I define a blind spot as the gap between your intention and your
impact. You find a blind spot by
realizing that your effectiveness is disappearing.
It's eroding. And so that's a sign that it's
like there's a blind spot here. There's something that I'm not
seeing because my impact is not in line with my intention, and
yet I believe the leaders with the smallest blind spots
actually win, you know? For more successful and drive
more performance. And so the more you can narrow
the gap between intention and impact, the more you're going to
be able to be effective in your role.
Hey everyone, my name is Henry Surya Virawan and you're
listening to the Technically Journal Podcast, the show where
I'll be bringing you the greatest technical leaders,
practitioners, and thought leaders in the industry to
discuss about their journey, ideas and practices that we all
can learn and apply to build a highly performing technical team
and to make an impact in your personal work.
So let's dive into our journal. Hello everyone, Welcome back to
another new episode of the Technicianal Podcast.
I have Marissa Murray here. So Amazon Best selling?
Authors, including her latest book Blind Spots.
So today, we are going to cover a lot about blind spots.
I think if you're into personal growth or things like improving
yourself, blind spot is always the most problematic one because
sometimes we don't know what we don't know.
And I think this blind spot is something that a leader should
be able to overcome in order to grow much better.
So Marissa, thank you so much for your time.
Looking forward for our discussion today.
Yeah. Thank you so much, Henry.
Me too. Right.
Marissa, maybe in the beginning, I'll ask for you to share a
little bit about yourself. Maybe if you can mention any
highlights or turning points that we all can learn from.
Yeah, absolutely. So my background originally
began in engineering. I did my engineering undergrad,
worked as an engineer, process engineer for a number of years.
Then I did my MBA and then I joined Anderson Consulting at
the time that became Accenture and I was at Accenture for about
15 years, all the way from what they called an experienced
analyst at the time all the way to partner.
And so that was a pretty exciting journey.
And during that time, I worked with a lot of heavy industrial
customers and utilities and also I was the client lead for the
aerospace practice. So I had a lot of amazing
aerospace clients. And so, yeah, it was the typical
Accenture career where I got to do a lot of things, a lot of
technical implementations, a lot of transformation and worked
with some amazing clients and I got.
A little bit Rd. Weary, as consultants do after a
while. So after about 15 years, I
decided that I would move away to more of a local role and I
joined as a Vice President of Bell Canada, which was a telecom
locally. And it was really actually a
difficult shift for me. I missed just this culture, the
feeling the, you know, the consultant energy.
And I found that I had moved into an organization that was
very operationally focused and I was like wired to the client.
So I had a really, I had so many blind spots during this
particular tenure, and I ended up leaving without a plan just
because I was not happy and my husband was daring me to quit
because he was basically saying you're miserable and you should
do something else. And I didn't know what I wanted
to do, you know? And I didn't think that quitting
was an option. But anyway, this is not a best
practice. But I quit without a plan and
went through a lot of reflection around what are the things that
I really loved, What are the things like?
So I actually interviewed a lot of people too.
I interviewed like former clients and former people that
work for me and people on my team and try to sort of figure
out like what do I want to bring to the world at this stage.
And I decided and the what resonated a lot was obviously by
clients, interesting, I realized that I wanted to be closer with
clients. Again, I think as you get very
senior in firms, you're more internally focused and when you
see clients, sometimes it's just for escalations, you know, it's
not necessarily to kind of do cool work together.
And so that was one kind of heartbeat.
And then the second one was people development.
And I didn't even realize because I was like.
As an engineer. And I was kind of like, of
course you get good at consulting and forming teams
together or even like in technology implementations,
right? You got to pull teams together
and you got to do really great work together and then, you
know, you dissolve the team or all this kind of stuff.
And you have to be very conscious of skill development
and all these kinds of things. But I didn't really realize how
much of that was sort of my primary skill set.
I was always sort of the thing that I.
Found secondary or didn't pay? Attention to or didn't pride
myself on right. And when that just kept coming
back, I was like, wow, I just, I'm curious about leadership
development in general. I had had opportunities to do
some amazing leadership development.
I'd also had some amazing executive coaches.
But I always kind of felt like they didn't understand my world
and I was always trying to translate what they were saying
into my world. And I was kind of in my own way,
because I was skeptical that they had never sort of done my
job. So I decided to do some
certifications myself. I got my executive coaching
certification and all of a sudden this.
World opened up to me where I was like, Oh my goodness, like
this is what people have been trying to teach me and tell me
and make more valuable. And yet it wasn't able to reach
me. And so I just started this
incredible passion unleashed in me to kind of bring these
concepts to technically minded people, to people of substance
doers, people that make things in the world.
And I include in that I serve a lot of just sort of the
analytical type people, finance people, but also engineering
people and a lot of technology type firms.
Because I think there's that combination of like, we got to
get the thing done, but we've got to get the thing done
through people, so. That's what I've been.
Focused on for the last nine years now, my company's called
leader Lee. And it's called Leader Lee
because I believe that the. Highest complement is to be
leader Lee Like I think that is sort of that is the game.
So it really shifted my career kind of shifted.
I got the memo late that people are.
Sort of the most important thing.
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Thanks for being the best listeners any podcast could ask
for. And now let's get back to our
episode. Thank you so much for sharing
your story during my research about you as well, right?
