Episode Transcript
Karuna: Senior leaders often, in the work I've done with them for years, they often overestimate their power and their knowledge. Middle managers often underestimate their influence and their information.
Brendan: Welcome to The Culture of Leadership. We have conversations that help you develop and become a more confident leader.
Do you lead change well? If you answered no, then that’s part of the problem. You tell yourself you don’t lead change well. In today’s episode, you’ll learn how to navigate change. From learning how empathy and the mind shift make a big difference to understanding context and the importance of aligning the pace of change with the flow of your people.
Our guest Karuna Ramanatha is a former naval warship captain with three decades of experience supporting senior leaders and organizations through change including at the center of his leadership in the Singapore Armed Forces. His book Navigating The Seas of Change was published in 2020. This is The Culture of Leadership podcast. I’m Brendan Rogers. Sit back and enjoy my conversation with Karuna
Why is change so hard for leaders?
Karuna: It's just counter habit. We are all programmed as human beings to seek consistency, to seek patterns, to let the conscious give way to the subconscious. Basically, it's the way we are wired in Edison biological levels, physical or psychological level. We do not like doing different things too often. We might do it once in a while. We might stretch it into it once in a while. But if you're telling me that every day is going to be different, it's quite a frightening proposition for most of us.
What do you mean every day is going to be different? What am I expecting? Military commanders are trained to appreciate that very early in a concept called the fog of war. There is going to be a fog. A shipping harbor is never going to be the same at sea. Those vocations and professions spend a lot of time and money actually training people to think differently around it.
For organizations, especially for young leaders who are stepping into organizations, that is actually quite a daunting topic to actually think that you will come up increasingly with conditions and stimulus that would actually rattle you. The body's defense or rather the human beings defense to that is to shut it down like, come on, I want to get back into safe zones, and what's this change all about?
Something has happened to me in the work that we've been doing over the last seven years. As a change consultant, I now empathize with individuals rather than to be reactive, dismissive around attitudes, around change, which is actually quite a populist movement. I actually start with every individual's predisposition to their insecurities around change. It's a lot harder work in the first mile, but actually, it sits nicely as it pays out into the middle zone. I hope that's making sense.
Brendan: It is. There's a couple of things where my mind goes, but is empathy one of the key things that you've been in this changing environment for a long time? You mentioned empathy. How important is that in the change process?
Karuna: If we're going to work with people, and essentially there is a change algorithm somewhere, or there's a change equation somewhere, then I think it needs to be founded or anchored on the basic belief that we are capable of respecting the other. We believe that we will be respected as well.
Together, we will forge new areas to operate, to work in, or to relate to. Therefore, empathy is underpinned by the basic human belief of respect for one another, professional respect. Therefore, if that is the case, then empathy is a leadership practice that we can easily bring quite naturally into the change challenge.
Brendan: It's such a powerful word. We know that. But it can be so difficult in the heat of battle. There's lots of pressure on leaders, and there's lots of pressure on people in organizations. How do you get the people that you work with to actually stop, think, have a level of emotional intelligence, get on that empathy path, and understand the importance of it, when they've got all these things happening all at once, going crazy, and people needing so much from them all at once?
Karuna: There are several of these kinesthetic activities that I actually encourage leaders, especially young leaders to think about. Take off your shoes. Just take off your shoes. Take off your shoes in your cubicle. Take off your shoes when you're sitting with someone else. Take off your shoes when you're at lunch. Take off your shoes and be curious.
For one thing, you get to keep your feet firmly on the ground, which is actually telling the brain, hey, I need to be grounded, I need to be firm, and I need to be aware of what's going on. But why don't you just take a peek at the other shoe and see if you're actually capable of filling it? If you're not, then we should be a little bit more curious as to why this person has got sneakers on or orange sneakers on? Basically, why does he or she got sandals on today?
That actually kick starts the conversation around, how are you today? What's happening in your life? Wow, those are really funny orange sneakers. Why orange? We start then appreciating in story form as to how that person's perspective on that condition or that situation might actually bring to bear in terms of the change work we want to do.
It is a leadership. Empathy is a leadership practice that actually is pretty trainable for most people who come to work and organizations because they are good people. There's nothing clinically wrong with them. Almost all of them, there's nothing clinically wrong. They actually want to be successful.
We flip that around as a condition now for successful leadership, for successful work, that you need to do with the other, because we can't afford to sit in our little little caves and cocoons and actually want to just do whatever we would like to do. There are jobs that require and do that well like researchers and lighthouse helpers. But for the most of it, we're not going to enjoy those positions in our personality.
