Mastering Leadership Adaptability - The Key to Climbing the Career Ladder
A common thing right now that a lot of leaders are facing is how to be more adaptable.
Technology is changing faster than ever.
Tools, systems, and processes are changing faster than ever, which means companies are making more changes on leaders and teams.
Hey everyone, and welcome back to my channel. Leaders need to know how to be more adaptable and more responsible to change. They also need to know how to make their teams feel comfortable with change.
So to help us explore this topic and give you some tangible tools to help you with being more adaptable, I have a special guest with me today. Her name is Suzan Bond. Suzan is a former COO and today she's a leadership coach. She's the founder of Constellary and her main focus is helping leaders navigate human and organizational systems.
Suzan, I want to thank you for joining us.
Suzan Bond: It's always the hardest thing I can in any interview, you're like, where do we start? I guess if I think about like about me, my whole career has been really fascinated with the world of work. How do we work together? How do we create great work environments?
And that came out of my dad was a design engineer for GM. He built prototypes and he would come home and he would tell me about our, he would tell us about his frustrations at work. Problems around leadership of management and organizational structures and all those things. And I think that got in me. I always wanted to help change things for my dad. I want a time machine to go back and make my dad have a better work environment, which is, I only realized that many years later looking back, but that's been the thing that's really come to me is I'm really interested in where individuals and the organization meet. That connection is what I'm really interested in. I have a background in social psychology, sociology, leadership, development, org strategy, and org development and community organizing. So fascinated by people in organizations.
Doug Howard: You have a lot of background working in engineering companies and tech companies too, right?
Suzan Bond: Yep. Yep. My I was a COO at Travis CI by CICD, one of the earliest in the CICD space, which is incredible. Hardest experience of my life and incredible, most incredible experience of my life. I work mostly with engineering leaders.
People always think I'm an engineer and I'm not, but I love engineers. I love working with them. I love their challenges. And so that's what we do at Constellary. We, we do support individual leader development. We've got a couple of programs for that, but the thing that we also do is help people think about how do I work with other leaders and in an organizational level, not just ourselves, because I think that's where I see a lot of leaders struggle is they suddenly start working more organizationally and they have to figure that out. We'll definitely talk about that more today, but that's a lot of what our work does is helping leaders navigate the organizational layer.
And let me just say, because I actually gave a talk once from the stage. Someone said, what do you mean by the organizational layer? It was the first and only time someone had ever asked a question.
Doug Howard: I'm going to guess that was an engineer that asked that.
Suzan Bond: It was an engineering conference. And they said, this is the first time in our history of many years that anyone's ever asked a question to a person on stage. Cool. I loved it.
The 3 Organizational Layers that Leaders Need to Navigate
Suzan Bond: So I'll just really quickly for folks, I think that we have these three layers that we have to navigate as leaders. Our area engineering, right? We have to navigate our area. We become pretty good experts at navigating our area, right? It's expertise that we have to have in order to do it. Technology, how engineering runs, all those sort of environments that you have to do. Pull requests and, production and just all of those things, decision records. We become really good at that.
As we go further along we also get really good at marrying our work to the business. How do we do business planning for our area and marry it to the needs of the business to the goals, the OKRs and things like that? So then that's another area. Then we begin to get better at that, especially as we get into leadership, because our work becomes more about planning and strategy and things like that.
There's a third layer that everybody forget, which is the organizational layer. That's the entity that we're in. It's the group that surrounds us, right? It's like almost like we forget it. It's not just culture, but culture is part of it. But it's like, how do we work with each other across these organizational lines? How do we come together to work together to meet those business goals?
Why Most Leaders' Career Get Stuck in Middle Management
Doug Howard: I think that's so fascinating. We were chatting a little bit before we started recording, you said that's where most people get stuck. That's where most people kind of career plateau. They're doing fine and then, somewhere when they're trying to get from middle management to executive level, they don't really figure out how to navigate across those lines. So could you tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that? Cause I think this is a blind spot for a lot of people, especially in engineering.
Suzan Bond: It is and it's interesting because it starts at the senior manager to director level, cause when you move into director, I mean in the UK director is VP. They call that now head up. So we can think of head up or director just for, I don't know if your audience is only US, so just to put that language out there.
Doug Howard: The sun never sets on this YouTube channel.
Suzan Bond: I love it. I love it.
I think what happens is you know, we're so used to working in our own area, we're not used to thinking about how to interact with different people from different functions, who have very different ways of working, different priorities, different things that they are incented on, different things that they're thinking about. That's a whole new thing to us. Oh wait, I have to now work with all these different people and they're really quite different from me.
And I now have to share land. If you think about organizational things, I think about, there's like shared land. We share this land. It's not just mine anymore. I share it with you. How do we share it? Now product and engineering. That's a classic. Shared land, but also conflict. It's a pretty classic one, but that we share land with the people department, with the policies that they make the way that we want to pay our people and things like that. Then there's disputed land, that's my land. No, it's your land. And then there is unclaimed land. Not it. Not my land. Not it. Not it.
Just talking with someone recently a client about that. They're like, not it. And there was, then there ended being some conflict about the way that the person who was it was put into that role and the way that the team allocations and who was going to do the work and all of that happened.
So I think there's like all of this land that we begin to have to really share and navigate. When we're really in management and even early into directorship, we're not navigating that land as much. When you get into director, senior director and on that is the lion's share of your work. Yes, you are responsible for your area, but in the end, your job is increasingly, how do we win together? How do we stitch this thing together to get where we want to go?
Advancing Into Higher Leadership Roles Requires Strong Soft Skills
Doug Howard: I always look at it this way. The higher you rank in the company or the higher you climb, it's less about the hands on things you do. And it's more about the, how do you bring people together? How do you unite people? How do you communicate your ideas? How do you get people to buy in instead of tug of war? You got to get everyone pulling together.
