Becoming A Driver Of Change With Lisa Carlin

Lisa Carlin is a Strategy Execution Specialist and Founding Director of FutureBuilders Group. She joins Adam Markel to discuss how to become a driver of change and cultivate continuous growth without waiting for disruptions to happen. Lisa explains what it takes to shape a workplace culture that improves and scales successfully in this rapid age of technology and the internet. They explore how to achieve transformation within the team by setting up a strategic and efficient feedback system. Lisa and Adam also talk about the right and most ethical ways to fix oppositional cultures, burnout, and mental health decline.

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Becoming A Driver Of Change With Lisa Carlin

I love the guest I’ve got. You’re going to enjoy her presence and her way of thinking, insights, etc. I’m going to share a little bit more about her and then we’ll jump right in as usual. Her name is Lisa Carlin. She’s a Strategy Execution Specialist. She helps business leaders to plan and execute their strategic projects, such as AI, in tough environments.

Lisa has run her own successful advisory business for many years, delivering more than 50 transformation programs in organizations large and small. We’re going to talk about some of those. Her newsletter, Turbocharge Weekly, is read by almost 8,000 executives. This conversation’s going to be chockful of interesting stuff and you’re going to love it. Sit back and put yourself in a position to truly be present and enjoy my conversation with Lisa Carlin.

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Lisa, I’m already anticipating what will be an epic conversation. I love our bit of warmup before we even hit the record button. Now you’ve heard me introduce you, share a little bit about your background, the CV and all that good stuff, your experience. What is something, maybe one thing, that is not part of your bio, the standard intro that you would love for people to know about you? 

When people meet me and they read my bio and they know what I do, it’s all about people. It’s all about behavioral change and work culture, getting things done at scale in organizations through understanding human beings. Underneath all of that, I’m a tech geek. I grew up in South Africa. My father imported one of the first computers and built it from scratch with the motherboard and soldering all the chips onto it.

It got infectious. I started learning how to program at that age when that wasn’t taught at school. When all my friends were playing Atari, Pac-Man and all those sorts of things, I was writing these stories, the interactive games. I’ve always been a bit of a tech geek. I had a Palm Pilot and then after that, one of the first smartphones, which was called a Treo, way before Apple came up with the iPhone. That’s why I love AI underneath all of it.

It’s interesting when you’re a lover of more interpersonal work and I think we have this in common. I was in the law. For twenty years, I was in that area of my life as a lawyer. The interpersonal stuff felt like the stuff I enjoyed the most, but it was the least of what I did. It was certainly the least of what paid the bills in that particular arena for me at that time. The work I do now and the work you do working in organizations with teams, with leaders, etc., is very much an interpersonal thing. Yet, even though we love that, I also geek out on the research side of things on the data.

I never would’ve believed that would’ve been the case. I love tech on so many levels. We developed an AI bot, a clone of me. We went into beta with it. We’ve been working on it for several months before that. Even at this stage where AI is quite well developed and a lot of people obviously can see that it is here to stay and it is prolific and ubiquitous, it’s going to change the world even more than it has already, I still feel like we’re a little ahead of the curve that not everybody yet has got to that stage. It’s fun that you and I have that in common. We love tech on top of that. 

That’s exciting that you built your own bot. I go and talk to different CEOs, roundtables, and audiences about AI and how to do strategic planning for AI. I ask a show of hands, “Who’s doubling in AI? Who’s using AI in their business?” It’s quite interesting that the proportion is low. If you ask people, “Have you ever tried ChatGPT?” almost everybody will put their hand up now. They’ve tried it, but then that’s it, and it’s still taking a while to get over that fear. When you like technology like you do, Adam, you don’t fear it, and that’s why you’ve become one of the early adopters. The tech professions scare people.

They use all these acronyms and people think, “That’s going to take my job.” Even when the internet came out, if you think back to that and people were nervous at first to experiment and couldn’t quite understand that they could find things out there. That’s part of all the resilience that you talk about. It’s having that resilience to try things out. I make that conscious decision to try things out.

We both remember the turn of the century. It’s an amazing thing when you can have part of your life overlap with an actual turn of the century, which is pretty cool and not be so young that you don’t even remember it or so old that you don’t even remember. At the turn of the century in 2000, among it being this amazing experience. I remember seeing the fireworks from Sydney, Australia, on the TV and it was the opera house there. It was right behind the opera house and that beautiful Sydney bridge. It was pretty indelible in my memory now. The other thing that was also hard to forget was the paranoia around Y2K. Do you remember how off-the-wall nuts people were about what was going to happen? 

When all those computers clocked over, it got one January, and it was an anticlimax. We were merely carrying on and then we had the dot-com crash, and then everything. It’s all these cycles. 

