Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Hosts Spencer Horn and Christian Napier discuss a better way to build and strengthen teams in any organization.
Christian Napier
00:13 - 00:24
Well, happy Monday, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Teamwork, A Better Way. I'm Christian Apier, and I am joined by the man in the royal purple blazer, Spencer Horne. Spencer, how you doing?
Spencer Horn
00:24 - 00:34
Great. Good to be with you. Glad to have you back after running solo on Friday. I know our listeners will be so glad that you're with us today.
Christian Napier
00:35 - 01:04
Very happy to be back, and sorry for the late minute but I ended up getting a meeting scheduled on my calendar that I could not move. And so I appreciate you carrying the torch and keeping the flame alive here in the Teamwork family. And speaking of Teamwork family, I have to tell you, Spencer, that our daughter-in-law is now in the hospital. Grandchild number four is on the way, so.
Spencer Horn
01:04 - 01:12
That's so exciting. I am so excited. Any bets of when the baby will come?
Christian Napier
01:14 - 01:24
No bets, but we'll see. We'll see what happens. We were over there yesterday afternoon. My wife made some cookies and took them over and could tell that she wasn't feeling great.
Christian Napier
01:25 - 01:44
And so my wife had a feeling like this baby's going to come sooner or later, and certainly it did. So we're super excited for them. That is wonderful, wonderful news. And speaking of wonderful, wonderful news, we've got an amazing guest joining us all the way from Lisbon, Portugal.
Christian Napier
01:44 - 02:01
And I have to say, Portugal is home to one of my all time favorite foods, the Francesinha. Super excited to have our guest join us here. So Spencer, why don't you do us the honors and introduce our guest to us?
Spencer Horn
02:02 - 02:09
Absolutely. Thank you, Christian. So excited to do that. A friend of mine and so excited to have him back.
Spencer Horn
02:09 - 02:35
He's been on the show before. Ricardo J. Vargas is the CEO and founder of Consulting House, executive advisor, researcher, and creator of the evidence-based self-leadership accelerator. and he works with CEOs, executive teams, and organizations to expand leadership capacity, adaptive performance, and decision-making under pressure, which is a big focus of today's topic.
Spencer Horn
02:36 - 03:30
He's the co-author of the peer-reviewed research on self-leadership, adaptive performance, happiness, flow, and performance under crisis conditions, and the number one international Amazon bestseller author of Chief Executive Team, The Transformation of Leadership. I'm excited to hear how these things, happiness and flow and performance, go together when so many leaders and managers are struggling right now with those very things. Over the past 30 years, Ricardo's work has impacted more than 450,000 people across 20 countries and 126 industries. And he's also the creator of the YouTube channel, Rewiring Leadership, focused on leadership capacity and performance under complexity and change, which is so important right now because what do we call today's world, Ricardo?
Spencer Horn
03:30 - 03:41
The Bonnie world, right? B-A-N-I, which is just berserk. That's not what it means. Crazy and incomprehensible world that we live in today.
Spencer Horn
03:41 - 03:43
So glad to have you. Welcome, Ricardo.
Ricardo J. Vargas
03:44 - 03:48
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to chat with you guys again. Thank you so much for the invitation.
Spencer Horn
03:48 - 04:31
You know, you focus so much on leadership, of course team performance is a result of excellent leadership, and a lot of leaders are under pressure. It seems to me, you know, sometimes the people we would think who would naturally be the best leaders, when pressure shows up, They crumble and it's not always the people that we think are the best leaders that send to rise. I mean, I, I see that in, in so many histories of, of warfare and you know, when, when people are in the trenches and the bullets start flying, the people who are supposed to be the leaders crumble and the ones who, who, uh, are able to adapt under, under pressure, step up.
Spencer Horn
04:32 - 04:37
I don't know if you're familiar with the British literature, Watership Down, a book. Have you ever heard of that?
Ricardo J. Vargas
04:38 - 04:38
Not really.
Spencer Horn
04:39 - 05:09
Christian, you've heard of it. This is a great book about rabbits. And it's actually a great lesson in leadership, because the rabbit that ends up leading the warren is Hazel, just a regular, average rabbit, clever rabbit, but not the strongest, not the smartest, but the one that listens to everybody and brings the wisdom of the team out to help the warren survive.
Spencer Horn
05:09 - 05:19
A real interesting start. Why is it that some leaders, in your experience, crumble under pressure and others rise to the occasion?
Ricardo J. Vargas
05:21 - 06:09
Yeah, it's interesting because the image that we have of leaders is usually made up of a mix of technical competence, market knowledge, industry know-how, a bit of intelligence as well, so they think faster and smarter. The thing that exactly you touched the critical point, the thing is that all things equal, this works. But when the conditions change so much unpredictably, when you have a war situation, when you have disruption, when you have creative destruction of a market, when you have complete turnaround, the competitors do completely different and unexpected things. Now, all those things are only useful if you can learn fast out of them.
Ricardo J. Vargas
06:09 - 06:30
And for that, you need other things. You need to be able to work and organize your behavior to reach goals in unpredictable circumstances. That's the pressure, that's the disruption, that's all of that. And those conditions require something different.
Ricardo J. Vargas
06:30 - 06:58
And that's exactly what my research is about. We call it self-leadership. It's actually a term coined exactly 40 years ago this year by an American psychologist called Charles Manns, Professor Charles Manns. And he said that self-leadership is the process by which individuals manage deliberately their thought processes, their behavior, their emotions to reach goals that are important or meaningful for themselves.