And I know that sounds like cliche, but it's true. It's more about the soft skills as you go up and self awareness and just recognizing it's not all about you. As you're saying this to me. I'm just thinking back to my early days, my first manager role for me and I would butt heads with other departments. You're talking about shared land and divided land and unclaimed land. And one of the things was our product was I guess we would say divided land in a sense where our sales team would commit to things we couldn't do. They would sell things that we weren't qualified as engineers as a company to do. They would promise these lead times and they would sell it at this price that wasn't enough, they didn't charge enough money for it. These were repeat customers who liked our other products. So then there's just like, Hey, now we look incompetent as engineers. Now we look like we don't know what we're doing. And so there's all these disconnects and I would butt head so many times.
The way I overcame it eventually was, I started thinking let's assume that this other person, in sales is a good guy or a good person. Let's stop assuming that they're trying to create problems. Just kinda think, why would they do this? As I just walked myself back to the process mentally, I'm just thinking he's incentivized to make commission and he makes commission by closing deals and keeping our reoccurring customers happy and giving them what they want. So there's a disconnect somewhere. That was the first step towards empathizing and building a bridge. And I'm just curious, am I on the right track here with what you're talking about?
Building Meaningful Relationships to Create Aligned Incentives
Suzan Bond: Yeah, again, the incentives are, and sometimes there's misaligned incentives, right? Are those incentives aligned? And the work of this most senior leadership is to get those incentives to align, or at least not to fight with each other, right? That's really the work of senior leadership that I think they need to be undertaking, but yes, exactly.
And you're like, Oh, wait, but that person, that salesperson, if we think about the way that they're often paid, they make a very low based salary and they make most of their money in commissions. They are highly incented to sell. And people say they're unethical. I don't know that they're unethical. I don't know that the incentives are there. Again, are we, are we as an organization thinking about those intersections in the business and how, where we might be, there might be organizational friction because of, structures or things at the business.
One of the things I always tell people is when you begin to get into a director, a head of role, the first thing you should do, build relationships, get to know the other people. Build some kind of relationship so that you can begin to see them as a human, rather than as an impediment to your own goals. Crap, now they just put a whole bunch of stuff on my plate, and I don't know how to, we can't do that, and now with my pressure. And it's easy to go what's wrong with them, or they did it wrong, or whatever it is. We can blame them, we can get judgmental, but I always tell people the first thing you should do is build those relationships. You have to peak your head up, like you're a little gopher, peak your head up above the ground of engineering and go meet people in other areas and understand what are they trying to accomplish, what are they incented on, what keeps them up at night to begin building those relationships.
Doug Howard: If you don't ask, if you don't get to know the person, then you don't know what their incentives really are. And in which case, how can you really align the incentives? As you're saying this, building relationships is the first step. If you expand on it a little bit more? If I'm new in a director role, what does that mean? I get the idea of talking to people and being friendly, is there a right way to build relationships? Is there a right way to start this process?
Suzan Bond: I don't really love the right way. Cause it's like hard to know. You know what I mea n, I'm like maybe, but I get, I love where you're getting to, which is like, how do we go about it? How do we think about it? Because it can seem really overwhelming. I think that's what you mean by that.
Doug Howard: I guess just for more context, it's also like how do I know what's not being too nosy, too personal, crossing lines and things like that. How do I show I care without making this other person feel weird?
Taking Inventory on Your Relationships Throughout the Organization
Suzan Bond: I will tell you one of the exercises that I have folks do who've been in the role, let's say people who've been in a role for a little bit. What we do is we have them do an inventory. I want you to write down every single person you have to work with across the organization at a leadership layer. Not because the people in your team don't matter. Of course they do. But again, we're talking about organizational leadership, like the cross functional work. I have them write down who it is.
And then I say, I would like you to classify your relationship with them. And I give them a few different categories, Is it good? Is it, one sided? Is there friction there? Is there open conflict? And it's beginning to understand sometimes one person said, I have no relationships. Oh my gosh, I never realized how much I needed them. And someone else said, I'm doing a lot better than I thought. And so that helps us like doing an assessment of who do I need to work with? What is my relationship with them right now? Will begin to help you understand things. So that's just one thing I always recommend. It's an exercise I have folks do.
Doug Howard: I like that. I can see how that's very helpful because why would you think about it unless you just have some type of framework that challenges you to think about? Otherwise you just just, you keep going on with your day and you don't really think about things like this. And I think that's great advice.
Suzan Bond: It can slip away from you and we realized oh my gosh I don't have it and then we don't have the relationship then when we need it, right? When someone sold something you're like I can't actually deliver on that and then it's a really hard, really uncomfortable conversation that nobody wants.
Doug Howard: Or you I think you have a good relationship and they don't. So you approach it all casually I'm just asking for a small favor. And they're like, wait, why would I do that for you?
Suzan Bond: Exactly. So that's a really good proactive thing. For me I always tell folks that say like new, or you're just getting to know people, a simple, like casual conversation. Hey, I just want to get to know more about you and your work and what you think about all the time. I just want to get to know you. Often times leaders are super busy, half hour on the calendar, make it simple and easy. And that's where I would start is just getting to know them and then just regular check ins here and there.
Building any kind of human relationship, because as we get stressed, what do we do? We treat each other like objects. You're, you are an obstacle to my goal. That's not helpful. It's really not helpful, to reaching organizational goals.
So I think it's simple. I don't think you have to get all gooey and emotional. I am some emotional person. I tend to wear my emotions, to the surface, but I think it's just about stopping for a minute.
