Team Building – Coach em up or out.

TRANSCRIPT

Well, hi guys. One step ahead. Attitude sickness or gratitude slickness. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. When we go in Nepal, it’s really important that we don’t cause people altitude sickness. This is a group I took just before COVID shut down. So when we’re taking people up in these mountains, it’s life and death, and the way it works is, is pretty interesting. What you do is you have to go up a mountain and then you have to plateau off overnight. And the next morning you go up a mountain and you go, I’ll always a little bit higher than where you sleep. And then you go back down and then overnight you adapt, adjust, and then you go stay another night and you go up, up up a little bit, not all the time. You’re a climatizing. So each night, this is where your sleep at night. Then the next day you go up a little bit more and you come basically back down and you’re still, you’re a bit ahead of where you were, then you sleep and you adapt. Now. That’s how you prevent altitude sickness, but it’s also how you prevent attitude sickness as a leader. This is called order, and this is called chaos. Now chaos means we’re going into unknown territory or we’re pushing ourselves to the next level of altitude. And in the Himalayas, that’s about 300 meters per day of altitude game. And then we have to stay the night in a lodge lower than we went to. So we’ll go up to say 400 meters and come back down to 300 meters higher than where we were last night, 300, 300, 300, but this will be 400 meters higher than where we were. So we’re continually rising in our adaption every three nights or two or three nights. We stayed two nights to allow the body to assimilate and get used to the reduced oxygen volume in the air. Now, this is exactly what leadership is because the people you’re leading. If you take them along the straight line, which you’re probably capable of doing of a, to B and say, I want you to perform along this line. What do you not recognizing is the degree of chaos that is entering into them and how they, how people need to back away from that chaos. So if you maintain a consistency of intensity, if you maintain a consistency of of elevation of asking for more, cause I Don’t know if you’ve realized it yet, but businesses every year raise the budget and they raised the expectation on people that raised the expectation on you, but you evolve at the board of order and chaos. Now it’s different in business. It’s very different in business because if you experienced that chaos customer facing, then the customer’s going to see you out of leadership. And if you experienced that chaos out of in front of your staff, so your leadership, you as a leader can not be in the same chaos as the team are in, but you will also be evolving in the in the metaphor of order and chaos. So if I could, if I can draw it, which I probably can’t do very well, but if I could draw it like this, let’s go back a little bit, try and clean this thing up and back, please. Really not as you know, my occupation was not an artist. If one of your team members here is it about, let’s say they’re at 2000 meters and they’re climbing. And tonight they’re going to be at 2,300 meters. And then tomorrow night, 2,600, these sorts of things you need to be up here at 3,600, still going through order and chaos, but not at the same level as your team. Now, if you wanted to draw this picture, there’s no better way of describing this than the rings of a tree. What the growth rings of a tree. And you’ll see trees grow at the border of order and chaos. They grow this area of the tree will be raw, no bark. And then they put back on the outside, they take a break. The most important thing about this diagram to emphasize is number one, the universal principle is nothing grows in a straight line. It grows at the border of order and chaos, which is another way of saying, are you ready for it as a leader, support and challenge. So it is not about holding your foot on the accelerator, a constant pace when you’re driving your team or at a constant pace. When you’re driving yourself at work, not asking them to go chaos at work order at home, or sending people off to ashrams or to yoga retreats or meditation classes or lunchtime beanbag setting. It’s you the leader, putting the foot on the accelerator and taking it off, putting it on the brake, taking it off, put it on the Sellerator taking off and you’re applying pressure, taking it off, applying it, taking it off. And you’re evolving people by putting order and chaos. Life will be doing that to you as a leader. And you not, you cannot be in the same project, chaos as one of your team. Otherwise you can’t lead it Kenya. So you need to be what we call. We’re going to talk about in a minute. One step ahead. So in the process of managing a team or people, you can’t just say I’m going to constantly apply a moderation of pressure or as it is with many leaders, become obsessed with creating order for them or putting them under the pump and creating chaos for them. Now, order and chaos are masculine and feminine. And a lot of our baggage in our history, if we’re anti the masculine and let’s say in the classical environment, that’s our father figure and something who put us under a lot of pressure, we will try to lead with softness. We will try to support our children and support our people at work without introducing challenge. At the same token, if we were over nurtured over supported over claustrophobic, we will be infatuated with the idea of challenging people. We will want them to be more challenged and we may put our foot on the accelerator too hard. Now this fine balance is really important. Now, if a person lives in this zone of the trauma of their, of life, this has got to because remembering when you wake up in a morning on a Trek, your body’s just managed to finish climatizing to yesterday’s trick. And you’ve got to start again. And the basically you’re a got to you’re at the bottom of the next pyramid of the next day. And you walk up to that thing and you get to the top, you can take a break, being loved to place recuperate, start all over again. One of the most interesting things, it’s a bit of a sideline to leadership, but one of the most interesting things. And when I work with someone who is about to pass and they’re leaving this earth and I asked for me to come and help them get to, to reconciliation with something that’s really a painful memory or something of the sort or a guilt, what you realize when you say to a person, tell me events in your life that you can remember very often a person will only remember the moments that they crossed this line, because those are moments of inspiration, true unconditional love. So by understanding that we want to build a business at the top end of this pyramid in the, in the, in the desire to choose, to love to zone, this is where we can inspire people. If people are in that zone of the pyramid, you can inspire them. And if people are in the bottom of this pyramid, want to need to should and got to, if they’re down there, you can only motivate them. So we have in the Walker world, we have a philosophy that says, coach them up, coach them up. And if they refuse, coach them out leaders and all followers grow at the border of order and chaos leaders must be one step ahead, not in the same chaos as those, they lead some of the first groups of people I took to Nepal. I flew up with them to the mountaintop and started tracking. We tracked from a place called <inaudible> it’s about 2,600 meters. And I would start a climatizing with the group. What happened a couple of times with different people is they didn’t decline the ties vegetarians, for example, don’t climatize in my experience as fast as mediators. I don’t know why. So the vegetarians would not a climatize fast, but I would also not be, not always be a climatizing as fast. And so then I would get this thing. I’ve got altitude sickness at the same time as my clients got altitude sickness, how can I lead someone who’s going through? And I’m going through the same thing. I’m not turning up. I wasn’t turning up to turn up. What I decided to do was go up whenever I did a trip with a group of people was go up two weeks early climatize, come back, pick them up and take them up. I was already a climatized. In other words, I was one step ahead. I was not experiencing the chaos at the level of chaos they were at. I was turning up, turning up. What’s that mean I was inspired in love to place. I was not experiencing the order and chaos paradox that they were going through walking up the hill. I was already there. This is pretty important stuff. So one step ahead is the next is this second part of the leadership journey. Be one step ahead of those you lead by for now.