Ricardo J. Vargas
06:59 - 07:41
Actually, I prefer to define self-leadership these days, and my work is about that, as the capacity, self-leadership is the capacity to achieve relevant personal goals regardless of circumstances. So you only test self-leadership when circumstances are dire, when they are difficult, when they are completely out of the predictable. And very often people mistake this with the usual traits of leadership, as you mentioned, right? The good official, the good CEO, the good whatever director, the good person that in any trade knows a lot about.
Ricardo J. Vargas
07:42 - 07:59
doesn't hold under pressure because whatever they know is not enough anymore. So you need to regulate yourself. You need to be able to regulate your emotions, your thought processes, and your behavior in order to find new ways of achieve the goals under the new circumstances, under the critical conditions.
Christian Napier
08:00 - 08:42
Well, I think this is really, really interesting because Just hearing you talk about this self-leadership on the surface, I would probably do what a lot of people do. If the idea is to achieve my personal goals, my objectives, irrespective of circumstance, I think to myself, I will have a better chance of achieving those goals if I can control my circumstances, right? So what do I do? I try to put myself more in a position of control And maybe that works, maybe that doesn't because there's some things that may or may not be in my control.
Christian Napier
08:42 - 09:03
So I'm curious to hear from your perspective how you advise leaders who in an attempt, and I would say a sincere attempt to achieve their own personal objectives, they try to maintain very tight control over all of their circumstances so that they can achieve their outcome.
Ricardo J. Vargas
09:04 - 09:38
Well, good luck with that. We know how things have been working in the latest years and we know that Whatever your plan is, there will be a disruption. This can be major, minor, medium, whatever. So my approach is, of course, you should control everything that you can control, but there's only one thing, one factor that you control that is completely under your decision-making power, which is yourself.
Ricardo J. Vargas
09:38 - 09:56
So the only person we can be sure that we can control is us. And what does this mean? This does not mean that I'm going to be my own slave master. This does not mean that I need to discipline myself, that I need to force myself to do things.
Ricardo J. Vargas
09:56 - 10:09
This means that I will carefully understand what the gap is between my current circumstances and my goals. I understand this gap. I understand this gap in terms of behavior. I understand this gap in terms of feeling.
Ricardo J. Vargas
10:09 - 10:17
I understand this gap in terms of competence. And I will plan accordingly. So I will control what I feel. I will define what I feel.
Ricardo J. Vargas
10:17 - 10:25
I will define what I want to think. I will define what I want to do. And I will control myself to achieve my goals. That's self-leadership.
Ricardo J. Vargas
10:25 - 10:58
It's, for example, very different from disciplining myself, right? Let's say, People go through fasting 16 hours per day, plus cold showers, and they force themselves through it. Now, if cold showers and fasting 16 hours per day are the most probable way to reach my goals, then I better enjoy it. So self-leadership helps you to enjoy what is positive for achieving your goals.
Ricardo J. Vargas
10:59 - 11:22
So it goes from suffering through something that is difficult to reaching your goals. Now, it's also very different from motivating yourself to do this, right? Because motivation is a pull that you feel from things that you like to do. And this is what you need to do, regardless if you feel like doing it or not.
Ricardo J. Vargas
11:22 - 11:24
That's what we are talking about.
Spencer Horn
11:35 - 11:54
Oh, Ricardo, I love what you're saying. Yes, I did cut you off. Sorry about that. I love what you're saying because what I hear is there is hope for those managers who are struggling to find satisfaction and relief.
Spencer Horn
11:54 - 12:10
There's so much stress, so much pressure, so much anxiety. In the world, the Bonnie world, I was joking earlier, is what we call brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible. So as you said, good luck. There is really no control of our environment.
Spencer Horn
12:12 - 12:34
But we do have at least 90% control. And that's of our reaction, our response. But your research, and you hit on this, is that you can enjoy. Even those difficult circumstances, not doing the things that you want to do, but things that you have to do, I want to hear more about that.
Spencer Horn
12:34 - 12:54
You're connecting this idea of happiness, flow, and adaptive performance. You talked about you're adapting to the circumstance, but that's not a combination that we often hear very often together. Walk us through those three things and how they interact. So for example, happiness, flow, and adaptive performance.
Spencer Horn
12:54 - 12:57
And why breaking them apart is a mistake?
Ricardo J. Vargas
12:59 - 13:54
Well, we are talking about two different research papers that we published with our team of researchers. Let's focus on the first one, and I might describe quickly the experiment so that the audience understands what was going on. So we set out to experiment if an increase in self-leadership, so this capacity to master your own thought processes, behavior, motivation towards meaningful goals, would have an impact on adaptive performance and job satisfaction and in performance, in sales performance of a group of private bankers of a bank. Now, unfortunately for the economy, for the private bankers and for the investors, the bank failed at a resolution because there was a bank resolution and a lot of people lost their money.
Ricardo J. Vargas
13:55 - 14:37
And the private bankers were in the eye of the hurricane. Now, we had a control group, so a group that had no training, no program, no development of self-leadership, and we had an experimental group. So they were equal in all variables, except that one group received the training, so we could evaluate and control if the impacts of self-leadership in the experimental group in those variables were due to the training. And unfortunately, as I mentioned, in the middle, exactly in the middle of our program, the bank had a bank resolution, and those people were having death threats.
Ricardo J. Vargas
14:39 - 14:55
Some of them had to take their families out of the city to protect them. They were being insulted. They had their job jeopardized. They were blamed for what happened to the bank, although their responsibility was very low in the scale.
Ricardo J. Vargas
14:55 - 15:29
The difference was outstanding between the control group and the experimental group. The people in the experimental group, after all of that, after all the difficulties, after the death threats, after all of that, they said, you know what? I feel happier now. And they explicitly said, what I learned through this process helped me to be happier despite the circumstances, despite all the difficulties.
