Intentional Leadership Habits: Comcast + Sky TV Agile Leadership Podcast with Katie Anderson

Speaker 1 (00:00.056)
It’s wonderful to welcome Katie Anderson to our podcast today. Katie Anderson is the author of a very famous book called Learning to Lead and Leading to Learn. This book is around her remarkable journey with a Toyota leader, Isao Yoshino. In this book, Katie unpacks some of the profound insights around leadership, creating the culture of learning, how to be a real role model as a leader. So Katie, welcome.

It’s really good to have you here with us at Sky. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for the invitation. I’m really looking forward to the conversation.

Thanks, Katie. And Katie, I have to say, I read this book earlier this year, and it completely transformed some of my thinking. I’ve seen it in other courses and books, but nowhere have I read a book which is so personal, so real. It’s about someone’s experience over 40 years. And you give such good advice about how I can make it real as a leader and as a coach. So tell us, how did you meet Isao Yoshino?

It was actually 10 years ago this week, I had just moved to Japan with my family for my husband’s job. But I, as a lean and continuous improvement leader and practitioner, actually I just started my consulting practice the year before, was thrilled to move to Japan to go to the birthplace of the Toyota production system and immerse myself in that culture and really understanding so much more.

Speaker 2 (01:30.954)
And I had met Mr. Yoshino at a conference a few months before we had moved to Japan. And he’d given me his business card and said, look me up when you move to Japan. And then in April of 2015, I jumped on the Shinkansen and met up with him for what I thought would be a once in a lifetime opportunity to spend the day with this incredible Toyota leader and go visit Toyota city and see the Toyota plants. And it became one of the most important personal and professional relationships of my entire life.

what started as just some conversations and I was writing a blog because I wanted to share this unique experience of me being a lean practitioner, someone who is passionate about continuous improvement organizations and being in Japan. And that became the genesis five years later of what emerged as Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn. And it really was the culmination of me trying to deeply understand the real essence of what

All of us around the world are trying to emulate in our companies this high performing learning culture and what it was really all about. And the opportunity I had to have these enriched conversations with this incredible 40 year Toyota leader was just one I couldn’t not share with the world.

It’s really fascinating because we all know about Toyota, how they did things so differently and they brought about the Kanban and they brought about some very innovative ways of dealing with leadership. How would you sum up your book, first of all? How would you sum up if somebody asked you that elevator pitch?

Well, I believe the title really describes what the essence of the book is. It’s learning to lead and leading to learn. And it describes Mr. Yoshino’s, you from the very beginning of his career, coming out of university all the way through past his retirement of what we have to do to learn to really lead the things we have to unlearn about what we believe leadership is about and learning through trial and failure. And then leading with truly an attitude

Speaker 2 (03:30.254)
towards helping other people learn, achieve goals, create alignment in organizations so that we can really achieve what the organization needs to do to create value for their customers. And so it’s a cycle of learning to lead, leading to learn, and what I now call a chain of learning that we have to create across our organizations to really be successful. It just can’t be individual leaders having all the answers. It’s really creating this connected chain of learning that builds and strengthens.

know, individual chains are only so strong as individuals, but it’s the bond between us, those links of learning that really create the strength in organizations.

Isn’t your podcast named along that line?

Yes, so I’ve titled my podcast Chain of Learning because it’s the intention of my podcast that together we can learn and then build that into each other’s organizations. So this chain of learning together. And I believe that is the essence. When I first started talking with Mr. Yoshino, I was really curious, what is the secret to Toyota’s success? mean, so many companies, your company, all the companies I’ve worked with both internally and externally are trying.

to figure out that essence of the Toyota way, the Toyota production system, the offshoots of what we call lean or agile, all comes back to the same concept. And he kept saying, there is no secret. There is no secret. And one day he said, you know, the only secret to Toyota is its attitude towards learning. And he went on to say, we don’t even notice and we take it for granted. And that’s the opening line in my book. The only secret to Toyota’s attitude towards learning. It’s not about the tools.

Speaker 2 (05:07.648)
It’s not about the beautiful visual artifacts. It’s not about all of that. All of those are enablers to create improvement. But success is founded on an attitude towards learning. And I was actually talking with him earlier this week and he says, all is about people. We were talking about how do you get leaders to understand what it’s really about? And he said, leaders have to understand. It starts with them and it starts with their belief and support of people.

and then that attitude towards learning as well.

Tell us a bit about if I’m a leader in the Western culture, how different is leadership in Western cultures compared to what you picked up when you were in Japan with Mr. Yoshino?