I actually run a half day kinesthetic modeling for individuals. I remember we did this once with our apex sales team while in Bali. There were 34 people whose shoes were all over the place. We actually asked people to go collect shoes and collect different shoes. There was, I think, a CEO, he was this very strong leader who went wrong with a six-inch heel. He actually picked up a six-inch heel and said, I know whose this is.
I can imagine the life she has, and I'm curious about what else you do. It's in us. It is part of our DNA. It's just that it doesn't come out the way we think or we think it should, because we defend up. We defend up into change immediately the moment something different pops up, we fight, flight. We do all those things.
Empathy, to come back to a point, is a huge enabler for change. In fact, in some of my postings over the last few months, I've said it is the practice of leadership.
Brendan: I like what you're saying. Two things, trigger and observation. If I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, potentially the path to empathy and empathize more often to start this openness around change and use the shoes as a great example, is it that somebody or a leader needs to work on a trigger that stops them, and then they catch themselves into empathy?
Is it that they need to be more observant around, to use an example you had, orange shoes? Hey, somebody's got something different about them or something unique about them today, and then start a conversation on that, and then that leads into empathy. I'm trying to get a balance. Is it the trigger that starts it, or is it the observation that starts it?
Karuna: It is your drilled in practice. It is being curious when you step into a room. It is actually a pretty short format.
Brendan: When you say being curious, what does that look like?
Karuna: For example, I just had this conversation with a team of leaders yesterday. I said, I'm not going to walk into a meeting with my laptop half open and assume that everyone is ready for the meeting. I am going to commit to arriving early. I'm going to be seated in a particular spot in the room.
I am going to actually engage anyone who comes into the room. I am going to do formalities as well, but I'm going to say, hey, how are you? I'm going to pay some attention to their response or the reaction of that person. I am actually going to make some small talk, and I'm not going to build and basically get past my agenda.
Brendan: It's creating a connection.
Karuna: Yeah, it's actually going back to basics. With the leaders that we are seeing, it's a huge growth space opportunity for young, very able, men and women coming out of educational institutions who have spent a lot of time, investment, and money setting themselves up for success, and armed with the degrees. When they step into the workplaces today, it is hugely challenging for them because to use a naval analogy, they're not boarding the ship in harbor, they're boarding the ship out at sea.
The ship is rolling, it is uncomfortable. It is all wet, slimy, and difficult. They're saying, whoa, wait a minute, this was not what I signed up for, why are people so difficult? That's really where it's changing.
We actually train them into, hey, watch yourself, step into it, be sensible about some things, and spend the first couple of minutes shaping what you believe to be reality and confirming that to the best extent. Actually, if you do that in empathetic fashion, over a period of time, it translates into you being identified as a humble leader who's practicing humility, who's always bothered. Hey, you're not present today, is there something wrong? Do you need some time off to deal with something? Those little things.
When I run these workshops, I actually ask, can you give me a list of all the statements to make so that I can pull it off a drop down? I said, This is the ChatGPT thing. We always think that there's always a solution to something else, but it's the basic human dynamic. It's pretty much like, if you're interested in having dinner with someone, you're not going to go straight into what that person's agenda is. The act of circling the situation rather than centering it too fast.
Brendan: It's really breaking this down even further, that connection, that relationship building, and that ability to make other people feel that they matter to you. If you've got that barrier overcome, then you've got a foundation for whatever change that you're looking to work on.
Karuna: Totally. It is about relational caution, it is about relatability, it is about the commitment to building that professional relationship. Actually, as we get into the advanced stages of it, it is becoming more conscious of the biases, the stereotypes, and all the prejudices that we have accumulated over the last couple of years. All of us have that. And to be able to distill between noise, bias, and to be able to intervene at the right spot.
When you start into this frame, a whole lot of things start making sense, active listening, communicating to influence, curiosity, the intentionality. The work starts and ends with me, Brendan. It has got very little to do with the other.
Brendan: Fundamentally, the principle, isn't it?
Karuna: Yeah, and that is not going to be achieved in a leadership course.
Brendan: You mentioned biases just then. Tell us more about that. What are the examples that you're seeing, maybe common examples of biases that you're seeing?
Karuna: I regularly suffer from overconfidence bias. It snares up quite often, and I need to caution myself constantly. Wait a minute. You have no right to come to this conclusion, just because you claim that 39 years of working experience have taught you some lessons, so you're sure what to do, that kind of thing. It is an internal conversation that we, increasingly as leaders, have to start having with ourselves when we are faced with the whole set of problems around change.
Brendan: What are those problems?
Karuna: Being asked to do something different in the context of an organization is problematic for most of us. The root problem is the notion of success. There might be a handful that see it otherwise, but most of us see success as being enabled by fulfillment at work, achievements at work, performance at work, and all the other associated concepts.