I hope this is okay You and I just got to know each other before the episode. We took 15 minutes and we're like, okay
Suzan Bond: Simple, just make a little bit of time for just making each other human It doesn't have to get overly personal. Over time you'll get to know more things like how they take their coffee or their dog's name. And one thing I always do if I see an animal walk through the screen. I'm like wait, who's that? Hi! But any little way to make each other human and to begin to just make any sort of connection, that relationship is so critical.
Doug Howard: I agree. And you're touching at empathy, and if someone's just a number, you have no empathy. That's why when you hear a story on the news that says 10, 000 people died in some, tragic thing. It doesn't really mean anything to you because it's just numbers. But when you hear the story about one specific person who had this tragic car accident, you can relate to it. It's like a heavy example, but I like to use it to just quantify empathy. It's like you don't relate to numbers. I'm with you on this, to build that relationship because now you're giving them skin in the game to care about you.
Suzan Bond: I actually love your example because I think people mistake empathy sometimes for a show of emotions or crying with them. And I'm like, that's actually not necessarily empathy. And sometimes we can make it about us instead of them. We can center ourselves. And I'm like, that's not empathy.
Empathy is just saying, Oh, you're a human too.
Doug Howard: I understand.
Suzan Bond: I understand. You're a human. That's really, for me, the beginning of where empathy is. I love your story because I think we mistake it sometimes what empathy really means and looks like. And your example is Oh, I see you as a human. I can relate with how that might be hard if my relative, passed in that manner or whatever. It's about being humans with each other.
Doug Howard: So let's switch gears a little bit. I think these are great discussions, but I'm realizing like, wait, we got off the beaten trail of, adaptability
Doug Howard: but this is good.
Suzan Bond: There's some undertones under there though. There's some undertones under there.
More Relationships and Diverse Perspective Means Less Narrow-Mindedness
Doug Howard: I sensed that so that's why I thought it was a good time to segue back. One thing that jumped out to me is the less relationships you have, the less you engage with other people, the more, narrow minded you become, unintentionally. It's not like meant to be that way, but you don't get these other perspectives. So you think one dimensionally. So I guess I'll just ask, do you feel like building relationships is a tool for becoming more adaptable?
Getting Stuck in Your Own Mindset Prevents Adaptability for Leaders
Suzan Bond: Absolutely. Like 100 percent because I think one of the reasons why, people struggle with adaptability is because we do get stuck in our own mindset. And the thing is, we don't even realize it.
So there's this beautiful Anais Nin quote, which says, we don't see the world the way it is. We see it the way we are. And it's this idea that we all walk around with a lens. But if we don't even realize that we're walking around with a lens, we just think something is the truth of the capital T.
That's just the way you do it. You work hard, you work 60 hours a week, no matter what, and you get it done. That is not a truth. That is a lens and a perspective about how we get work done.
Doug Howard: Perception versus reality. And to you, the perception is reality. You're none the wiser.
Suzan Bond: I think that a lot of things happen. In leadership, we have to work with other people in like leadership style. And if we don't recognize that we are applying a lens, then we're bashing our way through things and it makes it harder.
People aren't going to want to work with us because it's like, it's my way or the highway. What do you mean? You're not working 60 hours this week at 70. And we become less adaptable when we don't actually have a variety and diversity of people in our lives. And I mean that in all senses of the word. And even if at a very simple example in leadership is like different functions. Different people who think differently because engineers likely think quite different than someone in marketing or sales or operations or people. Yes, I would 100 percent agree. So that's that quote. Anise Nins, remember that you are applying a lens to the world and that there is not just one way to get something done in the world. There are in fact, many more ways to get things done that all can be equally valid.
Doug Howard: Every time you're saying these things, I'm just flashbacking, 10 years ago in my career where, I'd be in these busy patches as a manager. I'd be closing my door and I was really only engaging with the engineering team and then I'd get really rigid. It was this like cycle effect and then I, I wouldn't have the patience for another department that would come to me. And this held me back. I had aspirations at that point and I eventually figured it out, but it took me a lot longer to get to where I wanted to be because I felt like the only way through it was to muscle through it, to hustle through it, to grind it out, like you're saying, and really, it probably went a lot easier if I just, leaned back and shared my problems with some of the other managers and learned about their problems and figured out maybe there's ways to help each other..
Doug Howard: But a this is a big miss for a lot of people.
Suzan Bond: It is, and it goes back to this organizational piece, which is it's how we understand what our work is to do. And as a leader, your work is not just to get your work across the line. It just isn't. Your job is to get the whole organization across the line. And I know that probably people are like, that feels overwhelming. Yeah, sometimes it is. But there's a group of you doing it together.
But when we shut our door, right? My sense is, and I love that you shared that openly. That's an easy mistake, right? To make for people, we feel a lot of pressure. We feel like we have to know, have all the answers and get it right. And it feels hard to reach out and we be, and we are responsible for goals. At the end of the day, you were responsible for a set of goals and that pressure can feel really heavy. It's really easy to go inward to ourselves and to our team, rather than to go outward. Particularly when we're getting into more organizational leadership roles, i. e. our work is much more at the organizational layer. And the way that success looks like to us is there.
The Relationship Between Leadership, Adaptability, and Climbing the Ladder
Doug Howard: As you're saying this, every company is different, right? And every leadership structure is different and there's different personalities at each layer and from company to company. Director at this company could be a different type of person and as you're saying this i'm just thinking and maybe this is what you're guiding me to, and I'm not realizing it, but I guess I'm seeing this relationship between adaptability and climbing the ladder. It's like the more rigid you are, the more you are stuck in a pigeonholed role, but the more adaptable you are, the more you can get along with others and fit in at this company or in this level or in this team is, am I off base on this?