AI In Workplace

Literally, the thought that the world was going to end. It’s an interesting thing to be so much of the social sciences. I was an English major in college and steered away from all that Math-related things or Science-related so much to be embracing of it at this phase. In part because I feel like there’s an element and when we talk about AI, when I deliver talks, keynotes and things like that where we do work with companies, we often are talking about it from the standpoint of how it can contribute to wellbeing in the workplace. It is not a technologist’s perspective on it because the ability to use it as a tool for productivity but also for creating more harmony between your work life and your not work life.

There are many tools available. Even the term artificial intelligence, which I know goes back to the ‘50s when these things were first coined. As I understand it, I prefer it, and we’ve been using the term more augmented intelligence as a way to see. How does it augment the intelligence of the universe, our intelligence, and the collective intelligence of our teams of organizations? We think it is an interesting way to look at it. I want to get your beat on it because I know you work with leaders and you work to empower them and even create transformations within organizations. I want to get a little of the backstory on how you got pointed in that direction, and it has stuck, but I’m sure there are some earlier pivot stories of things that you were doing that were leading to this.

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Could you bring us back maybe to one of those moments where maybe you were still searching for what would feel good when you got up in the morning to do? 

There were two. I was working at Accenture in Cape Town. I did that for a short while in a couple of years. We were developing some systems. I thought I’d go into that because I like tech, but it wasn’t for me. I missed getting out there and I wanted to work with people, but what I had this epiphany is that we had developed all these great systems and the work was such high caliber that the organization was doing. People didn’t always use them in the right way. They were scared to use them, like you talk about Y2K. I remember training one guy and he was an older man and we’d filled out all the information on the screen. He had to press the return enter key. He was scared to do that in case he put something in wrong. 

That fear, I realized the people side of things were important. I became interested in change management. To cut a long story short, I went to go live in the US and I had the opportunity to work for McKinsey, which was fantastic. We were doing all’s amazing strategy work and we deliver these brilliant pieces of strategy work to the clients and McKinsey does some fabulous work. I’d have the sinking feeling that they don’t have the will or skill to do anything with it. They’ve got the strategy but like where to go from there. I became interested not only in the change management but also in the culture of organizations and how you get that strategic influence to move forward and get things done. Those two experiences led me to want to focus on getting things done in organizations through people and culture. I went to work for a firm that focused on that and then started my own business in 1999. 

You had the entrepreneur DNA.

I never thought about it that much because I knew this is what I want to do and it was more like the solopreneur. I’m going to go and do this myself because I’ve got the skills to do the work. I know I’m going to put it all together and run these multifunctional projects and programs of change. That’s what I’ve done. I’ve done over 50 of them, and I want to work directly with clients without having the interface of a consulting firm. When you work on your own, you’ve got a lot more flexibility around working with the client and the way you want to work with them. You don’t have to pay for an office.

Driver Of Change: When you work on your own, you have a lot more flexibility working with your clients.

Pass on the same things. 

You can, and you can work there for longer rather than hiring a firm that can’t wait to get you out because of the expense. 

50 Transformations

We find the same thing. Agility is not a word. Being agile is, almost from the start, what it looks like when you are working with an organization that is stuck in the process and stuck in their own systems and not, therefore, able to be flexible and truly adaptive, which is ironic. Systems and structure are required, and yet people can get locked and stuck inside of those things. I would love to, if we can, maybe take a little survey of the journey because you mentioned, and it is part of your bio, these 50 transformations in organizations that I’m sure span this massive diversity of everything we could probably imagine.

Let’s see, is there a through line in looking at 50 organizations, what can we say, is there a common thread that runs through them all when it comes to change? Let’s start there. How do organizations typically either fail at change or sometimes get better than would be expected? What have you found in having that many organizations to draw upon in terms of your experience?

It’s been an interesting ride. I’ve been very fortunate because I’m like a dog with a bone. I’m incredibly persistent. I will find a way through to get things implemented. I’ve had two failures out of the first 50 programs I’ve done. I’m pretty proud of that. I’ve learned from those failures. I think the hardest thing that people don’t think about then with change in all the different organizations is that if I always say to people, understand the culture of the organization. Understand culture not just to change it but to navigate through it. Understand culture to navigate it, not just to change it, because people talk about the culture of the organization and they talk about how they want to change it to be more innovative or more performance orientated or whatever it is. 

Effectively, to achieve change, leaders have got to navigate through the existing culture before they can even think about changing it, especially new leaders. I see there’s much churn in organizations. You see people coming and going. The new leaders come in and they’re often the ones that want to achieve change and they want to achieve cultural change. Unless they fit in and are accepted by the organization, they can’t change anything.

