743: How to Teach Your Expertise to Others, with Roger Kneebone

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Many leaders get into the roles they have because they are experts in their work. But once you’re leading, the work is less about being the expert and more about teaching your expertise to others. In this episode, how to get better at doing that well, this is Coaching for Leaders, episode 743. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate. Learning, Maximizing human potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:48]:
I say that at the beginning of every episode. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. It is, I think, so true for so many of us in that leadership is a learned skill. It’s the thing that most of us really didn’t learn about in school, we didn’t learn about earlier in our careers. And often we show up at a place in our careers where all of a sudden the role has changed. It’s no longer about us just performing well ourselves. It’s helping other people to be able to do the work that we do, to be able to pass along our expertise. And that is so much at the heart of of today’s conversation of how we can pass along a bit of our expertise to others.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:32]:
And I’m so pleased to welcome Roger Kneebone. Roger directs the Imperial College center for Engagement and Simulation Science and the Royal College of Music Imperial College center for Performance Science. He researches what experts from different fields can learn from one another, including a creative team of clinicians, computer scientists, musicians, magicians, potters, puppeteers, tailors, and fighter pilots. He is the author of Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery. Roger, hi. It’s so good to have you on the show.

Roger Kneebone [00:02:08]:
Well, hi, Dave. It’s a great pleasure to be on the show.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:11]:
I probably could summarize your biography by saying that you’re an expert on experts. And I know that may be a little bit oversimplification, but you have really researched this word expert that a lot of times we throw around very casually. But there is so much to think about with this word. And I’m wondering if perhaps we could start with just framing what an expert is and how you think about expertise.

Roger Kneebone [00:02:42]:
I mean, that’s really challenging question. Really, Dave. I mean, first of all, you said that I’m an expert on experts, and I would say I really don’t think I am an expert. I think I’m very interested in experts and what it means to become expert. And the more I’ve thought about It. The more slippery and difficult to pin down that word becomes, really. Because I suppose the first thing to say is, how do you know if somebody is an expert? Because often people say they’re expert, and it’s pretty obvious that they’re not. Even more often, people who clearly are experts don’t describe themselves like that.

Roger Kneebone [00:03:24]:
And I think from my experience, the people I would think of as being most expert are the ones who are least likely to describe themselves in that way. And I think that’s because they are more aware of how far they still have to go or want to go in developing, in whatever they’ve chosen to do, than they are of how far they’ve come. And so it’s not a state that you ever achieve. I think, from the perspective of people who are going through that process. I think expert is a useful shorthand for many people. You, for example, would like to know that the surgeon operating on you or the pilot flying your plane or whatever is expert in the sense. In the rather restricted sense that they have achieved a number of markers of competence and so on. But that’s not the same to me as this much more subtle and interesting and nuanced process that I think of as becoming expert.

Roger Kneebone [00:04:26]:
I think there’s something also interesting, though, in how people describe their work. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who I consider to be expert, and pretty much all of them are very. They’re very modest about the way they talk about their work. They don’t talk in a boastful way, but they describe things that to me would be completely unimaginably difficult, as if they were very straightforward and ordinary. And I start off my book by describing an encounter I had with a taxidermist called Derek Frampton, who was just finishing off a very beautiful big cat. It was a clouded leopard. And I use this example because when I asked him how he did that, he said, and this is him speaking after being a taxidermist for over 40 years, he said, well, it’s. It’s very straightforward, really, Roger.

Roger Kneebone [00:05:18]:
The process is straightforward. All you do is you. You take the clouded leopard, in this case, whatever animal it is, and you take the skin off. And of course, you need to prepare that. But then. Then all you do is you just sculpt a clouded leopard that size and shape out of clay or whatever you’re using, and you put the skin back on. And I thought that was brilliant because that use of the word just. You just sculpt a clouded leopard that size and shape, not in a boastful way, but in a matter of fact way speaks volumes, I think, about the decades of work that Derek has gone through in order now to be able to describe that process as you just sculpt a clouded leopard that size and shape.