Yes, and so I’ve continued over the last decade to return to Japan twice a year. I lead these immersive executive leadership learning trips to Japan to help global leaders understand also the essence of this. But also we unpack like what is specifically Toyota? What is more specifically Japanese culture and what is really just sort of human elements? And I really want to emphasize this is not just a Japanese thing. Not all of Japan is run or approached the way that Toyota leadership is.

although there are some components of Japanese management practices historically that influence this. Toyota also did something different. They flipped some of those more challenging aspects of Japanese culture on its head, like how they leveraged the hierarchy. Japan traditionally has been a very hierarchical society, but they flipped that from being a command and control type of structure to really…

Speaker 2 (06:45.274)
using that hierarchy, but it’s that chain of learning that leaders are there to set the direction and then provide the support that enable their people to achieve that direction, but not just waiting for the leader to say everything, but really creating innovation and problem solving capabilities at all levels. And then there are some things that they learned from Toyota pulled and got externally from their visits to, in particular to the United States, but other Western countries. In fact, you mentioned Kanban earlier, that idea

of Kanban, of the poll system, was inspired by visiting US supermarkets and seeing how the milk was put out first. And so it was this poll system and they thought, how can we create more poll in our organizations and use visual systems so that we know when the next step is needed? So they were inspired by and built upon best practices, know, globally, and then brought it back together. So it’s not just a Japanese thing. It’s not just a Toyota thing. And there are some elements of humanity as well.

Yeah, tell me, I read in the book that there was quite an important stage in Toyota where they realized they had a lot of issues and there were a lot of problems and they did something quite profound in that moment. It was, I think, back in the 70s, is that right?

Yes, so this was in the mid 1970s when there was the global oil crisis and there are a few things going on. One, the oil crisis was causing, you know, people were buying fewer cars. And then secondly, Toyota was having a quality issue in the production of some of their cars. And this was a big crisis. The senior executives realized that they needed to do something differently. And what was really interesting and what the reason I got to learn so much about this is that Mr. Yoshino

was supporting the senior executives around their strategy functions at that time. He was in his, you know, his early, late 20s, early 30s. And so he had like a purview to what was happening at the executive level. And the executives came together and realized that the real root cause of this was that their executive team was not aligned in the real mission critical purpose of the organization.

Speaker 2 (08:58.002)
and that there were a lot of silos that had developed across the organization. they that it was, you know, the quality wasn’t just a manufacturing challenge. It included all the other aspects. It included, you know, the engineers who were the product development and included HR because they were supporting, you know, the people development included all the functions. And they realized it came down to how leaders were leading. And in the 1960s,

Toyota had won the Deming Prize, I think it was 1966, right before Mr. Yoshino had joined Toyota. And so they were one of the highest quality companies globally and something had happened. And Mr. Yoshino likes to say that the Toyota executives realized they had to re-tighten their belt, that generationally, the organization had really forgotten how to lead and that they needed to create.

reinvest in their management capabilities of their senior most leaders who would then develop the people below them. And they created this two-year intensive leadership development program, but it’s different than what we would consider like a leadership development program of a few classes. It was both highly immersive and also included the executives talking to them as well, but they had to work on real cross-functional problems and learn how

to solve problems and importantly, how they as leaders were going to develop people. And this was called the ConPro program and it was all about how do you develop management capabilities. And at the same time, they developed this cross-functional management of the chief engineer who would really be working across, it wasn’t someone who functionally had ownership of all the silos, but they realized that the silos that were being created or had created over time,

were actually not serving their customers. That the real value flowed for a customer, that the customer doesn’t care about all your functional silos, that you really have to look about their experience and that someone needed to be looking across that experience and then oversee how there was greater communication and coordination across those silos. So it was two things, really working on how the individual leaders at the senior level

Speaker 2 (11:13.986)
were very clear on their top priorities and how they were also going to develop and support their people to be able to get those priorities. So not them, just themselves, but how were they communicating, coordinating, and supporting. And then the cross-functional management so that there was greater collaboration and understanding of what the value creation of the organization was and how they were going to make that.

Yeah, and in your book, I like the way that you’ve laid it out because you put it into lessons, which helped me to articulate and put it into clear lessons that I can apply. And your first lesson, you talk about GEMBA. Can you tell us or tell the audience what GEMBA is? And just also, when you talk about GEMBA, does it apply to executives or is it only senior managers?

Yeah, Yeah, and I realize I’ve also haven’t addressed one of your first questions, which is I had a totally different vision of how this book was going to emerge. I thought it was going to be a joint collaboration of stories from my experience around working with companies in the West and then Mr. Yoshino’s experiences and under leadership lessons. But I realized that that wasn’t going to serve the reader in the same way and that the richness of his stories of truly learning how to lead and then leading to learn.

actually allowed the lessons to emerge more organically for the reader. So that’s how I ended up structuring it. And I think, as you said, it really does speak in a different way than most business books are because it really is a genuine human person’s story of that. Going back to the concept of Gamba, this is one of the most fundamental parts of what makes the Toyota Way successful and is a critical part

that sometimes we miss when we’re thinking about lean and agile as well, is we have to get out of our offices. So, gemba is a word in Japanese that actually means the place something happens. So, a weather reporter would say, I’m going to gemba to look at the weather. But in the business environment, it means the place the work happens. And we talk about going to see, going to gemba, and it means really going to actually see what is happening with the work.

