S12E05: How your own thinking is keeping you stuck in low-value activity

Davina Stanley
Hi, Welcome back. Its Davina Stanley, here with Richard Medcalf. Again, we're delighted to be bringing to you the next piece of Richard's new book, Making Time for Strategy. So today, Richard is keen to talk about mindset, how our thinking can keep us stuck in low value activity. Hi Richard, how are you?

Richard Medcalf
I'm very well, thank you. Looking forward to jumping into to this topic of mindset, right? Which is so important when we want to think about freeing ourselves up.

Davina Stanley
Absolutely and it's a counterintuitive one in a way, but yet so incredibly obvious, isn't it? Because when I think of my own, you know, making time for things that I want to do, or whatever, I don't necessarily think about my mind. How did, how did this come about? Why is this such a high priority for you in thinking about making time for strategy?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, so you're right. Yeah. Sometimes people think yeah, okay, mindset. Yeah. Okay, let's get on to the real stuff. Okay. Especially if I'm already a senior leader, right. I'm beyond mindset issues. I know how to make things happen, right? I'm not, I'm not holding myself back. I'm, I'm out there. However, mindset is so important. I'll give you two examples. The first one is a lot of leaders think they have Ownership mindset. I take ownership, I take full responsibility, right? I'm not one of these people that's deflecting and blaming other people on outside situations, I'm really owning things and in many cases, that's true. That's how they're so senior in the organization but when it comes to time, how many times have you heard people say, Oh, it's just crazy busy right now. Like, I'm so overloaded, I haven't got time, right? Same thing that I haven't got time. The classic example of, well, it's not my fault. It's just all these other things happening to me. It's a mindset issue but rather than saying, owning it, I'm perfectly busy and I have the ability to refocus my time where it matters, we come up with reasons why it's impossible for us right now. That's one example of mindset and the other one, I'll try to really show how that might land is I was working with a leader, um, I've told this story before in the podcast, and probably from previous episodes, but I think it's a great one, I was working with a leader who I was helping him deploy a whole number of transformation projects, he just been promoted to the C suite and he was, he was saying, I'm struggling Richard, I'm stuck in my email. I'm spending too much time there. I've got so many requests from the organization, and I'm not getting enough time to really focus on these strategic projects. I need some tips and of course, when people say I need some tips, they will mentally pushback, because if it doesn't get a tip from me, they're probably paying me too much money for that, right to do that instantly more than a tip. They can Google the tip. We dug into it and I said, we're looking at what's going on but I said, Well, for me to do my, I need to do my emails. Well, why? Well, because I need to be trustworthy, and a team player. I don't want to be that guy who everyone's waiting on. Yeah, who's who's who's never replying to emails, who's not responsive? I get it. So tell me, your CEO, if he was in the room? What would he be asking me for? Oh, yeah, he wants me to deliver on these transformational projects. They're gonna make a big difference. I got it. What are the investors? Well, yeah, I guess they really want it to because it's going to make a big difference on the bottom line. We're going to save some real costs here. What about the employees? What about the broader organization? Oh, yeah, well, they're desperate to have upgraded systems and processes were really archaic right now. They're really frustrated. So they'd love to have these projects, too. Right. What about customers? When it's an internal project, they wouldn't really know but I guess actually will free up our team so that they can spend more time with customers and on the real business. Got it. So what you're telling me I fit do all these people, your stakeholders, actually, actually want you to be doing these transformational projects. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So when you're in your inbox and find all these low level requests, you're actually being untrustworthy, unreliable, and not a team player, because you're not doing what you're getting paid the big bucks for and at that point, it was like, Ah, I get it, right? It was that mindset shift suddenly, early on earlier on what was making him successful, what he was being asked to do was to be that to respond to all the executive requests coming in, in his new role, what he was really being asked to do was deliver these big ticket items and that was the mindset shift. At that point, he didn't need me to help him with his Gmail filters and his productivity suite, because everything had changed for him.

