The Importance of CEO Self-awareness in Leading Organization transformation - Joe Privott at Novus International

Speaker A Would like being an achematician and a theorist and all that stuff is interesting. But I had at the end of the day, something had to work. I just had to be able to apply it and get that stuff to work. There may be five, there may be three, there may be for. It really is what works for me. What can I do to help people, John? See themselves, really see themselves and understand themselves, and then understand others, and then understand a bit how to interact. And as I started looking at requisite organization, I came to the conclusion fairly early that I had a lot of people who valued a role. They had the I call it IPC information processing capability, who had the IPC right, and they had certainly the knowledge, skills, and experience, and they still had mutual disrespect. They just weren't working as well together as I thought they should be working. So I did a 360 feedback on myself, and can you believe what those clowns that I have been working with told me? They said, we can't trust you. I said, Give me a break. If there's one thing I value as honesty, it's clarity. Tell me a time when you couldn't trust me. And synergistics has an instrument called synergistics level three, which I think is sort of where a guy wakes up in the morning. The level one is who I think I bring to work, how I manage a guy that wakes up in the morning. And level two is the people get to tell you who really shows up at work. Well, this guy took me by the collar, figuratively and said, let's look at this guy who wakes up in the morning and who comes to work. High people values, right? You really do have high people values. Yeah, I agree with that. You're a boredom. You'd rather run than fight. You don't like confrontation. It just doesn't seem useful. You'd rather not confront unless you have to. And a little high on the perfection scale, quite high standards. So he says, I'm working for you. I mess up. What do you do? Most likely no, you probably come to my office and you tell me for 30 minutes how great everything you can think about, good to tell me about me, you tell me. And as you're slipping out the door, walking out the door, you may slip under the thing, oh, by the way, you might think about it. Now you're my boss. My selective listening is and your subsequent actions, are they consistent? No, not at all. So once I could get my brain around the real me that was playing out, my motives weren't what my guys thought they were. My motives were pretty good, as a matter of fact. But the dynamics of that as it played out were not as good as they could be. He said to me, It's a good thing, your reason to be bright, because otherwise you'd ruin this company. And he was right. What I did is got him to undress me in front of my staff. And we talked about me. We talked a lot about me. I could give you examples. We talked a lot about some other people. But it gave all of us a permission to talk to each other and to ask each other to hold us accountable. I had a very brilliant CFO, son of a minister, just the greatest soul you've ever seen. You'd love a guy, sarcastic as could be, just absolutely put down, and he's off the scale in opposition. And he finally said, Guys, I don't mean it. Don't take it personal. He said, I've come to realize I cannot help the first thought that comes to my mind. No matter what you say, the first thought that comes to my mind is, you're wrong. He said, But I can do something about that thought that comes to my mind. And he would sometimes literally put his hand over his mouth in staff meetings just to keep from saying things. We began to understand him better. I'm a visionary. Time starts in the future. It's what could be and moves forward from that. Now, we made an edible product made from three most dangerous chemicals known to men. Hydrogen cyanide was the easiest to handle of the three raw materials made by that product. Now, before I understood any of this stuff, I had enough sense to hire an Admiral Rico trained submarine driver to run that plant. And he and I used to have mutual disrespect. I would say, don't you realize you can't keep doing the same thing over and over and over again? We do have a significant advantage over competition, but they're working hard, too. You've got to keep moving that plant forward. And he'd roll his eyes and say, don't you realize what would happen if a cup full of that spilled? We'd wipe the city out. Don't you understand that? Well, guess what? When we took this, who wakes up in the morning test, I'm at the 80th percentile of visionaries, Joe and I. And I'm about 30 in halfway to get there and about 30th percentile in the here and now. Guess where Joe is? 80th percentile here and now and 30 over here. Well, we were able to turn mutual disrespect into mutual respect. And by doing those kinds of things, by expanding the window, whether it's manosty or whether it's wisdom or whatever, but by expanding the window and getting another window to look at the way we were interacting and to stop telling the bad stories. When you do something that I don't like, the first thing I'm apt to do is to tell the bad story. I'm apt to go to your motive. I'm apt to assume what your motive is. So once I tell the bad story about you to me, then it's a lot harder for me to appreciate you and to work together with you. So that's the way this stuff played out for us. And even after getting the IPC and the values and knowledge, skills and experience right, this took us to a next level. I made it a condition of employment that everyone who came to work for us had a conversation. You see, the answer to these tests are only marks on paper. But what you can do is use the results, the answers as a forum for talking about things. You're still your own CEO. So this test can say that you are whatever you're oppositional. You can say, I know that I've been dealing with it all my life. Do you have any better ideas of how I might manage me if the first thought to come to my mind is negative? Or you can say, that's not me, it really isn't. I'll say, Ask your wife, she'll decide whether you're right or score the right. Or you may say, I never thought of me quite that perfectionist. But now that you say that, I can see that about me. So I can manage me a little differently, more perfectly okay. But I just find it can take the effectiveness of a group of people to another level to take a look at that and to have an adult conversation, a respectful conversation about that. Now, I must confess I'm to these type of people. I don't live my life for crooks to protect myself against crooks. I live my life to deal with other people. So I start from the point of view that everybody's bad and occasionally I'd get bit by these kind of people. I don't find this instrument very helpful in sorting out that. So you just have whatever window you can find to look out for that. Thanks, Joe.