Suzan Bond: That is exactly right. In my point of view, that is exactly right. I see so many leaders have, who have great functional expertise and are good at leading an engineering team. And then spectacularly, unfortunately fail when they have to learn how to work cross functionally with other people and adapt to that, other people. They also have to adapt to the environment, which is unpredictable, uncertain. Look at this year. Leadership is full of lots of unpredictable markets and moments, and we have to figure out how to navigate those.
If we're not adaptable, it's going to be a lot harder, because one of the things that I think a lot about is, I think there's a little bit of a misunderstanding about what leadership is. We think it's complicated. And I will say engineers often think this way, right? Engineers. I love them. Big fan, got one in my house, one of my house growing up. But I think that engineering leads us to think that every problem can be solved and we can reduce things down to ones and zeros and we can solve problems. And we can in engineering, solve lots of hard problems, lots and lots of them.
Leadership is different. Leadership is not complicated. It's a lot, I gotta do this and this and this and this and this and this. But there's an answer. It might be a lot of steps. But I can get to the answer.
Leadership, organizational leadership is not complicated, it's complex. Uncertainty, unpredictability, a lot of moving parts where we have to like work together as a team and where sometimes the decisions are not excellent, good, and okay. They're bad, worse, and disaster, or we don't know, and we can't predict what's going to happen.
So I think we have to understand what leadership really means, which is, it means it's complex, which means it's really hard, which means you have to adapt because your plans are never going to go to as you plan. And you have to work with a whole bunch of people to get there.
Using Adaptability to Understand the Complexities Behind Leading People
Doug Howard: I think it's interesting that you brought up complex versus complicated, cause this is a concept that I picked up on a while back and just took me a while to wrap my head around it. But one, metaphor that helped me was just, complicated is a building of engine. There's a set order to how things go together, but complex is more like stacking one grain of sand on a pile indefinitely and then predicting accurately when will it collapse. It's you don't know. So many different variables of how it falls. There's really no way to accurately predict that.
That really resonated with me as far as what leadership is. What worked in this scenario might not work the next day, and it could be because of something tactical, or it could be because of something emotional. The person who you were trying to influence was having a bad day, and they didn't like the idea the way you presented it to them that day, even though the end result and the was all the same, and the words you said were the same. So I feel like that's something that a lot of people don't realize. It's not necessarily what you say or what you do. It's how you do it and when you do it.
Suzan Bond: I love that. That's a great metaphor for it. Cause I do think it's a little bit confusing at first for lots of us, to understand the difference between those things and what does it mean?
That complicated, we can build something complex, sometimes we may not be able to or it might break down. It might tumble over and in complicated, we understand the problem we're trying to solve. In complexity and leadership, sometimes we're not trying to solve the right problem. We're like, oh, wait, that's actually not the problem, it's this problem! Oh! So have we, do we have the right problem identified that we're trying to solve is also part of that.
Doug Howard: Or are we overlooking an obvious solution that's just something we haven't tried before? And I think, what we're saying here is when you're adaptable, you can solve the complex, but if you're rigid, you can't, right? Is that kind of what we're hovering around here?
Suzan Bond: I'm going to be frank. This might be disappointing to some. Sometimes we can solve the complex and sometimes we can't. Sometimes there aren't. But I think we have a better chance of it. And we have a better chance of Oh, that didn't work, okay, now we can pivot more quickly. This can work. This can work. I think we have more of a chance to solve complexity. You know what I mean? Because sometimes there aren't good options. And sometimes we're like, I have to make this decision. And I hate it, but this is the decision I have to make. So I think when we're adaptable, we're able to deal with complexity with less stress and we can make better decisions hopefully by doing that.
How Engineering Leaders Can Become More Adaptable
Doug Howard: So I have to ask then, I'm an engineer. And I've, had my whole schooling and my whole career was all, be rigid, be disciplined, follow the rules, follow the code books. That's the right way. Don't deviate. Don't take risks. So how do I become more adaptable? Where do I begin?
Suzan Bond: I love it because I think it's really, I think it's really hard. It's a problem, right? It's baked into our system the way that engineers are brought through the way the kind of work that they do. It is an exquisite. It is an exquisite challenge I think for engineering leaders. I think they can absolutely do it. No question about it.
But it is an exquisite challenge. Whereas like my work with human nature and systems is quite different. I've had to learn how to, go with the flow. And again, human nature, human nature is hard to overcome sometimes.
But a couple things is I want to bring out the trait from StrengthsFinder. You're aware of StrengthsFinder, I think, right? Have you taken StrengthsFinder?
Doug Howard: I have, but maybe share for our audience, just in case they're not, what, give us a little bit of background on what that is.
Suzan Bond: So Gallup, it was designed by Gallup. Everybody thinks they do polls, but the lion's share of their work comes from what they call human capital consulting. They've done the employee engagement, they're really famous for their employee engagement surveys and StrengthsFinder. is they've identified 34 strengths. It's not a personality assessment. It is a strengths assessment that they rank order from 1 to 34. You have a top five. It's not just the strength that you have, but it's the combination of those five strengths that will make you different.
I'm a former Gallup Employee and I'm a certified strengths coach. They'll say, Oh, should we use this for team, to help teams communicate? It's really tough at that because there's 200 and some thousand different top five communications. So it's like 260, 000. I can't even remember. It's a lot. And so it's not great for that. But what it is great for is as individual strengths and understanding again, understanding ourselves.
When folks work with me, it's the thing I understand because it gives me language very quickly and I can work with somebody and understand who they are. And we have a common language. It's great for one on one career development for leaders, in my opinion.
Again, to reveal the lens. What do you mean they can't figure out a strategy? What do you mean they're not working 60 hours this week? Oh, that's a lens I'm applying. Got it, right? Self awareness is so important.