Reading the book and also watching your Ted talk, you kind
of like open up as well, like some of your past
vulnerabilities, you know, your career struggle and things like
that. Always appreciate that kind of
story, which I believe is also one of the strengths for you to
become a coach, right? And I think you also wrote a few
books including these blind spots.
Maybe in the 1st place, could you tell us your background?
Like why did you have interest in writing about these blind
spots? Yeah, absolutely.
Well, the first question is why did I try to write, period?
Because writing a book was not even in my realm of ideas, and I
started writing my books. I wrote my first book three
years after I started my company.
My first book called Worksmart, and that was to try to organize
like everything that I was learning an working on my
clients with. And I wanted to sort of like
nailed down my perspective of one of the key things that
leaders need to get right. So Work Smart was like, it's an
acronym, it's nine areas. And it was like, I just want the
formula, like what's the formula?
So I started writing really to understand my own perspective on
like, what is this thing in my own words.
I mean, there's tons of incredible leadership
development resources around. But in my own words, like what
is core. And I realized through the
process of writing that it forces you to really sharpen
your thinking. Like, what do you really think?
And so I do it mostly for my learning.
So my second book is called Iterate, and it's about this.
It's really a longer version of my Ted talk because my Ted talk,
I had 14 minutes. I was like.
That wasn't long enough to explain what I want to say.
And it's about this idea of being much more agile in your
leadership styles. I invented a word called
interactive, which is like not being reactive or proactive, but
being interactive, which is this idea of iterating your way.
Because we live in a fast changing world.
And I think that the reality is we just have to, we most often
can't be proactive. And unfortunately, if we only
think we can be reactive, then we have a really tough life.
Like it's just a really, really hard thing.
So how do you get comfortable with that, that modulation?
And then, you know, I promised my husband I would never write
another book. And my children, because they
were kind of like when you write a book, you're like obsessed.
But three years later, just this.
Like starting about, well, 18 months ago, or two years, I
guess when I first started to conceive of it, I just again
started to notice these patterns and I wanted.
To figure this. Pattern out and the pattern this
time was. What are the?
Breakthroughs that come from blind spots with the leaders
I've been working with. And what are the categories of
blind spots that just seem to be coming back?
I have the great fortune of working with a bunch of leaders
simultaneously. So it kind of gives me this
really interesting lens on how is this world challenging
leaders and how is this environment challenging leaders
and what are the kinds of things that leaders are facing and
overcoming. And sort of.
So I wanted to tell stories. This one is really it's 21
client stories, Hero's Journeys stories.
Of how they identified blind spots.
And really it led to a significant breakthrough for
them. And it's my attempt to kind of
organize because I think blind spot we all understand.
It's like the thing you don't know, you don't know and we
understand conceptually. But I was like, what does this
really mean? And what does it look like in
real life when you actually find one and work through it?
Yeah, so maybe let's start with the definition of the blind spot
itself. I think when I read your
definition in your book, I think that really clicks and very
insightful. Maybe if you can define what is
blind spot for all of us. Yeah, I define a blind spot as
the gap between your intention and your impact.
And I use an analogy of like black holes.
They find black holes not by finding a black hole.
They find a black hole by finding matter disappearing,
right? And blind spots are a little bit
like that. You find a blind spot by
realizing that your effectiveness.
Is disappearing. It's eroding.
It's like it's not there. It's almost like, you know, the
intention, the powerful passion and intellect and vision.
You've got like all of this, like power.
And then it lands in other people and in the world in a way
that's just diminished or misinterpreted or.
It just in a totally different angle and direction.
And so that's a sign that it's like there's a blind spot here.
There's something that I'm not seeing because my impact is not
in line with my intention. And I feel like when we define
it, or when we think about it that way, what's powerful about
that is we realize it's kind of normal.
It's kind of normal that our impact is not going to be
completely aligned with our intention, right.
And so I think you can kind of normalize and sort of it's to be
expected and yet I. Believe the leaders with the
smallest blind spots, actually. Win, you know, are more
successful and drive more performance because it's almost
like an engine that you're revving really high and just not
getting them forward movement with right and so the more you
can narrow the gap. Between intention and impact,
the more you're going to be able to be effective in your role.
Yeah, I really love it, The gap between intention and impact.
So I think that's really a great definition and one of the common
thing that I see in the industry, like not many
companies actually consciously, you know, focus on figuring out
blind spots either for individuals, for leaders or even
for the organization itself. Maybe.
Could you tell us a little bit about, like why companies
doesn't seem to consciously focus on this?
Maybe they're focusing more on, you know, improving skill set or
maybe doing some process management and things like that.
So maybe from your experience, why probably this blind spot is
like really a blind spot, right? Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I think we are all really very focused on our intention.
We get so excited and we have so much clarity in our own minds
and so. We.
Keep doubling down on what we have.
We have hypothesis that if we do more things then somehow that
intention is going to come to life even more and we're not
curious about sort of that impact thing.
And impact is interesting. When I collect feedback, I like
talking about it and thinking about it as impact and you can
do this on the customer side too.
Like if you think about we want customer feedback, well we kind
of do, but we kind of don't, right?
Or even like, you know, development feedback, we kind of
want it, but we kind of don't, right?
Because when we get feedback and we feel like it's not in line
with our intention, then somehow we start to feel like we've done
something wrong or something's wrong or it's frustrating.
