help the world get to where it needs to be. So how do you get people to know the right thing to do?

Well, leadership is the ultimate pyramid scheme. The first thing a leader approaches anyone with is a gift. You’re bringing something that is an opportunity to this person to develop in some way, to change in some way, to see something, to slow down, to observe. Whatever it is, you’re bringing the potential for that to become part of their hardwiring. It might be they have to do it a bunch of times so it gets locked in, but your hope, if you think of it as a pyramid scheme or as an investment, is that it doesn’t stop there. (I think that’s important.) Because if you think that it stops there, you can go, “My job is done.” But the job is not done. Everything that you do has to be about helping people to take that thing that you’re sharing and pay it forward. It’s also helping the people that you’re working with to understand what you’re going through and the value of that for you, so that when they are in that position, they have the same understanding. Because that’s how it continues on. They will say, “I absolutely must bring this to other people. I must help other people to have less fear. I must help other people to lead themselves. Lead teams. Lead in society.”


Is that the trickle down, then? That you will bring someone into a greater state of leadership and in so doing, they will then do that for more people?

At an individual level, there’s fear and there’s love. And if we can eliminate fear, then we have more room for love. The same thing is true about leadership. It’s not that leaders should be fear-less. It’s that despite those things that are indicating that we should be afraid or concerned, we still act. Leadership is acting despite the forces that are trying to constrain that action. Don’t get me wrong about the utility of fear. Jumping out of a plane without a parachute is probably pushing the limit. There’s no question that fear is there for the right things. But I think that when we as leaders talk about the right thing to do, it’s like, “OK. I see this thing. And it concerns me. I might be afraid of it. What am I going to do with that? How am I going to demonstrate that to those around me? How am I going to coach someone through that?” Because most of the time, even when we’re coaching or helping someone to see their way through something, when we start at that place of fear or trepidation, almost always that’s where the lockup is happening. I’ve talked before about both fear and leadership from the point of view of a pebble.


OK. Metaphor me. Pebbles?

people tenting in a snowy base camp

Photo source: WildPlay

Well, coming from the mountain guiding background, you’re very aware from a risk point of view that something little — raindrops, right? it could start to rain — could grow big. We think, “Oh, it’s just rain.” But in the mountains, if you’re walking in places where you’re exposed, that’s not just rain. That’s a change. It’s something that’s hitting something, and that something’s going to hit something else and that something’s going to hit something else. That simple rain could ultimately deliver a load of falling rock. It’s not always a negative spiral. At WildPlay, I look at what we do as: We’re a pebble that’s being thrown against a rock, and the rock is going to bump up against a boulder, and the boulder is going to create an avalanche of an outcome. So while our influence in scope is small, in effect it is large. I look at leadership in the same way. So our little company out of Canada can take this approach to fear or leadership — I see them really tightly related, actually — and make a difference that makes a global shift stemming from these little “pebble bumps”.


Tell me more about how fear shows up on a team.

Not wanting to make mistakes. It’s often associated with failure. Fear shows up on a team in ego or invulnerability.


Invulnerability?

Yeah. You can tell that fear exists when people aren’t willing to be vulnerable. One of the things that our team has is we’re pretty vulnerable with each other. We’re pretty open in ways that wouldn’t be normal in a workplace, but they’re real. I think fear shows up in a team trying to make everything safe or having rules. Whereas love shows up as principles.


What’s the difference between rules and principles?

We try to control people and events, and we end up bound by these rules. Yet there’s no way to control everything through rules. That’s insanity. And yet the world tries to do it. But principles, we can all understand those pretty quickly and we can actually work with them.


Do principles translate to values?

Directly. When you start to think that way, and you’re building a company or leading teams and you focus on principles first, you have a huge advantage. It’s really simple. It’s easy to remember. It’s not a thousand things. It’s, like, four things. You know, like, we don’t hurt people. We build people up. We have each other’s backs. What we say we’re going to do, we do it. Whatever those things are. Those are principles. They’re easy to guide your actions by, individually or collectively.


Is it useful for you to articulate WildPlay’s values as a way of showing people what you mean? Were those the ones you just listed off?

No, WildPlay basically has four values. The values are: Circle of safety. Share the fruit. Taste the dirt. Nurture the pride.


Taste the dirt. I love that. Can you walk us through them?

Circle of safety means make it good for people to be able to be vulnerable. Everything we do at WildPlay is entirely dependent on trust. And so we cannot break trust. Make it that people can place their trust. That goes into how we design an element, how we run the business, how we work with each other. I would say at the core of that first value, that’s the word: it’s trust. It is both noun and verb. And we need to trust as well. That’s the other thing about how fear shows up in a team.


A lack of trust.

If I don’t trust you, then how the hell are we going to make it through this thing where, you know, I’ve got to know you have my back because I can’t even look behind me — I’ve got to run in this direction. Leaders need to actively focus on reducing these fears. They need to build trust. It’s cyclical: if we’re going to build trust, we’ve got to reduce fear. If we’re going to reduce fear, we’ve got to improve trust.


Do you want to talk a little bit about share the fruit?

It’s making a difference in the communities that we work in. It matters to us a ton. Long before we were making a penny, we were giving our pennies away. We’ve made a huge difference for Mental Health Recovery Partners on Vancouver Island, and the Brain Injury Society in Victoria and Nanaimo. And like Roy Group, we are members of 1% for the Planet. Wherever we can, our business is pushing to make a difference in these communities. We work really hard to do it. We’re excited by it. A business that doesn’t understand this idea of sharing back is missing a huge opportunity. This is part of the blueprint of business in the future. If you don’t understand this blueprint today, you will not make up this ground with salaries, you will not make up this ground with bonuses. That is not going to matter to human beings in the same way. People need to be able to make a good living and survive, there’s no question. But that’s not where people’s hearts and minds are going to land. People are really voting with their hearts and minds.


We see it now, don’t we? This Great Resignation.

I look at that as a great opportunity. Where do you want to come to work? What kind of environment do you want to be in? How do you want to feel? What difference do you want to make?


Would you say organizations need to get clear on what they’re contributing to the world, so people can find their alignment?

If you don’t have an understanding of the purpose your business operates with, what are people aligning with? Hardwire your business around your purpose. By God, if you’ve built something that’s fake, just watch how quickly that sniff test is going to break you. Going back to the conversation around trust. People trust less now than they ever have. If you’re going to go and lead a company and lead teams and you’re full of shit, you’re going to get called on it, and there’s no coming back from that. You broke trust. If you’re laying this out there and you aren’t willing to actually put skin in the game and really put yourself at risk through your values, they’re not going to mean anything. And if you break them, you’re in trouble because that’s how people are making their decisions about who you are, or the approach they should take. So put it out there. Get behind it. Be prepared for the storm that you’ve created for yourself. Live by it, and at least you won’t be alone.


Wow, I can feel my wings filling with air. You’re inspiring when you get on the soapbox! What about taste the dirt?

When we started the company 16 years ago, we knew the environment matters — and we knew it was really going to matter. Our belief is that if you aren’t creating meaningful experiences for people that they can associate something emotional with, you’re not going to create stewards of tomorrow’s natural spaces. Not unless people have touched them, felt them, had experiences in them. The masses generally are not doing that anymore. We want to change that.


And nurture the pride?

It’s an acknowledgment that our people are everything. We have people that have been here since day one. That doesn’t happen in most companies. We have people that have left and come back two or three times.


That ties to retention, right? Having that stance that your people are everything. If your people believe in your purpose, if you’re positioning them in that leadership pyramid scheme and giving the gift, if you are creating opportunities for people to push past their fear or to take on more leadership…all of those things are motivating. They deepen the love and deepen the trust so that it becomes this virtuous cycle.

Yeah. That value is pointing at the core of: we care about the person, and in many ways the outcome for the person, more than the outcome for the business.


Hmm. Say more.

I love people to stay in my company. But if the best thing for them to do is to take everything that they learn here and to carry on the mission in some other form or to carry on their own personal purpose in some other form, that’s a good thing. The other thing about nurture the pride is the things that we do are about taking care of each other. We don’t look at revenue as this thing that creates profit that lines our pockets. We look at it as a hunter-gatherer thing. First and foremost, revenue makes sure that we’re okay and that the people in our organization are okay. When we have a new park that opens somewhere, they might need the support of the revenue of the other parks to get to a point where they’ll be okay. It may seem like that’s just simple business: you move money around. But we don’t look at it that way. Because culturally, it’s an entirely different mindset for me to go, “You know what? I’m grateful for the fact that the rest of you who are in this position have helped me in my business unit to get to this point. And when I am at the point you are at, I will now understand that is part of what I do.” It’s a very nuanced cultural difference, and it matters.


Most times people see their job as the company paying them, but they don’t look at each other as key parts of a well-functioning machine. That supporting your colleagues to do their best work ultimately helps drive revenues and makes everyone better off.

It’s a symbiotic relationship. Going back to trust, and the relationship between company and employees.


It’s an ecosystem.

Exactly. We are an ecosystem. It’s all totally interrelated and it is not about “company” and “employees”. It is not.


Drucker again. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Tom, the world has much to learn from you. Thank you for being such a mentor to so many.

The mission keeps me centered. Evolve the human.

 

 

tom benson ceo wildplay

Photo source: WildPlay

/by Roy Group
smoky view across the lake
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The Way You Choose To Conduct Yourself When Your World Burns

It was mid-July when the fires started in our part of the province.

We live near Vernon, in central British Columbia. Prime wildfire territory: semi-desert, low precipitation, high summer temperatures.

As we live in a more rural area, I was keeping an eye on the BC Wildfire page. We were watching the White Rock Lake wildfire that had ignited toward Monte Lake. But it was a few dozen kilometres away, and well behind the mountain to our west.

It was close enough that we were concerned and watching it, but it seemed okay.

Ah, we’ll be fine.

We went on alert in the last week of July.

In an alert, government advises you to get ready in the event of an evacuation order. Get your important documents together. Make a plan for your pets. Make a plan for getting yourself out. Figure out what you’ll do for elderly family members.

So my husband and I went through our place and put a few bins together. Things that we wouldn’t want to lose.

But just as a cautionary measure.

By Sunday August 1, the fire was much larger.

thank you picture

We had heard that people were collecting snacks for the fire crews, so we headed into town and bought a couple packs of Gatorade. We bought a huge crate of bananas and some healthy granola bars. Our nine-year-old son had drawn a picture to take with our food donation. We had this whole plan that the next day—Monday—we were going to deliver these snacks as a family.

That Sunday evening, we headed into town for a family movie night. As we were sitting down to a pre-show dinner at Earls, we got a phone call from a friend.

“You guys are on evacuation order. You’ve got to get out.”

You’re on evacuation order.

My crisis response rose up, levelling my head and giving me the calm I needed to take the wheel. Okay, what do we need to do?