To go back to adaptability, there's actually a strength called adaptability. I happen to live with a person high on adaptability I, I know it quite well. People high on adaptability, they believe that change is inevitable. Change is the only constant in their mind. And so rather than trying to avoid change, they want to find a way to flow with it, to be with it.
And the other thing I've noticed about adaptability is, Gallup classifies their strengths into four areas. And I think they classify this one as like a relating strength, but it's a way that they relate. They're we, over me, right? They're we over me, in how they in, in how they deal with the world instead of what's right for me. They're thinking about we a lot and they can adjust themselves.
I'm going to tell the tiniest story that I hope makes sense. My now husband and I were traveling in Spain and we planned out our money because we did not want to get money out of the machine. And we had a little bit of euros left and we had an early morning flight.
So we got to the hotel, but we ended up with less money than we thought we had because of, it wasn't like. It was just like, you pay 20 euros. So we get to the airport and we have very little money. And so my now husband, now we're just dating at the time. It gives me a little bit of money and I figure out what I can get. And then I come back and I give him the rest left and he picks up the change and he's counting it all little by little. And then he puts it in his hand and goes up to see what he can get, right? That's an adaptability going, okay, we don't have enough money. And I was like, do you have food he goes. No, I'm okay. I'm not hungry or whatever, right? Like it's love, but it's also like we over me. He knew he wanted me to be well, and he was going to be. He's I'll be fine. I'll get something on the plane.
It's a lot about people. And so if we think about that, it's expect the unexpected. To say the unexpected might happen and I'm not going to let it freak me out, right?
But it's okay, it's going to happen and that's okay. And so trying to build on adaptability rather than only predictability. Knowing that things, unexpected things are going to happen and I'm going to be able to adjust with the change. Because as you said, as leaders, our job is to manage change and we have to know that change is the, it is the only constant, it really is. There's always imperceptible changes. I wrote about this week in my latest newsletter, I wrote about, everything ends. Maybe sounds depressing but, there's always change, things are always ending. And then how do we think about that? Just being prepared for change. I think that's really important.
There's also something I think is really important. I'm a very prepared person. I love to be prepared. I prepared before we talked, I prepare for everything. I'm a planful person. I'm not high in adaptability. In fact, my number one is strategic. Very different than, let me tell you, strategic and adaptability sometimes. As I know from personal experience, it took us a while to get there.
Doug Howard: I'm with you. When I first started doing this channel, Oh my Lord, I wrote every single word down as a script and I've over prepared to a T. And then like I'd watch these videos and be like, Oh my God, this is terrible. This sounds like some seminar. So I'm with you. It's not natural for me either. I've had to learn this.
Suzan Bond: It's really helpful because we have to find being prepared is good and we have to find the balance between that and being open to somebody else's point of view, open to a new idea, open to changing conditions. And so I think it's like, how do we find the balance between prepared and planning and leaving room and being open so that we can be more adaptable?
Doug Howard: One thing that helped me, because as I'm just thinking about this, it's just baby steps at first. Instead of this end goal for argument's sake, the YouTube channel, I want to have an episode every week and how can I keep up with this, but I've never written a thing in my life or created content before when I started this and just okay you know what, I'll start small. I'll create one video and I'll post it and I'll see that the world doesn't end even if the video isn't good and then just going, okay, and then I'll create a second video and then, okay, now I'll try to make it more engaging and now I'll try to work on my presence and just and then just reflecting. Hey, the world didn't fall down because of, all these things I was worried about beforehand, because that's what usually gets me. Even when I was a manager and a director, I would take longer than I should have to make decisions, because I would worry about all these what ifs. And like you're saying, it's finding that balance. Okay use the what ifs to draw out potential scenarios that you need to prepare for, but then prepare for them and move on and make the best decision, right?
Suzan Bond: Totally, and I love because I think underneath that, I don't know about you, but I am a recovery perfectionist and I always will be.
Doug Howard: Perfectionist anonymous.
Suzan Bond: Yes. Yeah, totally. I'm like, I'm a totally card carrying member. I think that's like underneath the preparedness. I want to get it right. And I want to get it right. And especially when we move into management and leadership, we want to get it right because the consequences impact other people. And I don't want other people to feel pain. I don't want to harm other people, even if accidentally. And so the pressure can be really big. And I think part of what gets us into rigidity and away from adaptability is trying to get it right. And that was something that I've had to hugely work on.
Utilizing Improv Training Techniques to Build Up Your Adaptability
Suzan Bond: I think one of the things we connected over was I took improv.
Doug Howard: I was gonna ask you about that.
Suzan Bond: Yeah one of the things we connect on is like improv because I was I would get so anxious.
I was very unconfident in my 20s. Like I was like deer in the headlights in conversation. Now that's what I do for a living. I facilitate all the time and I love it. I never know what's going to come at me and it makes me slightly anxious and I relish it, but I got so nervous in conversations because I was trying to get it right. I was worried I would look stupid. I was worried that I might get fired. I was worried that I was asking ill informed questions. I would get sidelined. I was so ready to get it right. That if somebody did something in a conversation that was unexpected, I just froze. Listen, I get along with all sorts of people, but mine was like, I was trying to get it right and I didn't realize how much it was really impacting the ability for me to be adaptable, specifically for me in a conversation.
Doug Howard: I think this is something a lot of engineers can relate to. A lot of people bring this up. I, I'm in a meeting. I could ask a question. I'm not prepared for the answer. I don't know what to say. I freeze. It's almost like flight or flight, symptoms kick in. And I guess my question for you is what are some things you did to overcome that? I think that'd be really valuable to our audience.
Suzan Bond: I will tell you, this is not everybody's solution, but I'll tell you what I did and then we could talk some more about it.
