MOOC 1 Transcripts - Leadership and Teams

Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader
Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd
Module 4: Growing as a leader
Table of Contents
Lesson 4-1: Module 4 Introduction..................................................................................................2
Module 4 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................................2
Lesson 4-2: Leadership Growth: The Three C’s .................................................................................7

Leadership Growth: The Three C's ........................................................................................................................7
Lesson 4-3: Leadership Growth: Curiosity ...................................................................................... 13

Leadership Growth: Curiosity .............................................................................................................................13
Lesson 4-4: Leadership Growth: Courage....................................................................................... 21

Leadership Growth: Courage ..............................................................................................................................21
Lesson 4-5: Leadership Growth: Commitment ............................................................................... 28

Leadership Growth: Commitment ......................................................................................................................28
Lesson 4-6: Wrap up ..................................................................................................................... 38

Module 4 Closing ................................................................................................................................................38
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Lesson 4-1: Module 4 Introduction
Module 4 Introduction
Elizabeth Luckman: One of the themes that we've talked about throughout this whole
process is how leadership is a practice. It's a process of development and a process of
growing. We've explored some of the ways in which we are working on that. Let's just
talk a bit about why we framed this course in terms of the development piece? Why was
that important to us?
Denise Loyd: I shouldn't say just anything, it's actually really important that students
appreciate the contrast with a destination versus the journey. The growth mindset is
about being on a journey and developing on that journey, which creates more
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opportunities to make some mistakes, try different things, learn from those things,
adjust, recognize that we're in a context. We are literally as humans changing every
single moment, and often times, ignoring that, or discounting it, or forgetting it
somehow, or resisting it. For me, the power of this is understanding that it's a journey
and being willing to be on that journey.
Kari Keating: I want to pick up on the use of the word human a few times, and I think
about all of this is human development like writ large leadership as a social science. It's
about humans growing and changing and influencing each other and being in this
process of life and navigating change together. I think that's inherently developmental,
and it's like what you said that we as individuals are changing over time and changing
because of all the influences coming at us all the time. There's really no other way. It's
not static. Leadership isn't a place or a thing or a person. It's a moving, changing,
amorphous, messy, hard process.
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Elizabeth Luckman: Yeah. Journey and process. Yeah. Because of that, it's a complex
systems mentality almost. You can't impose one framework on it and expect it to work,
but you do need some structure within which to grow and develop and change and
evolve and whatever.
Kari Keating: Yeah. Great point.
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Elizabeth Luckman: And so that's what we talk about in this module is the three Cs,
which is curiosity, courage, and commitment. I'm not going to pretend that that's the
only way to think about developing as a leader.
Kari Keating: But it is catchy. It is…it’s great!
Elizabeth Luckman: I love three letters or four letters. It helps me so much.
Kari Keating: Any three great letters, I think.
Denise Loyd: Three great words.
Elizabeth Luckman: There is a lot in those. Those are three letters, but there's a lot
that we can unpack there that speaks to giving us some structure for this process of
evolving and growing as humans and as leaders.
Kari Keating: Yeah.
Denise Loyd: There's one other thing I want to say, in addition to the complicated,
messy, difficult. It's exciting, rewarding, powerful. When you hear about how you've
impacted someone's life, giving them voice, how you've made change in a space,
accomplished things through this journey, through this process, through these practices.
It's just fantastic.
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Kari Keating: Yes. That's the sweetness of it all, and it's probably why we engage in it.
We study it, is for those rewarding pieces that come along the way. Yeah. Curiosity,
courage, and commitment. Did I get that right? Did I get the three Cs right?
Elizabeth Luckman: You got the three Cs. You'll learn the three Cs.
Kari Keating: Curiosity, courage, and commitment.
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Lesson 4-2: Leadership Growth: The Three C’s
Leadership Growth: The Three C's
Kari Keating: When we're talking about leadership development, developing ourselves and our
own leadership capacity. I like to think of it as leadership capacity. It's not as if you arrive. It's
not like a video game where you like you arrive at leadership and so therefore you are now a
leader in all contexts at all times. It's a capacity that we're, it's a health check, right? Like we're
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still growing, we're still developing, we're still learning, we're going to get some stuff wrong and
hopefully learn from that and try again. So, leadership from a personal standpoint to me is about
a capacity to build skills.
Elizabeth Luckman: Leadership growth is a process, a lifelong process for many of us and it's
an individual journey based on the context, experiences, and people around us. The best