Work, to many of us, is a means to an end. If we're lucky enough to find those conditions that exist very well and we create those, we can be working ourselves, it becomes a joy to go to work. What you don't get and you should not get is love at work. If you're overly obsessed with work, and you get all lovey dovey about it, then you tend to conflate or confuse happiness with it.
That makes a lot of misery in your cause for most of us, because our standards in which we hold happiness to, which are largely personal, are not quite the same as success. There's a lot being said about success. In terms of success, it's largely dependent on what you choose to do.
In the change paradigm, that's really quite true. It is what you choose to do with yourself as you become more influenceable. You build your influence around others. That actually redefines leadership, because leadership is no longer the traditional power position based definition, but it is largely influenced.
Influence in this edition, where the change becomes alive is because complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity is built up to a point, where you actually cannot afford to believe that what's been done in the past is actually going to be sufficient to what you're going to do in the future. The root space here is influence. To what extent are we prepared to actually build our influence skills?
That's a whole lot of self-investment, because actually, when you start doing that, you look up to change a little more comfortably to say, it's okay, I don't really get it at this point, but I actually believe we can sit down and talk about this and get this going. I will not be any lesser for it successfully because we can do this.
That has tremendous implications for the work that we do with organizations. These are the bedrocks around teams, these are the bedrocks around dealing with the biases. These are the calling-outs. Sometimes you hear the word, we hear psychological safety. It's actually a condition that arises quite nicely when leaders actually commit to working in a certain way.
We hear about diversity and inclusivity. Diversity is largely designed, but inclusivity is mostly a leadership act. It is the willingness to respect other people and to actually understand that their point of view is actually going to matter. That is exactly where we need to go with so many people.
I'm a little troubled about that over the last few months, because the space for this work is no longer at the top. The space for this work is at the middle. The middle is actually three times bigger than the top pool. You take any organization, about 3%-5% are top leaders, management and classified, maybe some talent, some stretch, some really abled people. Then you look at the bottom 50%-60%. These are the folks who actually get out there, do their work, they go back home, they are looking for rules and processes, and they're looking for SOPs, standard operating procedures.
It's the middle managers, the supervisors, the managers, the project leads, the team leads, the people who are actually suddenly in front of the project, who actually increasingly feel a lot of tension. Most of them are non creative tensions, who actually have to deal with these ambiguities, the vulnerabilities in front of the uncertainties, and a lack of data or the other loss.
Actually, you get back to it. The whole chain space affects the middle the most, and the middle is where the action needs to be. All these people actually need a lot of help very quickly, because it's getting a little brutal out there.
Brendan: Is this where your adaptive leader's view and program comes in, working with that level from my understanding? Is it focused around overcoming these challenges?
Karuna: Totally.
Brendan: Tell us a bit more about that. What is this term adaptive leaders and adaptive team leaders program? What's the objective? How does that move people forward in that space?
Karuna: We believe we don't need to help managers manage better. Managers got to where they are because they are trusted, dependable, competent, loyal, aligned. They pretty much know how to manage the work. They may not have enough resource managing the work or the resource might not be at a capability that they desire, but that's exactly where this is. We believe we don't have to teach managers manager skills.
There's a whole lot you can do. Basically, organizations are organized around the waterfall workgroups and structures, such that alignment would probably manage expectations around work. There's enough language out there in management and organization management. They're quite synonymous of KPIs, key performance indicators, deliverables, work plans, outputs.
Performance effectiveness is largely an individual exercise. Therefore, the behaviors associated with managers, supervisors, team leaders, are largely individual. This is where we come in with our hope that a good number of managers can actually make the shift from manager to leader. Then the pushback becomes I'm not a leader, I don't have that position. How do I expect to be a leader? We say that actually, it's leadership.
It's manager to leadership, because not only do you need to now manage the work, you need to work with people. When you work with people, you don't manage them. You don't manage your children, you don't manage your brother and sister, you don't manage your parents. It's not a very nice thing to do because you're managing them. You actually need to lead them, which means you need to be able to influence them in a positive manner to be able to let them step up into spaces that they actually thought that they would not want to get into. That is the change shift that we need to see.
What the adaptive leader program does is it breaks that down into confidence in a sense, making skills only to the point where you can work across an organization rather than top down. Now you're working with your peers, and you're more confident working with people you don't control or you don't write reports on, and you are looking to relate to the person, all that stuff we spoke about in a room, and watching people being curious, being empathetic. All that adds up into your toolkit and skill sets.
After a while, it becomes your change DNA frame, where you actually look at people and work with them. I don't like you, but I believe the two of us need to work together, so can we just stay at that level and get this done and get on, because I'm not going to have dinner with you? I don't need to meet you outside work. That actually sets the stage for learning because there is a direct correlation.