Speaker 2 (13:24.588)
And there’s really important thing there. It’s go to Gemba with purpose. It’s not just the management by walking around. It’s really going to see to check on process and to check in with people to show that you care. And going to Gemba is a critical skill and behavior for leaders at all levels. So of course, frontline managers tend to be in the workspace more frequently just by the nature of their job.

Senior leaders also need to go and see and check to really understand what’s happening in their business and what’s happening for their people. And their go-sees may happen in different ways and in different rhythms. They’re not going to be there at the same amount of time. But it’s critical to not just be relying on reports and hearsay of data, but really validate, get facts, and really connect with people to understand what’s happening in the business. And Mr. Yoshino has a great

story at the end, was leading a failed business venture. And he was responsible for this. Ultimately, it did fail. But he had called out to, I really need you to come see what’s going on. And Mr. Cho cleared his busy schedule. didn’t know, Mr. Yoshina didn’t know if this would actually happen. Cleared his busy schedule. He and some of his top people came out to Orlando, Florida, where this business was happening and went to see, to really understand

what the problems were. He actually, he asked, don’t just tell me the things that are going well. I came here to see the things that are challenges, the problems, so that I can know how I need to help. And so it was just really important to go and see and not to go with a place of looking to blame, but going to see how we can help because this is ultimately, you we all want the organization to succeed or to achieve the goals.

So it’s interesting you talk about don’t go there to blame because in lesson two, you touch on that culture of blaming and you talk about Mr. Yoshino, says, he, and I quote him, he says, managers need to create culture where people are not afraid of making mistakes. We can learn many things from mistakes we make. And that’s something which really grabbed my attention because I think we all say that.

Speaker 2 (15:34.21)
Yes.

Speaker 1 (15:43.658)
in our careers and in our jobs, like, you know, we don’t blame anyone. But sometimes it’s not necessarily what you say, but how you showing up or the shadow that you cast as a leader. How do we change our culture so that we can actually embrace learning?

I get asked this question all the time. And the answer is it starts with you. And by you, I mean each individual leader listening to this podcast. It starts with how you intentionally react when mistakes or challenges happen. One of the best examples I have of this is how ingrained this was in the Toyota culture. So picture this. You’re just out of college. You’re 22 years old.

and you’re assigned to your first your first role and you’re going to be working in the back office. You’re not even going to be working on the front line, but your orientation program puts you out on the front line for a little bit. And you are assigned one simple job for a few weeks. You are to pour a can of paint and a can of solvent into a big vat every few hours. And well, not surprised. You’re working at a car manufacturer. And as the cars come down the line, this paint will get sprayed onto the cars. Well, simple, right? Shouldn’t be any problem.

One day, one of the shop for leaders runs into the paint store, into the paint shop and says, stop, we have to stop the line. hundred cars need to be repainted. The paint is literally dripping off the cars and all eyes go on you. What would happen if this was you in your first job or if you were a new employee at your current organization? some, yeah, with someone probably

be mad at you, yell at you, blame you.

Speaker 1 (17:29.752)
Your performance appraisal would go down in

Yeah, yeah, like there’s definitely something negative that’s gonna happen to you. I mean, you’re in your probationary period. Maybe you’d even get fired in some organizations. mean, everyone’s face when I share this always like looks like, my God, everyone has a look of fear because we know most likely there would be some level of blame or anger or something negative happening towards us.

Even in our culture, the people around you would probably, even though they’re not saying it, you could feel their judgment.

Yeah, yeah, like, he did something bad or she did something bad. Well, that is not what happened to Isau Yoshino in his first months at Toyota. And there are two things that are really astounding to what the intentional decisions his bosses made in how they reacted to that situation. The first is they came over and asked, what was the process you took to pour the paint in the solvent into the vat? And he held up, you know, a little nervous. He held up the cans.

and they realized they looked nearly identical. And so they said, we see that this would be very easy for a newcomer to make a mistake. So they worked together and thought, how can we mistake proof this for the future? But even more astounding, and Mr. Yoshino was laughing decades later when he remembered this because even he was thinking, wow, this is incredible. They said, thank you. Thank you for making this mistake. You highlighted to us

Speaker 2 (18:56.792)
that we hadn’t set the working conditions up for you to be successful, and that’s our responsibility. So thank you for making that mistake because this showed we had an opportunity for improvement. So if you want to create a culture where people feel welcome to bring forward ideas or to experiment or to be engaged and to try their best, your response to mistakes and problems is critical. How can you reframe and switch

from anger and blame to one of embracing the mistake as an opportunity for improvement and even thanking someone for that mistake. Most people don’t come to work trying to do things wrong or bad, to err as human. And so if we can embrace this, we are gonna actually improve so much more. really the foundation of Toyota’s attitude towards learning is that no problem is a problem. So if we pretend that we have no problems,

That’s actually the biggest problem because those issues are existing. We’re just not addressing them or making them visible. And so they’re still going on. We’re just pretending that there’s no problem. And to expect perfection in people is also impossible. know, truly we are going to have mistakes and be imperfect. But if we can embrace that as a continual process towards excellence. And it’s not that Toyota doesn’t want high performance. They absolutely do. But they understand that the

process to get towards high performance includes not being right the first time, making mistakes, and knowing that there’s always going to be opportunities for improvement. So thank you for making that mistake. That’s the critical switch.