Roger Kneebone [00:06:00]:
Because it’s only when you have internalized and made a sort of integral part of what you do and how you think that you can use that word just in a matter of fact way and mean it and not even think about it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:15]:
Boy, I was thinking about that exchange and how conversations like that happen in organizations all day long between experts and the folks that they’re trying to pass along skill to. And I think about the amount of times someone has heard something from someone more senior in their organization or in their discipline say, oh, well, you just, you know, you just do this and this and this. And it’s, you know, it’s very straightforward. And I think it’s really a lot of the folks who are in our listening community find themselves in situations where their whole job, their whole career was about performing well and now it’s about how helping others perform well. And it really is a huge change and it’s an entirely different job. And yet we don’t often see the huge divide that is there between us and the, the Apprentice as, as you talk about in the book. And you have this really beautiful analogy of crossing the haha. And I’m not sure I’m saying that, I’m not sure I’m saying that correctly, but I’m wondering if you could just explain what that is, because I think it illustrates this perfectly.

Roger Kneebone [00:07:31]:
Yeah, the ha ha, just spelled ha ha is a name for a curious convention in English landscape gardening that goes back for several centuries. And imagine that you’re in a large country house with a garden, big, big garden, and then parkland with deer, for example, animals grazing. Well, the people in the house wanted to look out there and see those animals coming up very close because it made them feel that they were in the midst of wild and untamed nature. But of course, they didn’t want the animals to come and eat their flowers in the flower beds. So the ingenious landscape designers came up with the idea of a ditch, a steep, vertical ditch with a slanting slope on the other side. So that if you are sitting in the house looking out towards the park, you don’t notice the ditch at all because you don’t see the vertical drop. All you see is a gentle curve that goes from the garden into the park. On the other hand, if you’re in the park, looking at the house, the house is completely inaccessible because all around it is this huge ditch with a vertical wall that makes it quite clear that you can’t possibly climb up the wall and get into the garden.

Roger Kneebone [00:08:54]:
And so I think I use that as a sort of metaphor, really, for the difference in perspective, framing the people in the house as people who have become, let us say, expert in some area, who see out in the park other people who aren’t yet experts, and they think, well, why don’t they just come in and join me? But of course, if you’re a learner, if you’re a novice, if you’re in the park, all you see is this great big wall, this great big gap between you and the experienced people you can see on the other side, and you can’t really imagine how you could bridge it. And I use that as a metaphor because I think that once you’ve made that transition from being in the park to being in the house, very quickly the pain of that process evaporates and you forget what it was that you found so difficult when you were in the park. And you think to yourself, well, why don’t they just come and join me? After all, I’m doing pretty much what they did and what I was doing at their stage. And it’s a bit more difficult. But now, you know, and there is this complete dissociation between the experiences of people on those two sides of the haha. And I think that it is extraordinarily easy for people to forget how difficult it was to get to a certain stage and then to take it for granted and assume that everybody around them has got to that stage. And I mean, I remember when I learned to drive and it was really, really difficult. And then I took my driving test and I failed it, and I took it, you know, and then I took it again, and finally I passed with all that studying and practicing and going round roundabouts and things.

Roger Kneebone [00:10:34]:
And then after a little while, I thought, well, you know, maybe that wasn’t so difficult after all. And before I knew where I was, I was driving had just become a more or less automatic thing. And I completely sort of erased the pain and the stress of that stage of learning and being tested and going across the point of transition. And I think that that often happens when you’ve just moved from one area, one phase of practice to another. When you get to the new one, you’re surrounded by people who’ve already forgotten what it was like to be at the stage. You are just at now. And I think that’s one of the things about inspirational leaders, is that they somehow have the capacity to join you where you are, rather than stay where they are and expect you to try and bridge a gap which is ahaha. And which you probably cannot bridge until you’ve made those additional steps yourself.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:32]:
You have so many wonderful invitations on how to help others to bridge that gap, to cross the haha. Right. And one of them is the invitation to listen well. And you cite Sophie Yates, your harpsichord teacher, as an example of someone who does this. Well, what is it that she does that really taps into listening?

Roger Kneebone [00:11:57]:
Well, Sophie Yeats is. She’s a very distinguished harpsichord player. I’m not sure how many people are familiar with the harpsichord, but it looks a bit like a piano, but it works very differently. Instead of being an instrument where you press a key and a hammer strikes a string, it’s a little plectrum that plucks the string. So however hard you press the keys, it doesn’t make the note any louder. So the essence of harpsichord playing is being extremely precise about when you press and release the keys on the keyboard. And it’s quite a difficult technique to learn. I’ve been having lessons with Sophie for years and years, and she’s just as a beginner to begin with, at any rate, and she’s a very distinguished performer and recording artist and broadcaster and things, but she’s an extraordinary teacher.