Ricardo J. Vargas
15:29 - 15:55
And we measured, we didn't measure happiness there. That's exactly why we set up to measure it in a different group later. We measured adaptive performance and we measured job satisfaction. So these people that went through these difficulties in their job, all those insults, all those difficulties, They reported, evaluated higher job satisfaction after the fact than before when everything was good.
Ricardo J. Vargas
15:56 - 16:07
They were happier with their job. They were more satisfied with their job. And they had increased in their adaptive performance. So adaptive performance is the ability to adapt to circumstances, changing circumstances.
Ricardo J. Vargas
16:07 - 16:32
So the control group had lower job satisfaction because, of course, they went through all those difficulties and they suffered and that impacted how they were satisfied with their job or not. In this case, not. They had the same level of adaptive performance. So all the difficulties, they did not use the difficulties to learn how to adapt, which the experimental group did.
Ricardo J. Vargas
16:33 - 17:05
We proved, of course, that our program impacts the development of self-leadership. This is very important because it's one of the few programs in the world that is validated to impact self-leadership. And according to my knowledge, the only one in for-profit organizations that includes all the variables of self-leadership. But we also showed that Self-leadership increases adaptive performance and increases job satisfaction, even when you go through crisis.
Ricardo J. Vargas
17:06 - 17:33
And this was surprising for us. So we set out to measure the impact of self-leadership on happiness, just because we were not measuring happiness on that study, but they referred, I'm a happier person, although I've been suffering so much. And they were even surprised. Some of them were saying that, like, realizing after our program, we were having a chat about different impacts, qualitative impacts.
Ricardo J. Vargas
17:33 - 17:55
you know, I feel happier now. And this is kind of surprising because I've been through hell over the last eight months. So we measured in a second group, a group of middle managers, high performers and high potentials of FMCG company. And we measured the impact of self-leadership on flow and happiness.
Ricardo J. Vargas
17:55 - 18:21
Flow is what people usually say being in the zone, right? So our paper is actually called get into the zone and be happy. which is about using self-leadership to getting into flow and become happier. We expected that an increase in flow, which is the optimal work experience, it is the work experience where I'm completely absorbed in my task.
Ricardo J. Vargas
18:21 - 18:41
I forget about time, I forget about place. I'm just focused on my task because my task requires that I'm working at the best of my capacities, but not higher than that. So I'm doing my best and that's working and I feel great about it. And we expected that an increase in flow would increase happiness.
Ricardo J. Vargas
18:42 - 19:14
We found that the effect of self-leadership on happiness is not mediated by flow. So self-leadership increases both flow and happiness and increases also job satisfaction and adaptive performance in crisis. So that's what our research shows. So the connection, as you were mentioning in your question, is the common driver of performance, adaptive performance, job satisfaction, flow, and happiness is this core capacity that we call self-leadership.
Ricardo J. Vargas
19:14 - 19:23
And this is really surprising because we found that happiness is not something that happens to you. Happiness is something that you strive to achieve.
Spencer Horn
19:24 - 19:30
Well, and that's, I mean, I want to dig into that, don't you, Christian? What, where that, uh, why that works, why that comes from.
Christian Napier
19:31 - 19:34
If I were to guess, now I haven't done the research or I haven't read your research.
Spencer Horn
19:35 - 19:56
I think it actually comes back to maybe something that Christian was saying. We can't control the environment, but we can control. our actions and that sense of control could be part of the answer. And then of course, I mean, most people want to achieve, most people want to excel and they want to create results.
Spencer Horn
19:56 - 20:22
And it's more fun when you're able to see the results or the impact that you're having as an individual or as a leader. I just imagine that this idea of flow, I was just talking to a business leader the other day and he was talking about the experience of a job that he loved. Uh, the day was over and he looked at his watch and it was five o'clock and he thought it felt like it was 9 a.m. In the morning still.
Spencer Horn
20:23 - 20:44
I mean, that's the idea that days are going by so, so quickly, but that comes from a level of engagement, enthusiasm, knowing that you're making a difference and being able to have that confidence that what you're doing is making a difference. To me, it seems like there would be, that would be part of the reason. And I'm just speculating. I mean, I'd love to hear why.
Spencer Horn
20:45 - 20:48
Why is that working and why is that happening?
Ricardo J. Vargas
20:49 - 21:32
Well, exactly what Christian was saying before and what you were saying now, those are two pieces of the same puzzle that we are building here, which is flow happens when you structure your job according to your capacities, right? So you are expected to do a lot of things by the company, by your boss, by your CEO, by your shareholders if you are the CEO. The point is, who's going to structure that for you? So you can organize your tasks according to the level of competence required in a way that fosters your personal development, your professional development, the development of your competencies by keeping you on your toes.
Ricardo J. Vargas
21:32 - 21:46
Let's use the image in the sense of I'm striving to work at the best of my capacities most of my time. And that's when you get that expression of, wow, what's the time already? It's like 5 p.m. and I think it's 9 a.m.
Ricardo J. Vargas
21:46 - 22:04
That's exactly an expression of flow. That's the distortion of time that happens when we are completely focused. And this requires that I'm working at that level. If I go above my capacity, if the job demands are higher than my competence, what happens is I enter into stress.
Ricardo J. Vargas
22:05 - 22:44
And if I stay there longer or if this is the big delta, of difference between one thing and the other, I get into burnout after sometimes. If I'm at the other end of the spectrum and I'm working consistently lower than my job boredom, I get bored. So I disengage either by boredom or by burnout And the optimal job experience is exactly being in flow most of the time. So that's something that we help people to manage to get into, because my boss cannot know the best of my capacities all the time for each task.