They first got to understand the culture. By understanding the culture, you can figure out how to get through the difficulties and how to get things done. I’ll give you an example. In a very large bureaucratic bank, they’d acquired another significant business in financial services and they were trying to integrate them together. I ran a stream of work there to do the integration. People identified with their silos. 

They worked in a very siloed culture. We needed cross-functional participation and integration to get things over the line. I formed this cross-functional group and the way we formed it and the way we got people involved and the way we worked together, I found a way to get them all to identify with the same success measure. Only then could we get people thinking outside their silos as they come from marketing or their product area, wherever they come from in the bank?

They all want this particular project to be successful and then it becomes a bit of a game because you’ve got a timeframe and you’ve got to get it done and everybody’s pulling together, then you get excitement and you get some visibility to the folks that are involved so that they feel like the success of this project is critical for them in their career. You find those kinds of reasons why people want this to be successful and it all works. We got in. We got the project done on time. We got the integration happening and everybody was thrilled because it was hard. It was hard to do this. Because of that siloed culture, that’s where it’s hard. You find these aspects of the culture that are going to stop things from happening and people working together, and I find that all the time. 

I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine about this and I’ll tell you what we were talking about and ask you the same question, which is in an organization where you’re trying to assess where things are at, if you speak to people, often when it comes to advocating or discussing what change might look like or change that has to happen, people will advocate for their own existence. They very rarely advocate for something that makes them vulnerable to obsolescence or redundancy or any of those things. You find that even though we all know that the status quo is not a reason to wake up and be excited about your day, when I ask people about this, they always nod yes, and of course, that makes sense. 

Status quo will lead to mediocrity, toxicity, and to the devolution of a system because we’re either growing systems are either in some form of growth or they’re in some form of decay and everybody gets that. Yet, people will not advocate against their own interests. It’s a default way of responding to things. When you are looking at an organization and trying to assess culture, it’s difficult to ask people about it because they are like a fish that’s in the water.

Redesigning Culture

What are some of the things that you look at? What are some of the things that, after having been done this long, that you can almost, as a matter of gut instinct or as a litmus test or it’s something that is tried and true for you like a smell, you go, “I can smell fear.” I can smell it is a fear-based culture or whatever the things are that we find that are getting in the way of true evolution. What are some of those things for you? Is there a funny story or an interesting cautionary tale in there that you’ve seen anything like that? 

You have these conversations with people, like it’s those water cooler moments, “What’s it like to work here? Do you like your job?” That’s even a closed question. I try and ask open questions like, “What’s it like to work here?” Even if you ask a closed question like, “Do you like your job?” That is like red to a bull and you’ll get all sorts of things. I spent time at the beginning of every project getting to know the organization.

I’ll start with the leader who’s hired me and say, “Tell me what it’s like to work here,” then people share the most interesting things. I worked with one CEO. She told me that she was planning to leave confidentially and why she didn’t want to stay in the organization. It hits you when she starts talking about it, that is why it’s not the place that she wants to be and what’s in that culture that’s not working, which is ironic because the CEO has a huge influence over the culture that she wants to create.

Leaders can create and change the culture. It takes a while. It’s like a ship turning a ship and it’s slow. I’ve talked to people and they tell me stuff. If you’ve spoken to at least 6 to 8 people in an organization by then, after about the the 8th person, you’re not going to hear anything new from a cultural point of view. You just pick up those tips. What advice I give to people is I have a membership that I run called the Turbocharge Hub. It’s all about how to get influence at scale in an organization to get change to happen. Everything I teach looks at that cultural lens. I give the people a list of different types of culture. 

I say, “Pick 1, 2, 3 at most attributes of the organization that are the most significant in how things work around here and prioritize them. What’s first? What’s second? What’s third?” People can do that. I’ve done multimillion-dollar cultural diagnostics. There’s value to those in some ways too. People have these conversations and people know. If you explain to them how to define culture, they’ll know. Don’t you find Adam in all your work that you hear a lot of, “This is a great place to work. This is a great culture.” That word is great. What does that mean anyway? It doesn’t define things. 

It doesn’t. I agree with you that the question of what it’s like around here and what it’s like to work in this environment leads to the most interesting transparent revelations. There’s quite a lot of gossip, frankly. There are a lot of people who will speak and tell you things you seemingly couldn’t imagine anybody sharing. Certainly, not with a stranger. Not what somebody has even been hired to be in that investigative role. That’s interesting.

That’s a reflection of what it’s like inside of that organization, whether or not those things are in some ways either rewarded or are being modeled elsewhere where there’s a permission that’s given or where it’s even a response to a lack of voice and people’s ability to communicate their feedback. When that feedback system or loops we refer to it is not operative, then people have other ways of exercising their displeasure or they find other outlets for their thoughts, constructive or otherwise. 