Roger Kneebone [00:12:45]:
And one of the things that she does, I think, is to treat each lesson as an opportunity to identify what that particular person needs at that particular time and shape her teaching accordingly. Because sometimes the difficulties I experienced were technical ones about how to play little tiny ornaments with great precision, or how to do this kind of thing or that kind of thing to do with the physicality of playing notes on these actually quite small keyboards. But at other times, Sophie takes a completely different perspective and doesn’t bother particularly about tiny errors that I’ve been making or tiny slips of the fingers, because she knows that, you know, I’ll be able to go and practice those. She listens in a way that I really can’t listen, because my listening is focusing on the things that I’m struggling to play, whereas she listens with a much more, much broader perspective. And so she’s listening to the shapes of the sounds that I’m making, not just the individual notes. She’s listening to how I balance the notes that make a noise and the silences that surround them. And she’s also making broader judgments, really, about, you know, whether this is the best piece of music, whether it’s time to move on to another piece of music that would open up different challenges, whether maybe it’s time to try playing in front of somebody else, perhaps it’s time to change to a different repertoire altogether. She’s making judgments not about me playing bar 56 of this piece by Bach or whatever it is, but about what is happening to my development as her pupil, one of many pupils.

Roger Kneebone [00:14:43]:
And what is most. What is the right balance of challenge and feasibility, if you like, for me at that stage, which is pushing me on, but not making me lose heart, because what I’m trying to do is totally unattainable. And so that is a combination of having a deep understanding of the repertoire and the music that she herself can play, but also a deep understanding of. Of what it is to teach, what it is to identify what is most important to convey to me at that moment, in that hour or hour and a half, without overloading me, what is best to leave for another time, what is the right thing for me as she has got to know me over these years. And it would be different for somebody else playing the same piece of music. And I think that there’s something there that’s very much a microcosm of leadership, because she is inspiring me, but being extremely critical, not in a negative sense, but in an invaluable, precise, observational sense of listening and watching and identifying what are the things I need to work on in order to move to the next stage. And I can’t do that myself because I don’t know the next stage. I haven’t got there yet, but she has.

Roger Kneebone [00:16:10]:
And I think- I’m sure you get similar examples in, in all kinds of areas, sport and other kinds of music, all sorts of things. But my own experience with Sophie Yates is that that process of being guided by a true expert is what’s allowed me to progress. And I think that as an instance of small scale leadership, I think that covers an awful lot of important ground.

Dave Stachowiak [00:16:39]:
You write, “I found that one of the biggest challenges as a teacher is deciding what not to point out. It’s easy to swamp a learner with long lists, but less is often more.” You alluded to that a bit with how Sophie works with you. Tell me more about that. Of what is it that doing less is actually more helpful in passing along expertise?

Roger Kneebone [00:17:05]:
Well, I think it’s a temptation if you’re. And I mean, I found this in my own experience, in my own career. I was a surgeon to begin with, and then I was a family doctor and then I became an academic. And in each of those I did a lot of learning, of course, but also a lot of teaching. And I think one of the temptations one has to resist as a teacher is to say, oh, well, there are all these sorts of things that I can see would really improve things if you did that, you know, if you sat differently at the table, if you did this with that hand, if you knew about. And you can easily swamp somebody. But actually, if you are an effective teacher or leader or manager or any of those things, I think one of the skills you develop is, is how to put your finger on something that, if addressed, would make a difference at that moment to that person, would help them move on or across some sort of difficulty that they’re encountering. But you can’t do too many of those at the same time because all of us have a limited capacity for what we can absorb and make sense of.