Or other people are frustrating. Like especially if the feedback
of the customer is so far from the intention of the brand, then
you're just, you're mad at the execution and all these kinds of
things. And so I think depersonalizing
feedback is one of the most important things you can do and
realize that it actually isn't personal.
It's not a judgement of your intention.
It's personal to the other person in terms of the impact
that they receive. And it goes through the filter
of a brain and a filter of an experience and a filter of all
those kind of things. So I think that companies are
fairly good at looking at results, which is an impact.
But I think there's also different types of, there's like
the subtleties around impact that we could be more curious
about. And I think when you are more
curious about them and you realize that they are just the
impact, you'll start to find creative ways to because between
your intention, I would sort of draw a glass with my hands.
But between your intention and your impact, if you think about
an angle in between, if you imagine an angle, what changes
that angle to narrow the gap between intention and impact are
small deliberate actions. They're small deliberate actions
in all the clients stories in my book, they are such small
things. It's just this new awareness
around how your leadership in this case is impacting people
that makes you tweak your actions, and it can be true at
the company level, at the team level and at the individual
level. Yeah.
So I think the key here is not like figuring out the big things
that we can do to uncover all the blind spots, but it's a
small little things that we can do, right.
And I think when you mention about we all maybe focus a lot
more on intention, right, Probably it's also something
related to our strengths. So in your book you say that a
lot of blind spots actually is kind of like an effect of us
focusing too much on our strengths.
So maybe elaborate a little bit more on this.
Yeah, absolutely. We found this, you know, and I
think people intuitively know this a lot of times there's like
our strengths. There's like a shadow side to
our strengths where the strength is over exhibited.
I think people are kind of aware and this is a similar idea,
although I think that it's a little nuanced in that I think
you're blind spots often hide in your strengths.
So you know it's not that the strength is being over
exhibited, it's you're exhibiting the strength really
beautifully. But the byproduct of you
exhibiting that strength really beautifully is that you're not
as attuned to the impact that you're having.
You know when people are just doing their thing and it's
beautiful to watch. I feel like sometimes the
spotlight on the impact on different people and also on
maybe smaller groups of people, right?
Like be it's maybe 80% of the people just love your leadership
style and eat it up for breakfast, right?
But then you have these groups of people.
Like I remember from my experience, sometimes I would
have some deeply technical people that I needed to keep and
I needed to engage, but kind of secretly drove me crazy and
didn't really buy into my way of thinking and all those kinds of
things. And as a leader, I had to figure
out a way to understand what is the impact of my style on that
group of people and how do I nuance my style for that.
So I think sometimes we don't get the feedback on those things
because people don't want to wreck us, right?
They don't want to wreck the strength.
They're like, you know, they're afraid that they're going to
wreck the strength. And what I've discovered is that
if you're just sort of a little logical about like, OK, I'm
really, really good. I'll just give you an example of
David the Difference maker. David, the difference maker, is
one of my unbelievably amazing talented clients who runs.
As a partner at a large technology company that sells a
lot of. Works amazing Sales guy creates
kind intimacy, builds unbelievably strong teams.
And he's the difference maker, right?
He's the difference maker in a deal.
So meaning that like if he's on the deal, the deal sells, right?
If he's on the deal, the deal goes well.
And so it is his strength. And people say, like, yeah, he
makes a difference. He's a difference maker.
Now the challenge that happened is that he became such the
difference maker that he had to be everywhere and it was only
him. And if he wasn't him and he was
spreading himself too thin and he was getting really grumpy and
he was dropping balls because he kind of over extended himself.
And so he's not becoming the difference maker.
Sometimes because of just the sheer volume and the small tweak
when I collected a bunch of impact statements, people wanted
more of his time helping them develop.
People wanted him to make them difference makers.
His team wanted to elevate. And so he was all of a sudden
like, oh, OK, now I have to be the difference maker for my
people, which will then be the difference maker for the
enterprise. Right.
And so it's the strength that nobody wanted to get rid of.
Like, they're like, you know, they didn't want to get rid of
this difference maker. But, you know, now they're able
to scale. And he's way happier.
And he's growing like, you know, and all those kinds of things.
And so I think sometimes people are afraid of wrecking what's
great, but I think sometimes just an ever so slightly the
mind is very interesting. You know, I always think of it
as a heat seeking missile, like it's just trying to do exactly
what you've programmed it to do. And it's trying to do that every
day as efficiently as it can for you.
And as soon as you give it a slightly different coordinate,
like just point O2 different coordinate, it narrows in on
that unbelievably and change can happen very very quickly and
quite effortlessly. Yeah.
So I think the interesting thing here is to figure out the
angles, right, the different angles that you, your mind is
moving towards, right? And you mentioned a few key
things which you mentioned in your book as well.
The 1st is about impact statement.
Earlier you mentioned about getting feedback as well.
I think maybe one of the challenge, especially when you
go higher up in the leadership management right leaders may get
little feedback. As higher you go, most likely
you get little feedback. So tell us how maybe great
leaders can actually overcome their blind spots by collecting
more feedback or impact statement in this case.
Yeah, yeah, I know this is the tragedy of leadership, right?
You know that you need more and more.
The game becomes more and more complicated and somehow in that
you get less and less data and that's really difficult.
And I mean personal data on sort of on your style, your impact.