It’s almost like the leaders took responsibility for the environment. And that’s what’s so profound about that is that is like a very clear mistake and it obviously had a cost involved. And yet the leaders still came over. They had firstly the time to come over and inquire. And then after inquiring, they actually took the responsibility on themselves.

Speaker 2 (20:43.725)
Yes.

Speaker 2 (21:00.844)
Yes. Well, two things on that. They were actually out in Gemba. So this would have been the manager and the frontline supervisor were out in the workspace. So when something major happened, they were there and could come over and provide assistance because that is a key part of their role at Toyota is not just to be off in an office, but to be spending time down on the floor in the Gemba. Right. And then, you know, even Mr. Yoshino in reflection said their first response internally as a human being probably like, my gosh.

The difference, and this goes back to a concept I talk about all the time, is intention. And I like to say intention equals heart plus direction. heart by like, what’s impact you wanna have? What’s your purpose? What’s sort of the true experience you wanna be creating? then direction, what actions are you taking that are in alignment or not in alignment with that? And so they were more intentional rather than reactive. They had an experience, probably a frustration.

but then they didn’t act on it. They then said, okay, what’s that impact I wanna have? I actually wanna be creating this culture that embraces problems and mistakes. And so then they went over and they inquired about the process, found some ways to mistake proof and recognized that it was their responsibility to set up the working conditions for him to be successful.

It’s almost leaders have to take a step back and we have to realize if somebody’s perhaps underperforming in the office, we need to actually go to GEMBA. We need to find out what is happening in that situation because nobody comes to work to underperform. What is happening? Have we set up the environment right for them to succeed? That’s what you’re saying.

Yeah, absolutely. And so I like to say that the leaders role and what I call leading to learn is first to set the direction. What are the goals or the targets or direction that organization needs to go in? Then provide support. So how are we creating the conditions for people to be successful? It could be are we developing their capabilities to be successful? Are we creating the systems and structures in the organization for them to be successful? Whatever support that is for them to actually be working towards success, towards those

Speaker 2 (23:11.468)
you know, that direction you’ve set. And then third is to develop yourself because that’s hard to do as leaders because it means we have to show up in a totally different way than we often have been taught about leadership.

And that goes back to one of your, you wrote for industry week and you wrote about the serious leaders are committed, consistent and patient. And that you wrote last year in September, if I’m not mistaken.

Yes, and this came out of even more conversations with both Mr. Yoshino over the last five years since I’ve written the book, as well as continued time in Japan with other senior executives of other successful Japanese companies. And it all comes back to they are really, truly serious about the culture they want to create. Mr. Yoshino will say this repetitively, leaders must be serious. And by serious, don’t, you we don’t mean stern.

but they must be committed truly to what the organization culture is going to be in their role in creating it. And that’s also serious about what’s the outcomes that they need as well, but it’s not this management by objectives, it’s management by process. And so being really serious about that and being patient is the other thing that Mr. Yoshino talks about all the time. I think one of the biggest differences often in Western cultures versus Japanese companies or business culture is that

We are very impatient in the West. We want things done now. We want the quick fix. We want the outcome. We’re driven by quarterly reports. And really, high performance comes through being patient and having the long-term view of knowing where we’re going and building that culture, the capability, and riding out the blips in the economy as well. And it doesn’t mean we don’t want

Speaker 2 (25:03.266)
performance in the now, but to create that true high performing engine, it has to have a longer term view and we have to be a little bit more patient. We have to have time for pausing and reflecting, not just doing, doing, doing. The learning comes from the true reflection and the studying and understanding, wow, what are we really learning from that? What do we need to do differently? We are so reactive and we just keep moving forward. We’re missing the learning. We don’t have that attitude towards learning.

because we are not patient to take the time to learn, to truly learn.

And there’s one story which comes to mind when you say that. And that’s when Toyota wanted to move into the American market. And they looked at their competitors and they made a call and how they actually created or aligned the culture. Tell us about that story.

Well, this was back in the 1980s and this is a very famous case study globally. You can read about it in a lot of business school magazines. This is the Numi joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. And what’s interesting is Mr. Yoshino shared the inside scoop that Toyota actually wasn’t the first to enter production in the United States of the Japanese car manufacturers.

They waited with some patience to see what some of their competitors were doing first and to learn from that. And then they actually chose one of the hardest partner situations out of anything because they knew if they could learn and be successful in this partnership with an organization that was actually not performing well and had a really and truly antagonistic union relationship between the union and management.