My parents and grandmother live nearby. I called and checked in on them, making sure that they had their plan all set.

Plan in place. OK. Next step.

You’ve got to get out.

We raced the 30 minutes back home. By the time we got back, our whole community was teeming with people in a panicked state.

People were loading up their cars. Their kids. Their dogs, their cats.

The RCMP were there, checking everyone as they were coming in and out of the community. I could see officers going door to door with surveyor’s tape. Different colours denote different things. They tie a blue ribbon on your house if you’re not home. Pink if you’ve been advised to leave. Yellow if you’re evacuated.

It was chaos. Orderly, but panicked. It felt like a dream.

We emptied the bananas out of the car and put them on the dining room table, swapping them for the bins of our belongings. We finalized the suitcases that we had half-packed.

I called a friend who lives in West Kelowna. “Listen, this is what’s happening,” I said. “Can we come and stay?”

She said of course.

I was the last person out. As I turned to close the door, I spoke to our house. It was half plea, half order.

“Please be here when we come back. You’d better be here when we come back.”

We checked on our neighbours to make sure everyone was doing all right. Then we got in the car. My husband and I and my nine-year-old and our dog and all of our stuff. We drove through the RCMP checkpoint, watched as they wrote down our destination, and then headed to our friend’s place.

smoky mountains across the lake

It was six o’clock.

And the sky…it was so smoky. You couldn’t see the flames, but the smoke from the mountain behind us…it was that eerie, haunting greyish-orange glow of a forest fire.

We stayed with our friends that first night.

Night number two, we moved again.

It’s incredible, the way the evacuation centres are set up to help. And the volunteers. There were so many people volunteering. The Red Cross, Emergency Services…everyone in the community wanted to help, evacuated or not. The whole community of the Okanagan came together, just trying to find ways to help. Even us, and other people who were faced with losing their homes.

“What can we be doing? How can we help? What can we do?”

Through it all, I felt so thankful that we live in a place where we have an infrastructure that supports people when crisis hits.

 

There were so many unknowns.

At first, I thought we might be away for a week or two.

And if it turned out to be longer, I figured I’d be settled into my new routine of living in a hotel. I figured I could just pick up my work where I left off.

I soon realized that “being settled” was out of the question. For a couple days the fire would go in one direction, and then the next thing you know, the winds would pick up and it would move a dozen kilometers in the night. The emotional up and down was enormous. I just couldn’t get myself to a place where I could feel anything close to normal.

For the first week, we lived our lives from a standard 400-square-foot hotel room. Two beds, the dog, our son, all our things. Us.

Over the weeks, we changed hotels a few times. I struggled with the grief of letting go of the summer I had planned. In a rapid re-prioritization, work became secondary. It simply wasn’t where I was needed.

Roy Group totally had my back. Anything that was on my calendar that I couldn’t be there for, the team came together and covered it. I focused on what my husband and son needed, and what my parents needed, and what my grandmother needed.

I created normal as best I could for my son.

We met other evacuees at every hotel. There were constant conversations around who had lost their house. What happened last night with the fire? How close did it come?

I wanted to shield him somewhat from what was playing out. But you couldn’t hide from what was happening. You could see the sky. You could see that it was dark at three o’clock on a Friday.

There was one Roy Group event that I’d kept on my calendar. I had really been looking forward to facilitating this one — a virtual event on the 17th and 18th of August. I figured for sure we’d be stabilized and back home by then.

But the evening of August 15 was the worst night of our fire. It raced along through the tinder-dry forest, sweeping its scalding wind and flames right up close to where we live.

The emotional strain of going through that night was something else.

We were following seven or eight different social media pages, just glued to what was going on. There were people who didn’t evacuate even though they were supposed to. Some people were still on-site in certain areas. Some people on the other side of the lake were watching the fire from across the way. And all of them served as different sources of information.

BC Wildfire had announced that they expected it to be a bad night. The weather report showed winds were expected to gust up to 70 kilometres an hour.

Everyone was watching. And everyone was talking.

Your friends, your family. Everyone calling each other, texting each other, checking in. Did you see this? Have you heard that? Are you watching the news?

And of course, the panic. Social media is the best thing and the worst thing all at once, because you’re getting real-time updates from all different areas. There was this frantic panic in people; facts were few and far between, and people’s emotions were heightened. Everyone was posting their every thought, feeling, thing they’ve heard, thing they thought they saw…it was absolutely exhausting.

We found out the next day that our local gas station and corner store — the hub of our community — had burned down. Seventy homes chewed up by flames, just four minutes from where I live.

I just called the Roy Group team and said, “Guys, I’m so sorry. I don’t think I can do it. I can’t hold it together.”

***

You know I wouldn’t be writing this if I weren’t going to talk about how I leaned on the Roy Group toolbox.

We say that the way you choose to conduct yourself creates an atmosphere inside others.

I saw that playing out everywhere.

Just for a sec here, before I unfold the next bit of the story, I want to acknowledge the fire crews who fought this fire. Enough cannot be said about those people and how hard they worked. How brave they were.

Yet from early on, people were criticizing them on social media, saying they weren’t doing enough or doing the right thing. And it made me so upset. Those firefighters are people. They are members of our communities. I couldn’t imagine how demoralizing that would be for them.

I wanted to give the complainers a shake: Who among us can say we would do a better job? Would you imagine that someone could do your job as well as you can, given all the years you’ve been building your expertise? Would you sidle up to a paramedic, push her aside and take over the defibrillator?


On the flip side, it was heartening to see a finer kind of conduct.

Most of the community rallied to support the Emergency Services and fire crews. Every night, Vernonites would hold signs and cheer in places where we knew the fire crews were coming off the mountain for shift change. Somebody created a fire crew appreciation page. It felt so great to see that the majority of people, whether they had suffered loss or not, understood that this was well beyond anybody’s experience — this fire, this fire season, these conditions, the dryness, the winds.

Most people wanted to have a positive impact on others.

The fire evacuees all identified each other throughout the weeks. You can recognize an evacuee once you’ve been one. Not because they’re carrying certain luggage or anything. You just…start to notice the faces. “Oh, are you evacuated? Where are you from?”

I had many conversations with folks who were in a desperate place. I remember talking one day in the hotel parking lot to a woman whose property backed right onto the fire line. She was in tears, having been evacuated four times in the last 20 years. “I don’t think we’re going to make it through this one,” she told me.

“I can’t tell you why,” I said, “but I feel like we are.” And I showed her the fire map I’d just been looking at. I told her what BC Wildfire was forecasting for the direction that night, and the weather.

We talked in the parking lot for half an hour.

At the end of that conversation, she said, “I don’t necessarily believe you. But I really appreciate this conversation. And I feel better than I did when we started.”

Those little touches with people. The ones you meet at the front desk of the hotel, or in the parking lot. They matter.

***

There was no good reason why, but from the beginning, I knew it in my heart. Our house is not going to burn.

If you look at the fire map of what did burn, it really is quite a miracle. The place where we live is literally a little horseshoe of land that was spared. And on either side, there was total burn, right down to the lake.

The constant thing I kept coming back to during those weeks was this:

Nothing I do right now is going to change the outcome.

I do not control this wildfire.

I do not control what will come to pass here.

I have faith that the people who are trying to battle it are going to do their very best, and me sitting here having visions of my house burning down and having nothing is not going to serve me.

That was my stance through the whole ordeal. Until I know something is a fact, I’m going to lean toward the positive.

I tried to do that with my mom and with my neighbours when they were in those dark places. Because when you start to spiral into those catastrophic scenarios…it’s devastating to everyone around you, and to yourself.

I often was met with that truest face of fear. There was darkness. It was in the sky. It was in the air. It was in people’s hearts.

***

We returned home on September 16.

The drive to and from our community now is hard. Either way you go from where we live, whether you’re going to Vernon or to Kelowna, you drive through areas that are burned black.

We have survivor’s guilt. People down the street got completely wiped out and yet here we are, our beautiful community still has its trees and all our houses are safe…and people down the road have nothing.

We were among the last to return. Our house had needed restoration work done because — well, because a crate of bananas plus 40-degree heat plus four weeks equals a disaster of its own.

We know how lucky we are. This could have been a very different story. We are continually looking for the avenues to give back and help folks from other areas that lost so much.

One small way we will give back is through our conduct — the way we show up. We will be listening. And holding space for people to unfold their stories.

Sharing. Giving. Receiving. Laughing.

Healing.

We are not built for easy.

But we are built for the next step.

And then the next.

 

Roy Group has worked alongside BC Wildfire Service since 2018, supporting their fierce commitment to investing in their people, building strong relationships and creating a learning culture. We are grateful for the dedication and skill demonstrated by the leaders throughout the organization during summer 2021.

 

boy with thank you sign

 

Yolanda Moran is Roy Group’s Practice Lead for Enterprise.

/by Roy Group
coaching approach to leadership model
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Steps To Building A Coaching Culture

There’s a lot of talk about the shift toward coaching cultures in organizations. This is a good thing. Roy Group has been ready for this for a long time. But what does “a coaching approach” really mean?

Our definition of coaching is the intentional positioning of others to perform at incrementally higher standards, to learn more from their experience as it emerges, and to be increasingly engaged in their endeavours.

Let’s put it into a story so you can see all the parts at work.

Step 1: Identify the moment of performance.

Say a relatively junior staff member, Maria, has been asked to give a presentation to a group of stakeholders.

Step 2: Position for success.

As Maria’s manager, you want to set her up for success, right? You’ll likely give some tips and advice. But you’ve also got an opportunity to dive a little deeper with some good coaching questions:

  • What do you want to accomplish here?
  • Who are the people involved?
  • What messages do people need to understand by the end of the session?

Your questions will spur some reflection and planning in Maria’s mind, and help clarify outcomes.

Step 3: Pay attention to the person’s performance. Notice.

Ideally, this is where you sit in the corner to observe. Notice your team member’s performance, bringing your full attention to how things unfold. Take notes.

Sometimes your direct report will nail it. But for the sake of fully walking you through the process, let’s say Maria’s presentation doesn’t go super well. She gets tongue-tied from stage fright, and her voice shakes all over the place. She doesn’t nail the messaging. The session ends up being a five out of ten.

And Maria? She’s embarrassed and worried about what you’ll think.

Step 4: Review, note the learning, plan for next time.

As a boss, you could conclude that Maria is no good at doing public presentations and decide to give her other jobs instead. But this is a key moment. You want to build capacity in your organization, so use that failure for the information it gives you. Our organizations tend to be failure-averse. But that’s misguided thinking, because failure is an awesome teacher.

Help Maria understand that learning from her attempt → error → failure sequence is exactly what we’re supposed to do as humans. After all, it took you and me a few times to learn how to ride a bike, right? To learn how to write code in Python. To chair an effective meeting. To speak Spanish, to meditate, to eat with chopsticks…

We learn through practice.