leaders commit to continuing to grow, to paying attention to the process of developing as each
problem at work changes, as each job evolves and as a career expands. One action, one
choice, one job does not make a leader. The most effective leaders are intentional about
consistently learning and growing.
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Jim Luckman: I go back to the model that Stephen Covey had, which was a great big bull's eye
and there are three different ends parts to that.
There's what you can control, there's what you can influence and what you can't control.
And obviously we all live in, I don't care if you're the lowest level person in an organization or
the highest level person in an organization. You have the bull's eye. The CEO has people on
the board of directors that he has to understand and listen to and so on. So everybody's got this
bull's eye. So there's this piece you can control and you have to say, what piece can I control?
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What piece can I work on to build my own capabilities, and how can I grow strength in that? And
what Covey says is when you do that and you take control of that middle part of the bull's eye,
the next piece which is those things you can influence, you actually grow that piece and you
begin to influence people around you. And then when that grows, you might even bridge into
those things that you have no control over. So, this thing grows from within and out for
everybody and I don't care what position you have in the organization. You always have the
right, the willingness and the responsibility to do your own personal development and make it
grow.
Elizabeth Luckman: I'll suggest here that we can grow as leaders by developing the three C's,
curiosity, courage and commitment. Curiosity is foundational to learning. Being curious
about leadership, about ourselves and about the people we lead can open our minds to growth.
Courage is required for trying new things and learning from things gone wrong. Being open to
trying new ways of leading to be our best facing uncertainty with vulnerability. And commitment
is about building habits that help us to continue to learn and grow. The most effective leaders
are reflecting and learning on their leadership consistently.
Paying attention to our leadership growth by focusing on the three seeds should not come at the
expense of solving problems in our jobs. The two are intertwined. Because leadership classes
are taught separately from other classes both in business schools and elsewhere. It's often
tempting to focus on leadership as this thing to focus on in isolation of the work itself. But
leadership exists in the context of the organizational and team environments. I can practice
building trusting relationships, but am I building them in the context of producing whatever good
or service it is that we create for customers? I can develop my self-awareness but am I thinking
about how this matters in the context of my relationships at my current job? These three C's can
help us not simply think about leadership, but develop as leaders in the context of our work.
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Aravinda Garimella: I think leadership, like anything else is a skill that takes practice. So, if we
want to create good leaders, we need to give people ample opportunities to practice leadership.
These leadership muscles need training. So, one thing that I found does work in, in nurturing
leaders is giving them opportunities. And when you give new leaders opportunities, there is a
tendency to stand right behind them. Watch what they're doing or micromanage, which is
understandable for the trainer because it's their first time leading. But maybe I found an
approach that works a little better than that, which is give them opportunities, which are in
increasing order of stakes. Give them low-stakes opportunities, but give them their space to do
their thing as a leader. And then give them opportunities later to reflect on what went right and
what went wrong with you. Scaffolding goes a long way, but remote scaffolding instead of being
in the scene and meddling with their leadership process. And I think with time, opportunities to
reflect and opportunities to make mistakes, people grow into effective leaders.
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Elizabeth Luckman: Now the three C's is not some magical formula. It's simply a place to start
that's rooted in what we know about personal learning and growth, what we know about how
adults learn and how the best leaders develop. So ask yourself this question, am I ready to get
curious to test out my courage and to commit to growing as a leader?
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Lesson 4-3: Leadership Growth: Curiosity
Leadership Growth: Curiosity
Larry Gies: The more experiences I have, the more I realize I don't know. The more I
realize there's more out there, the more curiosity I have, the more I learn. What I try to
do is, I do a lot of things that are outside my comfort zone. I say yes to things that will
allow me to have a different experience. That's very difficult because you also want to
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make sure that you're focused. You have to be very intentional about those
experiences. I don't mean intentional that it has to make sense, I mean intentional about
that interests me.
Elizabeth Luckman: Curiosity is critical for the process of learning and development.
Evidence suggests that learning with curiosity leads us to remember more of what we
learn and moreover, to enjoy the learning process more. What do we mean by
curiosity? Philosopher and psychologist William James defined curiosity as “the impulse
towards better cognition”, or in other words, a desire to learn and know more.
Contemporary definitions of psychology consider curiosity an “internal motivation to
seek information”. These are semantically different, but the meaning is the same. It's an
individual desire an internal desire to want to go out and find something new.
Some might argue that curiosity is a fixed and innate trait, either have it or you don't. We
can all probably think of people that immediately come to mind as curious people and
others that don't seem so curious. But what if that is more of a state of being than an
intrinsic trait? What if we thought about curiosity as a competency or a skill to be
developed? To be fair most of us have gone through an education system that values