Speaker 2 (26:46.104)
that they could be successful anywhere. So they chose a hard partnership so that they could learn from it. They waited with patience to allow their competitors to go first so that they could learn from that as well. And then they were highly successful. mean, clearly Toyota has dominated the car manufacturing globally since then. And what they did there is they created this joint partnership, actually near where I’m based in the San Francisco Bay area. And they took

the what was the the worst performing GM plant and said, we’re going to partner with you and we’re going to make cars together. And so they they knew that they had to invest heavily in teaching a different management style and practice to the leaders. But most of the leaders actually came from that GM plant, especially the the front line managers. And, you know, and they so they took them and to an immersive learning experience, hundreds of them. And actually, Mr. Yoshino was in charge of

creating and leading that training program for the American leaders who were coming to Japan on these three week cohorts and Excuse me. He knew that that he was sort of tasked with changing their culture and I’m using air quotes that he was his responsibility was to change their culture

before you go, what was wrong with the culture did he think? What did they want to change?

Yeah, so it was this antagonistic culture between, you know, there people were intentionally sabotaging the cars on the line. I mean, these are well documented, like people were, you know, removing like frontline employees were so upset with management, they were, you know, actually causing harm in the cars, like putting gum in cars or removing a bolt. And hopefully no one got injured. But there was this real just bad, bad attitude.

Speaker 2 (28:34.114)
between management and the union because they had a really bad relationship. They weren’t treated with respect and the management thought, those people are doing a bad job. And then the frontline people thought, we’re not respected. And at the same time, there are a lot of quality issues because they were looking at just getting the cars off the line, production, production, production. That was the number one. They weren’t looking at total quality.

They weren’t looking at people and that the end result was the most important. And so people were working around the system to get to that end result, which actually was causing more problems as well. And I realized, I didn’t share one of the things that was really important about the, it was less than a handful of years earlier during that oil crisis, that Toyota had realized that

quality was the issue of everyone, not just manufacturing. And so they had to really look at all of management’s capabilities there. Well, the same thing, when they had that same attitude when came in with the front line managers in the manufacturing area, understanding quality starts, they’re actually the people doing the quality work, but it also is the responsibility of all the leaders across the system. And one of the most powerful

switches or what Mr. Yoshino believes is like the key element that switched the culture because he knew that he couldn’t, so he was tasked to change the culture and he knew that it was impossible. He could only create the conditions that allowed those leaders to change their culture. We can’t force a culture change. It has to be owned by its individual leaders’ behaviors and the collective sort of, you know, the collectiveness of those accepted behaviors.

And so he wanted to create the conditions that allowed those leaders to see something different. And he believes that the number one most important thing that happened was that when they came to Japan and that they saw that the line was stopped multiple times when anyone had a problem. So there’s this concept of and on. And on is a word in Japanese that actually means signal.

Speaker 2 (30:45.1)
So it used to be a line that people would pull, that’s why people often say still pull the Andon. It actually is now a button people push for a light or a signal that they need help. So with expectation at Toyota is that on the front line, that if you’re having any issue that’s gonna not allow you to do your work in the allotted amount of time as the car is coming down the line, you push that button and the front line manager or supervisor comes and helps you.

The expectation is you push that button. In most companies, the expectation is don’t push that button. Don’t tell anyone there’s a problem. Just pass that defect or pass that challenge down the line. then we end up with a ton of, know, we rely on end of line inspection, right? Rather than fixing in the moment. And that actually causes a ton of rework and a lot of cost. So the difference is to stop the line. And this goes back to the concept we talked about of embracing mistakes and failures.

It’s the leader isn’t coming to say you did a bad job. Why can’t you figure this out? They’re there to say, how can I help you figure this out? And so the biggest shift was seeing like they helping them understand that it’s good to say I have a problem. And the critical shift was how the Japanese leaders came or the managers came in and said then said, how can I help? And that shift we if we want people to come forward to share.

the problems or challenges, and then it’s the leader’s response to that. And they saw that, wow, the manager’s there to help. And they actually were more rapidly solving the problems, making sure the cars were going down the line without problems and errors, because they were fixing it at the source. And that was their biggest takeaway that they brought back to the NUMI plant, the former GM plant, and shifted. They shifted their attitude towards mistakes and problems and that their responsibility

at managers at all different levels was to help create the conditions for people to be successful, to provide that support, and that that was the most important part of their role, and that shifted it.

Speaker 1 (32:51.212)
And when I went back after going through this process, the leadership, going through this three week process in Japan, did they see a big change in the bottom line or in issues?

Yes, absolutely. So in one year, this plant went from being the lowest performing of the GM plants to the highest performing. And it came through a shift in management and leadership behaviors. And of course, many other things as well, but that was the critical shift is how they were showing up as managers clear, clear on the direction of the organization and then how were they providing support. And then all those managers and leaders were working on developing themselves to be different and better leaders.

almost like a leader is not the doer. And that’s one of the articles you write about. They’re not the doer. They’re actually creating the environment. That’s really their role, isn’t it?