So you could get curious about what got in the way for Maria. Invite her to unpack her own experience of herself in that presentation, and then give her some helpful feedback from what you observed. Find out what she needs in order to perform better next time. Maybe she needs to practice in front of a mirror, or maybe she needs to change the way she scaffolds the learning. Maybe she needs to slow down, and harness the power of a good pause.

Then position her to do it again.

This is the coaching approach to leadership.

We conceptualize the coaching approach as a möbius loop, in reflection of continuous improvement. If you practice coaching your direct reports this way, over time you are going to grow those individuals’ accountability, responsibility and ability to make decisions on their own. This takes the pressure off your shoulders to get everything right.

This is what we mean by “building the capacity of other people”.

We’ve built our Coaching Approach to Leadership downloadable resource to make it easy for you to remember and practice the stages. Try it out in your team, and let us know how it goes. And keep at it. Practice does magical things.

Roy Group tools for great leadership
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Download this resource as a quick reminder of the steps. Share it with a peer. We’ve built a bank of seriously great coaching questions into our HELI deck. Visit Shop Roy Group.

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/by Roy Group
man quietly sitting on a dock with lake and mountains
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Start. Again. A Practice Of Accountability

Photo by S Migaj on Unsplash

By Ian Chisholm

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ll know I like the idea of new starts. I like early mornings. I like September for the new start it represents. I like January for the same reason. And recently, I realized that you can make any day of the year a new start, especially if you just need to start. Again.

Let me explain.

When March of 2020 brought the pandemic to our doorstep, we shifted into a heavy regime of work to convert our business into one that could be delivered online vs. in-person. I could tell you that I like work — even that I love work. The truth is that work is a vice I struggle with. The way I work can be excessive, compulsive and self-depleting. The crisis at hand really just gave me a context where it would be acceptable to give in to my vice.

So I did.

By December, I had run myself aground. The last time I had worked this way was in my early 30s (which was followed by six months of convalescence, sitting in a lawn chair with a blanket over my knees). I didn’t feel good at all. It was hard to focus, I had put on a lot of weight, and my adrenals were spent. I needed to ask for help.

I started working online with a personal trainer named Nick.

We would meet twice every week: on Mondays to go through a new workout that I would do three times that week, and on Fridays for more of a chat about where I was at. I could tell that Nick knew his stuff. What I didn’t know was just how great a coach Nick was. This young guy had a serious system for helping people like me to “hack” ourselves.

Over the next nine months, Nick and I would treat my wellbeing as an experiment. What differences did I notice when I changed my water intake? My coffee intake? My food intake? What difference did my body temperature make before bed? How many hours of sleep felt rejuvenating? What was the rhythm of my week and when did I run out of steam? How could I break that up? How could I address sources of stress? What kind of movement made me feel better? What kind of exercise made me feel stronger?

We cleaned up my entire world.

Work went online…and I went to work. I got serious about rituals. Lighting an early morning candle and doing yoga. A pitcher of ice water on the corner of my desk with my vitamins. Strength training. Healthy snacks. Fasting. Walking phone calls in the forest.

It was like my soul had signed a contract with my body — and made a promise to keep it well. You can’t pour from an empty cup. Finally, after decades of hammering through life like a young sheepdog, I was conserving effort and taking responsibility for my own resilience.

I reduced my “festive” waistline, increased my function, honed my ability to empty my brain of thought.

And then I tripped up.

Enter fall 2021. Restrictions relaxed, and the Roy Group team climbed back onto airplanes. We were eager to reconnect with clients in Alberta. Eager to observe BC Wildfire crews in action in southern BC. Eager to connect with executive teams on retreats.

I travelled for a month. Dropped right back into my old habits. Living by plane schedules, spending time in airports, early mornings, late nights, full days. Beer and wings.

My sneakers were always in my suitcase…but never got unpacked. The regimen I had created to nourish and uphold myself fell right off the table.

This is right around the place I normally start beating myself up. The shame flares go off, the hair shirt goes on, the self-blame loop whines back to life like an old phonograph cranking up.

I’m a screwup. Where’s my self-control? I have no discipline. How will I ever stay fit if I keep blowing off my fitness regimen? I suck at staying the course.

That’s just a taste of the things I say to myself. The spiral is slippery and quick. And ugly. There’s nothing good down there. You know it. And I know it.

So I decided not to go down there.

 

 

The concept for this Roy Group sticker comes from the mat of Bowspring founder Desi Springer. Springer describes Bowspring as “movement medicine” — a postural system that optimizes mind-body health through the body’s natural curvatures.

The important starting place here is that in Bowspring, like in any practice, you must quietly take full accountability for your own practice. You can always ask for help…but ultimately your practice belongs to you.

Then, you open yourself up to mindfulness to grasp a sense of what is really going on — what is — and all the dynamics that you need to be aware of. For me, I noticed how good I had felt when I was practicing…and how less good I felt now.

Normally, once we become highly aware of what is, we immediately judge ourselves (or others).

Instead, what is required more is compassion: “I made really great ground and know so much more about myself now. I miss the habits that I created with Nick. In adapting to the world snapping back, I let go of some important pieces.”

I didn’t judge myself for losing track of my self-care. I just witnessed it, and decided that yeah, it’s human. And it’s okay to be human.

And that brought me right back to full accountability.

No blame. No recrimination. No negative self-talk.
No story.
No room in my mind for that sloshing around.

I simply started again.

Instead of, “You need to clean up your act and get back on track,” I said, “Hey, you worked out like a champ for nine months. You learned a lot about what you need to be resilient. So you got thrown off for a month. Okay. Now what?”

Did you hear that? So what? NOW what?

That’s what I mean by a new start. Not “getting back on the rails.” I just cut cord with the story — the why, the how, the blame — and took action. Started over.

Accept where you are, right now.
Drop the story.
Choose your next move.

The very best part is that you can do this in any area of your life. With your children. With your partner. In work relationships. With your health.

We’ve created a learning resource that builds on Desi’s concept of Accountability – Mindfulness – Compassion, to remind you that it’s a daily practice.

I hope you find it useful in your growth and healing as a leader.

 

Ian Chisholm is a founding partner of Roy Group.

/by Roy Group
jonny-schwartz-director-of-finance
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When Your Chief Of Staff Passes The Baton

Formerly titled “What is it time for? Continuing the evolution,” this post originally took the form of a personal letter from our then Chief of Staff, Jonny Schwartz, to the whole Roy Group team. Jonny wrote his letter early in the summer of 2021.

What is it time for?

Chiz asks this so often that when I think about it, it’s his voice I hear in my head. As we start asking our clients that very question, it has me pausing and reflecting.

What is it time for at Roy Group?

And…how about for myself?

It’s the exact question we asked ourselves when the pandemic redirected our course a year and half ago.

My answer then, for both Roy Group and myself, was simple:

Survival.

As the newly named chief of staff and the person responsible for the finances, I was feeling the weight of it all. Survival didn’t even mean breaking even. Forget that. Our business—our bookings, our work, our revenue—vanished in the span of days. Survival just meant finding a way to keep it all together.

We had assembled a team with plans for growth and now, by something completely out of our own control, those plans were shelved. I found myself analyzing scenario after scenario, looking at all the possible outcomes. How much revenue do we need, not only for the year, but for the next month? The next few months? How much can we turn up the revenue and turn down the expenses?

I didn’t realize it at the time, but while I was trying to solve this scary and unexpected puzzle, I was actually using the skills and abilities that bring out the best in me.

Figuring out scenarios.

Gauging our potential.

Looking past this year to the year after…and the year after.

That is the sort of work that allows me to add my greatest value.

Don’t get me wrong, this was still the most stressful and anxiety-filled time of my career so far. I imagine it’s so for many others, too—if not for all of us. The stakes were high and very real.

But I recognized that those were forces outside of my control.


So I looked at what was within my control.

What I could control was the work it would take to figure it out.

And that had me getting up early and working late every day, not feeling like it was really “work” at all.

At the time, it wasn’t easy to see I was doing some of my best work. What has given me the perspective now to realize it?

Well, while the unknowns were definitely stressful during the pandemic, it did give Roy Group some time for doing some extra personal development within our team.

We started working together to figure out our Leader’s Gifts. Led by Chiz, a group of us spent time over a number of weeks discerning, both together and within ourselves, What is the gift that we bring to the world and allows us to make our finest contribution?

It was a powerful process. It gave each of us a new lens on our strengths as perceived by others, and as defined by our own preferences in the work we gravitate toward.

Through these inner-focused sessions, I was able to see what was happening while I was working around the clock, trying to solve these problems….and totally loving it. I was able to identify that spark in me, and define what it was that gave me the energy to try to solve the challenges ahead.

As we close this next pandemic chapter—hopefully the last—I’m wondering, What does the next evolution of Roy Group look like? How can we use this knowledge to position ourselves in a way that we could all be at our best, making our finest contributions?

So, what is it time for?


I’ve realized through my work with the Leader’s Gift I am not the chief of staff for the next phase of the Roy Group evolution.

This wasn’t an easy decision to come to. The world tends to push us to more, to bigger, to better, to always keep moving forward, to never give in. To keep moving UP.

I had to ask myself, Am I allowed to take a step back?

And then I considered: Will that step back actually be a step forward for myself and for Roy Group?

I spent some time getting curious, wondering whether the best thing for everyone involved might be to let go of this societal programming…and do it our way. The simple truth is, for some people, once we climb to certain heights, we realize it’s not for us.

But instead of resigning and going to find something else to do, what about just accepting that we were happier a step before?

I realized I wanted this. It’s what I thought was best for the team. And thankfully, when I pitched the idea, they got it.

They understood as well as I did that for the chief of staff role, we need someone who can bring us together. A communicator. A connector.

We need to simplify our processes and communications, and increase efficiencies.

Luckily for us, the person who has exactly those gifts had joined us during the pandemic. Nina has tackled trickies in a way that has often left me thinking, “I could never have done that.”

She has filled the gaps I’ve left open and picked up the balls when I dropped them. And I am excited to pass the torch to her to lead the team along with Chiz and Anne-Marie into the future.

I won’t be going away; I will be moving back to my role as director of finance, using my Gift to create the blueprints for the future, assisting with solving problems as they arise, and supporting Nina and the team wherever I can.

I feel rejuvenated with the possibilities this new structure brings to our team.

The takeaway?

Sometimes leaders provide a gift to their teams in taking a step back…and allowing others to lead.

 

Jonny Schwartz is Roy Group’s Director of Finance.

/by Roy Group
Mentor Carole Cooper and Yolanda Moran
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Conversations With Roy: We Often Don’t See Our Mentors Until We Look Back

Every now and then, a person you never suspected turns out to be a powerful Mentor. You walk beside someone on the path for a few years. Or a few decades. And one day, you turn around and look back over all the ground you’ve covered together.