the acquisition of knowledge and there's nothing wrong with that, of course. But often
curiosity goes against the norm and therefore it's hindered instead of cultivated. When
you were younger, especially in early elementary school, did you ever experience that
kid in your class who all of a sudden, out of nowhere asked a question that seemed
completely unrelated to whatever was going on in the class at the moment? Chances
are, that student, was told to pipe down or wait until later. Or have you ever been in a
meeting where you are close to consensus on some decision with your team and then
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someone pipes up with a question that no one had yet thought to ask, and then that
person gets shut down? These are examples of curiosity at work.
Throughout our lives, most of us get graded and evaluated on what we know. How
much we studied, how much we remembered, how we will be able to work through a
problem to get to the right answer. Because of this, we grow into knowers. We believe
we have the answers and we stopped checking our own assumptions. This makes us
feel confident and in control. It helps us to demonstrate to others our values so we can
get that promotion or take on that new project. But it also completely gets in the way of
our ability to be curious, our ability to learn.
So, cultivating our curiosity is about shifting from being a knower to a learner. This
doesn't mean we don't have any knowledge it means we are open to constantly
updating our assumptions by taking in new information. It makes it more likely that we'll
engage in a dialogue in which all voices in a team contribute instead of a debate that
turns into an uncomfortable conversation.
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It means that when we face disappointment, we will explore that experience for what we
can take away from it instead of letting it shut us down.
Jim Luckman: Question is, how do you get into a learner mindset or how do you know
you're not in a knower mindset? I think you have to almost catch yourself or somebody
else can catch you with it and say that's a solution that you're thinking about and it's not
a problem. That might be one way to do it is you might just say to yourself, am I thinking
in terms of a solution without a problem defined? Or am I thinking about a problem and
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am I my asking all the right questions to try to find out all the different aspects of this
interdependent problem situation that is going on. And I think that might be the simplest
way of asking yourself, am I a knower, or am I a learner? A knower would be like
Richard Feynman and his dad versus his friend. Feynman was a theoretical physicist,
brilliant guy.The story goes that they would go out into the forest and see birds and
trees and his friend and his father would say to him, "You know, that's a cardinal or
that's a birch tree" or he would explain to him what he was seeing. Of course, his friend
would memorize that and he would be a knower of all of those things. Richard's father
would say to him, "Why do you think the beak on that bird has that shape?" It's a
completely different thing. It opens up a set of questions. I think to that example, I would
say that maybe the way you become a learner, always start with a set of questions that
you don't understand the answer to, and then you ask, how can I get answers to my
questions? That puts you into a learner mode.
Elizabeth Luckman: Curiosity is powerful. I was a really shy and awkward kid. I had
bad anxiety and I didn't like uncertainty or anything new. I was just afraid of everything.
We moved to a new school system when I was in fourth grade and the school pretty
shortly thereafter called my parents because I wasn't playing with any kids during
recess and they were worried there was something wrong with me. They probably
should have just given me some time to acclimate, but at any rate, they called my
parents in. But thankfully, I was raised by parents who understood the value of helping
their kids grow. My dad has this pretty highly developed sense of curiosity when he has
cultivated over the course of his life as a third child, as an engineer, and now as a
leadership coach who helps teams develop cultures of problem-solving. His approach to
helping me overcome my anxiety was to act as a coach, to ask me questions, to help
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me get curious, to find my own sense of curiosity. We moved again when I was 16 and I
finally at that point had this great group of friends. I was comfortable, and now I found
out I was going to have to spend my junior and senior year of high school in a new
school, in a new city, and a new state. He knew this was scary for me. He asked me
what my fears were. I told them I was afraid people wouldn't like me, that I wouldn't be
able to find good friends like the ones I had. I said, I didn't know how to make friends
and he said, "What do you think would happen if you just went up to somebody and
said, 'hi, I'm new here, it's nice to meet you."' That got me thinking. They'd probably say
hi back and we'd have a conversation, and of course, I had to try to think of the worst
point to come up with. The worst thing I could say was maybe they would laugh and
walk away. My dad's response was, "So what if they do? They are always more people
to talk to." He continued this line of questioning with other fears I had like, what if they
didn't have a dance team. They didn't and I ended up joining a competitive
cheer-leading team, which I never thought was an option. One of the teachers were
helpful. They were wonderfully helpful. My Physics and Pre-calc teachers used to let me
come in early to ask questions about my homework and they'd work with me
one-on-one. They made learning fun. I continued to practice being curious in my own
learning. It's led me to have all kinds of fun adventures, including living overseas, and
experiencing things I could have never imagined. Quite frankly, I'm here teaching this
course because I asked myself what would happen if I left my first career and got an
MBA. Then when I was getting my MBA, I was like, what happens if I get a PhD? Then
what if I become an educator and a coach to help others grow and learn by tapping into
their curiosity?
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How can cultivating curiosity contribute to your growth as a leader? Curiosity can help