Roger Kneebone [00:18:11]:
And I think that as somebody further along that path, you can often see that there are loads and loads and loads of things that could usefully be fixed. But by pointing out too many of those things, you don’t allow the breathing space and the sort of settling space for that person to do one bit of it better or more confidently. What you can do instead is make them think and pull their hair out and think, oh, there’s just so much of this stuff that I can’t cope with it. I’m never going to be able to learn it all. And so there’s a skill, I think, of great leaders and great teachers, of doing just the right amount at the right time, but no more.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:56]:
Oh, indeed. And as you were saying that, I was thinking of an entirely different situation, but the same concept. Roger that. For years I taught courses for Dale Carnegie, and one of the courses I would teach was presentation skills. And as I’m thinking about that, the lens I would often think about it through was that lens of what’s something I think they could move on pretty quickly and at least on the initial interaction, whatever it was, on the skill we were building, like if, if, if I knew that they could have some early success with a little bit of focus and build some confidence. That’s often where I start. I’m curious how you think about this, though. When you think about offering that one thing or zeroing in on what that one thing might be, do you do something similar or do you think about it differently?

Roger Kneebone [00:19:45]:
No, I think I do think about it similarly. I mean, at the moment. I’m thinking a lot about the idea of performing as the means by which people do expert work. And your example of presentations, I think, is a very good one. In my experience, watching people give presentations using PowerPoint or whatever, I often have the feeling that their starting point has been to create a PowerPoint presentation, and their actual presentation involves reading it or delivering it. And one of the things that I think can work, provided that the conditions under which they are able to deliver what they’ve prepared exactly mirror the conditions under which they prepared it. But if things change, if the technology doesn’t work, if the amount of time available is squashed or something, then they have to go back to a different point, which is not the presentation that they’ve prepared, but their understanding of whatever it is that presentation is all about. Because if they are secure in that, they can then present the same thing in one minute if they have to, or move it to 20 minutes if they have to, or do all sorts of things with it, because that essential understanding of what is the point of what they’re trying to convey will stand them in good stead.

Roger Kneebone [00:21:13]:
And I think people often over focus on the external format of something that they’re, let us say, presenting without spending as much time really being confident about what is the message they want to put across in that example. And so I think that that’s the sort of thing that sometimes you can point out to people. If you judge that people have got to the point in their own development where that will make sense to them, then I think just pointing out something like that is an equivalent of what Sophie sometimes does with me when she makes a comment that is going beyond or in a different direction from the particular technical difficulties I’m having in Bar 17 or whatever, to making me think in a different way about the piece of music as a whole. And I think that applies to, for example, presenting a piece of work or an idea, or pitching something to a group of senior colleagues. Any. Any of these things that people need to do more and more as they go up along these leadership pathways. And so I think there’s something about leaders being able to look and identify things that less experienced hadn’t even thought of as being salient or important. Yeah, and I’m not sure if this is making sense because it’s difficult to put into words, but I think that it’s a skill that you see in very effective and thoughtful and caring leaders whose emphasis is on helping other people to develop.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:44]:
Oh, indeed. I think that’s one of the big misses for early leaders, and I would also say even for experienced leaders is they don’t make the connection out loud. And to go back to your analogy of the haha, they’re at the house, they’re looking out into the garden and they don’t think to connect the bigger picture down to the one thing at a time that they are working on with that person right now. And I find it’s, at least in my experience, it’s the rare person that’s really intentional about doing that. And it doesn’t take a lot. It could be a 30 minute conversation where you’ve been working with someone on a skill and you may spend 26 or 27 minutes focusing on whatever the skill is. And then there’s a sentence or two of why? Like why does this matter? How does it fit into the bigger picture? And when I see people do that, well, it’s really, really special and yet I don’t see it very often.

Roger Kneebone [00:23:55]:
And it’s very skilled, isn’t it? Yeah, all the more so because it doesn’t trumpet itself. But they unlock things or they change frequency or somehow they move things on and lead to a resolution or something important happening. And the more skillful and experienced they are, the less obvious it is what they’re doing. But it’s very powerful. And the really expert ones, I think are able to do that in a way that doesn’t. It’s not a display of bravura or anything like that. It’s just that they have managed to distill all their experience and wisdom to ask exactly the right thing in exactly the right way at exactly the right time. And it’s that knowing where to hit it, you know, it’s that, that, that knowing when to intervene and how, that is the crucial thing.

Roger Kneebone [00:24:54]:
And if they get that sweet spot and hit it right, I think it can make a transformative effect on the person or the people they’re with.

Dave Stachowiak [00:25:03]:
We haven’t said this phrase yet, but we’ve been talking about it, which is the zone of proximal development. It’s one of the concepts you highlight in the book. And I think what we’ve been talking about latches onto this a bit. I’m wondering if you could just explain how do you think about that?