I took an improv class and someone suggested, they said, I did this, I finally confided to somebody. Was this man I didn't know? I don't know why I blurted it out, but I was just like, I blurted it out. And he said, you know what? And he was like further in his career, really like polished. And he said, I had this problem too. And I was like, you did? What did you do? And and he said, I took an improv class and I went okay.
So I took one and I was awful at it. There was an exercise like where you look at someone and you throw the ball to somebody else. We all got balls in the face because we were not like looking in the right way. We were trying to prepare and it taught us like, be in the moment.
The second exercise. Oh, I failed gloriously. We're in this exercise. We're performing a scene. I don't remember why it was or what we're being taught, but we ran a laundromat. And then my scene partner, all of a sudden was like, and then there's aliens and you're having an alien baby. And I was like, Nope, I was like, having an alien baby, what are you talking about? It didn't make, okay sense to me, and I got scared and I got nervous and I basically made him wrong. And, he, it made for a really awkward conflict.
And afterwards, the instructor was like, there was a big problem in that scene. And in my head, I'm going, yeah, that guy with the alien baby. And instead what the instructor says is, Suzan, you made your partner, your scene partner wrong. But I was like, oh no. And it was the biggest aha moment for me because listen, I love people. I don't ever want to make someone wrong, but I recognize, Oh, I am so nervous about a script and running a script and getting it right.
I'm overly focused on me. And what I need to do is be focused on them and us. I need to focus on the relationship and not my performance. Thank God it was early in my career. It was really early in my career. And I ended up taking a year long improv program after that. I went home and I was like, Oh, I'm going to take this. I'm totally terrified. And I performed a year later live on stage. with my troop. So that's how I overcame it.
I also was becoming a coach at the time. And so that there's also something called dancing in the moment in my school where they teach you. It means that you can't predict where they're going. And like the, when you're coaching the person you're coaching. They're the one with the knowledge of who they are, what they want. It's not about your agenda, it's their agenda. And so dancing in the moment is you move around it and you're like, you never know what's going to show up. And how do you become basically adaptable?
But that, that improv program changed my life and changed the course of my career. I'm not even being bombastic or, exaggerating.
Doug Howard: I can feel it as you're describing it. This is powerful stuff. The thing that jumped out to me the most of what you're saying is just how you had this realization that you're, I don't want to pick on you, but you said, you're fixated on yourself.
Suzan Bond: Yes!
Doug Howard: It feels like a place of being considerate because you're like, Oh, I don't want to, make this uncomfortable for the other person when you were actually having the impact you didn't want to have. I think that's super powerful. And it's something that a lot of people don't realize, they think they're coming from a place of good and they're really actually making the other person feel uncomfortable.
5 Levels of Listening to Shift Your Focus and Attention on the Other Person
Suzan Bond: We're coming from ego and ego can mean lots of things. Like ego just means I'm focused on me. I'm focused on my goals. And when you are a leader, if you focus on you, your goal, if you come from ego, you and your team are going to have a bad time. It's not going to be fun. It's going to be much more difficult.
Yeah. I was young. I was just, I was self focused. You're not picking on me. I'm like, absolutely true. That was what was happening. I'm grateful. It happened so early in my career and it, I am absolutely turned that around very quickly thing, thankfully. But yeah, I think we don't recognize that when we're so focused on when we're inside our head.
I will tell you one quick thing that might help you about it. It's related to adaptability and where's your attention? How do you know where your attention is in a conversation?
Doug Howard: I'm fascinated already.
Suzan Bond: Okay. So my coaching school, Coaches Training Institute. Where I went has this really great model, which is levels of listening.
Level listening, me one, what's happening for me. Oh, do I have to go to the bathroom? Oh, my head itches. Am I saying this right? I was in level one listening all the time in my conversations when I was before my, I took improv, went into coaching.
Level two is what's going over there. What's happening with Doug? What's happening on Doug's face? What's happening with his eyes right now? Oh, what's happening with his mouth right now? What Doug might be thinking about that's level two, right? I so I can recognize that.
Level three is oh What's happening between us? Oh, we're like puppy dogs. I keep jumping over him. I keep interrupting him because I'm so excited that, okay, and you're excited, and there's a, okay, good, that's great.
Level four is, what's going on in the environment around us? What's happening in, I live in New York City. There has not been a fu or a honk, but there probably will be soon because it's New York City.
Doug Howard: Averages. It's gonna, it's gonna regress to the mean here in a second.
Suzan Bond: Yeah. And school is about to be let out. There's a little preschool right in front of me and it's honks all day. Get the bleep out of the way.
Doug Howard: These are five-year olds, right? No.
Suzan Bond: Yeah, exactly. It's the five-year-olds. Yeah the buses and everybody's yelling and it's chaos.
And then if we, I think the other layer that they've actually added is more like level five, like what's going on in the world and what's going on in the larger context of the world. And, a lot is going on as we're recording this.
And so I really love that levels of listening model because. It reminds us if we say adaptability is about relationships and being in the moment, adaptability about how can I respond to change? How can I respond to something different than what I was expecting?
Levels of listening can help us understand where is our attention focused.
Doug Howard: That's really interesting. I'm familiar with the idea of levels of listening, but I think the thing that's most interesting is you said what's going on in the world and just realizing like that can also just change how you're hearing someone else say something and how they're hearing you.
And I think like election time, not that we have to talk about politics or anything, but like a message could be really differently received if everyone's thinking about who they're voting for right now. That's really interesting.
Suzan Bond: Yeah. It's it's a model in a way of like, where is my attention focused and how do I, how am I taking in all of the information that is around me?