Davina Stanley
Absolutely and it's part of that big shift, which is that shift from doing to leading it's another step in that journey, isn't it? Whereas if you're responding, are you actually leading or not, you know, you're really perhaps not in the way he ought to have been? So no, that's, that's fantastic and I think you've had a few other sorts of stories that you've given me over time, and one of them speaks to being a perfectionist and it's a different, a bit of a different type of mindset issue but do you want to talk about that at all?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, well, I have to step back and say, you're in the book in the whole mindset area, we dive into a whole number of different mindset traps ways of thinking that we unconsciously fall into the hole just back from making time for strategy. That's where I kind of deal with it in the book, I suppose today, we come back to draw out perhaps three of those, which I find are pretty common and perfectionism, you just said, that's that that is a key one. Or the other two, I think we could look at people pleasing, which in a sense, is what we just talked about, actually, why don't we just close the loop on people pleasing, because that example I gave? Well, the example of people pleasing, right and the distinction I want to make there is, if you're people pleasing, that then you need to shift to serving stakeholders. So serving stakeholders in that example, when my client thought about the broader stakeholders who are relying on him, the investors, the CEO, his colleagues, customers, you realize to serve them the most would be to focus on on these big ticket items. When you're doing people pleasing, you're just listening to the loudest voice, the person in front of you right now, not the bigger picture and so that, if you like, is a, it's not a helpful way, I think if you're people pleasing, if you can't say no, you got to realize every time that you're saying yes to something, you're actually saying no to some unseen stakeholder that you're not thinking about right now. So people pleasing, you know, one of the one of the big three, I would say, the second one you just mentioned is perfectionism and perfectionism, I think rears its head in various ways. Some people really do feel Yeah, I feel really, really perfectionist. Like, you know, I, that is a real issue for me. Some people, it's a bit more insidious, it's like, Well, I'm just the best person for this role in this activity, or, you know, I just need to like, be in control on this, I just, you know, because because, again, the self identity is often I'm a safe pair of hands I've been, I've I've been promoted for the organization, because I keep my promises, I deliver a high quality, and the idea of perhaps letting go of some of those things, doing it a bit less well, or giving it to my team and some risks that might come out of that. That's speaking to my self identity but it's a real issue. What I'd say two things, one of my clients, which really woke him up was I think, and he was saying, I'm the only one in my company who can do these things and these things right now. It's really hard to let go of that and I listen to the processes and systems he was talking about and I said, well, yeah, I get it but at this point, you've been the high performing janitor said, What do you mean, what's that? Well, you that, you know, you've got your mark on your bucket, and you're like really polishing that floor tile, you know, down in the insurance lobby, it's really, really shiny, you could probably eat your breakfast off of it but in the meantime, there's a whole business to run, right? This projects, this strategy to think about, there's there's a team to develop and you know, there you are, you're really, really proud of this floor tile that's super, super shiny, and it smells of lemon fresh or whatever, but but it's not the highest use of your time. It's your comfort zone. You know how to do that and so, that idea of really over indexing in an activity, which is not the most important use of your time. It's so common, I often say normally, most organizations everybody's working one level down From where they should be, they're a little bit in their comfort zone that have been in repetition, not learning at the rate they could be learning and it's kind of comfortable there but it is being the high performing janitor and so I want to ask people, what's it going to take just a shift out. So you feel a bit nervous, you feel that you're not quite sure I just say, if something's worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

Davina Stanley
There's some truth in that to.

Richard Medcalf
Doing like, you need a strategy, and you haven't got one, but I'll do a bad strategy and you'll work with it from there, right? If you need to develop your team, you're not really doing much of it, well do a shitty job in developing your team and then you'll start to become a better person at developing a team, you'll figure out what needs to happen. So there'll be the high performing janitor.

Davina Stanley
Yes, yes, I'm seeing in the first two examples you've given there vary a lot about pulling people out of that comfort zone and having an appropriate balance of being uncomfortable versus comfortable. I assume everybody needs a little bit of comfort but your suggestion is, particularly as you get further up the chain, I think that people need to be willing, which is the mindset is to be uncomfortable and be stretched.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, that's right. I think what happens is the stakes rise as we get further up and so part of us starts to get more defensive. Like I've got more to prove now. Like this is why people promoted me because I'm good at this and therefore now I need to do this even more because I'm more senior, I need to like work faster duty law and that's why we're all overloaded, because we're kind of relying on that success formula but now we've got more and more responsibilities. So we need to kind of work harder and harder using the same formula we've developed rather than risking the stretch and so a lot of this is about that deeper inner work. It's why it's why I wrote the book. It's why it's not just a tactical issue. There's some tactical components, we've covered that but the deeper issue is around fear versus contribution, it's about getting out of our own way and actually doing it despite the slight sense of discomfort.

Davina Stanley
Comfort and carrying that thread through discomfort. That idea of not being busy sometimes and allowing yourself times to think, you know, not being super busy and over productive is really key. I think that's another mindset piece to think about, isn't it?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, exactly and so, the third one that I had to focus on. So we've got perfectionism, and we got people pleasing. We've looked at the third 1/3 mindset challenge that stops people making time for strategy is what I call it over productivity and this shows up in various ways. Over productivity, I think I suffer from this, you know, this is one that I have to be careful about. Which is the risk of adding too much value or being too responsive. So actually getting things done diving into things, knocking things off our to do list, pushing things forward. That gives us a dopamine hit, right, that gets this feeling good. feel productive. I mean, a lot of times my wife says sometimes Oh, you know, at the end of a weekend, we had a really productive weekend and I'm going you know what, I'm not sure what my weekend is to be productive, right? So you gotta knock things off our list, right? And so often when we have that, where we've kind of driven where we want to be going places, a bit restless, where we're goal focused. That can create a few things, right? The first thing is that whenever people bring a team, they bring ideas to us, we improve those ideas, and we think we're adding value because we're getting into our genius, so many great problem solvers, we're strategic, we can see the bigger picture and so we we jump in on their tasks, we can take what they've got, and we make it better and not realizing that we're actually making it ours and it's no longer theirs because we, you know, we've redecorated the room that they've just painted, or whatever is no longer their room is our room because we've done it with our style and so although we feel we've made it better, we've actually reduced ownership, which is one whole issue and the other one is being overly responsive. So people think I need to be on Slack all the time, I need to be on my messaging, I need to be replying to emails. I need to be in those chats. Like I've got messages pinging all the time and the issue is that's like a needle that's waving rapidly, like, so much noise possible to focus. People think, though, I'm being I'm being hyper responsive. That's what people expect from me. Perhaps they do but put it another way. If I was to, if I was to try to contact the President of the United States, the CEO of your company, you know, the chairman. important influencer, right? Would I expect them to better just ping them quickly get an immediate response, get them to drop everything and focus on me know, they're important people, they're working on big things. I'm not sure I'd want the prime minister or the president of my country to drop what they were doing and reply to a message that I send them I've heard they've got bigger, perhaps more strategic things that they need to put their attention on and so this sense of being overly responsive is actually an impartially around our own sense of self worth. You can actually important person, you've got projects and goals to deliver, you've got strategies to think about, you've got things you need to invest in, give yourself the time, the company will not fall apart, if you're not available for a couple of hours, until you check back in with to your email or your messages and yeah, suddenly, people they don't do that and, and instead, they they get the person they get the buzz of, of solving problems, for trying to pick messages but again, it's the easy stuff is the easy stuff is much not the important stuff.