Christian Napier
22:46 - 22:51
Okay, so I've got another question for you. I think this is a fascinating conversation.
Spencer Horn
22:51 - 22:54
I have so many too, Chris. We're trying to take turns here.
Christian Napier
22:54 - 23:20
Yeah, so I want to kind of get into the nuts and bolts of what it is that you do because, you know, Oftentimes, we as human beings have a tendency to put people in buckets. And when it comes to the happiness bucket, you know, one bucket that we often use are the buckets of optimists and pessimists. Like, okay, there are some people that just seem to be naturally optimistic. They look at the bright side.
Christian Napier
23:20 - 24:13
And we, you know, sometimes we imperfectly correlate that with they must be happy people. And then the pessimists, we put them in another bucket and say, well, these are perpetually unhappy people, but it sounds to me like you've created a program that irrespective of what bucket you may find yourself in or others might categorize you in. that this flow, this happiness, could potentially be attainable, not just by the optimist, by the pessimists, right? So I'm curious to hear a little bit more about how the program works, like how it's structured, and irrespective of your quote unquote attitude, you know, coming into this thing, you can come through difficult circumstances and you actually can find a happy place.
Ricardo J. Vargas
24:15 - 24:50
Yeah, exactly. So I'm a psychologist and there's one thing that we are most of us familiar with these days, which is neuroplasticity, right? So we know that the brain has this ability to adapt to what you think, what you do and to circumstances and to what you eat, to the chemicals that you put in your body, all of that. So we know that the brain changes, we know that there's neuroplasticity, we know that we are not fixed, that of course I cannot turn into an elephant or a whale, but my brain can do a lot of things that other humans can do and that I'm currently not
Ricardo J. Vargas
24:50 - 25:20
able to do. Now, just to look at what you mentioned, Christian, if someone goes through bad experience in life, what makes them pessimistic afterwards? What makes them pessimistic is mostly that they acquired specific beliefs about circumstances, about themselves, about who they are and what they can do. For example, they can get to a situation that we just call learned helplessness, right?
Ricardo J. Vargas
25:20 - 25:37
We learned that nothing that I can do will make me successful. So we look at those beliefs in the program, right? We look at those beliefs. We look at how people think about themselves and how they think about the circumstances.
Ricardo J. Vargas
25:37 - 26:13
And we deconstruct that because the person that will reach the goals that are ambitious for yourself is not you. It's a version of you that you need to give birth to. You need to develop into the identity that is able to get to where you want to be. Now, this idea of changing your identity, changing going above what you do today to get there is about your thought processes to change your brain.
Ricardo J. Vargas
26:13 - 26:22
You need to think differently. You need to think differently about the situations. You need to have different beliefs about yourself. You need to have the ability to structure different behaviors.
Ricardo J. Vargas
26:22 - 26:41
You need to control your emotions. You need to learn to like things that you don't like. You need to be able to motivate yourself to do things that are useful and beneficial for you that you don't feel like doing. but you need to learn to enjoy them because if you are going to discipline yourself into it, it's going to fail.
Ricardo J. Vargas
26:41 - 27:20
What we do in the program is we revise all these three dimensions of self-leadership based on the identity of the person that wants to reach that ambitious goal. So I'm just simplifying because the program goes over 12 weeks and it's some moments in time where we meet the person and some distant learning and things that fit together like that. But in general terms, we go through what makes your identity and what makes you believe who you are so that we can help you to reach the goals by becoming a person that is able to reach them.
Spencer Horn
27:21 - 27:31
So where is, and we have a question from one of our listeners, which I'll put up on the screen in a moment, but where does job crafting fit into this? Are you familiar with that term?
Ricardo J. Vargas
27:32 - 27:33
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Spencer Horn
27:33 - 27:51
It seems like that would have to be part of this, right, where you're, where you are. So often, you know, we're hired for a position, but, but when we're given a little bit of autonomy, we can say, here's where I'm at my best. Here's what, here's what I'd love to be doing within the organization. Here's where I can create the most value.
Spencer Horn
27:52 - 28:15
Maybe start there, but then, then we still have to identify that gap and, um, I can't wait to learn. I mean, I wanna hear how we start shifting our thought process. How do we regulate ourselves to like those things that we don't like? How do we say if I'm not a morning person now that I love mornings?
Spencer Horn
28:15 - 28:27
Whatever it is, right? Share those with us. And then I think that fits a little bit with this question that we're getting. I'm not sure who this is.
Spencer Horn
28:28 - 28:50
Let me let me see if I can put it on the oh, it's not So the question is by Amy it says where is this transformation available? What is the role of? Organizations if it is an individual development, where do we learn all of this?
Ricardo J. Vargas
28:50 - 29:35
Oh Uh, well, it's, it's, it's a, it's an individual transformation, but our clients are usually organizations. So what, what happens is that the organization has a group of people that they need to develop because they are having special projects. They have a task to completely revamp the company or to disrupt the company, or they are high potentials, or they are, they are very high performance and they want to, to, you know, um, reward them with personal development. Now, it is possible, it is possible to combine the goals of the company and the vision of the company and the goals for the jobs with what you need to do.
Ricardo J. Vargas
29:35 - 30:08
So I'm expecting, and that's going exactly in what you were asking Spencer, which is I'm expected to produce specific results. And I can produce these results in many different ways. And that's the flexibility that you have in agile organizations these days, in more flat organizations where people can craft their job role and they can move it a bit more to the left, to the right, up or down. So we can help the person to understand those goals and how they meet their own individual development goals.