And then you get the memo:

While you were busy looking to other people for your learning (or imagining that everybody was learning from you), you suddenly realize that this person you’ve crossed deserts and oceans with…was actually schooling you all along.

That’s a hallmark of mentorship. Sometimes, like that “Footprints in the Sand” poem, you can’t even feel someone holding you and pushing you until you realize you’re in a totally different place.

In this instalment of Conversations with Roy, Yolanda shares a story of one of her key Mentors as she was growing through the ranks at Flight Centre.

* * *

You have a great story of mentorship from your own experience. It’s a take on “the Mentor I never suspected”. Will you tell us more?

Yes, Carole. The funny thing with me and Carole is, I never realized she was a Mentor to me until about a year ago. When I was working for Flight Centre, I knew that she was a huge supporter of mine. And I was also aware that I owed many of the steps of my career directly to her. She was a good friend. But I didn’t really see her as a Mentor. I always saw a Mentor as being someone that you notice, but she was like the Mentor ninja, a silent Mentor.


How old would you have been when you and Carole began working together?

I started working with her when I was twenty-six. And we moved through our organization together. I followed in her footsteps.


Why didn’t you really notice her as a Mentor?

As we worked closer together, I had always felt that I was backfilling her shortcomings. Which, in certain ways, I guess I was. But she was a lot more strategic than I ever realized. And she was propping me up in certain ways when I needed it as well. Now looking back on it, I think to myself, How did I not see this clearly? She is my biggest Mentor. I learned so much through working with her.


How so?

With Carole, I feel like she almost fell into that role. It was this perfect storm that created a dynamic between us over 15 years working together. She opened many doors for me. She always saw much more potential in me than I ever did. I always had confidence, but she put me into positions where I was in way over my head, in roles I had no business having. And then I would figure it out. Just as I was about to drown completely, I would somehow find a way to stay afloat, and continue to move through it. At times I would think to myself, Why didn’t she prepare me better for this? But I know now that she had. She prepared me just enough to stay afloat, and the rest I needed to figure out on my own.


Take us back to those times when you would say, Why didn’t she prepare me better? Where was that coming from?

Yeah, I would have been in a state of fear and fluster, doubting my abilities and feeling like she should have given me more tools. Or better tools. Or a ladder or a lifeboat. Something! And, you know, we blame other people when we’re scared, or when we’re not taking full responsibility for ourselves. But of course, she knew I could cope. Even when I didn’t know it. Without her, I wouldn’t have even thought to go for the opportunities that I was given without someone going, You should go for this, and me replying, You’re crazy! She did that for me at least five times over 15 years.


That fits with the idea that a Mentor often can see a deeper and wider set of abilities in the person in front of them than the person themselves can see.

Yes, absolutely. I grew as her mentee and she grew as a Mentor, as I happened to be under or alongside her catching the draft of her own journey. I just showed up at the right time, in the right place to be there as she was moving into her own leadership, holding space as Mentor.


Will you share a story from those years?

One that comes to mind is when I was in a western Canada operations role. Carole ran the Canadian business and there was a middle-layer manager between my role and hers. That middle-layer position was held by someone I will describe as emotionally manipulative and psychologically abusive. When they said, Jump, I said, How high? I was permitted absolutely no boundaries.


Those folk are hard to deal with. It’s hard to even get the ground to stop moving underneath you.

Yeah. I was done working in that kind of environment. But I was hopeful, because our financial year-end was coming, and there had been discussion that the structure was going to change, meaning I would no longer report to this person. But that change didn’t come through. So when it was announced we were keeping the structure, I thought to myself, OK, I’m going to have to do something drastic. Am I going to have to quit? What do I do?


Because you knew you couldn’t stay.

It was not healthy. I was broken under that leadership. So I had a conversation with a trusted peer and she said, “You need to call Carole and tell her exactly what’s been happening.” Because she had no idea. Any of the stuff that was going on—it was pervasive—but she had no clue. We were all terrified of Carole at that time! She had been portrayed to us by this person in middle management as a tyrant.


Right. That’s classic manipulation. The fearful despot trying to get everyone onside, against their would-be opponent.

And so I called Carole and I told her everything, and she said, “Leave it with me.” And within a few days, that person had been given some options…and ultimately left the company. Carole had taken immediate action simply based on my word. And then eventually she promoted me. That’s kind of a heavy story, I guess.


It’s always heavy where culture festers.

She stepped in and she trusted me. She believed me. She heard me. Wow, I’m even a bit emotional about it right now. It was a really hard time, and I was so afraid. It’s easy to get scared of consequences within a corporate culture, especially when there is this tyrannical image perpetuated of a leader. I was so fearful of her and scared to expose the bullying that was happening.


You didn’t want to rock the boat.

I loved my job and I loved the company. And I was terrified of what might happen if I spoke up. But through that experience, she went from this person I was completely intimidated by to someone who…just heard me, and took care of me in that moment.


Let’s talk about trust, because this kind of story probably plays out in a lot of places. Carole trusted you…but you didn’t even know that could be possible. It took huge courage to take your problem to her.

Carole’s conduct through that time completely changed my internal atmosphere. And we talk about that idea a lot at Roy Group. I had moved from being afraid, feeling not worthy, feeling disempowered, to feeling totally valued, totally respected, fully empowered, fully trusted—literally in the course of a few days—through how she conducted herself. I think that was a catalyst to enable me to be open to all the opportunities that came in the years that followed. I shifted from a place of fear and under the thumb to a front-footed, confident place where I could actually see myself moving forward in the organization.


Can you say more about how Carole was the Mentor you never noticed—at least until much later?

I always respected her, but I was young and I thought that the areas that were not her strong points would be her demise. And I was so wrong. In fact, because those weaknesses were my strong points, I believed, Oh, to be a really good leader, you’ve got to have all this stuff that I bring. But actually, I needed to learn more of what she had naturally.


So humbling, those moments of clarity.

Totally. You can’t always see it while you’re in it.


You never really know who might turn out to be one of your greatest teachers. Yo, this was a great conversation. Thanks.

Thank you.

 

Yolanda Moran is Roy Group’s Practice Lead for Enterprise.

Share your stories of mentorship right here. Your stories will help us build research in this area.

/by Roy Group
The Roy Group Team takes a pause to build a sense of community at Bilston Creek Farm

Conversations With Roy: How To Build A Warm And Productive Community

We’ve been thinking a lot about pause over the summer. Our chief of staff noted hundreds of out-of-office emails when we sent out a recent announcement about the 2021 MacGregor Cup.

This is good news. After 18 months of discombobulation, it seems like people have taken a serious pause. What if—collectively—the world begins to understand, like never before, the value of pausing? The value of coming together again? To play, to relax, to wonder, to savour spending time in each other’s company?

Our practice lead for Education, Heather Gross, recently took a holiday to Alberta to gather with family. Since Heather is known for her gift of building community, Roy sat her down to talk a bit about how to do that.

This is the first in our Conversations With Roy series, where our team members gather to talk through our best insights on what’s important now.

* * *

What are you paying attention to these days? What are you noticing?

I’ve been thinking about building community a lot. I’ve just transitioned from a place that really prides itself in community building and has been a community I’ve been very engaged with. That’s Pearson College UWC. Transitioning into new communities of practice has been interesting. And transitioning out of COVID means thinking again about community and especially about gathering: How do we gather again?

I was anxious about visiting family in Alberta recently. My wife and I were ready for that unique pause that a holiday gives you, and were very keen to see family. From a scientific perspective, I was ready to go for it…and yet I still had all this anxiety. I noticed that we did a bunch of things that felt familiar and welcoming. That helped. Right? Sitting around a table really helped. Working together on food really helped. Calling each other by name as “Aunty”. Even how we gardened together. That was something we could do outside, and everybody could opt into that process. That opting-in is something I’ve been thinking about as we gather with groups.


What else?

I have my first in-person facilitation with Roy Group next week. I’m thinking about all the rituals of what we do in person around being in a circle, being ready for people, having things prepared. We do that professionally, but we do that personally also, like making the food that somebody likes, and getting things ready for gathering.  This was something I really missed this year. For sure we came up with inventive and virtual options, but many of them were ersatz solutions for the time-honoured act of convening around a table.


This idea of rituals…we had those taken away from us during the pandemic. How has turning back to a familiar way of doing things been grounding for people? What do rituals mean for us?

Well, definitely there’s something about “the things that make us part of the group”. So the things that we know how to do, and in showing that we know how to do the work, we’re aligning ourselves with community. I was experiencing it on our holiday with family for sure. And they’re not big-R rituals. They’re small-R rituals. Like how we load the dishwasher. How we roll the dough. The small-R rituals of deferring to grandparents, and making decisions based on the needs of family peacemaking.

I’m not sure two years ago we could have listed all of the things that we do, but it’s fascinating to notice what we’re recovering. It’s so grounding, being part of a community. Helping people be comfortable and to know what’s coming next, so they can worry about how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking about rather than “what to do”. Rituals that come up in life transitions (births, celebrations, deaths) are really about members of a community knowing what to do, so they can get on with the work (care, rejoicing, grief).


What you were saying there, about when you’re gathering or doing more in person. Part of the work is to help people feel comfortable by helping them know what’s next. We’re always asking ourselves, What is it time for? How has it been hard for people in the last year not to know what’s coming next?

Yeah, this time was perhaps a gift of the ultimate “living in the present” moment. And yet it’s not really a gift when it’s because of a traumatic event. We were given this wonderful opportunity to live in the present: Today I’m going for a walk around the lake. This is what I’m doing. I don’t know tomorrow if I can go to the office or not. But also we had: Today, I don’t know what’s going to happen with this unseen, unknowable health crisis and pandemic situation. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the rest of the world. There’s a lot of uncertainty about that. I think the “not knowing what it’s time for” has been about what’s unknown, but it’s also been influenced by this being such a time of anxiety for people. It’s been an invitation to simply focus on what’s happening. What can I do right now? versus What can I control in the future?


Right. And we turn to each other in times of uncertainty. Can you talk about why a sense of community is important on teams and within organizations?

Community is the fastest way to build safety in a team. Feeling like you’re part of the mission. Like you’re part of what’s happening, that you have a role to play. I think building community—even in ways of sharing food and connecting across ideas and personal experiences—builds that belonging. That’s key for people being productive and bringing themselves to an issue.


There’s that important word, belonging.

Huge. It’s really important to look at how we build community in person, to look at how we build it in distributed teams, not only for the fun parts of it and the joy and the good feelings that can come from gatherings, but also so that we’re ready for when we face trouble. Knowing you can count on your community to step in and to help solve a problem, regardless of domain or sector or role, means a lot to leaders and to team members. And the time to build community is before you need to test its strength.