And I think part of the reason why coaching in particular has
grown so much is because of that sort of lonely vacuum that can
happen around leaders where they don't necessarily have safe
spaces to really discuss everything.
They think to have all that kind of stuff and also a way to
really get the concrete feedback that they need.
And I always explain this to clients when you have these very
senior roles it creates. I mean, I saw it.
I felt it. When I made partner.
All of a sudden, what I said got repeated before that, nobody
repeated anything I said, right. And then all of a sudden, I made
partner and people were repeating what I was saying.
And I was like, wow, I didn't even really mean to say what I
said, right. So you have to sort of pay more
attention as a leader because your voice just becomes louder
because of the title and the role.
And a lot of leaders underestimate.
Because they just feel like the same person.
They're just like, I'm a human. I'm flawed just like anybody
else. They feel like the same person,
but they're not really received as the same person.
And so ultimately what I find is with my clients, I often go as
the investigator for them. So I would love it if we could
make everyone brave enough to be able to share feedback really
directly. I also think that three 60s and
digital surveys and all those kind of stuff have marginal.
Value. It's very hard to decipher what
is worth. Like people are being careful
about how they write it, so they're not identified.
And you know, there's just sort of like a lot of stuff to behind
that. And So what I do.
Is I literally do interviews. I do interviews with the key
people that are critical to their success and I capture
themes and I playback themes and we dissect those themes.
And that's why most of my clients in this book are clients
that I worked with where it began with a 360 feedback, with
collection of impact statements, first person impact statements
where I'm literally probing for them because I'm asking
questions that's hard for you to ask, like, well, how does their
impact vision impact you? Or how does the vision impact
you? Or do you have the kind of
clarity and direction that you need?
Or what could they do more indifferently to just enhance
the quality of your relationship, even just your
relationship? And what's their impact on the
team collaboration? I just keep asking questions and
collecting themes. And then when we bring the
themes, and then I typically work with them in a coaching
period where we're experimenting because now you have the themes,
but then it's like, OK, but what's the little magic tweak in
your leadership style that's going to have the exponential
impact? And that takes time.
That takes time to think about 1:00 and then experiment and
think of like a daily meeting that you're going to sort of be
different in and then get feedback again and all that kind
of stuff. So, you know, it's a little bit
of an effort, but I do think that at the top, you have to
always imagine at the top, every little millimeter you move or
inch you move, you're basically impacting the levers.
You have such a large lever on the organization and the people.
Really interesting technique. I wish like many leaders would
have this opportunity to actually have someone
investigate their impact statements with their people.
You know the key stakeholders. So I think no matter what,
everyone will have their blind spots right?
Maybe some strong leaders will think they have little blind
spots, but that may not be true, right?
So maybe the great leaders also have to think about what blind
spots that really they do not aware of.
And maybe these impact statements that you collect from
stakeholders will be one of the greatest inputs for you to
figure out and most likely create a breakthrough, right,
because you mentioned by moving past your blind spots, you can
actually create a change and a breakthrough through yourself.
So let's go maybe to the seven blind spots that you mentioned,
maybe a little bit of overview what are those blind spots and
maybe we'll dive deep into some of them.
Sure, absolutely, absolutely. So the first one is called false
assumptions, which is a pretty accessible language.
I mean, it's obvious that we have false assumptions.
And false assumptions are, you know, we are operating on a
belief or on a thought that turns out to not be true.
And as an example, I talked about David, the difference
maker. He's an example of where he was
running on a thought that being the difference maker meant he
had to be the one that made the difference.
And that's a false assumption. The truth was he could be the
difference maker by empowering his people more.
And so that's an example of a false assumption that was just
kind of running the way. The second one in the book that
I highlight is called unhealthy detachment.
Unhealthy detachment is when you are aware of something that's
important to others, but you don't really care.
You have an unhealthy detachment to something that is important
to others and that thing because you're like, yeah, yeah, they
want that, but it doesn't really matter.
Or they feel that way or that's their culture, but it doesn't
really matter. And what happens with that is
you're going to have some really significant blind spots around
things that will come to bite you in the future.
I mean, there is only one story in the book that does not have a
happy ending, and that is in unhealthy detachment.
And in this particular case is a very talented CEO who was
getting speed back from the board.
And in my impact statements, I collected very specific feedback
from the board around things they were attached to that they
wanted this person to do and that this person just felt was
less important that they were going to get there a different
way. And ultimately, they ignored
that noise, that little noise, for so long that there was, you
know, the board replaced them, didn't want to deal with it
anymore. And so that's the one sad story.
There's also a ton of, you know, amazing stories where people
just noticed that, like, I'll just give you an example of one
leader who his unhealthy detachment was.
He always wanted to really protect people and make sure
that they weren't overstretched. He was, like, really kind to his
people. And his people wanted more
visibility and exposure. And he kept saying, you don't
really want that. You think you don't want that,
right? But as soon as you get in, as
soon as you start taking on these things, they're going to
get in your kitchen. You know, like, he sort of had
this bias. And he kept ignoring that his
people wanted to have more visibility, more stretch
assignments, more engagement, to the point where he was running
up a very high attrition rate. And people were like, I loved
it, but I couldn't grow, right. And so he was aware of that.
But he had a really unhealthy detachment to what his people
wanted from him because he was from coming from a good place.