It is their role and we need to get out of the doer trap. And I also say like, it’s a combination of getting out of the doer trap and we have to break the telling habit. We are so ingrained to being the hero with the right answer, coming in to save the day. And often not because we, you know, coming in with a bad attitude as well, like, I just want to be the one with all the answers. Truly because you want to help or you have a lot of experience. But when we do this, we actually overburden ourselves with

And we may not even know the real situation of what’s going on, but we overburden ourselves with the responsibility of all the problems in the organization. And that is impossible, impossible for any one person or small group of people to do. And so we have to get out of this this sense of being the hero or the doer. And there many other manifestations of the doer. We can be the rescuer. We don’t like to see people not have the right answer, you know, or we just fall into this trap and

Speaker 2 (34:41.506)
There are certainly times, there are absolutely things that all of us, no matter our role, have the responsibility for doing. But the challenge is when we’re taking over the responsibility of doing or thinking that should be that of someone else. And this is where we have to let go and realize what is our true responsibility as at different levels of leadership and how do we then let go.

of doing all the doing and then creating the capability of the people around us to do the things that are, you know, their responsibility.

think it’s really hard as a leader to let go of control because we get promoted because we do a good job and then we get promoted into leadership and we think that doing what we previously did is the right way to go and maybe we don’t understand what a leader is all about or our role as a leader. One thing which did strike me about Mr. Yoshino is that when he had these people over from the states and they were in the three-week training program,

Mr. Yoshino would every evening go and visit them. And on the first day, he made it his mission to actually learn their names. And just by doing that, you write in your book the change that it made for people when they realized that actually somebody was interested in them.

And I mean, this gets back to his comment the other night. It is all starts about people and showing that you care. know, the way to get organization, organizational results are created through our people. And if we can really care about the people, our people as human beings, that is the foundation. Like they’re not we’re not just like cogs in the system to like get output. Everyone at work is a real human being. And if we can show that we care about them.

Speaker 2 (36:35.79)
truly as a human, there’s so much more alignment and engagement and desire to work through problems and through challenging situations because we have this human connection. And that simple step that he took, which was learning all of, I think it was about 30 people who were coming, learning their names, he would study the picture and learn the names, it made a huge difference. And so it’s not necessarily a

saying that’s exactly what you, who’s listening, have to do as well, but how can you really show that you care about the people who work for you as human beings? And then we can work together to all the goals and challenges that need to be achieved for the organization.

Katie, how do we do that if we’re very busy? I mean, we’ve got so much stress at the moment and we’ve got so many deadlines to meet. How do executives at C-suite and senior management, how can they practically go to GEMBA?

Yeah, well, again, going to GEMBA as a senior leader doesn’t mean you’re on the front line of every of every part of your organization. It’s also about making sure that you have clear understanding with, know, how are you checking in and on the people who directly report to you? And then how are you making select, you know, opportunities to go and see over the course of the year that you’re going out to different parts of the business and checking and

Again, it’s not just I’m checking, like checking to be punitive. I’m truly going with curiosity to understand what’s happening in the business and what’s happening for people. And that we have to get out of this busy, this busy, vicious cycle because it leads us to be more reactive, less connected, less intentional.

Speaker 2 (38:32.014)
the sense of chaos. I was just working with a leadership team, which is the same thing. Like we are so busy, we’re under so much chaos, but we know this is not working. And literally we carved out a few two-hour sessions and we talked about the need to pause, the need to ask how do we break the telling habit, ask more questions, how to show up with more intention. And they said it was incredible just taking a little time to break out of that cycle.

and to practice being more intentional and showing up to ask more questions, not give all the answers or just they were running around feeling under this sense of pressure and chaos. They were just like shooting out all of their answers to people. Here’s the answer, here’s the answer, here’s what to do. Their people were disengaged. Their people were not really, they were keep coming back to them for all the questions too. So that was frustrating. But think about that, when your kid comes to you with a math problem and you always tell them the right answer,

what’s gonna happen with the next math problem? They’re gonna come right back to you. And so it’s the same thing with our people. how it can feel like more, but actually when we slow down and take a little bit of time to ask a few more questions and let others take some responsibility or some of their creativity to solve a problem, you are unburdening yourself with all the doing because you’ve taken on the doing that’s not necessarily yours. And that gives more space to actually then,

to connect with people and do the thinking and real executive work that you need to do, not all the stuff that’s happening that should be the responsibility of others. And so it can feel like more, but actually if we can slow down just a little bit, we create the space to do more with, know, we’re not just adding to our burden, we’re actually unburdening ourselves. It’s the art of unburdened leadership when we can create capability in our people and

when we can stop being the hero with all the answers.

Speaker 1 (40:29.688)
Yeah, absolutely. So Katie, tell me about your, how do you support executives and leaders?