What tips can you give for building community? That sense of belonging?

I think there’s something about setting the table, being ready, preparation. There’s something about checking in, having a time for people to bring what they’re bringing to the gathering or conversation, whatever that is. The emotional piece. Here’s where I’m at today, and to have that be okay. There’s something about conduct, and acting in a way that both holds confidence but also invites participation and invites space for others. So being careful about big claws.


Right. For readers who don’t have the background, the big claw is a concept we use when we’re talking about directive vs non-directive approaches to leading. Lobsters have a big claw for, you know, getting it done. It’s the crusher claw. It fights. It defends. It controls outcomes. And quite often we see leaders using the big claw, when actually, it’s the little claw that frees people on teams into their own power. This claw is called the cutter claw on an actual lobster. It’s about cutting ties with needing to be in control. Little-claw leadership asks questions. Leading with the little claw means you’re less concerned about needing to be right, or giving advice. Instead, you’re more interested in letting others have ownership of whatever they’re working on or grappling with.

I’ll add another tip for creating community that ties to leader behaviour: be mindful about your conduct as a leader. In terms of noticing when you’re the voice talking, noticing who else is gathered, noticing who might be missing.


So great. We have a sticker for that, too! It’s the W.A.I.T. sticker. Why Am I Talking?

It’s sticker day on the Roy Group blog! Yeah, W.A.I.T. is a tough one for people—especially leaders, who feel this pressure to always know the answer. But you can’t. Back to the theme of building community, I think there’s also something about doing something meaningful together. Working together for a common goal, maybe making something together, playing together or engaging in nature together. It distracts people from “having to socialize”…and therefore they socialize ever so much more meaningfully. Doing something together that’s meaningful often allows other things to happen. In my family, this shows up as travelling together, cooking and, most often, doing the dishes!


One of the things we’ve been noticing is that in the wake of the pandemic, people are much more inclined to show up in a transparent way. In a vulnerable way. What can leaders do to foster and encourage that?

I’ve also noticed that. I think it’s also the confluence of things happening. Thinking more about anti-racism, what does that look like? What does it look like to take these global crises, like the pandemic but also climate change, seriously? There’s a sense of urgency, I feel. Like: If not now, when? For people who are sincere in their work, I think that can be quite compelling for being vulnerable and transparent. For bringing their whole selves. If not now, when? It’s a reminder that we just can’t predict what’s around the corner. So we might as well try and do our best work now. And bring our best selves to that work.

Throughout the past two years, a major crisis I dealt with was walking the road of decision-making and then implementation around closing an international school in a matter of a week. We dealt with the acute uncertainty, fear, adversity, crisis and trauma that then resulted. I saw that bringing our whole selves to those issues allowed us to deal with them. We have evidence now that being vulnerable in that space can actually be productive.


What’s a leader’s role in that kind of situation? Because those aren’t going to go away, we all know that now.

Yeah. Well, noticing what’s going on, I think. Inviting all the voices in the room. Inviting all ideas. Because we were dealing with something we’ve never dealt with before. And so, really looking for who might have a voice in that? Who might we have forgotten or overlooked? How can we discipline ourselves as a community to consistently listen to more people? How can you create patterns of strong communication and a sense of belonging before you need to “close the school” or whatever challenge you are faced with.


What else jumps out around building community?

I think we were really creative about how to have fun for a while there, at the start of COVID. We need to exercise that muscle a bit more now! I noticed at the beginning of the pandemic in my circle of friends, we were really keen on doing trivia nights. And people were like, “Woo! What can we do online?” And we petered out of it. I think we have an opportunity now to revive some of that in person, and relax into some fun things with our teams.


So…have fun. Do meaningful things together. Pay attention to each other. Put the big claw away. Solicit a broad range of thinking. Be open and transparent. These are great tips for teams, Heather.

You bet. And one other thing: this is a time of big, rolling changes. Everyone knows we need to work differently now. With purpose, and focus. At Roy Group, I’ve been fascinated to join in with the facilitation of a method from our friends at Cognitive Edge called Future Backwards, where you sit down with your team and essentially write a script with two endings. You write about what’s happening now in your organization, and what led to it. And then you write about what would be your nightmare for the future? What would be your dream? And you work backwards to connect to where we are today. That really helps a group be intentional about a shared commitment to working for the dream.


That’s a very powerful exercise for a team to help keep its eyes on a shared vision. Interested folks can connect with any of our practice leads to explore the idea of running a Future Backwards with their team. Thanks, Heather. This was a great conversation to share with you.

Conversation builds community, you know it.

 

Heather Gross is Roy Group’s Practice Lead for Education.

Work with Heather to learn how to build community with your team.

Get in touch.

/by Roy Group
mother-and-child

Five Ways The Leader’s Discipline Made Me a Better Parent

By Vivienne Damatan

If I’m being honest, my transition into parenthood was a rough one. When I had my daughter, I was the VP of sales at a growing tech startup and everything was going really well. Through a lot of focus and consistent effort, I had invested in building an internal culture of caring for employees beyond “the work,” and had earned a reputation in the wider community of doing good business beyond mere transactions. I was incredibly proud of what I had a hand in creating.

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but as a part of the leadership team, I was accustomed to people listening when I said something. I was never one to wield my title heavily, but if I asked someone to do something relatively reasonable, they would generally do it. I was also used to working with clients to understand their pains and craft solutions together. It was all very civilized.

I was a self-proclaimed high-achiever. And proud of it. I was able to drive results for my company and I fully expected that professional success to follow me right on into parenthood.

And then I had a baby. And she didn’t care at all that in my professional world people respected me and listened when I said things. She was completely unfazed by my long list of accomplishments and my track record of success. She had zero concern that I had planned on transitioning into parenthood with the magical ease of Mary Poppins. All she knew was that she had a strong set of lungs—and she used them to let me know that her needs were to be tended to ASAP.

Honestly, this was a big blow to my ego. Hadn’t I done everything the “right” way? Hadn’t I read all the parenting prep books and eaten mindfully while I was pregnant and exercised until three days before I went into labour? I had worked to set up the perfect environment for this little girl and I to be partners from Day 1.

But when she was born, all of those plans went out the window. I was frustrated at not being able to control this tiny human and I was exhausted by all the crying (hers and mine). I judged myself harshly for not Winning At Motherhood, the way I had planned to.

I beat myself up. I was upset with her. I compared her to other babies, and myself to other parents. I’m sure she felt my negative energy and the cycle went round and round.

Sometime after I had returned to the office after a tumultuous maternity leave, I was invited to The Leader’s Discipline™, a two-day Roy Group experience that explores what it means for leaders to use a coaching approach.

I jumped at the chance for leadership development, a chance to return to one of my pre-baby loves. Honestly, a part of me was also excited to just drink hot coffee without a clinging child for a while.

I got a lot more than hot coffee from that course. Over those two days, I was able to revisit so many beliefs I had about what it meant to be a good leader.

And it completely changed my parenting approach.

Although I took away a whole playbook of wisdom from that Leader’s Discipline, the core concepts continue to surprise me in their power to guide me in showing up as my finest self in any situation, be it work or family life.

1: Your conduct is everything.

The way you choose to conduct yourself as a leader has an outsized effect on your team. If I show up to the office flustered and distracted, unable or unwilling to be present with my coworkers, they may take that to mean that they’re not important to me.

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like you weren’t important to your boss, but if you have, you know that it can affect the way you feel about yourself, the way you choose to move through the day, the way results unfold. The conduct of leaders touches every aspect of the performance of a team, at the most basic level.

On the other hand, if I show up and conduct myself in a way that shows my team that I care—if I truly listen when they talk and assume my role as an ally, my team knows that not only are they important to me, but they are not alone.

From that place, anything becomes possible.

This is true in how we conduct ourselves with our children too. When I show up for my daughter in a way that she can feel we are connected and she has my full attention, the parenting becomes easier.

2. Your team is capable. (Your child is capable too.)

Sure, when someone on your team comes to you with a problem that you already know how to navigate, it might be easier and faster in the near term to just tell them what to do. But over the long haul it’s going to serve both you and them better if you can stop yourself from giving them what you think the answer is. Instead, double down on building their capacity to find their own way forward. The most important leadership role you might play in a situation like this is to create a safe space for them to wade through the potentially uncomfortable process of learning how they will carve their own path.

Yes, of course there are times for instruction and for advice-giving. I wouldn’t expect my team to be able to use a brand new CRM flawlessly without providing instruction on how to use it, the same way I wouldn’t expect my 5-year-old to make a cake from start to finish without giving some direction. But more often than not, the most impactful thing you can do is give them ownership in finding the right solution for them.

The more opportunity you create for people to be capable, the more capable they become.

Truth.

3. It’s not actually about you.

Even if you think you could solve all of your team’s problems, it’s not actually about you (or what you perceive the problem to be).

Early on in my career, I had a team member who wouldn’t meaningfully participate when we had our one-on-one progress meetings on Wednesday mornings. Sometimes I would have to ask if he had heard me, or repeat myself multiple times. I started to feel a bit disrespected and took things personally because I didn’t see him doing this to anyone else.

After a few such sessions, I shared with him the pattern that I was noticing and asked him what was going on. His answer surprised me. He apologized profusely, and explained that he was staying up extra late on Tuesday nights to take a coding course and was having a hard time focusing during our meetings because he was so tired. We moved them to Mondays instead and everything was smooth sailing!

The other day, my daughter lost a rock. Sounds trivial, but for a 5-year-old this can be devastating. She was sobbing to me, and my brain immediately went to finding a new rock to replace it. That should solve the problem, right? Thankfully I remembered that it wasn’t about my perspective. I asked her what was really bothering her about it. Turns out she was worried she wouldn’t have anything to bring to Show and Tell the next day. It wasn’t about the rock at all. We chose something else from her nature collection to bring in instead. Easy peasy!

Try to remember that it’s not about you. Ground yourself in curiosity and ask questions without assuming the answers. Allow the space for your team members or your kids to examine and talk about things from their perspective.

4. Humans ≠ robots

For better or for worse, you can’t program humans to complete a task and just expect them to complete it to the letter, the way you would a robot. This is true for all humans, including your teammates, your kids, yourself.

This means that sometimes things go sideways. Sometimes there are mistakes. Sometimes things don’t get completed just as you intended them to.

But then you have an opportunity to ask yourself, Do I want to get more done? Or do I need everything to get done perfectly? Take that moment to reflect on what’s important. How far can your team reach, how competently can they traverse the terrain of today’s uncertain environment, how much will they learn to rely on each other for ideas and feedback if you’re always demanding that everything be tied with a bow?

Keep compassion and empathy at the forefront of your leadership and parenting. Compassion for them, compassion for yourself. Period.