His strength was that he built an incredible team around him
that knew that he really cared for them.
So there's another example. Different views of success is
the third blind spot I talked about in the review.
And that is where, like your version of success is different,
significantly different enough than other important
stakeholders. And that can show up in a
leadership style like your view of success is.
I used to actually with my coach when I was debriefing some 360
feedback that I had received. I realized that my view of a
success of a good meeting was completely out of line with the
view of success of a good meeting of my team.
So my view of success of good meeting is we get in there, we.
Cover it fast. And we're out of there, you
know, And we handle issues and we're out of there.
Like, that was my idea of a good meeting.
And my team was finding me unapproachable, rushed,
impatient, impersonal. And their view of a good meeting
was like, we're together as a team.
Can we say hi to each other? Like, can we like, you know, And
I was like, oh, my goodness, like the views, the success of
my team. But it's simple.
Meeting versus my view of success was out of line.
And I just had to add tiny, tiny, tiny things to honor that.
I'd heard that people hated my meetings.
Like, that's a horrible thing as a leader to say.
Like, they hate your meeting. So different views of success in
big and small ways. I also talk about outdated core
beliefs. That's where we've just been
running a belief. And you know, we think it's
normal and it ultimately bites us in some ways.
One of the examples in the book is Erica, whose military
background has certain ideas about how hierarchies should
work, how staff should work, you know, And so that's a core
belief, but it's outdated because we're no longer in the
military and now we're working with different types of
stakeholders, right. And so it's just kind of those
can be blind spots, unconscious habits is #5, which is again,
like the things you do that you don't know annoy people and they
can be small or little. I mean, one of the examples that
Tessa the teacher is what we nicknamed her, She was an
incredible CFO, incredible like finance leader.
But she would talk about operations and try to teach
operations about operations. She would get out.
She always wanted to add value. So she had this unconscious
habit of always weighing in on everybody else's instead of
letting them speak. And so that was just an
unconscious habit that she had to stop because it was eroding.
The quality of her relationships and triggers from past pain is
number six. And that's where we really, our
brain remembers us making a mistake in the past that it does
not want to repeat. And so we don't go places, You
know, feedback isn't a good example of that.
Like we don't dig on feedback because feedback hurt before, so
we create blind spots for ourselves because we are trying
to avoid. We have triggers from past pain
and the trick with that is to deactivate the trigger to be
like I'm not that person anymore.
We need to kind of walk courageously through our current
environment and finally mismatched mindsets, which is a
really interesting one because I think we all know as leaders
that our mindset matters and our mindset shifts over our career.
Our mindset begins as much more of an individual performer.
Our mindset then moves too much more of a team player.
Our mindset moves again to be a leader of a team.
And then our mindset needs to shift again as we're starting to
lead, change or lead the enterprise where we're having to
be much more future focused and much more long term and all
those kinds of things. So there's all these shifts
associated with these mindsets, and unless we tell our brain we
need a new mindset, like, it doesn't know, right?
It doesn't know. It doesn't know that we're like,
OK, now the game has changed, so blind spots are created.
When we're operating in a mindset that's incongruent.
With the role that we're in, that was a.
Lot. I hope that was OK, Henry.
Yeah, I mean, completely fine, actually.
So when I listen to your, you know, elaboration of all these
blind spots, I kind of like laugh a little bit because I
most likely have almost all of them.
I think all of us have some variations of all of them,
right. So I think our job as a leader
is to actually really recognize I think one thing before maybe
we go into some of them you mentioned about bias and bias is
also covered a lot. What's the difference between
bias and actually blind spots? Are they the same or are they
kind of different? Oh, that's a very interesting
question. I think a bias plays into a lot
of the different blind spots. I think of bias as just and
again, like I kind of a technical mind.
So I always think about my brain as basically a computer program
and I think of bias as just code that was in there and that was
maybe not fully scrutinized in terms of all the different ways
in which that code would get called upon and executed and the
impact that it would have. And so I do think that biases do
can play into it and do play into it.
But I think that some of the blind spots, let me just think
through that a little bit. Like I don't think a false
assumption is always a bias. It might be actually something
that was like actually developed through concrete data.
And you know, biases often times are unbalanced in terms of their
point of view. A false assumption could have
been very, very right at some point.
And that's I think what's kind of hard.
And So what happens is over time it's like maybe new information
is not being updated in the code, in the bias code, and the
context has changed. So it's an interesting
reflection. I'll do more reflection on it as
well. Right.
Thanks for your explanation. So maybe, yeah, let's touch on a
little bit on some of those blind spots.
Maybe for some of us, we want to learn after identifying the
blind spot, maybe we want to learn how can we actually
change? How can we actually avoid having
that blind spot? Let's start with the false
assumption, right, because I believe almost everyone would
make a false assumption. So for example, in technical
engineering, things that have worked in the past, right?
Most likely they will use that as kind of like examples that it
will work again for a new situation.
So how can we actually avoid these kind of false assumptions
that we have? Yeah, well, the trick with all
false assumptions is to actually identify your assumptions.
And we don't identify our assumptions very well, right.
And it's not possible. I mean, we might try to document
all of our assumptions, right? It's it would be an enormous
effort. But it is an interesting thing
if you develop the habit within your team to think about what
assumption is leading to this. Like what ideas are leading to
this decision or what ideas are leading to this position.