Roger Kneebone [00:25:22]:
Yeah, well, this is an interesting idea. This came from a Russian scholar called Lev Vygotsky and this was in the 1930s, although it wasn’t until the 50s or 60s, I think that his ideas were translated into English and became more widely known. But this particular idea he had lots of them. This particular idea of the zone of proximal development, as he called it, is that essentially, if you have a teacher and a learner, there are all sorts of things that the learner comes with that they already know. And there are even more things that are so difficult that that learner couldn’t possibly know them, hasn’t got there yet. But in between those, there are things that that learner can do with expert help that they couldn’t do on their own. And that’s what Vygotsky calls the zone of proximal development. And I think it’s a really useful idea because it sort of highlights that point in somebody’s experience where they need help in order to understand something or start to start doing something or whatever.

Roger Kneebone [00:26:27]:
But it isn’t a fixed zone. It’s fluid. And it’s the sort of work where a tutor or teacher or whatever needs gradually to fade away and dislim. And it’s a bit like, you know, the experience most people have had of struggling to ride a bicycle and then finding that, you know, they can do it because their father’s holding the saddle behind them. But actually, when they look behind, there isn’t anybody holding the saddle, because all of a sudden they’ve learned to do it on their own. And there’s something about that supported zone where somebody can be helped to move on and to often make a pivotal change in what they’re doing, but with the right kind of support provided in the right kind of way. Because if there’s too much support, it stops them moving on to becoming independent. If there’s too little, they’re not in the zone of proximal development.

Roger Kneebone [00:27:19]:
They’re in the zone where they can’t do it at all. And that’s demoralizing. And so there’s something, I think, in the world of education about teaching teachers working in that zone of proximal development. But I think the same thing applies to leadership in all sorts of ways as well, where people need to have the right kind of challenge to fire up their brains and their energies, but it needs to be the right kind of level of challenge. And sometimes people are catapulted into something where they’re totally at sea and can’t cope, or sometimes they’re kept in something that they can already do and it’s no longer interesting. And so that idea of the zone of proximal development, I think, is a very helpful one in thinking, perhaps from an organizational point of view or an individual point of view, how to make Sense of where somebody is and the kind of help they might need and the responsibility you have to disappear when that help’s no longer needed.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:19]:
You have thought about expertise, researched it and lived it probably more than anyone. I’ve talked to Roger in not only your academic work, but of course your own career of moving between being expert and apprentice in so many different ways. And I am curious, as you have spent the years researching this and talked to so many different kinds of experts in different fields, what, if anything, have you changed your mind on, on expertise?

Roger Kneebone [00:28:47]:
Well, I, I think when I first started, I thought that there would be people who were expert, of course, and I knew a lot of them and that the whole thing would be more clearly defined. You know, that once you’d become an expert, you were an expert and it was fairly straightforward. But over the course of talking to all these many, many people, and particularly trying to put ideas together in the form of a book that would make sense to other people who would be at their own point in any of the many strands of everybody’s life where you’re trying to get as good as you can at what you’ve chosen to spend time and energy doing. I realized that all these people who from the outside look like settled experts, and as a medical student they were hospital consultants, as a gp, there were all sorts of people around me and then doing all this work with craftsmen and performers, looked at from the outside, these experts seem to be as good as they can be. But talking to them, they all say that they are far more aware of the infinite distance stretching out ahead of them than they are of the distance they’ve come so far. And I think that that’s a really important observation because you never get to the point where you can sit down cross legged on a cushion and say, okay, that’s all right, now I’ve become an expert, and stop. Because if you do that, then that is the absolute antithesis of what becoming expert entails. And I think that idea that you’ll never get there, but it’s okay not to ever get there because you are still on a journey that is exciting and productive and constructive and allows you to make the best use you can of all the things you’ve got inside you, I think that’s a very empowering idea because it means that, that it continues to be an exciting journey.

Roger Kneebone [00:30:41]:
And as you go up through an organization, particularly I think these opportunities to think more widely about other people who are coming along that path and how you can help them by not falling into the trap of forgetting all the difficulties that you’ve encountered, but you can put those in a constructive way into helping other people make their transitions into different levels of leadership.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:05]:
Roger Kneebone is the author of Understanding the Path to Mastery. Roger, thank you so much for your time and for your work. I so appreciate it.