5. There is so much power in a pause.

As leaders and parents, we are pretty accustomed to jumping into action, to getting things done, to keep on moving. That’s great. The world needs you to act. But don’t forget to balance that action with a powerful, intentional pause.

Pause to restore your energy. Pause to reflect. Pause to allow space for the other person to work through a solution on their own before jumping in to help.

This pause away from the office and home to attend The Leader’s Discipline allowed for so much learning and it really allowed me to build my energy levels back up so that I could be a better leader at work and a better parent at home.

* * *

There is a virtuous cycle at work here. Being intentional about your conduct…leads to focus in your practice…leads to results and feedback…leads to reinforcement that your conduct is the most powerful lever for doing great work.

The more I develop as a leader and a coach, the more clear it becomes to me that I don’t know all the answers. And that it’s actually not my role to know all the answers.

My role is to help others learn and expand. To create a space where they feel safe to try things, to celebrate their part in the results when they succeed, to help them tease out their learnings when they don’t.

This understanding informs my role as a parent, too. When I view it from this lens, I’m able to be more patient, more solid and steady, more joyful (even in the hard moments), more present, less judgmental of my child and myself.

And that makes for a pretty good mom.

 

Vivienne Damatan is Roy Group’s Learning Lead for Women and Emerging Leaders.

Learn how to show up as your finest self in any situation.

Register now for The Leader’s Discipline™.

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chisholm-leslie-podcast

Choosing The Best Way To Have The Conversation That’s In Front Of You

In the moment, we think we need to know it all. We worry that if we don’t have the answers, then we’re not really leaders. And when we do have the answers (or think we do), we want to save some time by straight up sharing them with other people—delivering everything in the binder, so to speak.

In this episode of Leading with Curiosity, podcast host and Roy Group Learning Lead Nate Leslie talks with Chiz about the art of observation and discerning ‘what it is time for’—whether that’s advice, direct instruction, a briefing on key information, or coaching somebody to learn from their own experience. The conversation ranges from the board room to the locker room to the savvy streets of Glasgow as these two unpack the habits of inquiry we see exemplified by the finest leaders.

Pro tip: Your conduct is everything.

Listen here.

Key talking points:
  • We need to tap mentorship as a force to move us forward. COVID-19 sidelined us all, but what really set us on our heels was watching the US—one of the world’s most capable nations—falter in the face of something it should have been able to deal with.
  • Some titles need to be earned. From our seasoned Learning Lead Bob Chartier, we’ve learned that team, leader, Mentor…these are words you shouldn’t throw around. They represent hard-won value. Use them deliberately.
  • The more options you can sense in advance as a leader, the more effective your steering. When you can clearly discern what it’s time for and act accordingly in any given conversation, you’re better able to position people for making the most meaning from the next stretch of their road.
  • A leader’s work of self-mastery begins with their conduct. Conduct is where everything that’s going on inside us meets the rest of the world. It is the last outpost of sovereignty, where we get to choose how we show up in any given situation. (Yes. You actually have the ability to pause…and choose. Great leaders cultivate this with ferocious focus.)
  • Self-awareness is key to mastering your conduct. Self-aware leaders learn to ask: What about my conduct is creating value? And what about the way I’m conducting myself is getting in the way of us being able to move forward?
  • You don’t need to be an expert to coach people well. Throughout the 1990s, the Gemini Project in Scotland showed how true this is. When street-smart youth from Glasgow can coach emerging leaders from Edinburgh’s finance sector—without knowing a thing about portfolios or profits—you know you’ve got a formula that works.
  • Your labels don’t define you. Just because someone is using words like underprivileged or disadvantaged to describe you, it doesn’t mean they are right. Look for the steel forged by your challenges.
  • There is too much for leaders to know. It’s 2021. Who on Earth can keep up? Let go of having to know everything. Know your stuff—and honour that others know theirs. Understand that conduct and curiosity will move a group forward—even into territory that is unfamiliar to everyone.
  • Good coaching is in all likelihood not what you experienced as a kid. Few amateur sports coaches are trained in coaching. But once you dig into the discipline, you realize there’s a powerful history and set of practices to help people tap their gifts.
  • You’ve got to focus on learning if you want to be masterful at coaching. It’s not about the quality of the teaching. Not at all.
  • Leaders who are masterful at coaching are comfortable with risk. Feels counterintuitive, but letting go of control increases organizational capacity. Position your people to find the answers within themselves.

 

Learn how a coaching approach can free you from having to know all the answers. The Leader’s Discipline™ open course runs several times a year, or bring Roy Group in-house to work with your team.

Full transcript:

Ian Chisholm speaks with Nate Leslie on the Leading with Curiosity podcast, May 2021

Nate: Hello listeners. My guest today is significantly impacting my career in leadership development and executive coaching. It’s my honor to share him with you today, and his courageous views on what it means to be a Mentor and why we can’t call ourselves one. He’s been trained by members of the British SAS and spent years leading a program on the Isle of Skye where at-risk teens from tough parts of Glasgow and around Scotland had the opportunity to coach and be coached by executive leaders. Ian Chisholm is the founder of Roy Group Leadership in Victoria, British Columbia. I’m proud to be a learning lead and executive coach on his talented roster. If you care about the way you choose to show up as a leader and are curious about its impact on the atmosphere it creates in your organization, team and family, stay with us. Ian, welcome to Leading with Curiosity.

Chiz: Hey, Nate, thanks for having me. And thank you for such a nice introduction.

Nate: Well deserved. Let’s jump right in, Ian. Tell me about your convictions about the word Mentor.

Chiz: Well, we have a lot of them in that this concept of mentorship is really the north star of our firm, Roy Group. And so…where to start? I think my number one conviction these days is that it’s really relevant. In the last year, we have seen the most capable country on Earth falter in the face of something that it should have been able to face. It has all the science and medical capacity. It has the logistics capacity to keep its citizens safe and to be an example for the world. And they didn’t. They were not able to rise to that occasion. So what got in the way? That gives us a glimpse into what we’re up against in terms of this modern era. And I guess my biggest conviction about mentorship is that mentorship is a force that we’re going to need if we’re going to address all of the issues that Covid-19 has as exposed as part of this modern world. So I think it’s something that leaders need to pay a lot of attention to.

Nate: And I love when we call it a gift word. Let’s go there.

Chiz: Yeah, that was a concept that was shared with me by a Mentor of mine named Bob Chartier, who, if you haven’t met yet, Nate, you will.

Nate: I have.

Chiz: He’s our Learning Lead for Engagement. And he just introduced me to this idea of gift words, that there are some words that you can’t call yourself. It lessens the value of the word if you throw it around and take it on yourself. You actually have to earn it. Other people gift it to you, if you’ve earned it in the story of their lives. And I think there’s a lot of gift words. Like leader, to me, is best used as a gift, or team to me is a gift word. We might be working together, but it actually takes somebody from the outside coming in to say, “Wow, you guys are really a team. I feel it.” And one of the most misappropriated gift words of all time is, of course, Mentor, which, we throw that word around a lot. And it’s actually one of the most valuable gift words out there in that it’s a very important moment when somebody refers to you as a Mentor in the story of their life. That’s a moment really worth earning for a lot of leaders.

Nate: I can’t help but notice you led with talking about how important Mentors are in the world and that it’s a gift word. If we’re lucky, a couple of people might call us a Mentor when this is all said and done.

Chiz: Yeah, and that’s actually one of very few ways to measure leadership. Leadership is a very tough thing to measure across sectors, around the world. But to me, the number of times you earn that word Mentor in the lives of other people tells me a lot about your ability to not only get challenging things accomplished, but to design that work in a way that develops the capacity of other people along the way. So I think the number of times you earn the word is in an important measurement to keep track of.

Nate: And if we could explore just a little more without diving into, you know, the entire block of our courses, just this idea that there’s a time and a place for different behaviours as a leader that lead to becoming a Mentor. And today, let’s say, you know, coach[ing] being one of them and, you know, putting away that desire to tell people what to do.

Chiz: Yeah, and underneath all of those options, I mean, we can choose to conduct ourselves in any way that we want in any given situation, but the discernment to know what it’s time for, that’s kind of right underneath the plot line…that once a leader… And I think it takes time and I think it takes lots of experience; it also takes an openness to learning about all of the different options that you have. But when a leader can very clearly discern what it’s time for and act accordingly in any given conversation, maybe it is instruction, maybe it is advice, maybe it is, you know, a very clear briefing of key information. Maybe it’s coaching somebody and positioning them to learn from their own experience…that gear-shift is kind of underneath leadership more now than it ever has been in terms of choosing the right way to have this conversation that’s in front of my face.

Nate: Let’s…I introduced you mentioning that you had been trained by members of the British SAS and we talked about conduct in coaching. What was your biggest takeaway through that experience? And maybe let’s set it up as a bit of a story for the listeners, because it’s compelling. Tell us about that experience.

Chiz: Yeah. So now, the way you said it sounds slightly dramatic. So I just want to make sure that…I hope that got people to listen to the podcast! But let’s just qualify this for sure. I came to my office one morning and there was an envelope on my desk saying that I had been accepted to a program called Foundation. And I thought that was odd because I hadn’t applied for a program called Foundation. As soon as I opened it up and went online to find out what this program was, I suddenly realized that a gentleman named Rod Stuart Liddon, who had been one of our faculty members in Scotland, he worked as an instructor with a lot of our groups of young people. He had been in the SAS and this program was actually designed for former members of the Special Forces. Their careers are so steeped in leadership and teamwork that when they come out of the military, there’s this desire to continue learning, but also to share what they had learned about leadership and teamwork. So suffice to say, it was a very challenging, rewarding and memorable program that I was able to take part in.

Nate: And you’ve talked a lot about conduct, the way we carry ourselves, just the impact that the way we show up can have in all parts of our life. What can you share with our listeners about conduct?

Chiz: I guess first of all, until recently, it was a very old-fashioned word. We didn’t talk about conduct nearly as much as we talked about misconduct. But I think in terms of the political adventures of our neighbours to the south the last four years, all of a sudden people are talking about, you know, presidential conduct. And is it important the way a person conducts themselves? Or can they just be, you know, totally free and say and do whatever they think they want to do in that moment? Conduct is where everything that’s going on inside us meets the rest of the world. And therefore, it’s kind of the last outpost of choice where we get to choose how we show up in any given situation, a good situation or a bad situation. And so after 25 years of doing this work, I am just convinced that that is actually where a leader learns how to master themselves. It’s being aware of the way that they conduct themselves in any given situation and choosing a conduct that will not only influence the situation, but will actually influence the people involved. The biggest mistake that I see from doing this work is that leaders underestimate the impact that their conduct has in any given situation. Therefore, it deserves attention and focus so that that’s where mastery can begin.