To me, there are lots of little tells. That’s one of them I’ve found inside some big organizations, the willingness to crap on things and crap on other people is it tell. Sometimes, it’s just a person, but often it’s not just a person. It’s a person that may lean that way. They are predisposed to that on a personal level, but it’s inside of that ecosystem that they’re empowered to do that, which is their response to the fact that they don’t have any other healthy outlets for it.

Oppositional Culture

I would love to know, in your experience, if there is some aspect of a broken culture or toxic culture, a cancerous culture that you find is more prevalent? The reason I say this is because to me, again, this conversation I had with a colleague earlier was about the fact that you are looking at it from a nature, like a holistic standpoint, you’re always going to find something that’s either in that phase of it’s growing, evolving, or it’s dying or decaying. 

If you look at an organism, it’s not any different than looking at an organization, which is made up of many organisms. It’s either going to be in one of those stages or some variation in that cycle. Often, I prefer to be brought into an organization that isn’t in an evolutionary stage and phase. I prefer that because, to me, it’s again a reflection of the leadership and even the culture that when times are good, they invest in continuing for times to be good and for them to be even better.

They’re not riding on whatever it is on their success or banking on it versus the companies that will only sometimes bring people in when something’s totally broken, then there are these other companies that when things are broken, they’re in the greatest feeling of fear, scarcity and therefore they won’t invest any money in anything that isn’t driving sales or cutting expenses cycle. That’s even among public companies. It’s shocking how the mentality is repetitive and commonplace. Is there something that you’ve noticed in your work that is the most prevalent tell of a culture that is in need of support? 

More than even observing when I’ve looked at the research, human synergistic does some interesting research and they’ve got millions of people that have filled out surveys on their tool organizational cultural inventory, OCI and oppositional cultures come up as number one. This is where people are more likely to say no than yes and be cynical. That’s what the research is saying. When I go into organizations that tend to be larger, that’s where you would most likely see these sorts of oppositional cultures. The typical picture is the ostrich, it’s not, and there’s often an ostrich with its head in the sand. 

They are very focused on, “What’s in it for me. I don’t want to hear your stuff.” It’s new. You talk about that whole Y2Ks in Rome and new technology, new anything. I don’t want to hear about it because I’m too scared it’s going to show me up in some way, and that’s bad. It’s easier for me to point fingers and say why your ideas are not going to work and then I’m safe. That’s very dangerous in an organization. I’m sure you’ve seen that. 

I might call that like the status quo bias., that sense of it’s easier to say no. I saw that as a lawyer, too, because, in many ways what lawyers get paid to do in certain respects is to say why something will not work. I mean transactional attorneys or attorneys that are involved even in organizational.

Pointing out flaws. That’s what you paid to do.

It’s easier to do that because it’s safer to do that than it is to say why something might work or could work or to advocate for it because if it doesn’t work, then, “You said we could get away with that. He said we could do that.” Clearly, that didn’t work out for you. Let’s say that’s what we’ve found. 

That comes out as your number one feature of your culture. We’re going to narrow it down to a few things. What’s the main feature of the culture?

We take out our prescription pad. What’s going to be on your prescription pad for that senior leader team? What are you going to tell them? 

My focus is all about how you can get things done and you can get forward momentum. That oppositional culture is exactly the opposite because if you’re going to point out the flaws and find mistakes, it’s exactly diametrically opposed. 

It’s the gas and break. 

It’s important that people have a chance to be some self-discovery in there so they can understand it and work through that and understand what it means, then I help them develop the execution architecture, the ecosystem that is going to help them to get things done. I’ll give you one easy trick out of all of this for an oppositional culture. I’ve got lists of different types of culture and what I teach people is how you set up that execution from a project management point of view, from a change management point of view, from a strategy point of view, from a leadership style point of view, how do you work within that culture to get things done?

One example. When you are oppositional, you like to critique things because that’s coming from your place of fear. You are always going to do that. Ultimately, if you’re going to agree to something, you’re still going to start from that negative place. You need to give people that forum to be as negative as possible and get it all out first before you even turn to the positive.

I set up a conversation that says, “Let’s go through all the problems with this idea, then we are going to look at the positives and how it could work.” That simple way of doing things by starting with the negative because people want that outlet for all their fears, then focusing on the positive and how you can make it work. That simple technique works powerfully because by asking people, they get out all their negativity and all their issues and fears. By asking them to focus and brainstorm on the positive things and how it can work, it’s when people start going, “We could do this. We could do that,” then they tackle some of those fears that they’ve raised that an exciting process. 