This has been researched many times. The greater the complexity and uncertainty, the greater the stance in learning, where you actually have to build in the insights, and you have to watch the stressors, and you have to not repeat those bad things that have happened in a project or whatever the lessons learned.
That is a collaborative activity. That's the shift that we help managers make from managers to adaptive team leaders. We became very concerned about it, because we run these programs for organizations. Typically, an ROI or a measurement at the end of a leadership workshop can be anywhere from 8% or 25%, and these are all statistically proven. Change programs can go up to 35%-40%. That's the Johnson & Johnson example.
For us, we've been consistently hitting 50%-75%. We manage to convince the manager that this is a skill set that you can grow quite effectively and use quite successfully to get your work done, as well as to contribute to other work. But it is expensive. Consultants don't come cheap.
Before the interview, we actually put out a platform there to absorb a lot of that cause. It is actually three times cheaper. You can look it up in Play Store. You can look it up in the App Store. It's just Change Leader. It's worth a look, because it is actually a gamification guide using your phone over eight months to take you through various stages that you can develop. It's most useful for young leaders, I think. We're so happy working with their phones.
Brendan: Yeah, absolutely. We'll certainly put a link to all of these things in the show notes as well. You've mentioned influence a number of times now. How do you define influence?
Karuna: The impact we have on others and the extent to that impact that is deemed as intentional in the first place, which means I am not blindsided by the way I affected you. I actually was quite intentional, and therefore my influence has grown. It is the balance between intent and impact.
Brendan: Intense is such a powerful word as well in the leadership space. What intent do you need to have as a leader and take personal responsibility for to have the right level of influence?
Karuna: I believe that leadership remains a moral and ethical undertaking. It's a commitment to moral and ethical standards. The problem with this is this balance is difficult for most when you start thinking a little bit about it. It goes back to deep concepts like character, even deeper personality, psychological needs, a whole lot of stuff. The way we were brought up, your religious affiliation, spirituality, whatever the case might be. There's a lot there.
That level of self awareness is still who you are. How did you get here? What really has happened to you, with you, and why do you think the way you do? That stage is actually an internalization of who you choose to be. It starts with being uncomfortably existential and abstract for most of us. Some of us are just not prone to this thing. But I believe all leaders, managers, every individual out there could do a lot better by spending a little bit of time thinking about who do I choose to be.
In that transference, you actually start to decide what kind of influence I'm actually going to bring onto the other in order to do what. In the context of an organization or a team, it's always good to stay professional for the most part so that you actually stay focused on the results.
You and I need to work together. Brendan, I really want to work with you on this. I know if I know I pissed you off many times in the past, for example. That kind of thing is actually a step down. It's a humility exercise.
Look, I am sorry I stepped on your toes several times. I know that. Is there anything I could do to make that easier for me? Can I have an open feedback channel? Can we do that?
In Change Leader, we create all that. We create pure feedback mechanisms. It is continuous analytics on the individual, but we're not talking about the product now. Let's just go back to the philosophy of influence. Who do I choose to be? What exactly am I bringing on here into the table?
As a leader, that step comes from me. I do not expect to run a workshop or a key meeting to say, put everything you have on the table. It's actually quite worrying when I see that happen. It is the leader to step forward into the discomfort, it goes back.
The whole idea of influence's example is the example that I will say. This is the way I choose to behave, and it sits underpinning my moral, ethical constructs. We're not going to stab each other on the back here as long as we are working on this project, for example.
Brendan: So much of what you say makes sense. Are we as people in the leadership space and organizations, generally, and there's all this stuff that you read about unsuccessful change programs and transformations is a buzzy word, all those things, are we actually making change harder than what it needs to be? Or are we building up change into something harder than what it actually is?
Karuna: It's a very, very good question to ponder on. We have clients whom we have worked with, who have done amazing things by helping their people develop the opportunities to change the way they think, they act, and they feel. Essentially, anything that is complex has to be taught through differently, and we can teach that. If it's a live project, we actually do that quite well. In fact, the percentages are higher when you actually deal with real work.
In our zone, we don't do case studies. We don't do theories, we don't do readings. We simply get into the crux. We actually roll up sleeves, wear t-shirts into the sessions, and just get into how we might choose to think differently. But there's also the whole backstage work around personalities, psychological needs, the way in which we are wired, how different people look at things differently. Whether we carry with us pre-formatted fears and anxieties, there's a bit of storytelling and narratives that we use, we actually come to terms with the fact that every one of us in a room are quite different.
Is that a strength, or is that going to be a problem? Then we get into data, information, knowledge, wisdom. We get into those things. People start to suddenly feel that, wait a minute, I can do all this with others, and we get them across.