Roger Kneebone [00:31:13]:
Well, thank you so much, Dave, for inviting me to such an interesting conversation.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:23]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, three related episodes I’d recommend. One of them is episode 421, help people learn through Powerful teaching. Pooja Agarwal was my guest on that episode. Pooja is a cognitive scientist. We looked at the science behind teaching and teaching is a key skill set for leaders. Almost all of us have teaching skills, expertise as a part of our roles. And often it’s something that not only do we not think about a lot, but most of us didn’t get any training in how to do well. When we take on a leadership role, Pooja walks us through the science and more importantly, the tactical steps we can use that work.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:00]:
A lot of the things that we think work from our childhood. What we saw in school often are myths that science has shown we can actually do a lot better if we follow some of the more Recent research. Episode421 on just where to start and how to put it into practice practically. Also recommended episode 599, the Art of Mentoring. Well, Robert Lefkowitz was my guest on that conversation and he is a Nobel Prize winner. You don’t get much more expert than that. But also interesting about about his story. One of his mentees also won the Nobel Prize along with him. So we talked about mentoring.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:35]:
How does he bring mentoring into his lab with his students, all the folks who are supporting his work. It is a fascinating conversation on how we can show up and to share our expertise through mentoring. A wonderful, wonderful compliment to this conversation. Again, that’s episode 599. And then finally, I’d recommend the more recent episode with Dan Dworkis, episode 701, how to handle High Pressure Situations. Dan, an emergency room physician who in addition to his own practice teaches other doctors how to handle high pressure situations. A fascinating conversation on how we can all do that better as leaders who almost all of us get into high pressure situations at some point. So many of the principles we can learn from that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:22]:
And one of the things that we talked about in that conversation is the Goldilocks principle. It comes right back to the zone of proximal development that Roger and I were talking about that you don’t want it to be too hard. You don’t want it to be too easy. They finding that perfect just right middle zone so key, great compliment to this conversation and also a special thank you to Dan. He’s the one who introduced me originally to Roger’s work. All of those episodes you can find on the coaching4leaders.com website and one of the invitations I have for you today is to set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com it’s going to unlock an entire suite of benefits inside the website. In addition to being able to search all of the episodes by topic and pull my interview notes, one of the other resources that’s inside of the free membership is a suite of free audio courses. One of those courses is Four Benefits to Seek in Professional Development Folks ask me all the time our members and listeners, hey, I’m thinking about getting a degree or certification or I’m thinking about taking this course.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:25]:
Do you think I should do it? And what should I consider in that process? And I always point them to this audio course. Of the four things I think you should look for when you’re considering any kind of professional professional development program, whether it’s formal, informal, a course, whatever, it’s a great way to start thinking about, hey, is this going to be the right fit for me? And the four variables I think you should be looking about and thinking about in any professional development conversation. You can find it inside of the audio courses and the free membership. Again, just go over to coachingforleaders.com to set that up for the very first time. And speaking of things that come in fours, one of our members just this past week was running into a situation that I think many of us have run into in our roles in organizations where upper leadership, the CEO of the organization, had made a policy decision change for budgets that he did not agree with. And he had the respectful conversation before the policy rolled out and the message that came back was thank you for your input. However, we’re still going forward with this policy change and he finds himself now in the situation where he needs to roll out a change that he doesn’t really agree with. Personally, I’ve certainly been in that situation before, and I think many of us have been.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:45]:
It’s an awkward situation to be in where a policy change has happened. You have to toe the company line, as they say, and yet at the same time have the integrity to be able to do that in a way that’s genuine and walks that line between wanting to follow through, but at the same time being genuine about your own feelings about the situation. I talked about that recent journal entry. How do you actually navigate that when you do need to sell a policy change or any kind of change that you don’t agree with personally? How do you walk that line four aspects to think about and consider it is part of my weekly journal series. I send out a journal each week to all of our members that comes on email. It just takes a couple of minutes to read. It focuses on one specific topic and it’s part of Coaching for Leaders Plus. To find out more about how to get access to those and all the benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus, just go over to coachingfrorleaders.plus for more details.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:43]:
And thank you for all of you who are part of Coaching for Leaders Plus already. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Jenny Wood to the show. We are going to be having a conversation on where bringing in a little selfishness as a leader is actually better for everyone. Join me for that chat with Jenny. Have a great week and see you back on Monday.