you to explore jobs or projects you had not considered. It can open doors. Curiosity can
help you to learn more about yourself. It can facilitate development of your awareness
of self. Curiosity also helps you learn more about others. The next time you meet
someone, take a minute and get curious. Ask them a question you might not have
considered asking them before. See what you learn. Curiosity can help us be more
empathic towards others and vice versa.
The more we know about someone, the more likely we are to connect with them, the
more open we are, the more likely we are to build trust in a relationship. The next time
you find yourself at work saying, this is how we will do x. Rephrase to ask, are there
other ways to do x? Curiosity contributes to creativity and innovation, both in your
leadership development, and in the problems you're solving at work.
Let's talk about some ways to start developing curiosity for your leadership growth. First
and foremost, start with questions. When you catch yourself thinking in declarative
statements, swap it with a question. Use the principle of humble inquiry. Ask questions
that tap into what you don't know, be okay, starting from a place of not knowing, and ask
open-ended questions about your journey, about yourself and about others. Second,
pay attention to your assumptions. Our assumptions are operating at all times.
Check in and see what assumptions are leading you to make that particular decision to
engage in a particular way with another person. Along with our assumptions comes
evaluation. Play around with shifting from evaluation to observation. Be like an
anthropologist of your own culture. Take a look around and see how things are going at
work. How are people interacting? What norms are they following?
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Third, get curious about your feelings. Emotions are a part of being human and they
are always present. Explore how certain things make you feel and then consider how
those emotional feelings make you feel physically. Be present in your own body so you
can start to look for signs or your fist clenching before you go into a meeting that might
be indicative of anger or anxiety. If you're curious about these emotions, you will start to
see patterns and connections that will help you get to know more about yourself and
how you build relationships with others.
Jay Compton: But I think anybody who's truly in a leadership role needs to identify
themselves first is curious. You have to say, listen, I'm here to figure things out. If you
are not curious in a role, then you lose humility. When you use humility, then you start to
become the center of gravity in an organization. That's dangerous.
Elizabeth Luckman: Curiosity makes life more fun. Get curious about yourself, get
curious about others, get curious about your work, and use this curiosity to learn and
grow as a leader.
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Lesson 4-4: Leadership Growth: Courage
Leadership Growth: Courage
Denise Loyd: It's actually quite fascinating to me and nothing that I've studied
whatsoever, but that adage or 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal is so
powerful and so true, and we can't even process it. This communication happens in
milliseconds. We pick up things very easily, oftentimes from other people and some of
us are better at it than others. But if you're someone who's good at picking that up from
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someone else, that they spoke up and whatever the reception was not necessarily
welcoming. We can be the one that says I just wanted to point out that if it were me, it
would've been really hard for me to say that. I just want to commend John for saying
that thing and calling out maybe we're feeling uncomfortable right now, because of what
was said. Whether I even agree with it, I'm going to call out that it probably took
courage. If it was me, I think it would have taken courage for me to say that thing. I'm
just going to point that out.
Elizabeth Luckman: Let's talk a bit about courage and its relevance for leadership
growth. Dr. Brené Brown, whose work on vulnerability has become widely known,
defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Vulnerability is when
we are at our most human and it is not a sign of weakness, rather our willingness to get
into that state of discomfort and emotional exposure is exactly a measure of how brave
we are willing to be. Based on her research, she argues that vulnerability is our most
accurate measure of courage, and it is a prerequisite to the behaviors that her research
has found are important for what she calls daring leadership, which are rumbling with
vulnerability, braving trust, living our values, and learning to rise.
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Being a leader takes courage. It takes courage to let go of the assumption that we as
leaders have it all figured out. It takes courage to let an employee or team members
take ownership over a project. It takes courage to have a difficult conversation with
members of our team. It takes courage to look at ourselves and be willing to say, I'm
going to try to grow as a leader even if it's hard. Again, it's a sovereign responsibility.
Ron Myers: Again, is it that you're being watched all the time? The answer is
unfortunately, yeah. A lot of times we have unrealistic expectations of our leaders. I
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remember being junior and being in a meeting and sitting with a VP and I was like, they
must know everything. Then when I was a VP, I was like, yeah, I don't really know
anything. Because sometimes you don't know anything about the topic and you have to
have the humility to ask the questions. But people often will have unrealistic
expectations and part of what you can do and part of that soul is being very human and
being willing to be vulnerable sometimes. That's part of the challenge with that authentic
style of leadership and leading with soul is yeah, there's some vulnerability, but there
wasn't protect yourself as well. But at the end of the day, you are much more fulfilled
and you feel much better. When you put your head down on the pillow at night, you can
rest better knowing that you are your authentic self, and you are bringing your best to
your team or whatever situation you're working in as a leader.
Elizabeth Luckman: As leaders, we are in a prime position to have to deal with

uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Meaning we have to get messy with
vulnerability. Just think about it. Relationships with people who are looking to you to
make decisions, to be a role model, to empower them, to do great work, and to grow
themselves as leaders. Just to name a few of the responsibilities of leaders that require
us to be vulnerable. Because of all of this, it can be easy to build up an emotional
armor. What does this armor look like? Defaulting to making a decision without listening
to others, avoiding hard conversations, being a knower instead of a learner, blaming
others instead of considering our own role in a situation. Being courageous is about
getting vulnerable and learning to lower that armor. So, how do we practice lowering the
armor? How do we develop that sense of courage? Requires practicing vulnerability.
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Play with vulnerability. Brené Brown calls this rumbling with vulnerability and I like that
too. Test out what it feels to acknowledge your vulnerability instead of hiding from it.
Start by acknowledging those places of risk, uncertainty, and emotion with people
you trust, employees, team members, supervisors, or maybe even family
members. Finding a leadership coach can help here. Coaches are trained to help you
explore your vulnerability in a safe space. Don't think of it as, I have to get vulnerable to
be a good leader. Get curious, ask yourself, I wonder where vulnerability appears for
me? Look for opportunities to shift from blame to internalization. Good problem-solvers
look for the source of a problem. In teams and organizations that often turns into finding
someone to blame. This is a great place to practice being vulnerable. It's easy to blame
others, armor up. It's harder to acknowledge our own role in a problem, or sometimes
even to forgive when someone has done something wrong. If you find yourself
leaning toward blaming someone, turn inward. Acknowledge any resistance you are
feeling and see if you can figure out why. Then consider other elements of the system
around you that may be playing a role in this problem. An example here is a lazy
teammate. Have you ever worked on a team and there is one person or multiple people
who just aren't pulling their weight? What's the first thing we think of? They're lazy,
they're free-writing. But what if it's actually because you are taking too much control? By
the way, the first to admit that this is me. I'm a firstborn type A person. I like control.
When I was younger and I worked in team projects, I would often find myself doing all
the work and it took me years to get vulnerable here and figure out what was going on.
I'm part of the problem, I would prevent others from feeling they had a voice. I would
make them too nervous to speak. You know that old adage about if you point your finger
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at someone, you're pointing three back at yourself? Taking a look at those three fingers
and what they are telling you is a step toward practicing vulnerability to build courage.
Finally, practice somatic awareness. Somatic awareness simply means learning to
feel your emotions and your sensations with your body. It is about getting out of your
head and into your physical and emotional presence. Pay attention to how vulnerability
feels. When you acknowledge a vulnerability, how does it change your mood? How
does it manifest itself in your body? When you're facing a difficult conversation that you
don't want to have, what happens? You might feel anxious. This means your heart rate
increases and your palms sweat. How will this emotional and physical anxiety response
affect your difficult conversation? Well, it's probably not going to make you more
comfortable or more open. It's going to come across to the other person. That difficult
conversation is going to get even harder. Armor up on both sides. If instead we can be
in that moment and say, I'm anxious and I don't want to be that way. Then we can start
to get curious and we can even practice breathing or meditation to center ourselves and
put ourselves in a better place to get courageous to have that difficult conversation.
Jay Compton: The Navy buzzword that we use is honor, courage, and commitment.
Courage is, again, that's hard to do. Especially, I'll step into some of the fray here. I
think male egos are a little bit more fragile. [laugh] It takes some courage to basically
walk into your room and be the idiot. But it's okay. In this job I'm doing right now, I don't
know anything. I'm working in general construction and sourcing of materials. I know
nothing about. It's okay to walk in and say, I don't know what you're talking about. Can
you please enlighten me? It's amazing that you've learned because again, you're
making people feel important. You're demonstrating some courage by saying “Geez, I'm
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just not sure about this”. Then you gathering that new information. But then when you
do have the information enough to say, I'm willing to develop a strategy now, having the
courage to stick with it's important because consistency and leadership is also very
important.
Elizabeth Luckman: I love the work Brené Brown has done because it's opened up a
conversation about emotions and the very humanity that we all share that we so often
tried to hide at work.
Elizabeth Luckman: Being courageous means being honest with ourselves about how
we feel and sharing that with others and listening to how others are feeling too, so that
we can forge ahead together, solve problems more effectively, and find a path to
enjoyment at work. The courage to say, I'm willing to practice growing as a leader
means getting vulnerable with ourselves and others for the sake of growth.
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Lesson 4-5: Leadership Growth: Commitment
Leadership Growth: Commitment
Elizabeth Luckman: To grow as a leader requires commitment. I'm fairly confident in