Davina Stanley
And it's temporarily satisfying, but not really rewarding in the true sense of really achieving their bigger goals is that so having looked at those three things, then the perfectionism the people pleasing and the overall productivity. What do you recommend people do?

Richard Medcalf
Well, there's plenty of ideas in the book, let me put out a couple. The first one is to use the w w x d method and we did a whole discussion on that several seasons ago, if you remember, Dav, but w w x d is basically keep it really, really simple. Now it's, it's a, it's a methodology explained in the book but fundamentally, it's asking what would x do, and x is your super leader. So imagine somebody comes in, takes over your role, and absolutely nails it. I've seen nails that they create, they do all the things you would dreamed of doing the talks about your team are doing, they set the strategy, they break into new accounts, they roll out the platform faster than ever, whatever it is, then what do they do? How do these where did they spend their time? Who were they like? How do they conduct themselves? How do they operate in meetings? How did where did they focus? All these things, actually just spending five minutes just writing out like, what would this person do, looking at that list and make that your charter, really, really powerful and really simple. Like that, and set it in a workshop, just to get people warmed up in this whole idea and for many people that was like, Oh, got it, this is it. This is my roadmap. The second one is then to turn that into a to be list. So we have our to do list, we need it to be list and again, there's various tools in the book I talked about but the idea is just to boil it down to a couple of key words that you want to stick on your computer screen or, or keep somewhere really, really visible. So that as you go into a particular situation, perhaps it's a call with your team, perhaps an executive presentation, perhaps at the start of your day, when you're organizing your day ahead. You look at that and you use it as the filter. I'll give you an example. Why to be listed so important. As a leader, you might just you know, if you decide that, you know, your typical to be list is well you know, I want to be you know reliable. Hands on and supportive or something, right? There's lots of good things there but that might cause you to behave in a certain set of behaviors. Perhaps Two hands on getting into all the details. Whereas if you said, You know what I want to be, you know, today, I want to be empowering. I want to be inspirational and I want to be big picture, for example, those aren't nestle the right words, for everyone for every time, but just as an example, how you would show up with those two sets of adjectives, as your guiding thought are quite different and just to be intentional, to choose that at the start of your day, helps you kind of change timelines go in a different direction.

Davina Stanley
Yeah, and I think that notion of having three quite simple things, just to remind you, particularly as you're transitioning, as you're stepping out, would be, I can imagine that being very useful and you've got me thinking about who would my x be, you know, what would w w x d be? And then thinking about personifying that to thinking about, you know, what is that person like to not just what do they do, but what do they like, and then helping, using that as a bit of a guide? So no, I really, really liked that. So that's a lot of things to think about in terms of mindset, but very practical things that people can think about to shift, you know, for the impact of the time acronym, the tactics influence mindset, and then we have ether environment coming next. Don't wait. So I think that's been a really great discussion around the mindset piece and I really look forward to work talking with you some more about the next one around environments. So...

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, I think sorry, interrupting there but yeah, I was just gonna say, yeah, environments really interesting one, because what we do there is we shift from looking purely on what about yourself as a leader to looking about how do you shift the corporate culture, your team culture, the bigger picture, which is really important, a lot of books focus on you know, your own personal productivity, but in an organization, you have the rest of your team to think about. So we'll get onto that and in fact, just before we go, a final reminder, that if you're interested in checking out more about the book, you can go to makingtimeforstrategy.com. There, you're going to find out about the book, there's also a little questionnaire you can take to get to kind of get your score, where you are on the journey and also where the key focus areas for you. So that could be a useful resource for people but otherwise, let's talk next time.

Davina Stanley
Look forward to it. Okay, bye for now.

Richard Medcalf
Thanks, Dav.