Ricardo J. Vargas
30:08 - 30:45
Because that's the point, the goals have to be relevant to yourself. And if I'm having goals that are relevant to myself, and they also contribute to the development of the company and the KPIs of my job role, et cetera, so we help people to do that, then I can apply my energy at my best to reach the goals for the company, not because I'm getting paid, not because I'm going to get some money at the end of the month or the year. Of course, that's great as well, but that's not what makes people give the extra mile.
Ricardo J. Vargas
30:46 - 30:56
So for people to go this extra mile, they need to get it for themselves. That's why you go the extra mile. It's because of you. and because you aligned previously with the company.
Ricardo J. Vargas
30:56 - 31:29
Now, if this requires, to answer the second part of your question, if this requires that I do stuff that is not really pleasant for me, I have several options. I can, for example, identify in the task what are the negative situations, negative parts, bits and pieces of the whole role or parts of the task, and I can decide how to improve those. And sometimes it's about improving the conditions where I do them. Sometimes it's improving how I do them.
Ricardo J. Vargas
31:29 - 31:45
Sometimes it's changing whom I do them with. Sometimes it's trying to get rid of those by automating. So there's options. Nothing that is given to you is something that you need to take like that, you can transform your job, you can improve it.
Ricardo J. Vargas
31:47 - 32:08
Sometimes you really have to do it. And there it's a shift in perception and emotion. So there's some different ways that you can learn how to look at something that you find difficult or maybe challenging and see it as an opportunity.
Christian Napier
32:19 - 32:45
Oh, the festivities continue. Hey, so for Amy, we will make sure that we put links and show notes and things like that to Ricardo's organization to find out more information. I kind of want to draft off of Amy's question, though, a little bit to understand about the time scales we're talking about here. Because one person could say, and it's very hard to see that, Spencer.
Spencer Horn
32:45 - 32:49
I know. I'm trying to adjust it. I've never had this before. Keep going.
Christian Napier
32:49 - 33:11
It's weird. Anyway, because I could say, well, I spent my entire life shaping who I am. And are you telling me like in a day, a week, a month, a year? the time and effort that it takes to make this kind of a change.
Christian Napier
33:12 - 33:32
What are we looking at here? You're working with organizations. What are you seeing with people? How long does it take for them to adopt this adaptive self-leadership approach?
Ricardo J. Vargas
33:33 - 33:55
Of course, each individual is their own individual, right? And we all are some more prone to change, some a bit more resistant, some a bit more inflexible, but we all can change. Some major changes, some smaller changes. I work with the belief that change can be sudden.
Ricardo J. Vargas
33:56 - 34:05
I have that belief when I'm working with my coaches. I have that belief when I'm advising leaders, right? Change can be sudden. Change doesn't need to hurt.
Ricardo J. Vargas
34:05 - 34:26
Change doesn't need to be difficult and it can be sudden. So I work with that belief and I look for the leverages that I can have into the person's feelings, thought processes, behavior. Sometimes it just takes a change in perception. because perception is before all of that.
Ricardo J. Vargas
34:27 - 35:03
If I perceive the situation differently, if I perceive the difficulty as an opportunity, then I can engage with it in a completely different way. Of course, what I'm saying is kind of abstract because I'm not using your real example in your situation where you are telling me the difficulty that you are going through, and I look you in the eye and ask you, you know, yeah, but that's exactly the opportunity that you were waiting for, isn't it? And the person realizes that, oh, wow, that's my growth opportunity right here on the table, and I'm not taking it.
Ricardo J. Vargas
35:04 - 35:08
I know what to do, right? And then suddenly they change.
Spencer Horn
35:08 - 35:10
So, but there's, sorry, keep going.
Ricardo J. Vargas
35:11 - 35:54
Just mentioning that sometimes it's very fast and very sudden, the change, because you can find perception changes, and perception changes are a big leverage in all the other types of change. I was a therapist before coming into organization, so I have also that background. For other people, you need to help them to gradually change behavior so that they get different results than the ones they are getting, so that they change beliefs progressively, so that they can change finally their identity and then, okay, you know, I'm actually a different person now, right? And it's a bigger change process.
Ricardo J. Vargas
35:54 - 36:14
But what I can tell you is that We measure, because it's an evidence-based methodology that we use, we measure self-leadership, we measure these variables, these psychological variables, and the differences are big and they are significant in a 12-week program.
Spencer Horn
36:14 - 36:50
So my concern is, this goes back to Amy's question, what's the organization's responsibility? Because the fear is, Ricardo, you can make a quick shift on that individual, but then they go back to the organization, which may be dysfunctional or fighting against their change. And it seems to me, in my experience, that the system always wins, right? So you could be working on the individual to create that self-leadership, to create the flow and the adaptability, but then they go back into the environment that crushes flow and is brittle.
Spencer Horn
36:52 - 37:37
So that leads us to a second question from a listener that says, You said companies can use this program to reward specific groups of people in the organization High potentials, but is it a strategic benefit for companies to offer this program? So I'm saying it has to be because if if the individual is not changing I mean if the individual is changing, but the organization doesn't support that then you're actually going to create worse outcomes because Now you've got somebody that knows what it's like to shift, and the organization is actively fighting against them. I don't know if I'm making sense to you.
Spencer Horn
37:37 - 37:52
They're not going to want to stay there because they will have tasted flow. They will have tasted this excitement and this enthusiasm, and the organization that doesn't get engaged with that is going to lose.
Ricardo J. Vargas
37:53 - 38:15
Yeah, this is, if I understand the question, is about the strategic relevance for the companies and organizations. And the point is, there's different needs for leadership development. If your company is going through a market situation that is You have your challenges, but they are known. They are knowable.