saying that anyone watching this knows the feeling of setting a goal and then not being
able to commit for some reason or another. Maybe you want to eat healthier or exercise
more, or read more books or take a class, and it never happened. There are a variety of
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reasons excuses we make that get in the way of our commitment to our goals,
especially goals related to our personal growth. I'll share two excuses here for us to
consider. Those are; it's too hard, and I don't have time. Let's break those down a bit.
The first excuse; it's too hard. Of course, it is. Growth is challenging. But research on
goal-setting and motivation can help us deconstruct this excuse. Setting big picture
goals, stretch goals or other goals that involve substantial change are helpful for setting
up our future vision. But they can seem daunting and can undermine our motivation to
achieve those goals in the moment. We can make it more likely that we will feel
motivated to work toward our goals by making smaller, more precise steps toward these
big goals. Maybe you've heard the term SMART goals. Goals that are specific,
measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-based. I'm far more likely to work on
developing a trusting relationship with a single employee at a time instead of my whole
team. I'm more likely to commit to self-reflective practices to improve my self-awareness
if I start with a few minutes a day or even just once a week than if I say I'm going to
engage in personal self-assessment for an hour every day. The second excuse, I don't
have time.
As my mother would say, "Well, you won't if you keep thinking you won't." It feels like
there is never enough time in the day to achieve everything we want to. Work, family,
the daily rituals of life; getting through a to-do list sometimes seems impossible. We're
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living during a time when most people around the world glorify productivity. Being busy
is almost considered a virtue. But it's worth asking ourselves why this is and how we
can overcome it. There are a couple of problems with this excuse. The first is that we do
make time for things that are important to us. Actually, it's a really interesting test of your
personal values to see what you spend time on. Another problem is that we are often
more engaged in meaningless actions instead of productive activity. Productivity and
time management research demonstrates that we spend a significant amount of time
answering emails that are reactive and less time in deep work or working without
distraction on creating something, depending on your field of work, that could mean
writing, connecting with clients, building a product, coding, etc.
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Jim Luckman: Ask about employees that say you just don't have time to do this. I think
it's almost a universal thought and reaction to doing this. I get it everywhere and I
understand it because there are two types of waste that are imposed by managers on
people and organizations everywhere. It's mura and muri, that's the Japanese word for
two things. One is overburdening and forcing variation or creating variation. If you think
about it, almost every company does that. Particularly the good employees get more
work to do all the time because their bosses say, "Sally will get it done." Sally all of a
sudden gets all of this work to do and she's overburdened, then she can't do anything
very effectively. The second thing is that bosses say, they come in on Monday and say,
"We need to fix that, " and on Wednesday they go, "You need to fix that," and on
Thursday they say, "You need to fix that." It's variation, they create variation. Those are
the two things that everybody has. So, given that, you're in that situation, your
overburden, your feeling this pressure, this variation, and everything. Now, you come in
with this lean stuff and you want me to carve out time and do this. I don't have time for
that. Everybody's got it. My comment is if you really can't do anything other than what
you're currently doing to get the job done, keep doing it. Put this off until you have some
space; you'll have some space. But if you don't do it, you'll never have space. Carve out
a minute a day or two minutes a day or three minutes a day. Just think about it a little bit
and see if you can create more space to sharpen your own saw to get rid of all of those
things, many of those things that are causing you to be overburdened and dealing with
all this variation. When I go through and do a workshop with a group of people, I save
five percent max. Don't even start anything on this and expect to do any more than five
percent. Just take five percent of your day on. How much time is that? What's five
percent each week? To be honest, people take stuff home with them, too, so you might
31