And what you'll find if you keep asking that question.
Somebody says, like we have to do it, you know exactly this
way, right? The only way we can do this is a
waterfall approach. The only way we can implement
this software is with a waterfall approach, right?
And then asking the question, OK, what are the ideas that
support that assumption? You know what.
And if you start to ask yourself, like, well, there's
this project for like, the people will have data, but they
won't actually know what they're sourcing, right?
It's almost like you have to imagine the mind is like an
automatic librarian, and it's telling you the answer.
It's like, here's the book you need, and yet you haven't
checked its sources. It's just gone back and found a
bunch of stuff and handed you the book.
And so by asking the question, OK, So what are the ideas or
projects that are leading you to that conclusion?
And it's a different question than why do you think that?
Because why do you think that is going to give you a bunch of
reasons for the assumption. And the reasons for the
assumption are less interesting because they're probably sound
quite logical. But when you ask what are the
experiences or projects or what's the history behind that,
what you uncover is how much sometimes those things are
actually irrelevant. Now, maybe we had a hardware
issue at that time, or maybe we had this issue at that time, or
maybe we had all kinds of other constraints that existed at that
time. And it's only by revealing the
sources that you can actually take a look and say, OK, well,
wait a second, like all a bunch of the reasons are actually no
longer relevant. And So what I try to get people
to do is to try when they're really feeling like this is the
way or there's debate about a certain way.
Rather than talking about whys and reasons and rationales.
We talk about source examples and then we look at those and we
say, OK, well which of the projects actually the best is?
Then you add, look for counter examples.
Where was that not true? Where did we do this?
And it wasn't true. And it was great because that's
even more powerful. Finding recipes that worked in
the past. Our brain always kicks up the
ones that were hard, but finding ones that were easy is also very
insightful. And then that's how you kind of
unpack. OK, wait a second.
Here's why I have this assumption.
And what are the parameters in that context that are false?
And now what becomes possible to refresh as a new assumption?
Very interesting, right? To avoid false assumption, you
need to define your assumption. So this is also something I
learned recently, right? Probably we are always in the
problem solving mode, but maybe it's best for us to actually
first problem define you know like what is the problem that we
are working towards, right? And I think this assumption is
really, really important because once you make a false
assumption, right, the actions that you take probably is going
to be wrong and the result hence will be totally wrong as well.
So thanks for sharing that how we can shift our blind spot.
Second one is about unhealthy detachment.
So you mentioned leaders know that they need to care about
something, but somehow they just probably don't care.
Or maybe they don't. Have.
Energy to do that. I did that in the past as well.
So I've been guilty as well. So how can leaders have a more
healthy attachment probably or maybe healthy detachment?
In your book, you actually mentioned four different
quadrants, right? Healthy attachment, unhealthy
attachment and things like that. So maybe a little bit on this
part. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. It felt unnatural to just talk
about unhealthy detachment when there's actually four different
versions of this, right? There's unhealthy detachment and
there's unhealthy attachment, right?
And then arguably, we want to all be in healthy attachment and
healthy detachment. And all those quadrants are
really important. And as leaders, we need to kind
of dance around them sometimes. So, for example, sometimes we
have an unhealthy attachment to our opinion or to our way of
being and all those kinds of things.
And if we have an unhealthy attachment to our way, then we
close our doors in terms of understanding what our people
need from us. And the real shift as a leader
is that you have to realize that your effectiveness driven by
your preferences, right. So your effectiveness is
probably quite leading to your preferences is like a fraction
of what's possible when you're in a leadership role, because
it's not about your individual effectiveness, it's about your
effectiveness of the collective. And so if I have an unhealthy
attachment to my way of doing something, and I'm ignoring the
beautiful wisdom of this collective, then I'm probably
optimizing my performance at the expense of like 900 people at
some point, right? And so that's where it's like,
OK, so I need to have a healthy detachment to my preferences
because I have to realize that I'm the tip of the spear.
But I'm navigating for everyone. So I have to have a healthy
detachment to my preferences and a healthy attachment to the
things that are going to move the needle for all of our
people. And the things that people are
saying are really important. And it's not always easy because
we are probably in our unhealthy attachment.
I mean, right now there's all kinds of unhealthy attachment on
both sides around whether we should be in the office or not,
right? There's unhealthy attachment
from the leadership. There's unhealthy attachment
from people in terms of what lifestyles they want.
And so when we're there, you see that there's just a whole lot of
uncertainty that's going on. We're not really looking at the
whole picture. We're living in our own
attachments, right? So the important thing here is
to realize that we all want to be healthy.
We want to be in healthy attachment or healthy
detachment. And sometimes we have to be in
healthy detachment because there's something very important
that the organization needs to do.
For instance, we absolutely need to restructure the organization.
And so sometimes we have to have a healthy detachment from the
fact that that's going to create a whole lot of pain.
Not full detachment, but a healthy detachment just enough
so that we can execute difficult things.
So as leaders, sometimes we have to have a little bit of
detachment, but sometimes when things continue right.
So you know, you do 1 restructuring, but then you
didn't even get it right. And now you have to do another
restructuring and you didn't get it right and you're not getting
it right. So what are you not facing
right? What is wrong with the value
proposition, the culture of your organization?
Like what is the perpetual problem?
And there's often data. It's just that we're not.
We have a healthy detachment to the data.