It is, especially when you see that people shift. People can be tough nuts for sure, but it is also possible to see these micro-movements and you could call them changes or behavioral change, but it’s not. It’s more of a default mode that people lean toward the opposition, naysay or waiting to see whether or not other people will adopt or how it will be going before they commit to whether they’re bought in or not, that self-preservation. 

I’ve used it for some of the toughest leaders I’ve come across. One CEO said to me that his CFO had asked me to come in and have a look at the structure they’ve got for growth. I didn’t think that was what they had. It was a global growth plan and it wasn’t going to work. We first spoke with the CFO, then went to the CEO and started talking to him after doing some work around what some options were.

He paid me but did not want to hear my answer that he was wrong. It’s very oppositional, very brushed, very arrogant style, very hard for me to come into his organization after a minute of being there and tell him he’s wrong. I used that same technique. He turned around and he said to me, “I want what you’re saying. I understand that another option is the way I need to go,” but I’d given him a chance to think through the positives and the negatives and he could see the issues with what he had in mind. 

Biggest Mistakes

I’m curious about the side of business development as an example to have that conversation for a moment. What’s the most difficult part about that before we even hit the record button, you and I were having a moment and vibing on the good news in our lives and our work lives that we get to work within groups of people, within teams and organizations and either see an actual ripple effect of positive change that occurs in level of engagement and the performance and, and many other metrics that, that get measured throughout one of our engagements.

We also get to assume it even if we can’t see it, if we don’t see it at some point. We know that if we can have a positive impact on someone who is in a leadership role or on a team itself, there will be a ripple effect that we may not be able to see. It could be 2 or 3 years from now. There’s still some true benefit from it, which is quite exciting, yet to get inside, to be given the proximity, it’s a privilege, it’s an honor. We’re paid to do it, for sure. It is not an everyday occurrence, and it’s not a thing where access is given lightly. 

I’m curious, what do you find is the greatest challenge in some of the early conversations that you have with either someone who’s a champion already or someone who’s been referred to you or you’ve been given an introduction and now you’re having a conversation? It’s like a person that you see on the street that’s walking with a baby carriage and you look inside that carriage and you see a baby in there. You would never say, “What an ugly baby you have.” A) I would say because it’s not true. I don’t think there’s ever an ugly baby. I’m saying that I don’t believe that is true. Even if you did think somehow that that was not an attractive baby, it would be the most insulting possible thing you could ever say to anybody.

I’m jumping in the middle here. That is why consultants never say, “This is your problem.” They will say, “This is your opportunity.” 

Especially if you’re sitting down with somebody who’s in a senior level role, maybe even a CEO and because you’ve done it long enough that you go, “You’re the problem. You’re a part of the problem. I know that’s what we’re going to find out.” Outside of something like that, what are those conversations like for you? You did share that there were two engagements that didn’t go well. Would you mind giving us not the gory details, but I’m sure people would be curious, what didn’t go well, why and what did you learn from those experiences? 

The one which was a major point in my life, was I’m wired to be persistent and find different alternatives, different solutions and to find those solutions to make things work. That’s what I’m used to and they work. I was in one organization where we had a steering committee for the program. For the project, we had almost every key executive, each of the different functional areas on the steering committee as a decision-making body. They would not agree on anything. I’ve never had many corridor conversations in my life trying to get people to think broadly help inspire them to think broader than their own area. They’d come into that steering committee and could not get them to agree on anything. 

What I should have done is go to the CEO because that was a mess. What happened eventually was that some of the key people that I was working with were real high performers in the business, so they left and resigned because we weren’t getting anywhere. The project sponsor, who was the marketing director was, exited the business. The project was wound down. I let go all within the same week, the absolute mess. They’d spent all this money trying to fix this problem, this business that was losing millions of dollars every month, and we were all trying to fix it, and it was a mess. It’s not good for anybody. Ultimately, what happened within six months, every single member of the executive team of the steering committee, bar one, had left the organization and ultimately the CEO as well a disaster. 

I felt very personally responsible because, as the program project manager or whatever you want to call me, I was responsible for developing this new strategic plan that would save the company and basically, I’d failed. Over the years, I’d done a lot of soul-searching, “What could I have done differently?” Clearly, we had a dysfunctional team at the end of the day, what I realized, and some things were outside my remit perhaps, but I believe in thinking about,  “What can I do to make that difference?” It’s Stephen Covey stuff around Circle Of Influence. What could I influence?

What I should have done is I should have gone to the CEO at the time and had a conversation about that, “This was not working,” and I didn’t. The reason I didn’t is because I didn’t have the confidence. I hadn’t met the person, but I hadn’t got to know them properly. I felt I couldn’t run around the project sponsor that I had go above his head. I should have found a way to do that. 