Ricardo J. Vargas
38:16 - 38:36
You can adapt leadership, top-down leadership methodologies, and nothing against those. We also use them. And they can generate results fast. You can train a cohort of your middle managers in top-down leadership processes, evidence-based, and you get results.
Ricardo J. Vargas
38:36 - 39:03
Now, if your company is going through challenges or specific groups inside of your company are going through challenges that are not exactly known at the moment, you don't know the right questions to ask. And first, you need to find the questions, and then you need to find the answers. You need to know where to find them, and you need to build a solution. So it's a more unpredictable environment, the bunny world that you were mentioning before.
Ricardo J. Vargas
39:03 - 39:29
if the VUCA world was another expression that was used before. If your company is going through that, the level of uncertainty and disruption is higher, then the predictability of behavior that is successful is lower. So you need more internal regulation in your people. So the strategic relevance for the company is not to do one individual at a time.
Ricardo J. Vargas
39:29 - 40:18
We work with groups, so we were working with the full cohort of all the private bankers of this specific bank, which was the leading bank in Portugal in that business. If you work with a cohort, if you work with a group of individuals, then you have massive changes in the organization. You can work with high potentials, you can work with R&D teams, you can work with marketing teams, you can work with the executive team. Most of the work that I do is executive teams only, and there you align what these individuals are doing for themselves with what the company requires from those job roles, and you gain a level of language and methodologies that then spread to the rest of the organization.
Ricardo J. Vargas
40:18 - 40:52
What we found is that self-leaders tend to become what actually Charles Manns proposed in 1986, this can be some form of super leadership that when people learn this, they can also teach other people to be leaders. And that's what we find out. They teach other people to be self-leaders so that the whole team, the whole organization becomes more resilient, more performant, and more creative, more innovative. All those things have been measured by other authors, not our research.
Christian Napier
40:55 - 41:34
So just kind of expanding on that a little bit here, Ricardo, I'm wondering if you can, you know, without revealing, you know, any confidentialities or, you know, specific clients, you know, can you give us examples organizationally of impact, you know, because kind of hidden behind Nicole's question is what's the ROI? Like, okay, I, you know, I agree to spend money out of my budget to help develop self-leaders in my organization, what is the impact on the bottom line? Like, how does that really drive the performance of the organization as a whole?
Christian Napier
41:34 - 41:48
And so I'm curious if you have any kind of examples that you can share where the executives in an organization went through this personal transformation, executive leadership, and had an impact on the organization as a whole.
Ricardo J. Vargas
41:50 - 42:24
Well, I go back exactly to that first paper published. We were measuring sales performance. We did not publish sales performance on the paper because the measurement method of the private bankers sales performance was interrupted with the bank resolution, so we only measured the rest of the variables. But that was exactly what we were set to measure with this study, the impact of self-leadership on performance.
Ricardo J. Vargas
42:24 - 43:23
The impact of self-leadership on performance in our study was on the experimental group until the disruption of the bank bailout was almost 10 times higher on average in the experimental group. Of course, me saying this is worth nothing because it's only qualitative data because I could not publish it as it was disrupted, the measurement method in the middle. But we have research from other authors that proves that an increase in self-leadership has an impact on innovation, measured with KPIs of innovative ideas, product services, has an impact on creativity, has an impact on sales performance, has an impact on academic performance, has an impact on task performance. So people performing tasks, the same tasks, faster, better, higher quality.
Ricardo J. Vargas
43:23 - 43:51
as an impact on, of course, job satisfaction, engagement, all of those things then can be measured to ROI. There's not many studies on ROI on these areas. That's why I was exactly proposing to do one, because we had done a different study with ROI on another leadership methodology that we use. And a client of ours was using our methodology and measuring the ROI on a sales team.
Ricardo J. Vargas
43:51 - 44:21
And they got to a 689% ROI in 18 months. Now, if you give me $7 for each dollar that I invest after one and a half years, you get all my money next morning. There's not, as far as I know, specific ROI measurements of self-leadership, but there's all the variables that impact the ROI that have been measured by different authors over the last 40 years.
Spencer Horn
44:22 - 44:48
So if a leader's listening to this right now, Ricardo, and they recognize this pattern in themselves, they're capable, they're experienced, but they're inconsistent when things get hard. That's what we're talking about. How do we create that resilience? What is the first honest question they need to ask themselves?
Ricardo J. Vargas
44:49 - 45:11
Well, you've answered it. Is it within my responsibility to answer this question, to get better? Is it my inconsistency? If what you said is the result of the question, then they need to develop their self-leadership.
Ricardo J. Vargas
45:11 - 45:43
Because if my inconsistency is not due to just a momentary lack of competence or a momentary mismatch of my perception of the market and what I'm doing as a strategy, If I notice that when the going gets tough, I lose my ground. I am not able to deploy the best of my abilities. I lose the capacity to influence other people. I lose the center of myself.
Ricardo J. Vargas
45:43 - 45:59
Then I need to be able to control my emotions better. I need to be able to manage my thought processes better. I need to be able to manage my behavior so that I can become a better leader. Self-leadership is about radical personal accountability.
Ricardo J. Vargas
46:00 - 46:13
So if I am radically accountable for myself, then I need to look myself in the mirror and ask the question, is this within the realm of my decision power?
Christian Napier
46:30 - 46:53
Throughout our conversation today, which I found completely fascinating, by the way, I think this is an amazing conversation. I hear the word adaptive used a lot. We're seeing in today's world, and maybe it's just a recency bias type of thing, but change is happening really, really fast. You know, I work in the world of AI.