just take five percent of right before you go to bed at night and think about this stuff and
say, I might try something different tomorrow. So, just start off real small and don't make
a big deal of it. Over time, you'll grow more and more space to do continuous
improvement and think how to solve problems.
Elizabeth Luckman: To commit we need to move beyond these excuses and create a
practice for developing habits that will stick and habits that will help us commit to
growing as leaders. Creating habits is more than just being motivated to do so, it
requires discipline. I have a good friend who is an executive coach in business school
professor who always reminds people that motivation is just one part of the equation.
Discipline is key to building sustainable habits. Discipline really means “a sustainable
plan of action for you”. Have you ever gone to a seminar or workshop and been so
inspired to change your behavior at work only to have that wane once you get back
because of the regular cadence of your job? That's because you needed a plan; a plan
to build habits and I'm going to suggest four key things to help with this plan. Develop a
regular practice for reflection and learning, be prepared to fall off the wagon,
connect with others, and know your purpose.
32
How can we build commitment in a way that is sustainable? Number 1, have a regular
practice for reflection and learning. Are you familiar with the scientific method?
Scientists develop hypotheses, design experiments to test these hypotheses, evaluate
the results, and then make adjustments to their hypotheses, and complete the whole
process over and over again. This is how scientists learn, and actually, it's how adults
learn, too. Models of adult learning suggest that the way we absorb and integrate new
knowledge is that we take in new information, we test it out, we evaluate the results,
and we adjust. So, in this context, we can think of creating a meaningful plan as
engaging in the scientific method, we need a regular, consistent, and easy way to follow
experimentation and learning.
33
Jeffrey Loewenstein: Learning is hard. What I find is helpful for reflection is to structure
it. And I typically think about reflection in four steps. The first thing I'm trying to do as I
reflect on something is to identify some kind of, if then, cause-effect relationship.
When I look back at this meeting, or I look back at this project, or I look back at this
situation or events or whatever, I want to digest my feelings, I want to see if I miss
something, all that, but then I want to, at the end of that, see if I can pull away some
generalization, some lesson for myself.
Then what I want to do is provide the argument for why I believe that lesson. If I
think in this situation that instead of talking, I should've listened. Why? What's the
outcome that would have produced? Listening more makes people trust me more.
There's a potential generalization. Why do I believe that might be? What's the argument
for that? So, if I was going to try to convince my colleague to listen more in order to
foster trust, what would I say to make them believe that to be true? What happened in
this experience that led me to believe that? Is there anything else in my life that makes
me think that's a good lesson? What's the lesson? Identify not just moods, feelings, etc.,
but what's the lesson? Then, what's the argument for that lesson? Then the next step
is what I think of as complexities. What are the boundary conditions? When might be
hard to do this? When might it not work? There are always limitations, nothing is always
true. Things are usually true or often true or sometimes true, true under some
conditions. What are the conditions under which this lesson holds? Then the last one is
implementation. What am I going to do differently now that I appreciate this lesson?
34
What is the behavior, practice, saying? Photo on the wall. What am I going to do
differently, so that I remember to use this lesson rather than forget about it? So, when I
think about reflection, what's the lesson? What's the argument for the lesson? What are
the limitations? What am I going to do to make use of this rather than leave this behind
and forget about it?
35
Elizabeth Luckman: The second is to be prepared to fall off the wagon and have a
plan. Part of the reason this is so interesting to me is because I have always been really
good at setting a great big goal, getting excited about it, breaking it down into daily
goals, and then I miss ones day, maybe I wasn't feeling well or I was preoccupied or
whatever, I think, "Well, I missed that day, I might as well give up." We actually need to
have a practice for what happens when we aren't achieving our smaller goals. Is it
because we didn't set the right goal, to begin with? Maybe we need to course-correct.
Or did we simply have a bad day and we need to forgive ourselves, and think about
tomorrow as a fresh start? Research on fresh starts show that they do matter; they
matter for motivation and commitment to our goals. Decide whether your practice needs
to change or if you just needed a break, either way, you can keep going. The third is to
connect with others. You might have heard it said that if you share your goals with
others, you're more likely to achieve them, and this is true. Making a commitment to
others holds us accountable. It's why gym buddies are such a good idea. It's easy to
skip the gym if it's just you, it's harder to tell your friend who's already in the car and
headed to the gym that you're going to leave her hanging. Growing as a leader is an
individual journey, but it is not an isolated one. Other people are on leadership growth
plans of their own, and creating these connections can be so helpful. When I was
completing my leadership coach training, I found that my commitment to my own
practice of leadership growth felt like it took off because I had this group of like-minded
people to talk to, share ideas with, and to go to for advice.
36
The fourth is keep the big picture in mind. What is your purpose? Don't get scared by
the word purpose. I don't mean you have to write a treatise on your reason for
existence, I simply mean know why you're interested in developing as a leader. Why is
this journey important to you? What are you hoping to accomplish throughout it? Why is
a powerful concept and having that big picture goal in mind can be a powerful way to
help us stay committed to our daily exercises. Growing as a leader requires
commitment, and that means we have to build sustainable habits that will help us stay
on track while we grow. Create a practice for experimentation and reflection, course-
correct, and use a fresh start when you course-correct. Connect with others who want to
grow as leaders and know your why for choosing to focus on your own leadership
growth.
37