Mental Health

It’s interesting to look backward at those kinds of moments. Thank you for sharing that. It’s going to lean into the last couple of questions I have here. Mental health. Maybe that’s a good segue or we’ll build a bridge for one. How are you assessing mental health with the leaders and the organizations that you work with and what have you seen?

When we talk about culture, I think culture has changed quite a bit in my experience, from pre-pandemic to now after the pandemic. A) Do you see the same? If so, what changes in culture have you seen, if there’s something that’s a throughline to that? Where does it tie into mental health? We’re seeing more statistics coming out every single day about the prevalence of burnout and mental health decline. It’s certainly the thing that needs to be addressed. We address it, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it. 

What’s interesting is that the obligation to look at things and to take care of people’s psychosocial safety is becoming more and more important. In Australia, I’m based in Sydney, as you know, Adam, we now have legislation. It’s a criminal offense if you don’t set up an environment that’s psychosocially safe for people. Some of the European member states have also introduced this law. It’s quite interesting that the onus is now becoming more and more on leaders to think about these things. This is things like an overload of too much work.

The other thing that’s called out, for example, in the Australian law is the actual change process itself. The management of change needs to be done in a way that has got to think about the people. If not, there are criminal sentences associated with this because there’s definitely since COVID, there’s been a prevalence of mental health issues. 

I see a number of executives saying they’re overwhelmed and quite openly now, which is quite interesting. It doesn’t have to be all the way through to severe issues, but even well-functioning people are saying that they are feeling overwhelmed. AI is going to make it worse in some ways because of the sheer volume of content.

Driver Of Change: Well-functioning people are feeling overwhelmed in today’s digital age. AI will make it worse in some ways because of the sheer content volume.

I don’t know about you, but my email box is overflowing and that content is brilliant. That’s some of the things that I’m very focused on doing with the people that I work with in our membership in the Turbocharge that we’ve got, that I’m curating the information people get so it’s not this overwhelming of information, but it’s what people need to be able to move the dial, move forward and get things unstuck and get things moving in the organization.

Let’s go back to one part of the query there. Speaking of the prompts, I’m in the middle of a project for a new book about culture. Interestingly enough, in research and in conversations with folks that lead companies, we ask the question, “What was it like for you to get through COVID? What would you attribute the ability to get through it and get through it as successful as you did?” Often, people will point to their culture. They’ll say, “ It was a product that we are here and we’re succeeding because our culture was up for that challenge at the time,” which is amazing. I’m thrilled to hear that.

I’ll say, “What’s it been like? What’s the culture like now having out of COVID? Is it the same as it was before?” People will either grimace or they’ll make a change in their facial expression or something, and then often we’ll say, “No, our culture feels different and is different than the culture that got us through the pandemic is not necessarily the culture we came out of the pandemic with or if it is anyway, the times have changed in that. Things feel differently now.” I guess that’s what I was wondering is whether you’ve seen any change in how people are functioning as teams within an organization, as a culture since the pandemic and whether there’s been any notice of what it was like before and what it’s like after. 

The biggest difference I notice is that the people who have the most resilience are the ones who clearly are performing the best and are surging ahead in their careers. I was saying before we started even putting the recorder on that I love your show because out of all of these shows and all this content that’s out there, this avalanche, you seem to hone in on these exact techniques that people can find to build that resilience in them.

The one that specifically touched me was with Peter Nieman, who spoke about being better, not bitter. I thought that was exactly right because whether it’s I’ve had a failed marriage, I could have come out incredibly bitter after my husband turned around to me after almost 30 years of being together and said to me, “Do you think we’ve got a good marriage?”

I’m like, “What?” It’s a conscious decision for me to pull myself out of that and put myself into a better situation. I’ve gone online. I’ve dated. I’ve met this amazing man and I’ve got this wonderful life and I’m lucky, but I’ve also created that love. Is that better or not better? Same with people in the workplace after COVID. Yes, we’ve all had a hard time; some people are worse than others, but it’s coming out of that and making that conscious decision.

I’ve thought about your book, pause, ask, choose what future. That’s what I did coming out of that marriage that didn’t work, choosing to go back and create a life. It’s those people who’ve chosen coming out of COVID to do things that are going to work not just for them but also for the organization. Sure, you can go and stick yourself at home for five days a week if other people come into the office. You’ve got to think about what’s best for the business and yourself. Maybe it’s going into the office 2 or 3 days a week to be there and have a presence and finding solutions, choosing solutions that are going to be win-win. 

