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Understanding The Wake of the Action with Mike Watson
Christina: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of, I Am Christina DiArcangelo and today, everyone, I have an exciting guest on.
Mike Watson has joined me today. He is also the co-author of Rise Up Leadership Habit for Turbulent Times. The reason why this is so important is because we have had such turbulent times as of lately in the world of the past 2, 3, 4, 5 years and we're still living in turbulent times.
I really wanted to have Mike Watson on to be able to talk about leadership and some of the other things he's working on with us.
So welcome, Mike. Thank you for joining us today.
Mike: Christina is great to be on your show. Thank you so much for having me. What a gift LinkedIn can be to introduce us to like-minded people.
Christina: That's exactly right. I mean, that's how we met everyone. We have not worked together on projects. A lot of times we have people on that I've worked with either currently past life things. But one of the things that I love about us as professionals and entrepreneurs and the ability to utilize LinkedIn for what it's worth, we were able to meet and we have been kind of following each other now for, I don't know, I would say maybe since last year, I think. Right? Okay, good.
So that's how I got introduced to Mike, and Mike got introduced to me because we also are writers for CEO World Magazine. So we share that as a bond and we also, I think, share some of these leadership skill sets as well, because as you guys know that listen and watch us, I always try to talk about things that make us the same, the guests. So welcome.
Mike, why don't you just take it off from the top?
Mike: All right, well, thanks so much, Christina. You asked me to share a little bit about
the background and the passions that drive me.
So, in very abbreviated fashion, I was a banker, and I escaped after 15years from an executive role in banking. Great learning, but not designed for somebody whose creative temperament is greater than his analytical temperament. So moved out of banking and started this company, Ignite Management Services and we started Christina as a strategy firm, helping organizations create and execute strategy using a mantra of strategy from within.
So we go in, work with leaders to help them coalesce around where they're going and how they're going to get there. But we continue to come up against the same roadblock, and that's the execution roadblock and organizations would get stumped, and it would almost always come back to leadership.
It would come back to the way in which people were choosing to lead that got in the way of strategy. Ranjay Galati from Harvard, Just wrote a great book called Deep Purpose and in that book, Deep Purpose, it talks about having this strategy and the vision and the purpose that cascades through an organization. What takes a different type of leadership and different from what we were seeing in the command and control style.
So that's what led us down this path of leadership and ultimately to the book, but our practice, which still has a strategic component, but more about how leadership, individuals and teams embrace habits that are going to make them more effective in these turbulent times.
Christina: That's awesome. That is such an awesome idea that you guys came up with and that you took the time to do this, right? Because a lot of people like to talk about these types of things, but they don't do anything about it, right?
They want to talk about it and agree and maybe show up at Clubhouse or Instagram live or something, but they don't do anything about it. You guys actually took the time and effort to write a book about this, to try and help corporations and leaders understand how to do this properly, rather than being command and control like you put being a leader that actually listens to his or her team and is willing to recognize their shortcomings because, listen, you and I are both entrepreneurs, CEOs, and we don't know everything, Mike.
Mike: Hang on, hang on. Easy. Speak for yourself, Christina. I'm kidding. Carry on.
Christina: But what you just exhibited right there, hold on a second. That's how some leaders rule.
Mike: It is, right? It is.
Christina: So I'm glad you did that because I think it's important for people to understand these things, right? So that they hear it out loud, right? They can read it, but when they hear it, if they could hear themselves and how they talk to people oh, my goodness.
Mike: If only you could hear yourself talk. There's a little tool kit we occasionally bring into facilitations for some of the more challenged groups, and we bring it in with great sort of fanfare and we put it on the desk and they're wondering what's coming out and out comes this little toy floating boat that would sit in a child's bathtub.
The other is this ugly fly, and the third is a mirror and the whole construct is this as leaders, we must understand the wake of our actions and that's symbolic. The boat is symbolic of that.
When we speak, when we act, there are ramifications that spread a long, long way and some hit the shoreline gently with a ripple and some crash and destroy and as a leader, understanding the impact we have on people is critical. The fly on the wall is do you hear yourself?
What would a third party observer say about what's going on in this room today? I know I did it for fun. Stop. But that's behaviour we see the hand gestures, put it up, the pointing like this, and it's unconscious and it happens and if you were watching from the outside, you just go, oh, what just happened?
That's stopped that it would destroy you to see it take place and yet we do that on a continuous basis. The third is the mirror we get, okay, organizations do a culture assessment, and I know there are lots of assessments that are out there, tools that are out there. We find it quite easy.
We say, give us an hour and a half to observe your senior management team in a meeting, and we'll tell you what your culture will likely be. Because the mirror is the mirror of the soul and how, if you have challenges with culture and you're a senior leader, look in the mirror, because it starts with you. It always starts with you. And this gets into the type of leadership that we talk about. I know, Christina.