How to Maintain Focused Attention on the Other Person
Doug Howard: So how do you practice that? How do you engage that? So I get it theoretically, what you're saying, I don't know how to do this. How do I do it?
Suzan Bond: One of the things that I did, I don't even remember coaching school was quite a while ago for me. I don't remember how they taught us to practice the skill. I would just check in. Oh, am I oh wait. Do I have a lot of thoughts running in my head right now? Oh, wait, I have a commentary. There's a monologue in my head, but I'm actually talking to Doug. Oops. Time to get back in. So just checking in, just paying attention. I think even just reminding myself.
Sometimes I think before I would coach, I would write down the levels of listening and I would remind myself what each level was about. Sometimes, I might say, are you listening at level two? Because sometimes we might get distracted or we think about I'm getting prepared to say the next thing I'm anticipating what's going to happen. In fact, I'm not actually listening. I'm disengaged from you.
Doug Howard: I think a lot of people, including myself are guilty of that too at times.
Suzan Bond: Hello, done it too. It's human nature. We do it, right? But the problem is we're not really a good, So I think a lot of it is really just even being aware of that and trying to check in on yourself occasionally. Or you could do it, let's say one on one is there's a lot going on there. So it's a little harder to sometimes check in, especially in the beginning stages of this. But think about, what's happening and let's say you're on a zoom call and you're just listening. You're not talking.
Doug Howard: It is hard for me to imagine right now. No, I'm kidding.
Suzan Bond: But like, where's my attention focus? How am I thinking about this? Just checking in on those and reminding yourself of those different levels can help us begin to be more aware of them.
Doug Howard: One thing I've done for myself, I didn't really look at it the way you've explained it, but just, to look at it a different way. I think we all have ADD now from cell phones and, clickbait culture. So I think we're all fighting it a little bit, focusing our attention. And one thing I do is I realized that, it's like the brain has so much more capacity than we give it credit for.
It's like the brain can multitask in a way, maybe not consciously. Talking speed, someone can talk basically about a third as fast as your brain can process information and whether it's reading or listening. So your brain gets bored and it starts finding other things to do subconsciously. I don't mean you're a bad person, bored, but oh what are these, what are my grocery lists, what am I going to do after this?
So what I do to try to just keep my... Full brain engaged is I repeat back what I'm hearing in my head. There's like an echo chamber and I find it like that keeps me focused on the other person, but it's requires enough energy where my brain can't really go anywhere else.
So it's something that kind of just gets me into that second level. But I'm really curious, how do you. How do you engage the surroundings around you? Like, how do you do that without losing focus on the person in front of you?
Going Outside Your Comfort Zone and Trusting Your Reactiveness
Suzan Bond: It's so funny because I've been doing it for so long. Do you know the four stages of competence. Unconscious incompetence, you're incompetent, but you don't know it. So you're like blissfully aware you're like.
Doug Howard: I'm familiar with this concept. Yeah.
Suzan Bond: Conscious competence or conscious incompetence. I know. I don't know how to do it. I panic.
Conscious competence. I know how to do it, but I have to practice it.
Unconscious competence means you know how to do it so you don't even know that you're doing it anymore.
That's largely where I'm at with it, so I have to peel that, I have to peel that back. I think it's just, part of it is, it's hyper awareness. I'm just really paying attention and I'm devoting my attention to our conversation.
And I'm, again, I'm not running a script. I'm not trying to fill in the blanks. That's the other thing we try to do, right? We try to fill in blanks. And I had this the other day, someone filled in a blank and the conversation took a turn. And later they went, wait, is that what you wanted to say? And I said, nope, I was actually going to go in this direction. And they were. Oh, that was a way better direction. I'm like, yeah, the blank got filled in. It's okay. It's fine. But it's just really hyper paying attention to what's happening here.
And then if I say, okay, something feels off here, what do I do about it? I might say, do I need to say something like, are you okay? Or something feels off here. Do I verbalize it? Do I change mine? Let's say I noticed that you're shutting down and I'm like, Ooh, maybe I've been interrupting. Okay. I need to be quiet now. I'm just going to stop with that.
But it's just really a lot about, and again, it goes back to that game where we got the ball in the face about paying attention and not having a script about where we think it's going to go. But really being committed to the conversation, giving it our full devoted attention. I'd love for you and everyone to try it sometime. Pay attention. What do you notice about what's happening in the conversation? Do you notice anything about that's happening in our conversation? What do you feel or experience?
Doug Howard: I've been unconsciously doing that, cause I've just been paying attention. I'll just explain it. I pay attention to your energy. And when I see you light up and I see your eyes open up, I'm like, okay. Go deeper, like back off Doug and let Suzan go deeper. She's going to get onto some great point. I don't know what it is yet.
Suzan Bond: So that's level two and then level three, right? We're having a flow. Our conversation is flowing. We're moving around. I don't know about you. I don't feel, I don't. I don't have a script. I had some notes, they're long gone, and we're in the moment with each other it's throw those notes up. Yeah, so you're already doing it. My guess is that lots of us know how to do it, we just have to pay attention a little bit more. You're doing it, I know you're doing it, that's why I asked, I was like, I know you're doing it because I can see you doing it, because you're adapting to me in the conversation. There is not a script, despite the fact that you said you wanted a script early in your YouTube career, that's not who you are now, you've really learned something.
Doug Howard: Thank you. It was not easy. I'll say it was not natural for me. One thing I've, I guess I've realized that might help people who struggle with this is just trusting the reactivity of it. Where it's I want to be prepared for every what if, especially going back to my corporate days.
If I had a tough conversation with my boss or whatever. Or if I was trying to negotiate something, I would, okay, I'm going to say this, I'm going to say this, I'm going to say this, I'm going to say this, I'm going to say this, which doesn't do any good because if the flow doesn't match that way.