Yeah, a few ways. So a big part is holding the space for this time of reflection and learning these key unlearning are what we what we thought leadership was all about. In fact, one of I had the pleasure to talk with Larry Culp, who’s the CEO of GE Aviation at the time he was the head of all of GE. He’d read my book and was really taken with it. We were speaking at a conference together and I asked him what were the

most important things that he had to learn to be an effective leader. And first he said he had to unlearn everything that he learned about leadership in business school. And then secondly, it was about learning to ask better questions, to slow down, and to go out and see to go to GEMBA. And so these are really a lot of the key skills that I help executive teams do, which is how do we unlearn those behaviors that we thought were what leadership was all about.

still hold onto the things that kept us successful. Of course, you can still be an expert in your field. You can acknowledge your expertise, but it’s knowing when is the right time to apply it and when are those times to be helping others take responsibility in the organization. So lot of the work I do with executive teams is having some of these aha moments about.

What’s their real purpose as a leader? And then what are the behaviors that really will align with that to create the impact and outcomes they want? So that’s how to lead with greater intention.

Speaker 1 (42:01.294)
So do you actually go into companies and work with executives like that?

I do, I I often come in and lead learning experiences for companies and then can do some coaching and development work with the executive teams as well and their management teams. I also lead immersive learning experiences to Japan. I’m about to head off on my seventh cohort. I’ve had over 125 global leaders come with me. To have an…

truly an immersive learning experience to understand what this is all about. And it’s not just the trip to Japan. have some pre-trip learning to really prepare leaders about what they’re gonna experience and see and read my book and have some conversations and reflection. And then have an opportunity to step away from the chaos, right? Step away and really see something different and be inspired by what…

effective leadership and successful companies actually look like, mean, not that other companies aren’t successful, but that the secret to success is really around how do you really focus on people, how this high performing people centered learning culture and how do you, what’s your role as a leader to seriously create that? And it’s a great, I love going back to Japan and helping shape these experiences for global leaders and then the impact that they have, how it accelerates

their effectiveness when they go back to their companies because there’s an aha moment that you just can’t get from reading a book or you’re taking a class. It’s really gets back to the heart of leadership and then the how as well. So those are some of the things. And of course I do a lot of keynote speaking and inspirational talks as well. But really I love what lights me up is helping

Speaker 2 (43:49.228)
leaders at all levels from executives to mid-level managers have that aha moment of the switch, how to break the telling habit, how to show up with more intention, and how that not only creates a better feeling for them, but better, truly better outcomes and better engagement in their organization. it’s the linchpin of all the tools. so many work, this is, so many organizations I work with have been, you know, trying to bring in Agile or Lean.

or DevOps to their organization. And they’ve had some success of introducing the tools and working on some projects to date, but they’re frustrated. They’re like not seeing sustainability and it’s not happening across the system. And the root cause almost 100 % of the time is that not working on those leadership behaviors that create the conditions for those tools and the processes to really be successful. And it’s about developing people and it starts with

leaders themselves. And so that is a really important shift in mindset that I try and help leaders to have that you can’t delegate this. It is not going to be successful. You’ll have spot point improvements, but you’re not going to have the systemic transformational change that you’re really seeking in your organization if you don’t also look at how you’re leading and changing. And that can feel really vulnerable, especially for leaders who have been successful and been promoted, as you said, and for leading in a certain way.

But as Larry Culp said, the power comes from unlearning some of those things.

What did he actually have to unlearn?

Speaker 2 (45:24.6)
He had to unlearn that he wasn’t like the expert that comes in that has all the answers. Like, you he came in from being a management consultant out of business school and like, here’s the answer. Here’s the answer. Here’s what you should do. He had to learn to truly go see with curiosity, ask more questions and help extract the thinking of the people who worked with him, like to capitalize on their great thinking because they were the ones closest to the work. And his assumptions of what should or is happening wasn’t often right.

even though he thought that he had a lot of experience, and he did. It doesn’t mean that your assumptions or your ideas are wrong, per se, but you might then get compliance and not engagement, or you could be totally wrong of what’s happening. It’s the same example of, I worked with this really senior executive in a healthcare system. She was a nurse with like 35 years of real experience, and she found a great way to handle her own

expertise that she had. And so she would go to a nursing unit or go out to one of her hospitals and say, I have a lot of experience in similar situations from my 35 years here. But I want to hear, before I share my ideas, I want to hear what’s happening here in your unit. What’s the problem you’re working on? How are you thinking about solving that? And more often than not, they were doing a great job or she could ask a few more questions.

They didn’t need her answer to just jump in and say, well, this is what I would do. They get by giving the space, she acknowledged her expertise, but held the space for them to shape and share their thinking.

And I think that’s the crux of what you’ve been saying in your book is that leaders need to hold that space. Leaders need to provide that environment and that psychological safety so that people know that if they do fail, we’re going to learn from it. We are a team and go to Gamba and be curious.

Speaker 2 (47:09.39)
face.