Where the problem starts often is when the pace of change does not quite equate the floor that is required to move things. This is a systems thinking language. Pace is largely associated with strategy, with timelines, demands of the board, all the other investor considerations, growth markets, and all this hurry up, we need to get this done, merger and acquisition of space.
Flow relates to the readiness of people to actually unfreeze themselves, create water-like movements together, and not have to hit against walls, dams, and rocks metaphorically, to actually get the work going in the direction they need to see it. An irony of this is for most organizations, they're actually asking the same successful people who are actually good in the middle who are doing business as usual work to actually do more, and it's very, very troubling.
The first reaction as you go into the start of this interview is, I want to avoid all unnecessary things in my life and I need to get back home. That is purely justified. We do quite a bit with that to actually assess. I've changed consultants. I've actually been notorious in turning down work which means that if this is where the CEO wants to go and is largely shrouded in vision, this is where the organization currently is. There's no way you're going to be doing that very quickly.
Most leaders are impatient. That's where the problem is. Most are impatient, most are superficial, most actually blame people. They find themselves in a bit of a spot. Why don't you do what we need to do is actually very superficial in this space. I hope I'm making sense.
Brendan: To me, you are, and I'm pretty sure to our audience definitely as well. The 60%-70% of those middle managers, let's say team leaders, supervisors that you referred to, where the the real work needs to happen particularly around this, what signs do they need to be conscious of in that flow to know the pace that they can start to move along and have the empathy to move their team along? How do they pick that up? What do they need to pick up?
Karuna: We quickly help them in thinking formats that bring out into the conscious space and the discussion space, the tensions around capacities, capabilities, and commitments.
Brendan: Tell us more about capacity, capability, and commitment.
Karuna: It's actually quite straightforward when you look at it in isolation, but the trick is in how you put that together. Capacity simply refers to headcount, to resource, to how many people you have on the team, how many people you have available.
The capacity introduces a whole series of other issues. Are these people new? Are they competent? Are they proficient? Do they have enough knowledge? Is one of them caregiving right now? Is there distraction?
There's a whole lot of stuff there. They're all people related stuff. This is where the empathy comes in, where you actually have to start to look at every person as an individual, not as a human resource, but as an individual capable of doing work. What work?
The capability is a lot more technical. You take an IT manager, for example, who's leading an IT project and a project is on digitalization. What do you do when you come across cybersecurity challenges? IT people will tell you that they find it very uncomfortable to deal with cybersecurity challenges. That is a capability. Do you hire it? Do you rent it? Do you buy it? Do you partner it? Do you offer it? What do you do when you don't have that? A lot of transformation projects gloss over the capability issue.
We teach managers how to flag that out. If not, they would subconsciously carry that anxiety with them. Or worse, still even ignore it to the point that after a while, it becomes too invested already to turn back. That's where a lot of resource actually get compromised, because we actually wasted our time doing this project, when we should have figured that this is going to be a big gaping hole in the end, and why are we this way? That's the capability capacity.
We get to the commitment part of the equation, and that is a lot more serious. For a lot of transformation projects, a lot of what needs to happen is not going to happen just in the organization. It's going to happen with stakeholders, vendors, partners, maybe some authorities, maybe the government institutions. What is their level of commitment for this project?
We teach managers to actually question that in the first mile. A lot of times, we do find unfortunately senior leaders want to build an idea very quickly. That's the pace and ignore quite conveniently, or maybe as an afterthought, yeah, okay, we need to just make sure we got that.
It's the manager that gets them through the whole thing. They say, well, this is not moving. Why is this not moving? We give them a sense making technique to actually question the commitment that would be required to build and question the commitments and thoughts. I'll go back to capacity, capability, and commitment, the three Cs.
Brendan: I love it, the three Cs for change. Is that something you came up with? If so, what's your personal story, if there is one, attached to that? Where did these capacity, capability, and commitment actually come out for you in this 39-year journey you've been on in the space?
Karuna: I've had some wonderful opportunities and worked with some amazing people, as we all would have had if you have had four decades of experience. I think the really, really big project that I did was with an amazing team. It included consultants as well from overseas. It was when we made a deliberate effort to shift the culture of the military in Singapore. I think we did that in nine years.
Military system is generally an artificial system, because it's largely a training system in a synthetic environment and luckily enough, because you don't really want them operating in the real environment. It starts with commitment.
There is relatively abundant capacity, but capability becomes a problem, because what you're trained for might not be what you're good at or what you need to be good at. We worked that with soldiers, sailors, and airmen. It was a very, very big population grew up in the Singapore military.