It is a resilience skillset that you’re describing and part of it. I think for people, I have to say this is not quite a warning or a caveat. It’s more for clarification purposes. When we talk about resilience and when we bring the concept of operationalizing resilience to an organization, we’re not talking about people who have that greater capacity to burn the candle at every conceivable end. It’s not just a euphemism for suck it up, but it is seen that way.

In fact, there’s a medical institution, which I will not name, where we were up for an engagement and frankly, we didn’t get this engagement, but in the course of a very transparent conversation where I was advocating for training that would allow people to develop resiliency skills before they need them. 

Not just resilience is the result of having come through something difficult and be stronger on the other end. People get that. That’s more the old paradigm. This is about how you develop resiliency skills before you will need it next because the pandemic is one disruption that was chaotic for many, tragic for many and tremendously opportunistic for many as well, and many more disruptions and many more changes. Some of them may even be greater in scope than the pandemic.

The AI revolution, we’re just getting started with the change that is going to take hold. It’s developing this capacity before you will need it. It’s important to take a proactive approach, which is powerful. It’s very empowering to teams and to leaders. Frankly, I couldn’t predict what the changes or disruptions would be. I would drive myself nuts trying to even prognosticate those things and be wrong more often than not. What can I count on, and what gives me certainty? I’m a certainty freak. I’m a control nut, as many of us are with this. 

In the world of the greatest uncertainty, you crave it. I know what I can count on is my resilience. That’s the part I can sleep well and feel confident. I’m having this conversation with this person who’s running for executive director within this medical organization. She says to me, “We can’t use the word resilience. We have been told we can no longer use that word because of what went on during the pandemic with this particular group of people.” They were being told to be resilient, which they were being told, suck it up, stop complaining, do what you have to do and we’ll get to the other side together and all that. It’s a thing. She was like, “We can never talk. We can’t use that word. People will tune out immediately, they will object, etc.”

Shaping Resilience

I appreciate you brought that up and in the way that you did, which allowed for this clarification to occur as well. Is there something that you do personally for your own resilience? Is there something that you go because, as you said, in the Peter Neiman episode, which I recommend people go back to, Dr. Neiman is, I’ll say this, he lost a child to suicide who was a young adult, wasn’t a child anymore, but any parent knows your 50-year-old child is still your child. It doesn’t matter what their age, this is your child. It’s your child. 

I’ve got goosebumps on my arms as you’re talking because he’s moved me. I’ve sent it to a whole lot of different people I know it will resonate with for various reasons, such as lost a child or somebody who’s lost a friend. It’s very moving and raw. It’s interesting how he contrasted him and his wife and how their different reactions to the situation and your discussion with him had much empathy. It was beautiful.

For me, what works? I love nature. I have a garden. I spend time in the garden. For me, if I need to solve something or an issue or rejuvenate myself, I’m in the garden or going for a bush walk. That’s the other thing I do. I had lots of those walks after my marriage broke up after a project didn’t particularly have that difficult time for me to have a project fall apart like that. It’s a bit of time to reflect on it, figure out what I could do differently and acknowledge that irrespective of the situation, it seems like, we are not in control of everything. Other people are going to do things and, but we’re in control of our own response.

I would love to close with this too because you live in Sydney, but you’re from South Africa. We’ve had a number of people from South Africa that have been on the show, including somebody that had quite a moving, story to tell about her experience with apartheid when she was living there during that period. One of the things that I’ve thought about a lot about Nelson Mandela and his life and situation was the scope and the breath. I don’t have words for it, but to people that don’t already know this, he spent 27 nor 28 years in prison in a tiny little cell and all that and then emerged to take on a leadership role and a transformative role and a liberation role. 

I was thinking of a different form of that word, but all the while, he could have perished at any point along the way while he was in prison. Certainly, all hope could have been completely lost to the depth of that restriction, his literal freedom to move to do anything was taken away from him. That’s what prison can do. What’s not obvious and what I’ve been thinking about is that his captors, those that imprisoned him could not take away his right to think.

That freedom could not be taken from him and was not taken from him. That’s what I think you’re saying is that regardless of the situations that we find ourselves in, and much of what we find ourselves in, on one level, we can’t control on and on another level, this is hard to swallow sometimes, we’ve created or contributed to consciously, unconsciously or whatever the case is. During these difficult times we find ourselves in the one thing, in the midst of any of it that no one can ever take and that we can truly count on is our capacity to think. That is our greatest freedom. In an uncertain world, that is truly our greatest certainty. 

While you were talking, I pulled up one of my LinkedIn profiles because I regularly post on Nelson Mandela because of his values. I’d love to read you one of the quotes that he had. He’s got many amazing leadership quotes about positivity and resilience. I would love to read this one to you if I may, which is exactly talking to your point as you said all these years in a cell that’s like 52 feet big hard labor, this is somebody who is a lawyer by background and he says, “Don’t judge me by my success. Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

Driver Of Change: Do not judge me by my success. Judge me by how many times I fell and got back up again.