So it is figuring out what am I attached to, how do I detach
that? I was thinking about like we're
moving along the spectrum, right?
How do I detach enough, have a healthy detachment to what I
believe so that I open up my listening?
And often times you'll get people that are probably
unhealthily attached to their point of view.
But. That's kind of.
Fascinating. The only way you're going to
move them is if you bring them into healthy attachment to the
pieces of the puzzle that are important and the pieces that
are difficult. So if I could replay for
instance, which I cannot do my job at Bell for instance, I know
that I had a very unhealthy attachment to client centricity.
I thought that was the only way you could deliver services was
if you bent over and did whatever you had to do for the
client, right. And I had an unhealthy
attachment to operational excellence, which is what they
did. So their whole mindset was we
build incredibly strong operations rigger and we're
really, really strict about it. And because we're so strict
about it, our quality is really good.
And so our clients are happy because our quality is
consistent and good. And all I could see was that
makes you inflexible, that makes you hard to do business with.
I couldn't see that. So if I could replay it, I would
have said, OK, the engine and the passion and the drive of
this workforce that I'm now trying to lead is driven around
this really important value that's been around for 100
years. I am not going to change that
beautiful value. It is a good value, right?
Values are all by nature good. It's just that it's different
than mine. And so how do I harness that?
How do I buy into it? How do I try it on?
How do I put that outfit on and then figure out the result I'm
trying to achieve? And then how do I take I get
that result through what people are already attached to?
Because if a leader ignores this stuff, it's like you're ignoring
fuel. Everyone has fuel for your
engine. And you're basically telling
them, like, I don't want that, we'll just make our own over
here, or you'll only put mine in or I'll only put people in that
have this kind of fuel. You know, it's sort of silly.
Thank you for such an elaborate explanation about this
attachment and detachment. Right.
So the key insight for me is to shift the so-called the focus
from you yourself, right? The leader you yourself to more
people, right to the team, the collective intelligence of
everyone so that you can play around between the spectrum of
attachment and detachment. So let's move on to the next
one, which I think for many leaders who are aspiring to be
great leaders, right, there's always this mismatched mindset.
Because when you step up the leadership ladder, right, you
will always have something that you haven't experienced before
and hence you have to probably change your mindset or learn new
skills, right? So tell us a little bit about
this. How can we actually avoid
mismatched mindsets? Yeah, absolutely.
I think the consciousness or the awareness for mindsets is it's
the process of reflecting. So mindsets, I think about
mindsets as kind of like your operating platform, right, Like
it's like your operating system and what is the orientation of
that operating system. And with Leader Lee, there's
kind of three areas of leadership.
We talked about leading self, leading others and leading
change. And it is a little bit of you're
always doing all three and they're kind of foundational
like if you can't lead yourself, it's hard to lead others and if
you can't lead others, you're not going to lead change on any
kind of scale, right. So it is a little bit
incremental, but they're all fundamental.
And So what I found with when the case states that I describe
in Miss Massmindsets is it's kind of fascinating.
It's not like you just have to be in one, you have to be in one
that's also in mastery of the the others, right.
So it's not as simple as saying like, OK, I'm new in my job, so
all I do is think about myself and I don't build any
relationships and I don't, you know what I mean?
Like, it's not as as simple as that, but it is an orientation
and it is an operating system where it's like, where am I?
Where's the dominant thinking of my day and do I have enough
energy reserved for me? So I'll just give you an
example. In the book, I talk about people
who have mismatched mindsets that maybe are operating the
right man set example. So there was Chelsea basically,
absolutely in the right mindset around leading change.
Like absolutely in the right mindset about the role, like the
role that she was in and how she had to drive change, drive the
business, grow the business, all those kinds of things, right?
But was so obsessed with this that was really depleting
herself, really depleting herself, not taking good care of
herself, getting very forceful, getting very aggressive, all
this kind of stuff. So on the one hand, she had the
right mindset around, like her role, But on the other hand, she
had sort of neglected her leading self, like neglected
sort of her fundamental pieces. And because she was so focused
on leading change, she was alienating people because she
wasn't charismatic and light and, you know, she wasn't a
leader that people. Wanted to follow.
And she was so focused on winning that it was like taking
away the shared wins that were possible for everybody and sort
of the journey for everybody. And so with mismatch mindsets,
it's this idea of what are the pieces like, how do I keep the
whole pie together, what's my orientation with my role?
What's my orientation with my team, and what's my orientation
with myself? I think it's a very interesting
three different areas, right As you go up the career ladder or
leadership ladder always have three aspects, right leading
yourself, leading others and leading chains.
So the spectrum could change, right, depending on the context.
So probably something very, very insightful for all of us to
learn from. There are plenty more blind
spots in the book. So I really encourage people to
look at the book. So Marissa as he explained as
well, right uses a lot of examples from her client so that
you can relate better because some of those case studies
probably something that you experience yourself as well.
So uncovering blind spot probably is not something that
people would really be open to sometimes not something that
they are encouraged as well. So how can we create this
culture, maybe in organization or in team, such that people are
OK to talk about blind spots or even receiving feedback about
blind spots from others? Yeah.
You know, I think it's so powerful when people really
internalize that idea of intention versus impact.