Speaker 2 (47:21.902)
Yes, I mean that curiosity is so important and it’s easy to, we all love solving problems. I mean for the most part and we, but our assumptions are often wrong. And so how do we show up, how do we pause, show up a bit more curiosity and get out of this reactive mode of just telling everyone what to do because we are not going to really.

get the engagement and capitalize on all of the great thinking, the potential that we have in the organization. And secondly, we can’t forget about the most, like the starting point of leadership, which is to set the clear direction. How to create alignment in the organization about where do we need to go? Because great, you can create this conditions where everyone feels like they have capability and confidence in solving problems and have space, but they could be going off in a hundred different directions or you have

Functional silos like really optimizing for their subsystem, but then there’s, you know, there’s not connection for the consumer experience across those and things are fragmented. So leadership really needs to be very clear on the direction for the overall organization. And then what is the connection down and across through the organization as well. And so that’s the big role of leadership, the sort of, the more senior you get in an organization, getting that real clarity.

and then making sure that throughout the system, you’re developing your leaders capabilities to develop their people and their teams to then work towards that shared goal.

Yeah, and I think just in closing, just wanted to go back to one of the articles you wrote for industry week in October 2023, where it was about better continuous improvement through an acronym called GAPS, Go See Ask, Pause, Study. Tell us a little bit about that. It was a really interesting article.

Speaker 2 (49:10.808)
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (49:14.558)
I distilled down what I believe are the four key behaviors from my own experience of working in organizations as an external consultant for almost 15 years and from my time deeply immersed in Japan and Japanese management and working with Mr. Yoshino. These are the four behaviors that are really going to accelerate performance and engagement in organizations.

And so if we want to close the process gaps, like solve the problems in our organization, a process gap is just the difference between the target or the goal and what’s actually happening. And so we need to close that gap. Well, it’s the same thing with our leadership behaviors as well. So we need to close those gaps in ourselves about how we’re showing up as leaders to really create this high performing learning culture and getting the outcomes that we want. And so the first is go see. So we’ve talked about

the value and importance of go to GEMBA. Go see, get out of your office, go see what’s actually happening and not just relying on reports. And again, going to see is with intention to both check on process and check in with people. The second is ask. Ask more questions, break the telling habit. We can’t be the hero with all the answers. We need to ask more questions to both really understand what’s happening

and to develop people’s capabilities for thinking and problem solving. And we jump to a lot of solutions all the time. This is natural. But how are we really understanding what’s happening? And then the P is pause. And this is that slowing down. It’s not being reactive. It’s the asking a question and counting to 10 to give space for someone to think and answer. I mean, how many times are you asked a question? So does anyone have any questions? OK, move on. I mean, I haven’t even.

process that you would ask a question and you’d be surprised. I am, you know, I have to admit I have a telling habit and I’ve had to work each and every day to stop that and part of that is slowing down. One of my biggest countermeasures for me is to literally count to 10 and after I ask a question, especially if I’m facilitating or I’m in a group environment and I can feel awkward. So I’ll tell people I’m going to pause to give you space to think because that holds me accountable and it also, you know,

Speaker 2 (51:34.848)
It can feel very awkward in the beginning, but you’d be surprised. Like people come forward with an idea or a question at count seven, eight or nine. So we’re missing so much opportunity. So we need to pause. And we also use that pause to like think and also to not be reactive. How do we really be proactive in the way we want to show up? And so I often talk about taking an intention pause. It can be like five to 10 seconds as we transition between meetings, like what’s my purpose in this coming engagement? How do I need to show up? And then

The fourth is S for study, and that’s study and reflect. So there’s the plan, do, study, adjust, or plan, do, check, act, cycle. And we are terrible at spending the time in studying. And this is where the learning really happens. So there’s a Japanese word called hansai, which means reflection or self-reflection. This is the hansai. This is the reflection. At the individual level, like, how am I actually showing up? What’s going on for me?

at the process or organizational level, wow, we tried something and it didn’t work the way we thought it would. What actually was going on? How can we adjust and do something different? Or, wow, that process we took had the outcome we wanted. How can we leverage that for something in the future? But we need to spend more time in the studying because that is where the learning really happens. And again, the only secret to Toyota’s attitude towards learning, and they’re very intentional about building in study time, reflection time in their

organizational process. And we often feel like studying is not productive, right? So we’re focused on plan, do plan, do plan, do or do, do, do, do, do, do, do. And we’re running around doing all this doing, but we’re not learning from it. So the more you can build in a little time for that study. So the gaps we need to close are go see, ask more questions, pause and study and reflect. And if you can do that, you’re going to create so much more learning, so much more improvement and accelerate actually the outcomes and results you need in your organization.

And I think that’s a real big help for leaders to take that away and to be able to put that into action as the gaps.

Speaker 2 (53:38.476)
Yeah, it’s simple, right? mean, well, it’s simple, but not easy. But yes, those are if you can do the focus on those things and just slow down and really focus on that, then all the tools and all of the other technical aspects, which are important as well, they will make sense and can be applied to help you achieve the goals and improvements that you need in your organization.