This is why we connected. Why we're aligned is I saw some of your articles, and, oh, man, this is the stuff we're talking about. I can't remember all the details of you did a great post a while back on the service leader, the leader that leads with servitude.
Tell me about that one. Remind me what that was about.
Christina: Thank you so much. So one of the things that I'm a female CEO, and I've moved up the ranks, so a lot of times my bosses were all male my whole career and my job that I've had on the pharma side, because you're probably like, well, which job is it's? Tech job? The nonprofit job?
Which job are you talking about? When anybody asks me to introduce myself, I say I'm a clinical researcher by trade. That's what I've done the majority of my career and so in my role in clinical research and outsourcing and procurement and such, when I first started was most of the time I was a woman working in a man's role, and I reported to men primarily.
So I've watched over the years some of these things that you just brought up, Mike, like the pointing and stuff and the behaviours that I have been I don't know. I don't want to sound, like, abused by, but that's kind of how I felt, like some of these people that I was working very closely with, it was almost like a form of abuse. The way that these people talk to you and the way that I work across all of my teams, and they're all different companies, but we all have one thing in common, again, is that we're patient facing companies.
We work to help patients, right?
So all of my teams, that's one of the golden threads that we weave, is the fact that we're patient focused and so one of the things that I do for myself and my teams is I'm a service oriented leader. I live by this every day in my personal life, in my spiritual life, and my professional life. So for me, it's like a trifecta for me to be a service oriented leader, because it's who I am as a human and so what I meant in that article, for people who are listening today and who may not understand what that means, is that I purposely and wilfully try to make sure that I help my teams.
I demonstrate that I do things to help them every day of whatever we're working on together. So if that means that there's something okay, for example, we're working on building something else in the tech company in our enterprise for Spectral.
So instead of giving my right hand the paper, so to speak, and say, hey, you start this out and send it back to me, no, I said, okay, I'm going to start this so that it'll be easier for you to add this in when she was fully capable of doing it herself right first and then passing it to me. But the reason why I'm doing this, Mike, is because, one, this is really important for us to get this done.
Two, I know better than anyone else on my team, right, whether it's my EA who set up this podcast for us today, to be able to shoot this, or it's my head of technology or head of whatever, I'm just like them and so I want to make sure and I may not have all their skills, of course, but what I'm trying to say is I'm here to serve them.
What I do here in my role is what's going to impact them every day and if I give service willingly and fully both again in my personal and professional life, doesn't that want to make them to also be the same and give back, too?
Because it makes everyone feel better when we give back, doesn't it? Mike, what do you think about this?
Mike: Honestly, I'm just sitting back saying, oh, yeah, and I got to point out a couple of things, Christina. When you're talking, maybe it's your heritage, being Italian heritage, but you talk a lot with your hands. I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but your description is often like this, and it's just a natural thing and that's the heart shape.
Christina: Right.
Mike: And contrast the heart with pointed finger, and you got to do it this way. It was really powerful for me to watch you do that and speak with your hands in this open gesture and this body language that if people take anything from this podcast, as leaders, please understand that your body language is what people see and absorb much more than the words that you say and so I had to point that out, call that out.
It was really quite beautiful to see. There's another piece. The servant leaders, leaders in service. We talk a lot about it. It's what our book is really about. It's the definition of leadership and then how you might change the way you behave in order to become that leader. And it's the old beliefs of leadership, and it doesn't take much. Looking at me, just say that he's a mid 50s white guy, so how was he trained? Probably to be right, probably to tell people what to do, probably to leverage authority over followership, probably a little insecure, and so needing to show that he had it all together and that's what we see in so many leaders and I have a lot of empathy for them, Christina, because they've been trained that way and in my career, I came to what was nearly a crushing defeat at 37 years old, so ego at 55, at 37, it was massive. It was massive.
Telling people what to do always needed to be right and I was at a financial services company, and my job as the chief operating officer was to transform the operations, the culture, and the strategy to be more customer centric and I'd had a long history in banking and I knew the industry well, so I was probably the right person technically for the job, but I didn't have the maturity and I didn't have the empathy and I didn't have the care anyway. So the strategy, we created it and to this day, I'll say it was one of the better strategies I have seen in terms of understanding the market, positioning the organization against this strength, all these strategic elements and we launched. But just before we launched, we took it to the board of directors that were so pleased, they applauded. When do the board of directors applaud?
This is what we needed all this time, they said. So imagine me walking around, big puffy chest, and we launched and month one comes up and the results come in. Every perceivable category was a downtick. Financial margin, fee, income, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, down. Okay, that's month one. But we all know the change curve. Imagine me rationalizing this in my silly little brain. Oh, you know it's the change curve. It just takes time for people to sell.