So when people are really very respectful of the fact that they
assume positive intent. I worked with an executive team
yesterday. And so much of this, the
starting point for teams to be courageous with each other and
to be frank with each other is that we need to assume positive
intent. So when somebody does something
that is suboptimal, we first and foremost realize that they had a
positive intent. And so we acknowledge that
positive intent. We say, you know, I recognize
that your intention was probably to X.
We call it out if we're pretty sure what it was, right.
Your intention was probably to kick this off and generate a ton
of energy and make sure you had credibility to do this.
And I really value that intention.
So let's value the intention. The impact was we made maybe
certain sections of the organization feel less
important. We made sort of feel like if
you're on this team, then like something's amazing and then if
you're not on this team, you're chopped liver or whatever the
case would be, right? And so we have to make sure that
we anchor in the intention so that the person can hear the
impact without feeling like completely blindsided or beat up
over trying to do a good thing because their mind was focused
on the intention. So the more teams can call out
positive intention before they give feedback and make sure that
they're saying, I understand you had a positive intention.
And if you don't know the positive intention, like you can
ask, you can say can tell me more about your intention before
you, like when you were doing that.
And then you'll hear it and they'll tell you and you'll be
like, Oh my goodness, that is beautiful.
And I can see how you were trying to do that.
And then usually what you see is that the positive intention is
so much bigger than the impact. It's really bigger.
It's just that the impact needs a little course correction and
there's actions that can be taken about that.
So I think the way that people get more and more courageous is
they make this normal. It's normal that you're focused
on your intention. It's the way we're all wired.
It's normal that you can't know your impact all the time.
That's why we have to ask, and it's normal that sometimes we
have to course correct a tiny bit on our intention to be able
to maximize its alignment with our impact.
And I find that when we can do that in an environment where
we've built trust, where we've practiced this, where we've
gotten rid of the very quick judgement.
I mean, I think that curiosity, I've read somewhere that
curiosity is the opposite of judgement.
You know, where we're living in curiosity.
Like what was your intention? And let me help you lean into
that intention. And then here's some impact that
we might want to calibrate to even further bolster your
positive intention, right? Right.
I think it's really beautiful, right.
So trying to understand the positive intent from the other
person, right, Maybe also call it out, frame it and also tell
them the impact that actually is kind of like mismatch from the
intention. I think if I remember correctly
in your Ted talk as well about the interactive, right, you
mentioned about these 3A's, right.
I think that's kind of like a good framework as well to tell
the other person even though you're frustrated, right?
Acknowledge yes about the positive intent and explain
about the impact. Yeah, the 3A's are appreciate
ALIGN and AUGMENT. So you start by appreciating
something the other person, their intention, their whatever
a line you show like you're in alignment with that right.
And then the third is AUGMENT, then you add this data.
And the reason why the two, it's really important for the brain
to have sort of two alignment statements before you try to
nudge somebody somewhere because ultimately they need to feel
stable like the two first ones, you stabilize where you are,
what's already great. And then on this very strong
platform of appreciation and alignment, then you can nudge
each other to be even greater. Right.
So I think for people who are interested in this tree, a make
sure you to check out Marissa Hedtalk, right.
So I think she has it on the LinkedIn or her website as well.
So I'll put in the show notes as well.
So Marissa, I think it's a really beautiful conversation.
Unfortunately, we have to wrap up.
But before I let you go, I have one last question.
I always ask from my guest, which I call 3.
Technical leadership wisdom. So you can also do you know like
leadership wisdom. Basically it's like an advice
for us to learn from you. So maybe if you can share your
version of three technical leadership wisdom.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I guess the 1st in my mind
would always be your journey to your highest success, highest
fulfillment, highest life enjoyment is your journey to
your best leader. So it's all about leadership.
It starts with that fascination and joy of the unfolding of
becoming the most. Beautiful leader.
Possible. So I I.
Encourage tech leaders to just think about that because I think
intuitively we all know there's more in us if we focus on our
own development and leadership development.
The second I would say is your blind spot is your breakthrough
and that is really get curious, be bold, understand that there's
more upside, there's more ease, there's more flow.
And I guess the final thing that I would say is your best years
are never your hardest and so figure out your recipes.
It's always interesting how we think that somehow it's an
effort based approach, but there's magic in ease and flow.
Look at your best years. Look at your best projects, See
how, and then look at what you did and how you did it.
And often times those are other shortcuts to creating you.
Know your best years. Divorce that idea.
That heart is better. Right.
Wow, I think that's pretty interesting, right?
So figure out your recipe, right?
That could also be a good reflection point.
We are at the start of the year, don't forget.
So maybe for those of you who haven't done your reflection,
find your recipe for success. So Marissa, for people who love
this conversation, they wanna connect with you online or ask
more questions. Is there a place where they can
find you online? Yes, absolutely.
So online social media, I'm on all the platforms, but I'm
mostly on LinkedIn. So please connect with me on
LinkedIn and message me there. My website isleaderly.com, which
is an Ley and there's a way to contact me there.
And yeah, absolutely I've loved this discussion.
I love your. Podcast.
I feel so. Connected to your listeners.
So it's been such a pleasure to be with you, Henry.
Thank you so much. Right.
Thank you so much as well. So, Marissa, I hope that people
get to know their blind spots from this conversation, right?
And they get to work out all those blind spots so that we can
become a better leader. Amazing.
Thank you for listening to this episode and for staying right
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