Suzan Bond: They go here and then you're like, but this, and they're like, but I'm saying this and you're like, no, but this, I've been there.
Doug Howard: So I've found my own like balance of, okay, here's the information I need to have in my pockets. And then I go into the conversation and I, I really try to focus on just listening and reacting instead of having any type of proactivity to it.
Suzan Bond: Yeah. I will say, can I just offer one last thing too about being adaptable and figuring all this out? Which is embrace discomfort, which is my guess is what you've done to get where you are here because, and this is where we grow. I know, when we become comfortable with being uncomfortable, that's where we grow. That's where we're going to grow and learn the most. And so really embracing discomfort and being uncomfortable.
I was talking to a friend earlier today who is American, but lives in Ireland. And she was saying how comfortable Americans can be and how comfortable that our society can be. And it doesn't really necessarily always help us to embrace discomfort because we can get anything.
I'm a New Yorker. I could get anything anytime. But there's this idea of if we embrace the discomfort, that's where we grow and where we learn. And it might not feel good, but that's where we're going to be able to become more adaptable. We're going to be able to flow with change better, and we're going to improve our relationships.
Doug Howard: That is so true. I think there's something to be said about you when you're in your, you're the same environment, whether it's, your work, your job or your family or your house. You're tempted to just want to be the same, and do the same things. And it's a lot harder to, you have to be more intentional about, maybe I should try something new. Maybe I should try a different way to work, for argument's sake, this is a simple one, but then maybe I should, go a different way about having these conversations with people at work.
I recognize this is a little bit of a tangent, but I recognize this about myself, you said your friend moved to Ireland. I moved here to New York two years ago, right around the time I started my business. So 16 year career in engineering and leadership and engineering, and then started my own business working for myself doing something completely different and moved to a different part of the country where I didn't know anybody. And it was extremely uncomfortable. And it was really hard at first, but I've grown so much in the process because it really challenged. I had no choice but to figure out new ways to do things. And we live in the middle of nowhere for argument's sake. And I grew up in a city my whole life. So it was just, okay, now I need to be more strategic with how I get groceries because it's a 30 minute drive, and things like that.
Suzan Bond: I think you've become more resilient. When change happens, my guess is that you have more capacity now to change, adapt, be flexible, to find creative and innovative solutions to things. Because let's just face it, adaptive, if we are rigid and inflexible, we're not going to find the most innovative or different, interesting approaches. And we work in technology and that's really important.
Doug Howard: I think just to summarize that into a practical tip for everybody, so it's what are you gonna go move to Ireland or move halfway across the country to become more adaptable? And maybe people aren't willing to take improv classes either.
I think it's just about putting yourself in situations that are new to you, that are foreign to you. And it could be everyday things, but just, going out to lunch with someone you normally wouldn't go out to lunch with. That's something that's just going to force you to think differently or, including a different group of people on a project that you normally would. Facilitating that and guiding them. I'm not just throwing them at a deep end, but just seeing, okay, this is something I normally wouldn't do. And let's just see how I react to this situation. Cause we're going to react. We're not going to just avoid it. We're going to react. It's going to force you to go. What do you think about that? Is that good advice or am I sending people the wrong path?
Suzan Bond: I love it. No, I love it. I think it's really great. No, I love it. I was also thinking it's a yes and. I love all of those. And I would add to, get really curious about someone who has a super different leadership style than you. What might you learn from them? What might one thing might you take from them that you could borrow? Or that might make you more flexible?
Get really curious about other people rather than this. No, I'm right. No, I'm right. Fighting it out. Get really curious about somebody, embrace people who are really different. I love engineers. They're quite different than I am. Although my father says that as his daughter, I was the kid that got the most engineering sort of thinking out of all of them, even though I wasn't trying to, but I love engineers. I love that they deal in this ones and zeros. My world is not about ones and zeros. I do think that there is a tendency when engineering can get us a little bit more into binary thinking and we, and when we as humans get scared, we can get stuck in binary thinking this or right, that right or wrong, black or white.
But when we can find our way out of binary thinking and we can find different people with different perspectives. We become more adaptable and I think we become more able to handle challenges and we actually become, I think, happier in the long run.
Doug Howard: I think that's beautifully said and I think that's great advice for everyone watching and I feel like I've learned so much perspective from talking with you today and it's really helped me reshape my life. Thoughts and frameworks I've had about leadership and how to, basically become more adaptable because it's something I need to work on still too. So I really appreciate you coming on here today, Suzan, and for our audience who wants to get in touch with you and who wants to, stay connected with you, what are the best ways to get in touch with you?
Suzan Bond: So while I'm Suzan Bond, S U Z A N B O N D. It's like a little bit of a little uncommon name, and I've been on the internet for a really long time. But really long time. It's my name from birth. I love my name. I got married. I was like no, your name has three words to it. I'll keep mine. And he said, I agree. Why would you ever take my name? Which is great. But, LinkedIn, Constellary HQ dot com is as the website. I also write a sub stack called Suzan's Field Notes. I talk about leadership. And I also have a podcast called leaders unscripted where I interview leaders about a change or a challenge that they face and how they overcame it. I think those are the big places.
Doug Howard: Okay. I will be sure to leave a link to all those resources you just gave or the contact method you gave in the episode description for anyone that wants to, get in touch with Suzan. And I just want to thank you one more, one more time for joining me today. And it's been a pleasure. I feel like. There's more topics we can explore. We'll probably get together again in the future.
Suzan Bond: So fun. I had the most, this is the most fun I had all week. I know that probably sounds sad. I love my work, but this is the most fun I had all week. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was really great fun to hear your perspective too.
Doug Howard: Thank you. The pleasure has been all mine and thanks for watching everybody.
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