Nate: Nice. And hence our conversation about the turtle on that learning through foundation [“the turtle” is a graphic Roy Group conceptualization of what’s necessary for working well with a team; if you’ve taken The Leader’s Discipline™ you’ll know the turtle]. This idea of: there is all sides of us, there are many dimensions to us, and we need to choose which we’re bringing to the table. What can you expand on that for the listeners?

Chiz: One of the key learnings from that program—and that program, I mean, that was 20 years ago now, and a lot of the learning is still with me—a big part of it was about self-awareness. What is it about the way that I’m interacting with my team, whether I’m the team leader or whether I’m a team member? What about my conduct is creating value? And what about the way I’m conducting myself is actually getting in the way of us being able to move forward? And if you’re not aware of something that’s on that ladder, lest somebody else will make you aware of it, a big part of the program was getting feedback at the end of every day, but also at the end of the session. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this part of the story, but all of your other team members, when the week is over, sit and talk for 45 minutes about you. And they don’t hold any punches; they’re probably never going to see you again (we came from all over Europe). And you just get a recording of a conversation that your five other team members have about you and the way you conduct yourself and the things that you do that represent a positive contribution and the things that get in the way. I’ve still got that cassette somewhere here in my desk 20 years later. Now, the only problem is finding somewhere I can play it.

Nate: [laughs] I was just thinking that.

Chiz:  It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. And the big take home was: “Are you aware of yourself and are you able to get a hold of yourself and make whatever changes you need to if what you’re bringing is not helpful?”

Nate: Yeah, it seems to me that if you described for us today a little bit about that program on the Isle of Skye and the impact that at-risk teens had coaching senior leaders of organizations and vice versa, it might shine a light on how Roy Group has come to be and the work that you, and we, are doing now. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that program?

Chiz: Yeah, you will know that there are just some experiences in life that, you know, really shape you and shape your philosophy about what leadership is and what incredible teamwork is. The Gemini project—which I co-created with a gentleman named Mark Bell, who’s still a wonderful friend and a Mentor and somebody that I learn a lot from—came from a place of economic necessity. We had created a really great program called the Leadership Academy for young people from tough socioeconomic backgrounds. And we were finding sponsors for groups of 30 kids at a time. And we were, you know, kind of a summer camp that ran all year round. They would start the program in the city, come up and spend a week on Skye, and then we would follow up with them down back in the city with a community partner. That was super rewarding work. But in terms of the organization, it wasn’t giving us a lift. We weren’t making any ground in terms of coming out of some debt that we had acquired during the startup. And so the Gemini project came about, like so many things, because of an economic necessity to innovate. And Mark was working a lot with the banks in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a huge financial centre, so there’s a lot of headquarters there and he asked me point blank one day on a walk if I would ever feel confident putting, you know, ten of our participants, young people from tough backgrounds in Glasgow, kind of toe-to-toe with financial executives. And I just had zero doubt that that would be a worthwhile enterprise. I didn’t doubt our participants at all. So much of the work that we were doing was taking labels like underprivileged or disadvantaged and asking some questions about that to say, “If you grow up in a tough situation, what are the results of that? Does that make you disadvantaged or underprivileged or does that actually hone something in you that’s incredibly valuable? That’s incredibly resilient? That’s incredibly resourceful?” Which, of course, the latter is true. So, yeah, we started taking groups of 10 financial executives and 10 young people who had been through our programs, introducing them to the discipline of coaching. And in addition to the learning that they did beforehand, we would take the community stream through a process and then the corporate stream through a separate process, same exact material. They would come up to the Isle of Skye together for a week, and every morning they would go through exercises or simulations together, you know, cracking some problem, debriefing that, finding out what they had learned about themselves. And then every afternoon there would be a chance to practice coaching. So the executives would coach a young person from Glasgow and get feedback on that from somebody from our team. And then after a coffee break, we would turn the tables and the young person from Glasgow would coach the financial executive—and coach them very well. Because if there’s one thing about Glasgow, it’s there’s not a lot of fear when it comes to asking people some tough questions. And so the kids from Glasgow were actually incredibly challenging, incredibly honest and incredibly effective in, you know, challenging the thinking of these financial executives. It was just an amazing piece of work. And we ended up doing it several times over my last few years there.

Nate: What came to mind for me there was the power of creating new ways of thinking about something. That clearly was a new perspective. Whatever challenge that leader of a bank was facing, these teenagers brought a new way of thinking about it. And the other, which is something you and I wanted to talk about today, is the power of letting go of the need to have the answers for somebody. Coaching. And when I try to describe to friends that haven’t heard much about what is executive coaching? and how can you help someone in another industry? it’s those two things: creating an opportunity and challenging someone on a new way of thinking about a problem that they’ve been…the hamster’s been on the wheel for a while. And the other one is the liberating feeling of saying, “I don’t need to have the answer for that person in the industry that I’ve never worked in. I need to hold space and ask the right questions.” Story is such a great metaphor for what we do as coaches, eh?

Chiz: Yeah, I think it is. It was almost like an exaggerated experiment to put some of those concepts to the test. The impact that it had on both streams would say that there’s something incredibly valuable about not knowing. Which, of course, we spend our lives getting to a place where we do know and can offer value to a system because of what we know. That’s why we go to a lawyer or to a doctor. It’s because they know so much.  Increasingly, we’re in a world where that idea of a leader knowing the answer in any given situation is so far gone. In any industry, in any sector, there’s too much to know. And so rather than knowledge, what we’re doing is, is understanding that experience is very rich and it seasons people to be able to address whatever is in front of them without necessarily knowing what the answers are. And can we get good at not knowing? That’s a big question. And the answer is yes. There’s some people that can get very, very good at not knowing, but understanding what conduct and what questions and what processes allow a group to move forward, even into a territory that they don’t understand.

Nate: The art of coaching, of helping someone move from where they are now to where they want to be. That’s the art and the process of it. And every time you do it, it’s completely unique and different.

Chiz: Absolutely.

Nate: Yeah. Just maybe explore your experience in… With our courses, the Practice of Coaching and The Leader’s Discipline™, just the journey that you’ve seen some of your past participants go on in the course of a program or over the course of your time working with a certain organization.

Chiz: Yeah, and there’s such a huge range of experiences that people go through. That’s the nature of learning about coaching, is that you actually realize that you’re a pretty unique learner. But some of the patterns I see is that people, you know, when we start, they will say things…and they’re being honest, they think they’re being honest. They’ll say, you know, “I’m interested in brushing up my style a bit. But I’ve actually been coaching people for several decades.” And then we dive into it and find out what coaching is really about, as opposed to other options that leaders have, like instruction or advice or sharing information. And normally at the end, people will say, you know, “I started by saying I thought I knew that I had been coaching for quite some time. And I actually don’t…I realize now that I may not have realized what coaching was and that actually this is kind of brand new. But I’m excited to go forward knowing what it is.”

Nate: Yeah.

Chiz: I just think that’s a very natural outcome from the fact that our mental models about what coaching is are shaped from a very young age. We go and play minor league baseball or soccer or hockey…and somebody’s dad or mom is the coach of the team because they want to spend time with their own kid, and they’re totally winging it. If they do do a course, it’ll be about the rules of the game. But we don’t prepare coaches. And so people just kind of wing it and they “be themselves”. And so that becomes what people believe coaching is. And expand that out to whatever level of sport. And then add a nice big slice of Hollywood movies that want to make it exciting and want to make it dramatic. And so it needs the great dressing room speech! I think of Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday, right? “Life’s about inches” and all this bullshit. And so we’re pretty sure that we know what coaching is. And once you dig into it, you just find out that there’s a whole discipline there. There’s a whole body of knowledge and a whole history of where this came from. And suddenly we realize that we didn’t know really what it was all about, even though we’ve convinced ourselves we have.

Nate: Yeah. And as you know and some of my listeners might, that’s the world I came from in sport and hockey and developing volunteer coaches. And a number of years ago when I kind of stumbled upon this other type of coaching—and I when I saw the definition and I witnessed it kind of happen, I’m sort of looking around and thinking, “What have I been doing for fifteen years?” And I think I’ve shared this story with you: the day I decided to start asking more questions to children than telling them what to do, it was in a Roy Group workshop when we were together in Kananaskis. This idea of: “But I still need to instruct!” OK, a couple of teaching points, then ask them about it. And that was that was the game-changer. And I was just sort of stopped in my tracks thinking, “Wow, I’ve been carrying the weight of …”

Chiz: All that knowledge! [laughs]

Nate: This knowledge is heavy!

Chiz: Uh huh. It’s true.

Nate: It’s heavy, it’s in my head, it’s on my shoulders, it’s in my backpack. And then, you know, of course, suddenly all the hundreds of volunteer coaches we’ve worked with in hockey over the years, suddenly realizing that they bring all this other great human experience from other parts of their life. And, you know, just because they’re wearing jeans and didn’t bring a whistle and have a full cage on the ice and, you know, haven’t quite figured out how it might benefit them to “look” like a hockey coach when you’re trying to coach hockey (the kids look at you a little differently when you when you look the part). But they had all this other knowledge from the rest of their life, you know, that they can bring in and apply, but that the pressure release valve, and my own fork in the road to never go back the other way has just been so awesome. I suddenly have more space available for lots of things.

Chiz: It’s so easy, whether it’s a classroom teacher or a principal or a leader in an organization or a hockey coach, you can immediately tell if someone’s focus is on the quality of the teaching or the quality of the learning. And I think for most of us, we spend our lives thinking that those two words are interchangeable, when in fact, that’s a very different focus. I want to teach well versus I want to create really deep learning. Those are two very different focuses. And you’ve got to a focus on learning if you really want to be masterful at coaching.

Nate: And I have a strong bias there that just keeps coming up. When we are challenged or questioned about, well, when is it time to instruct? I have to do this training, right? Whether it’s participants in our programs, having my master’s in education from the IB curriculum of inquiry-based learning and a mother who spent 30 years working in an international school after 15 years in the Canadian system….great teaching is about letting kids explore an idea and ask their own questions. And so many adults that happen to be in an important instructor role / training role in their organizations kind of glaze right over that and go to delivery of everything in the binder, you know. It’s just so intertwined and it has an opportunity to surface many times a day. And to kind of connect the conversation we’re having today brings that all back to this idea of Mentor, of: there’s a time for a little instruction, there’s a time to say nothing and see what they figure out on their own, there’s a time to give feedback or ask about how that experience went. And none of that has the pressure to be right all the time.

Chiz: No. And it takes it takes a high level of awareness to make that choice. To be like, “I’m actually going to choose to play it this way for the next little while to see how this goes before I just go to my unconscious default.” Yeah, that that’s big work for people. That’s a lot. It takes a lot of energy to be that wide awake to what’s actually happening and what’s required.