Episode Wrap-up

It’s been an absolute pleasure to get to know you on a show to have this conversation and be real with one another even in the false when you think about it, it’s canned and constructed and contrived environment of the show. We know that other people are reading to this now. What I love about doing shows is how quickly and how accessible we are to one can be to one another that you can genuinely have a connection and have a real conversation. Other people also get to participate through their reading, etc., or sharing. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. 

It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. I’ve loved every minute of it. 

If there are things that where we went to in this episode that would be valuable to people that you know, colleagues, friends, family members, etc., I’m asking the community to share it with somebody because that’s how the word of this gets spread as well as does something positive with the algorithm of which I can’t control. We all have the same goal in this. It is creating a ripple effect.

Let’s help the algorithm to help that happen. When we know that there’s somebody also that might benefit, let’s take that extra second to take a copy, a link and paste it in a text or an email and say, “Give this a read.” I do that all the time. I love it when people do that for me as well. Lisa, thank you so much. Thank you to our beautiful community that is ever growing and it’s a joy, as always. Ciao, for now, everybody.

—

As promised, from the moment that I turned on this recording, I knew that the discussion with Lisa was going to be something interesting and special. We would follow the breadcrumbs and they would lead in the beautiful place they have, as I’ve come to trust in this process in that way. Lisa showed up and contributed, transparent, vulnerable and thought-provoking and all of that that makes for a great guest and a great conversation. Primarily, that’s what makes for a great guest, that we have a real conversation and a connected experience. I could feel that and I enjoyed her presence. I’m sure that you all did as well. 

We talked about some cool things that I think will be fodder for future thought, whether that thought is happening and is percolating right now for you or whether it’s something that you’re going to come back to or having taken some notes perhaps that you’ll bring to your leadership and look at where it is that something different might be possible.

Organizations and organisms in nature, as we talked about, are either growing or they’re decaying. That process of growth has to be ever-present. How you cultivate continuous growth and continuous improvement is truly the secret sauce, if there is any. There are a lot of things that we discussed in this episode that I think could be the catalyst for that next phase stage of conversation that leads to growth down the road for you all.

If you’re in a role as a leader or you’re even working in someone else’s, working in a role where you’re not maybe much a driver of change, you could still potentially be that person that is a catalyst for change. In fact, not even potentially. I know that to be the case personally, and I’ve seen it in many organizations that we’ve worked with.

If you are one of those people who can be a champion for change and a driver of change, we talked about what good culture looks like, what culture that is having challenges, where it is change management has its roots and where it can get stymied and stopped and where that process evolution can be actively opposed. Oppositional culture was the term that that was used for that.

I certainly loved our conversation that got quite personal around becoming better, not bitter, and the focus on and how we integrate life’s experiences and bring together the strands of those experiences in our daily lives to find a center and to find that place where we are growing in our way of looking at things growing and becoming more resilient before that growth or that resilience is needed or called out of us. 

Meaning we don’t wait for the disruption. We don’t wait for the tragedy. We don’t wait for the change to be thrust upon us, but rather, we’re proactively working at developing those skills of resilience, mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually speaking before things hit the fan. I love the conversation with Lisa. If you did as well, please leave us a comment and share or review. Share it with a friend, colleague or family member.

Feel free to take your own assessment to determine how you’re doing in this snapshot and time, and how resilient, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually are you at this moment. RankMyResilience.com. It’s simple. It is there for you to do that at any point. Use it with your teams. Use it with members of your family.

The insights are truly remarkable and it takes just three minutes. Probably the best part is that we can get to something real and true and useful in just a short period of time. Not that anybody’s looking at have another survey to take, but this one is simple and insightful. That’s why I recommend it every chance I get. For now, anyway, I will once again say thank you so much for being a part of this beautiful and growing community. We appreciate you very much. Ciao for now, everybody. Have a beautiful and blessed rest of your day, your evening, or wherever we’re finding you at this time. 

Important Links: 

• Lisa Carlin
• Peter Nieman – Past Episode
• RankMyResilience.com
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/In/LisaCarlin/
• https://www.YoTtube.com/Channel/UCnXxpKwKZmdMkUyJBHdac9Q
• https://LearnAdmin.FutureBuildersGroup.com/Grab-Your-Ceo-Guide-Boost-Your-Productivity-With-Ai-Tools
• https://LearnAdmin.FutureBuildersGroup.com/Join-TurboCharge-Weekly

About Lisa Carlin

Lisa Carlin, Strategy Execution Specialist.