Christian Napier
46:54 - 47:24
I've seen technologies change, but the rate of change that we're seeing today is pretty astonishing, not just in the technology itself, but also in the ecosystems in which these technologies operate. The business models are continually changing and adapting. Enormous advancements into this kind of technology. And so maybe 15 or 20 years ago, saying we need to be adaptive was one thing.
Christian Napier
47:24 - 47:54
Saying it today, it is front and center. It is really top of mind because things are evolving so rapidly. And so I'm curious, as you have been doing this work over time, okay, well, you know, maybe adaptive today, is it the same as it was 15 or 20 years ago? Or are things really changing at a faster pace and people are finding it more challenging to keep up with all of the rapid changes?
Ricardo J. Vargas
47:57 - 48:08
Yes, that's a question. We could spend the rest of the day here, right? As you know, because you work in this space. It's a completely different change that's happening qualitatively.
Ricardo J. Vargas
48:08 - 48:29
It's not about the quantity of the change that AI is bringing. AI is questioning what it is to be human. What's the role of humans in the workplace? And the point is that We have been progressively over the years, I have somewhere a paper that I wrote years ago on this.
Ricardo J. Vargas
48:29 - 48:41
We have been externalizing our cognitive abilities, right? We externalize the ability to do calculus with the calculator. We use the computer for other things. We have hard drives for memory.
Ricardo J. Vargas
48:41 - 49:12
So we progressively externalized our cognitive capacities to machines. Now with AI, we are not only combining all those previously externalized, but we are externalizing also our intelligence, right? We are progressively going in the direction of the general intelligence being developed. What's the rest for us?
Ricardo J. Vargas
49:12 - 49:35
What does it mean to be human these days? So it's an identity question that we are facing, right? And answering this identity question is different in different markets in the world, in different personal positions, in different... job roles in different social economic status, whatever.
Ricardo J. Vargas
49:35 - 49:52
But that's the question that we have no answer today. We have some hints, but we have no answer for what is being a human in the 21st century in the age of AI. So it's a very different qualitative question that we are trying to answer.
Spencer Horn
49:52 - 50:07
Well, we're trying our best. We love when we have guests ask questions. And Nicole asks one more. Would you say that self-leadership is an important competence for being able to adapt to the AI revolution that is coming around?
Ricardo J. Vargas
50:08 - 50:34
Well, yeah, well, actually, I was finishing with this identity question. And that's the identity question that we ask as a basis for our self-leadership program, which is, what is the person that deals well with AI? What is the person that deals well with the automation of your job role? What is the person that will design all the AI processes of your organization.
Ricardo J. Vargas
50:35 - 50:42
What is this person? What is this professional? What is left for you? And what is the role that no one else but you can do?
Ricardo J. Vargas
50:42 - 50:49
What do you want to play? What's the role that you want to play? If you answer this question, you'll find the role for you. You'll find the role for you.
Ricardo J. Vargas
50:49 - 51:10
Maybe not the role that you can you know, do for the next 20 years, but maybe a role that you can do for the next three years. And then you'll find another role that you can do for the next six months. And another role that you can do for another year and a half, because we need to reinvent ourselves in this age. There's no, there's no way of opting out of the development process.
Ricardo J. Vargas
51:10 - 51:18
I believe that any human being can develop until the day they die and opting out of that process does never benefit
Spencer Horn
51:19 - 51:28
Yeah, that's the neuroplasticity that you're talking about. But if performance under pressure is a skill, why aren't we teaching it?
Ricardo J. Vargas
51:28 - 52:02
Well, it is kind of a skill because self-leadership is a macro-competence that has different micro-competences inside it that are making you able to manage. So you manage your thought processes, your emotions, your behavior, motivation, then you can increase your performance, you can increase your flow, you can increase your job satisfaction. At the same time, you can plan yourself a way to develop the competencies that are required to do the job at the highest level. That's what elite athletes do every day.
Ricardo J. Vargas
52:02 - 52:11
They are self-leaders. You cannot get to Olympic level or to world-class without being a self-leader. They are examples of that.
Spencer Horn
52:11 - 52:13
And working on that mindset constantly.
Ricardo J. Vargas
52:15 - 52:15
Yeah.
Christian Napier
52:16 - 52:45
All right, well, this is, I don't necessarily have a final question. Maybe it's a comment, but I'm curious to get a take on it before we get to Spencer's final questions here. I want to come back to the Holi, I think. So, and I think I mentioned this, Spencer, to you before, you know, I was at a conference a few weeks ago in Philadelphia, and we had a little workshop, and in that workshop, one person in this, we split up into groups, and one person in this group, like
Christian Napier
52:45 - 53:14
seven or eight of us sitting there, The question was, it's 2036, what does your day look like? And so people started talking about, yeah, I've got this dashboard, it shows me all the stuff. A person asked the question to Claude, and Claude asked the question, well, you come in at eight o'clock in the morning, what are you doing? And my take on that was, and I'm kind of putting this back on the job crafting, creating your job how you would want it to be.
Christian Napier
53:14 - 53:54
If I created the job that I wanted to be and how AI would help me, it would be AI is taking care of all the things so that at eight o'clock in the morning, when I come in, my focus the entire day is on building and strengthening human relationships. It's all about building the relationships. And so, I am curious to hear from your standpoint, how creating this or fostering or developing this skill of self-leadership, how it impacts the relationships that we have with other people.
Christian Napier
53:54 - 54:12
Do we find ourselves in a better situation where we can build more meaningful relationships, irrespective of the chaos that's going on around us with AI and figuring out identities and all that kind of stuff. I'm just wondering if you can give us a little bit of a take on that.
Spencer Horn
54:12 - 54:15
Oh, Ricardo, you can never lose with more self-awareness, right?