Nate: As it applies to entrepreneurship, for any small business owners listening right now, I love Tim Ferris’s idea in the Four Hour Workweek, which is not about how to work four hours a week necessarily, it’s about “If I only had four hours in a week, how should I be spending them? What should I do?” And as we talk about…very coachable people have a high degree of skill and a high degree of will, he talks about risk as well, in that: What’s this going to cost me if this goes wrong? Hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars. It doesn’t matter. Everyone has a threshold depending on what, you know, what the project is. But what’s the worst that can happen if I let someone go for it and try to figure it out?

Chiz: Right.

Nate: And so I’m always sort of drawn back to that degree of risk. And of course, over time, the more we can help people learn to think critically…it’s critical thinking skills is really what this—whether education or coaching—comes down to…the less they come knocking on your door for more answers, right?

Chiz: Well, and the less risk in the long term. The less risk you’re actually taking because you’ve got so much more capacity in your organization. So you can manage, you can control the short-term risks, or you can actually take those risks in a really measured way to build capacity. To build capacity you’ve got to take some risk. “This might fail.” You’ve got to hold that. You could try to contain it. You can try to learn as much… but it is important that we do have some risk in our story every day if we want to get to a more capable team.

Nate: Will the building burn down if I hand over the control of this project? And if the answer is yes, well, what if we just had a fire extinguisher ready in the event we absolutely needed it. And then the ring stays on the fire extinguisher because you almost never need it when you actually let go. As we wrap up here, Chiz, what can people do to learn a little bit more about what Roy Group offers in terms of open courses and organizational development?

Chiz: RoyGroup.net is probably the best place. We’re on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and everything else, but I think the website is probably the best place to go where they get to see smiling faces like yours. Very up for a conversation to find out what’s really going on for people and what they need, and if somebody inside our group or somebody that we know is the right person to help. It always starts with a conversation.

Nate: Right on. And this experience over the last year has created some new opportunities there. There will be a return to in person, but also a transition to virtual.

Chiz: Yeah, I think like many people, we know what our business looked like in the before times. We know what our business has looked like in the last 14 months. And now we have some big choices of what our business will look like, starting this fall…question mark? And I think for us, the guiding principle has been, “What is most impactful for our clients?” And that will be the primary design principle that we work backwards from, is to give them learning experiences that will stick with them for the rest of their life, whatever combination of online and in person, whatever gaps there are in between the formal learning so that people can go experiment with it themselves. Whatever that most impactful rhythm is, is the rhythm that we want the band to play.

Nate: That sounds like you’re focusing on the learning and not the teaching.

Chiz: There’s been a lot to learn from the last 12 months, I can tell you that.

Nate: Ian, thank you very much for your time. This is Ian Chisholm, founder of Roy Group Leadership in Victoria. You can learn more at RoyGroup.net.

Chiz: Thanks, Nate.

 

/by Roy Group

How I Learned To Bake Bread With A New Set Of Tools (Or: Exploring My Dread Of Virtual Learning)

By Donna Horn

Great bakers bake great bread. That’s one of Robert Henderson’s lines.

It means even when you’ve learned your craft, you keep honing and advancing and growing in mastery. You don’t worry about “being great”. All your energy goes into simply baking the best bread you can. After a while, you get pretty darned good at your bread-baking. The bread that results is also seriously good.

But what happens an unseen force invades your kitchen, flips the butter out the window and runs off with your loaf pans?

CHANGE is what happens. (Ugh. Who ever likes that?)

In our line of work, our bread is curating and sharing the thinking and tools that help leaders along that path to mastery. Our bread is helping people commit to developing the strong, resilient relationships they know are needed to work most effectively together. Our bread is awareness, connection, trust, tools, believing in others. All of what we do revolves around human betterment.

Until 2020, the assumption was that this kind of learning and sharing worked best face-to-face.

Frankly, I don’t think anyone at Roy Group seriously weighed virtual learning against in-person…ever.

It wasn’t even on our radar. Why would it be? Our best work, the work of people and relationships, was conducted by gathering together in full-day, face-to-face sessions, seated around a room or a table, with intentional breaks for eating and conversation and practice. Tennis. Skis. Skits. Breaking bread together. When we’re up at Nimmo Bay, it’s kayak trips and forest walks and orchard lunches and barbeques centered around connecting with others.

We always laughed. We moved around. We noticed. We read and relied on and responded to body language more than any of us knew.

So when COVID brick-walled us, letting go of the way we baked our bread was hard. I found myself facing this crushing weight of reality. How am I going to survive without face-to-face workshops?

I didn’t believe we could create a virtual learning experience that would come close to the way we felt when we were part of moving a whole conference room or dining hall into a state of excitement or realization—sometimes even tears (the eye-opening kind).

Mixed into my fear of losing the familiar were some limiting beliefs about what virtual learning wouldn’t allow: Oh, I can’t possibly…

I didn’t know it then, but now I understand that I was travelling my slow way through the grief cycle.

From shock and denial all the way through anger and bargaining. You know the drill. I went through all the stages.

I resisted virtual learning initially. I love face-to-face workshops. I love the connections they create, the shared experience they leave behind. I love the awesome learning experience that we create. I didn’t want that to be gone. I was in resistance and denial.

Since our group bookings had vaporized overnight, I suddenly had more time on my hands. I made myself busy with something completely different that took my mind off the spectre of virtual delivery.

I signed up for a Seth Godin workshop, to see how someone I consider an influencer in many of the ways I think are valuable to humanity creates virtual learning experiences. And I signed up to complete an accredited coaching training program, a long overdue goal.

My coaching program ran out of Australia, from a school that has never done in-person training—they’ve only ever delivered their content online. They seemed like a good muse. And Godin’s course, naturally, was virtual.

I decided to watch and learn how other groups handled virtual learning and delivery. I went into each session primed to identify what I liked and what I didn’t like.

They were fabulous.

Back at home (metaphorically, not physically, since I wasn’t going anywhere), I listened skeptically to Chiz and Iain Duncan, who were at the leading edge of Roy Group’s shift to offering virtual learning experiences. Listening to their observations and experiences—and witnessing their willingness to give it their all—helped move me to a place where I could make the leap, at least mentally.

As it turned out, delivering a virtual learning experience didn’t end up being hell, after all.

I pushed off doing any virtual workshops until October. And when the first one finally loomed on my horizon, even though by then I’d experienced a fair amount of other groups’ virtual offerings and was hearing from my own team that things worked really well…I found myself dreading it. Like the sick-to-my-stomach sort of dreading it.

I thought it was going to be just terrible. How could Roy Group, known for our elegance and ease and ability to connect deeply with people, possibly replicate the feeling of our experiences…without having bodies in the room?

Instead, I was amazed and surprised at how easy it was to connect with people on video, and how easy it was for them to connect with each other. I got to create a great experience for them. And they learned!

In the intervening months, I’ve listened to what our clients have to say about it. They’re talking about how they’ve made this new virtual world work for them—enough so that in many cases, they’re considering not returning to face-to-face workshops. Or at least choosing a blend of face-to-face and virtual learning.

I’ve read feedback forms from our sessions where people admit to having dreaded the experience at the outset, but they ended up loving it.

Or at the check-in they’ll say, “I don’t know how this is going to work. I’m not so great with virtual. How do I stay focused?” And at the check-out, that same participant will speak about how the virtual space gave them a chance to experience emotion and focus, just like our in-person sessions were known for.

We had this one brilliant young man in a Practice of Coaching session. He’s on a team that usually engages in a lot of physical activities and hands-on training as part of his work, and he had previously experienced some online training that just didn’t grab him. We were heading into our first break when he spoke up. “You know, I just want to say,” he said [and I held my breath], “that this is the best learning I’ve ever had. And I think I’m speaking for the whole room by saying you guys are doing a really great job of this. Like, this is just a really good use of my time. And we’re so busy…and I’m saying this a great use of my time.”

Wow.

I think he was bracing for what a lot of people have experienced with virtual learning: a platform, a slide show, a video, then you read something, then you click NEXT, then you’re on another page with another thing to read, and then there’s an exercise to do.

It probably ticks all the boxes in terms of varied learning styles and good provincial education curriculum criteria.

But it sucks. Because it’s not interactive. And it’s boring.

I am here today, very pleased to inform you that not ALL virtual learning sucks and is boring.

What has turned out to be huge and unexpected for people is how well we can connect with each other on a virtual platform.

I think it’s made even easier with the live nature of our sessions. There’s a sense of We’re here with you. We are with you right now, and all these other people are with you, and there’s just something special about the liveness of it.

But to create that sense of We are with you, we keep our focus laser-tight on being intentional. With everything. You can’t assume you’re going to instantly be able to create connection through a virtual offering. You have to be intentionally and mindfully creating it as you go.

The details matter. We are very deliberate with the platform we choose to use. We use breakouts so people can go deep. We ask people to have their cameras on. We ask good questions. And we’re mindfully leveraging our solid, useful content to create connection all the way.

A big advantage I’ve discovered about delivering virtual learning is the ability to pull people together from geographically dispersed locations.

We’ve been able to capture people who work for the same organization yet live in different communities—something we wouldn’t have been able to do as simply pre-pandemic. It’s been thrilling for them to spend time with teammates from around the province who are in the same role, who have similar experiences, concerns, aspirations and things that keep them up at night. They’re amazed to learn they’re not in it alone. There are other people living the same thing who they can draw on for support.

I’ve noticed when people come out of the breakout rooms, they’re laughing, or they’re grateful for the opportunity to talk with a handful of others about something that’s important to them all.

They didn’t have to travel to get to the sessions.

They’re relaxed and comfortable because they’re in their homes. (We think dogs are learning a lot of tools too.)

It’s so great, especially for people who have an introversion preference. Virtual lends itself so well to enhanced inclusivity.

Guess we needed a global shakeup to loosen us from those old paradigms.

Here’s the thing. People are going to be working differently from now on.

It’s going to be different even after we can all hang out together in person. A lot of us want to keep working at home. The public service, for one, is actively thinking about what the future of work looks like.

The trickiest pieces are the seemingly little, but critically important, things. The water-cooler and hallway conversations are the hardest to create remotely, but it’s still possible to have informal ways of connecting with other people. We just need to be intentional about that.

I will add that working from home lets you do a better job of self-care. You can eat when you need to, you can cook for yourself instead of dumping money on grabbing lunch, you can create the sitting and temperature conditions that are optimal for you, you can take five minutes to connect with a pet. You have far more control over your work environment when you’re at home.

Even when your kitchen is turned upside-down, you can still bake great bread.

Someone broke my measuring cup. They hid my loaf pan. And then they used up all the butter.

But I cupped my hands to gather the flour. I decided my cast iron frying pan would do a fine enough job. And I rubbed it with olive oil.

And I damn well baked the bread.

 

Donna Horn is Roy Group’s Practice Lead for Public Service.

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/by Roy Group

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