Month two, all the metrics down. Month three, month four, month five, month six, and we are down significantly in every major category and now I have failed. I just call it out. I know in my heart I failed. So I talked to a leader in the HR group, in the organization that I really trusted, and she was so wise and I said, what's happening? What's going on? And she looked at me with great empathy and she said, come on, you know. I said, no. I said, I don't know and I might have thrown a few four letter words out there. I said, I don't know and she said, sure you do. I said, You've got to tell me, like, help. And she said, Mike, they can't stand you.
You're a bully. You go in telling people what to do. You go in there, they come to you with ideas and you're never satisfied. You got to show them that your idea is better than theirs. You don't respect them. You've done nothing to build trust.
I guess she's been waiting a while to tell me because she laid it out and honestly, I wept in her office. I wept. It was the most crushing blow of my career and that really was what I owe her to this day, because that started my transformation as a leader to understand that humanistic leadership is really in service based leadership.
So she said to I said, what do I do? What do I do? And she said, well, you know that office up in such and such where we've had all that tension? She says, you know they don't like you. I said, oh, yeah, I know there's tension there. She said, I want you to buy a box of donuts and go up into their lunchroom, actually two boxes, and sit in their lunchroom from 11:00 a.m. til 2:00 p.m. and engage every single person that comes in the room, and you can talk to them about absolutely anything except the work we do.
I had forgotten how I had forgotten how I didn't know how to get engaged in. Tell me about your kids. Tell me about your family.
What matters to you, what's important to you in life? I believe that everyone was there for this common purpose of making money for the company and how naive, how stupid I was. So that exercise was such an eye opener and the gift I will always value from her was that she knew that in my heart I was a good person. My behaviour was not good, but in my heart, I was a good person and she gave me that opportunity to bring my heart forward.
Let's talk about it this way.
The second piece was fairly easy. I stood in front of my group of senior leaders and apologized. I said, I'm sorry. I've been telling everybody what to do. I've dismissed the years of experience you have around this table, the 200 years of experience that resides around this table, and I said, I've insulted you, so let's start again and very symbolically, I stood there with my beloved strategy, and I started to rip it like this and one of the gentleman in the back, dear Andy Selentik, He looked at me and he said, Mikey, Mikey, Mikey.
He says, you don't have to tear it up. We just got to tweak it a little. We just got to tweak it a little. So that day, I handed it over to the team, Christina. They turned it around, and it's gone from me to they and we. They turned it around. They owned it.
The results were transformational. Ten years later, I was sitting in an airport reading the National Business newspaper in Canada, and there was a full page story on this organization that had quadrupled in size in the ten years since I had been gone and the vision hadn't changed. The core elements hadn't changed, but the people owned the strategy.
They really owned it, and they were passionately committed to it and I had nothing to do with it except the joy of knowing that I had a bit of influence way early on.
But it's a long story about these behaviours we instil, that are instilled in us. We have to confront them and when we confront them, we have to accept in ourselves forgiveness. Forgive yourself, you do care, you are good. And then take active steps. I'm going to come back to what you said and turn it back to you.I purposely and wilfully serve. You made a decision. You made a decision to purposely and wilfully serve.
How do you do that?
Christina: Well, you know, I was blessed because my dad, I grew up blue collar my backstory and so my dad working in the blue collar industries, both steel mill and then the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission. He was there to serve his members because he was very predominant in the union.
So he was president of the steel workers union for Phoenix Steel and then he became a teamster on the Pennsylvania turnpike and so his job was to serve the members. That was beside him doing his everyday job, whatever it was, driving a big dump truck or whatever and so I grew up watching this my whole childhood and into my early 20s and things like that and as a kid I was very much a service centered person. I helped the elderly people out in our home environment, in our family and things like that, my own parents. So I was always that person. So when it came to work for me, I always wanted in my role, I've always done that.
Like what I do as a leader, I've always done it. I can help you with that. Would you like me to help you? If you've got it, it's fine. But I can help you if you'd like me to help you. I've been like this my whole life and so I didn't even know that that's what it was called, Mike and one of my degrees is in organizational management. But I mean that was years ago. I got that one and they didn't call it that. So I didn't even know I was doing what I was doing until I had some time to really reflect on it and then even when you said that, like, yes, I talk with my hands all the time, but you're the first one, sorry I pointed at you like that, but I didn't need to.
But you were the first one who's ever said to me the heart thing and what's cool is you're right. I think about things for my heart. I try to connect mind and heart together when I work all the time, but my logo as you know, for CD is a heart. So now that you just said that to me, I'm going to have to tell, I'm going to give it back to my team and say, you know, guys, I never realized this about myself. I was on with Mike Watson because they obviously know who you are and he brought this up.