Lesson 4-6: Wrap up
Module 4 Closing
Elizabeth Luckman: All right. Well, we've made it to the end of Module 4 of this MOOC.
Woo hoo! There is a lot of content we covered here and so many different directions
that you can go as a learner. I guess I think we should wrap up with some thoughts
about how this all fits together, some thoughts about how to integrate this. So, how,
what sort of messages would we like to have our learners take away as they wrap up
this MOOC?
38
Kari Keating: Well, we've covered a lot of territory, that's for sure, and some of the
heaviest topics as it relates to leadership. I think for me it continues to dial back to this
idea of step when you're in an interpersonal leadership situation, this on-going ability to
“meta”, if you will, step outside yourself, watch yourself, how you're interacting, are you
getting it right, are you in your values, are you aligned with what you want to be doing,
do you have that uncomfortable feeling like maybe you're out of your values or you
could be doing this better, and then making time on your calendar, making time to spin
reflective periods, deciding how you might continue to grow and do better? So, there's a
lot here to think about.
Elizabeth Luckman: I like that observer piece, in particular.
39
Denise Loyd: I love that. It feels very connected, very supportive of each other,
symbiotic. But there was me and I have to understand myself, my values by influences
and there is always the other, and often times, many others and that is a dynamic
interaction that embodies change because we are influencing and we are being
influenced. And so, for me, I just feel like it all really fits together with that foundation of
recognizing this as a journey and having that growth mindset, that if you step into it
in that way, then it won't always come easy, but it will be a natural of reflection,
engage, feedback, and grow.
40
Elizabeth Luckman: For me, the mental model I use for this and I'm hearing the same,
this growth process, is the scientific method. My approach to developing and growing is
I create an experiment for myself based on a hypothesis. Maybe I was talking before
about vulnerability and so I decide I want to practice that. That doesn't mean that all of a
sudden one day I'm perfectly vulnerable, whatever that means, I'm not even sure that's
a thing. But instead, I pick somebody I trust and I say, I'm going to try to address this
differently today. And then, I have a process for going back and saying, okay, did that
work, did that not work? Do I need to get feedback on whether or not that worked? Then
I iterate my experiment and that's the scientific process. So, I love thinking about
ourselves as little scientific labs that are running experiments all the time and that's
what's helping us grow. And I think that's a mental model that I use to just solidify this
observation, reflection, change, and adaptation, learning, and then changing
again. Yeah, to me, this is such an important piece of this MOOC and what we really
want people to walk away with is this is not a codified body of knowledge.
This is a skill development.
41
Kari Keating: It's a way of being, it's a way of practicing, a way of being, a way of
developing oneself, and recognizing the power and potential in other people. And then,
how can I make myself and be myself in a way that maximizes that power and potential
that the others have.
42

MOOC 1 Transcripts - Leadership and Teams

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Leading Teams: Developing as a Leader

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Module 4: Growing as a leader

Lesson 4-2: Leadership Growth: The Three C’s .................................................................................7

Lesson 4-3: Leadership Growth: Curiosity ...................................................................................... 13

Lesson 4-4: Leadership Growth: Courage....................................................................................... 21

Lesson 4-5: Leadership Growth: Commitment ............................................................................... 28

Lesson 4-6: Wrap up ..................................................................................................................... 38

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Elizabeth Luckman: As leaders, we are in a prime position to have to deal with

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Elizabeth Luckman: To grow as a leader requires commitment. I'm fairly confident in

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

Professor Elizabeth A. Luckman, Kari Keating & Denise Lewin Lloyd

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