Ricardo J. Vargas
54:16 - 54:51
Yeah, well, both self-awareness, self-critique, but also there's one thing in what Christian was mentioning, which is If you have a group of people, a team of people, a company of people that are self-leaders, they will be more focused on solutions and not on problems. They will be accountable for getting to the best situation for themselves and for others. They will cooperate more inside the company so that they compete outside. And sometimes you have too much competition inside of the company and not enough outside.
Ricardo J. Vargas
54:51 - 55:11
Self-leadership, a self-leader in a relationship is someone that looks at the common goals and the personal goals and genuinely negotiates between them to get the best option. You don't need to overpower other people. You don't need to stand above them. You just need to be yourself.
Ricardo J. Vargas
55:11 - 55:31
You are your own adversary. No one else is preventing your development but you. So if you get this mindset, You have a team of a group of people that are exactly an unbeatable team because they have radical personal accountability. They are constantly developing.
Ricardo J. Vargas
55:31 - 55:46
They focus on solutions and not on problems. They will cooperate more inside the team and compete outside. And they will be focused on creating an environment that is healthy for them. It's an unbeatable team.
Spencer Horn
55:57 - 56:06
All right, you ready for the lightning round, Ricardo? Here we go. Talent or adaptability, which matters most when things get hard?
Ricardo J. Vargas
56:07 - 56:09
Adaptability is part of talent, is a driver.
Spencer Horn
56:11 - 56:16
One word that separates leaders who perform under pressure from those who don't?
Ricardo J. Vargas
56:19 - 56:19
Enjoyment.
Spencer Horn
56:21 - 56:24
Finish the sentence, great teamwork happens when?
Ricardo J. Vargas
56:26 - 56:32
you know yourself, you know others, and the way to bridge the gap.
Spencer Horn
56:32 - 56:37
The leadership book that changed how you think, not what you do, but how you think.
Ricardo J. Vargas
56:39 - 56:45
Chief Executive Team, The Transformation of Leadership. I changed a lot of my thinking while writing it.
Spencer Horn
56:46 - 56:54
Yeah, okay, that's good, that's good. What's the most overrated concept in leadership development right now?
Ricardo J. Vargas
56:55 - 57:02
Charisma, executive presence. I could name a whole list of 20 things that are useless.
Spencer Horn
57:02 - 57:05
Great. Self-awareness or self-discipline.
Ricardo J. Vargas
57:05 - 57:08
Just because they are fixed. They are useless just because they tend to be fixed.
Spencer Horn
57:09 - 57:12
Yeah. Self-awareness or self-discipline, which comes first?
Ricardo J. Vargas
57:13 - 57:15
Self-awareness.
Spencer Horn
57:15 - 57:20
A leader asks you, how do I know if I'm the problem? What's your one sentence answer?
Ricardo J. Vargas
57:25 - 57:32
What would happen tomorrow if you ask your people that question? What's the answer?
Spencer Horn
57:32 - 57:41
Yeah. My question is, is it possible that part of the problem is your part of the problem? And if they say no, they're the problem.
Ricardo J. Vargas
57:43 - 57:54
On my first book on leadership, which is from 2005, I say that a leader always considers themselves part of the problem. Right.
Spencer Horn
57:55 - 58:04
And if they don't have that attitude, you know they're the problem. Exactly. Research or experience, when they conflict, which do you trust?
Ricardo J. Vargas
58:05 - 58:16
Depends on how the research is conducted. I'm an evidence-based practitioner, so I tend to consider research first when it's sound research.
Spencer Horn
58:16 - 58:22
Fill in the blank. Most leaders don't fail because of what they don't know they fail because of?
Ricardo J. Vargas
58:24 - 58:24
What they think they know.
Spencer Horn
58:24 - 58:31
What is the one thing you wish every CEO understood before their first day in that role?
Ricardo J. Vargas
58:33 - 58:36
leadership is a team sport at executive level.
Spencer Horn
58:37 - 58:39
All right, that's all of them, Cristian.
Christian Napier
58:39 - 59:02
Wow, now this has been a fantastic hour and I think we were in the flow because it went like that, like we're gone, we're done. So I wish we could keep on going, Ricardo, but this has been a fascinating conversation. Appreciate you joining us. I mentioned a little bit earlier, we'll make sure we put all the things in the show notes, the relevant links and so on and so forth.
Christian Napier
59:02 - 59:11
But if people wanna contact you, they wanna understand more about how they can help, how you can help them and their organizations, what's the best way for them to connect with you?
Ricardo J. Vargas
59:12 - 59:24
Well, they can check my website, rewiringleadership.com. They can find my YouTube channel at Rewiring Leadership, or they contact me through LinkedIn, Ricardo JB Vargas.
Christian Napier
59:25 - 59:36
Fantastic, you got multiple options there, listeners and viewers. And Spencer, you've been helping organizations develop high performing teams for decades. What's the best way for folks to reach out to you?
Spencer Horn
59:37 - 59:51
Just LinkedIn, reach out to me, say hi. And Christian, Ricardo, isn't he great? Love having Christian on the show and so smart. We've got so many people that need to know what you know and that you can help.
Spencer Horn
59:51 - 59:52
How do they find you?
Christian Napier
59:52 - 1:00:03
I'll just say LinkedIn as well. Look me up there, Christian Napier on LinkedIn. You'll find me and happy to connect with folks. So it's been a fascinating hour and thank you listeners and viewers for chiming in with their questions.
Christian Napier
1:00:03 - 1:00:09
We really appreciate that. Thank you for joining us on this journey. Please like and subscribe to our podcast. We'll catch you again soon.