I got to dabble with competency based leadership learning, action learning, stories and narratives, gamification, the building of super games like helping leaders tell stories, and helping people on the ground frame lessons for learning. There's a lot of stuff that we did there. Then you realize that actually, capacities is actually a potential multiplier when you link it up with capability. If you can pair it up, well, you get people who are actually very enabled, and you get concepts like empowered teams, and you get all that.
That took a very, very significant culture shift till today that learning orientation remains in the Singapore military. It moved from that calling, yelling, screaming, and ordering, which happens and needs to happen, but it is fairly pinned down into the curiosity, the inquiry versus the advocacy. The tensions are creative. The learning orientations enable the military to actually exponentially increase its effectiveness.
That was a nine-year piece of work that I was very, very fortunate to be able to participate in, and learn, and to be actually trusted in a fairly senior position to be able to lead some of it across hundreds of soldiers, sailors, and airmen. I learned quite a bit there. This actually popped up there.
Brendan: Again, just researching yourself, but I have to say, yes, we'd love to have you on the show for starters. But then in preparation for today, it's certainly pretty well documented. You've had a fantastic career in Singapore military and what you've done there and also in Singapore government. Congratulations on the work that you've done. Singapore is a fantastic country. I love it. I've spent a bit of time there.
You said right at the top of the show that there's a mindset in the military versus change, versus organizations and change. I imagine that you, given your background and experience in the military and what you've just touched on, understand that mindset better than most. You're probably delivering it in your programs around change in organizations. What is that difference? What are those differences that you alluded to?
Karuna: Great question. Leadership has always been about context. The appreciation of the conditions requiring aspects of leadership is largely contextual, just as leadership has always been about practice to become a better leader. It's the only known way to practice.
The military is, for a large part, an artificial synthetic environment. It actually carefully trains its people and then it selects. All militaries around the world do this. Everyone's subject to training, and some people are selected into positions. It is quite difficult to imagine an imposter in a position of leadership in the military. It is just quite impossible.
If we go back to the Vietnam War, West Point is getting into theater in the late 60s and early 70s, where there were famous stories of them being shot by their own people, because they will bring the theory in, and they will not have any ground experience. That's going on.
It's just like working on ships. I've worked on ships for 11 years. I have commanded two warships, and I'll tell you that the ship does not put to sea until you believe that everyone is well-trained and actually everyone knows his or her role as part of a crew.
That environment, when we try to change anything, is pretty much leveraging or riding on the hierarchical structures and the hierarchical orders, so get it done. We're going to get it done. We get it done by when, because if you don't get it done, something is going to happen, and someone is going to basically get into trouble. Basically, that is visibly hierarchical.
That's what people in the chain look for. They look for the hierarchical order around change, which then means if my boss tells me to do it, I'm going to do it because my boss believes that it needs to be done. Conversely, if my boss is not telling me to do it, I'm not going to do it because actually, that's not what is needed here. I'm just going to listen to my boss.
That order is an advantage to change, but it can also be problematic to change. We also had some examples in militaries, where you have factions and people don't want to do this, don't want to do that. You take the army, you take the navy, and the air force. They are three different major cultures.
Okay, let's get to organizations. For a large part, management has actually evolved through bureaucratic control. Basically, bureaucracy has been quite intensely embedded in organizational forms. Of course, there are a few forms that actually sit outside that. But for the large part, any big visible organization is bureaucratic.
Bureaucracy or the language of bureaucracy is simply management by process, management by order, management by rules, management by protocols, management by systems, by platforms. When people cannot see that change originating in the new process, change management type thing, they cannot understand that, they cannot see the use of it, you start to move towards that resistance that actually, change work is quite notorious for.
What do you then do? There are two different systems. Organizations are bureaucratic. The government is even more bureaucratic than organizations. Militaries are hierarchical. Basically, that hierarchy actually has an impairment change.
Most of the organizations that are built for profit are increasingly having to deal with, there's not so much to change. But the rate of change is increasingly problematic, because it's algorithm probably includes both pace and flow, not just pace. When that happens, a lot of people in the organization, especially people with influence roles like we'd be talking about the middle managers, they are largely influential people, project leads, team leads, they actually become very anxious and confused.
What are we trying to do here? Why is this so important? How is this going to affect me? I don't have enough people. These are kind of symptoms that pop up when we get to the rate of change. I want this done in a year and a half. It's not going to happen. Will it happen in two and a half years? It might. What do you need to do to get that happening? That's really where that influence basis is.
I will say this, it's not meant to be a cheeky comment. Senior leaders often, in the work I've done with them for years, they often overestimate their power and their knowledge. Middle managers often underestimate their influence and their information. A lot of the shared consciousness, the knowledge management problems we're seeing, is not about process. It's about middle managers under estimating what they know, what is going to be important to the organization, and basically being overwhelmed.