That was so cool for you to tell me that because I never even realized that. But see, it goes back again to what you do for corporations like you came in today for this podcast. I had no idea you were going to tell me that. And look at that. I learned something about myself now. Thank God it was something good, Mike.
Mike: Oh, man. That reminds me of a time, tough conversations still have to be had. What I find is sometimes this construct of service based leadership or humble inquisitive trust based leadership gets a bad rap because we say, how do you get anything done? And tough conversations still need to be had.
Kim Scott's book Radical Tanner is so good talking about that. But I remember one time I was working with an organization, it was actually in your sector, and they were having some challenges. It was a drug research and development company and they've done some great things, but they were starting to have some real tensions that exist. So the CEO had great courage and she said, help me understand what's going on in this office. So I did, and I interviewed all these people and taking a page out of this HR leader's book in the conversation she had had with me, it's now debrief time with the CEO and I said, well, I said, it's a bit kind of awkward to present this to you and I said, it's actually odd for me because I know you well and I know how caring you are.
But I can tell you it's not coming across to your people and they see a different side of you. So can we spend a bit of time exploring how that perception is created? and I mean, it was a pretty tough message. It was the message of your people don't like you very much. But delivered with care. We can still deliver the top messages.
Christina: It's interesting that you brought this up because we didn't talk about this before. We spoke about you coming on the podcast, but I just released another article about working in the biotech industry for CEO world that came out yesterday and how CEOs in the biotech industry need to, there were three tips, but one of them was being empathetic.
Listen, we have lots of deadlines and I understand where that CEO was coming from, right? Because I have a biotech company as well. Not only the research side of all these companies, they're all separate.
I get it. I understand time.
You got to get the stuff. You got to hit it. You have stockholders. You have to make sure that you keep them happy. I get it. But at the end of the day, we have to remember who we are as a human. Right?
Like today, I didn't wear a suit to come on here. And normally I would be in a nice but no, this is who I am. Some days I feel like wearing a Nike outfit. Some days that's just who I am as a person. I don't worry anymore about perception as a CEO, I don't care.
Meaning if I come with a Nike Alpha Dante, it's my heart and my brain that show you who I am.
Mike: It's how you show them. It's everyday how we show up and most of the leaders we interact with are of goodwill. There are the occasional ones we meet that have personality disorders or challenges. It's true, they do. We owe a little bit of the book to people that suffer from personality disorders, narcissism, sociopathy. These things do exist. But for the most part people are good. And this is what we talk about in Rise Up is to help leaders help themselves to be the best versions of themselves.
Our definition of leadership very simply enabling people individually and collectively to be the best versions of themselves in pursuit of something noble.
If that's not about the job title, the authority, the power, the decision making, the chest game, the allocation of capital that comes with it, that's the job description. Leader isn't an automatic with your job description. Leadership is something you demonstrated in how you do that job and if you're enabling people individually and collectively to be the best of themselves in pursuit of something noble, you'll never have a succession issue.
I worked this morning with the CEO of a very large global company and she's just come in as the CEO and they've got a succession challenge and then she describes the leadership practices that she has inherited command and control.
Well, it's not a surprise. So the antidote to succession issues is humanistic leadership enabling people to be the best themselves. And what we talk about is this Christina it's easy to be willing to change. My results in that old financial institution weren't very good. I need to change, but change is hard. Especially when I have to change.
I can talk about other people changing, but when I have to change, it's hard. So willingness to change is a condition, but motivation to change is the true enabler. Why am I choosing to do this?
Christina: I had no idea that I make a heart hand motion when I make my hand motions because I try not to make too many of them on the podcast because it's distracting. So for you to pick up on that, that was pretty amazing.
Mike: Yeah, well, I mean, Christina, it speaks volumes about who you are. I mean, some things we can't hide. When we lead from the heart, it comes out and it was just coming out in the way you were talking.
Christina: Well, I appreciate you noticing that, especially since my logo has a heart in it, ironically and the whole brand is about being heart-centered and creating freedom for others. So I really appreciate that. And I swear we didn't even script that that just came right out.
Mike: That was a happy accident indeed. It sure was.
Christina: Well, thank you so much, Mike, for joining me today and talking about all the variances of leadership, service centered leadership, all of the work that you've done over the years, the lessons that you have learned, and all the things that you've done to help others be successful in their roles.
Mike: Christina, it was such a pleasure spending time with you and this sharing the energy of somebody that is so passionate about leading with care and bringing that to her day to day life. Thank you for making it available to others.
Christina: Well, thank you, Mike. I really appreciate you and like what we always say in every single one of our recordings, remember, #we are the same.
I am Christina DiArcangelo. Thank you for joining me today.