The change game is actually an important one right now. It's actually a future skill. Change skill sets are good future skill sets for all of us to have, particularly for leaders who are finding themselves having to work with others very quickly at the entry in the middle point of the organization. You should not be too worried about getting it. If the organization is in transformation, it is actually an investable area to enable as many middle managers as possible, to actually get on board and not feel that they're being burdened by work. I hope this is making sense.
Brendan: It is. You mentioned a really powerful word earlier again, context, which again, I'm 100% on board with that around the leadership space. And this word pace comes up a bit. If I'm a supervisor, team leader, middle manager, given that we're talking about responsibility and choices, how do I influence the context of the pace of change?
Karuna: My focus as a manager has always got to be about the work and then my curiosities around the people around that work. I can flip that around, which is what managers tend to do. They flip it around. They are curious about the potency of the work, where this is going to get them, and then they are focused on the people and they flop them, literally end up unconsciously flogging them.
If you stay focused on the work and basically the people, and you're curious about exactly what's coming up, you actually can work the context. We call it going from circling to centering. You can center and re-center based on the realities around you rather than a hypothetical, yeah, just go do it. This is pretty straightforward. That's all hypothetical. We actually teach managers to think differently around difficult work.
Brendan 70%, of what managers do are unknown to them. It has to be. You are in a supervisory position, you're really dependable. But when an organization is in transformation, 20%-30% of the work that's coming to them would start to get foggier, would start to get a little messier, would start to get a little bit more uncomfortable. We operate the 30% with them.
We believe that they are already good at 70%, and that 30% is largely contextual not as much as it is content base. It's about reading the situation, reading the room, looking as to where to balance. It proves that you can build in tech.
Some of us are familiar with the Cynefin model. We use that quite a bit in our work. How do you look at complexity? How do you differentiate between complexity and potentially uncertainty? How do you take on two points of view? There's a lot of skill sets there. These are cognitive skill sets, not taught in school.
Brendan: No. There's a lot of things not taught in schools, certainly in Australia. I can't comment for Singapore schools, but that's a whole other conversation. The next part of that question is, how do you set the context managing up when the context is, as you said before, just not always that realistic from the people that somebody is reporting to?
Karuna: We go back to centering the conversation on the work rather than the problems.
Brendan: Different scenario, but just similar application.
Karuna: Application. We teach managers very quickly to be confident in presenting questions around the work and not be sliding into their anxieties, worries, and asking for reassurance. These are pay grade questions that we actually help them frame.
Listen, boss, you're the one with a pay grade. I just need you to help me understand this. If you don't have an answer, I'm prepared to see your boss above you. Most times, bosses will not allow that.
We actually induce the whole mechanism and reframe to help managers become more comfortable. Don't say it simply framing questions around difficult choices you have to make.
Brendan: You've done work fairly extensively around and worked with lots of people from different countries. Are there countries or are there cultures that you find are better adapting to change?
Karuna: Totally.
Brendan: Tell us more.
Karuna: There are some cultural differences that are quite obvious. That has also been linked to innovation work and all that. Heavily organized cultures, very paternalistic cultures, might actually look at change work quite differently than the overcoming [inaudible 00:47:30].
I spent two years in the Australian Navy on exchange service. I'm actually allowed in Sydney at Waterhen 1995-1996. I'm always reminded by how laid back Australians look but how focused they are. It's a very, very important lesson having come from Singapore. It was one of my first learnings. Do not equate the number of hours you spend at work.
There's a lot of imagination that the Americans are good at what they do. The Israelis are actually with their backs against the wall all the time. You have some entitled cultures who actually are very contented, who actually have lots of natural resources that you can bank on, so change becomes extremely difficult there. And for the large part, cursory.
Take Singapore, for example. Singapore has been a migrant culture. Our beginnings are a migrant culture. Till today, there is this achievement orientation. There is this success equation. Of course, it's arguable that it has come at the expense of some of the other social areas that we would have liked to have worked on a little bit more over the years, but it's now every men out there, every woman out there trying to hit hard and hit fast.
Healthy, unhealthy, it's open for a debate. There are actual cultural differences. This becomes very interesting in a multinational setting. We do actually have workshops. I actually got clients who actually have a range of people from the Indian continent, from Japan.
I work with Apex groups. You can immediately see different orientations. How do we work with this then? We believe that empathy is actually universal.
Brendan: It makes a lot of sense. Is your ability to adapt to change and to lead change, wholly set, has a starting point in mindset, the choice that you make, I am going to be better and more adapted to change, or I don't like change?
Karuna: This is the start of this wonderful interview. Basically, we started by saying, I don't like change. Karuna does not like change, Brendan doesn't like change, we all don't like change. But I don't use mindset. I think it's a pretty beaten up word. Mindset mental models, these are sticky concepts. How do you unpack it for most people? No, I do want to talk about mindset.
We get into mind shifts. We work mind shifts, or rather we liberate mind shifting movements in cognitive, affective, emotive work that we do. Basically translated, it simply means how you can choose to think, how you can choose to act, and how you can choose to feel about difficult situations.
Most managers take on to that, because most managers tell us that, as they are, they are facing difficulties. They are not comfortable with certain things. Hey, why don't you choose to think, act and feel a different way? That is a mind shift. We don't really care where your mindset is, but we believe that wherever you are with that, you are capable of shifting it to the extent that you choose to. It goes back to the fundamental question as who do you choose to be.
Brendan: I do love mind shift. The reason why I love it, my first thought is, it is a shift which requires a change, which links very well to the topic of change, doesn't it?
Karuna: Totally. Let's be respectful here, Brendan. We don't really want to put a value on that. We don't want to put a currency on it. We don't want to tell people, you need to shift by this much, you need to change by this much, we're going to measure your change. I think all that is disrespectful. Most people are programmed for success, and they will make that effort. The question is whether that effort is enough for them and visible to others. That's what we measure.
Brendan: You used the term confident leader, which we love here on The Culture of Leadership, all about creating confident leaders. What's that one bit of advice that you want somebody listening and watching this episode to take about their approach, their mind shift to change moving forward?
Karuna: I think you can choose to be whoever you want to be. It's a bit like exercise. If you believe you have a health problem, you might want to exercise. But if you believe that you want to be fit and successful, you also need to exercise. You need to discern between those two. Why are you doing what you're doing?
That level of introspection is not deeply reflective mindfulness, all that good stuff, if you can do it. But it's simply a practical view to becoming a little bit more successful in the world.
We all need that. We don't have rich inheritances, most of us. We're going to have to work it ourselves. We're going to have to depend lesser on other known set pieces and to just build a cadence around exactly how we wish to be successful. One advice would be, you can choose to be who you want to be.
Brendan: Choice, love it. Karuna, what has helped you become this confident leader that we see in front of us today?
Karuna: I think I've made so many mistakes in 40 years that I wish not on others. I think my contribution to any coaching conversation is not, wait a minute, I did something like that 25 years ago. You might want to think about that.
Brendan: It's a fair point. Leadership can be a road to lots of gray hairs in my own experience. Maybe I'm a little bit of a slow learner than others.
Karuna: It's taken me 40 years.
Brendan: You're doing all right.
Karuna: Thanks for the information. It's coming a bit later, but I'll still accept it.
Brendan: Karuna, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I love the practicality of the approach you're taking around change. It's not just something you've come up with. There's, as you said, four decades of experience attached to this. You've had lots of learnings on that journey, few hardships along the way. That's part of leadership and the learning experience in the journey we're on.
It's been a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for coming on, sharing this change journey, giving these leaders some insight into what can help them become more confident about change. I really appreciate you being a fantastic guest on The Culture of Leadership podcast today.
Karuna: Thanks for this privilege. It's always amazing to be able to share these thoughts that don't come out quite naturally. The interview process is really good. I hope that I bring value to leaders. I'm more than happy to chat with any of them, should they wish to get a bit more insight as to the mistakes Karuna has made.
Brendan: It's a pleasure and you absolutely have.
Karuna: Thank you.
Brendan: Seeing your leaders overestimate their power and knowledge, middle managers often underestimate their influence and their information, focus on changing this and the change journey has a greater chance of success. These are my three key takeaways from my conversation with Karuna.
My first key takeaway, confident leaders respect people. They show empathy and aren’t dismissive of people’s attitude towards change. They proactively take time to understand the person’s insecurities. This empathetic approach during change will take additional time upfront but it will lead to time savings and better outcomes as the change process continues.
My second key takeaway, confident leaders understand context. In the decision making and communication, they understand the environment, team dynamic and the broader landscape, When across the nuances of each situation, they tailor their approach and lead change with more successful outcomes.
My third key takeaway, confident leaders control the pace of change. The problem occurs when time pressures are misaligned with people dealing with change. If the pace can be aligned with the flow of the people then the change journey will be smoother. Insecure leaders are impatient, superficial, and lay blame during change. Confident leaders won’t be controlled by time pressures. They’ll focus on aligning the people flow with the pace of change.
In summary, my three key takeaways were confident leaders respect people, confident leaders understand context and confident leaders control the pace of change.
Let me know your key takeaway on YouTube or at thecultureofleadership.com. Thanks for joining me and remember, the best outcome is on the other side of a genuine conversation.
