Redefining Leadership with Sonya Law: A Deep Dive into Modern Leadership Dynamics

Sonia is introduced in a blog post that I think went up tonight on a new leadership, which is what... I'd like to start this discussion about, but from the perspective of where both Sonia and I come from or came from in the older leadership style. So I worked with a couple of Caterpillar dealers and doing almost all the operational jobs and, you know, went through the hiring and firing and the lack of performance reviews. performance standards and all of the rest of that stuff. It was pretty much a command and control world. Sonia, you had similar experiences with manufacturers and different distributors in Australia. Do you want to comment on where you came from on that?

It was really an old structure. It's been around forever, though, right?

So maybe you can bring us, it's been about three years since you... left the corporate world and went into the consulting, directing, speaking world. Tell us a little bit about how that has been for you and how you've transitioned into that.

Well, you know, give yourself a little bit of a credit for a second. You were doing human resources in mining companies and manufacturing companies. You were kind of, I'm going to call it the conscience of the company. When you now all of a sudden get out into the world, instead of being the conscience on somebody else's issues, you were the analyst on those issues. That's a different role. Not everybody can make that transition.

I think a lot of people would love to be in that same position. People get stuck. They get caught in ruts in their jobs and they don't really consider that there's opportunities for them elsewhere. Yeah. It's really interesting. And that's generational more than anything else, I think. The younger people, and I'm going to just put a cut on it,45 years and down and 45 years and up,45 years and down and maybe it's younger yet, they're not as locked in.

As we were.

Yes, I was very lucky. When I started out, I was kind of the fixer. Wherever there was a problem, they put me to fix it. And as long as I fixed it, they kept me employed. But a lot of people are hired. They're trained on doing the job. Then they're asked to get really good at the job and do it more effectively or more efficiently or faster or fewer errors or whatever. But that's it. Don't look over the wall. Just do this job. I don't think the employees are interested in that anymore, if they ever were. Younger people don't want that.

I'd almost like to say that every employee is a consultant in their own right to their company. But I don't know that many leaders are interested in that kind of view. I have an exercise that I call five things. And it's a kind of a door opener to best practices that I say, okay, write down five things. And I give them a piece of paper. And we take some time and it's typically a department and say, OK, give me five things that you would like to have happen with your job that would make your life better. And when they finish that, then the next one is, OK, give me five things that you do today that are a real pain in the butt. And then after that's done, OK, give me five things that would make a big difference. in how the company operates within that department.

And then we take those five things in each of those categories, put them up on a whiteboard or a flip chart or whatever, and make the language the same because they'll use different expressions. And it's amazing to me, Sonia, how many items are on the same, are on all three lists. And I look at them and I say, okay, so help me. It would make your life better. It's a pain in the butt to do, and it would help the company. Why is it not done? And there's a lot of blank looks. I think that's got to be a real important part of the new leadership that you've been exposing. Am I wrong? Yeah,

That's another list that I should add, five things you want to learn. Yeah. You know, everything about what I've been doing the last 10 years, I guess, is about helping people identify their potential.

And that's not necessarily something that people want to do. That's tough work.

And when you're younger, you really have no idea. What do you want to do? You know, I tease people, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I say, well. I haven't figured that out myself, and I'm 76 years old, you know. It's kind of difficult. Because as what you've gone through in your professional life, you're evolving, you're moving in different directions as when you say learning and growth, and curiosity is part of that, and challenge is part of that.

I think, you know, I've said this since the beginning of time, everybody wants to do a good job, but everybody can do more than what they think they can. The trick is to interest them in doing that. Not everybody wants to, but they could do more.

I'm in these times, I'm telling everybody I want to have the people that touch the customers. At the top, like take our pyramid, our typical management pyramid where the boss is on the top, flip it so that the bottom is facing the customers and the leadership, their job is to support and provide for the people that are touching the customers. It's all about developing and maintaining a relationship and that's person to person. And customer service, in my view, over the last 20 years has disappeared. Part of that I can blame on the internet, but that's a bad excuse.

Sports is a wonderful metaphor.

Yeah, well, in life. Yeah, we get I think we need balance. And I don't think we're good at doing that. Perhaps COVID forced a lot of people, a lot of us to reevaluate things. So I'm going to split my life into three pieces. There's my career. There's my family. And then there's myself. And over my career, which has now spanned more than 50 years, the first thing that I would drop. was myself.

Because that's easy.

Yes. You don't even know. It's not important that I exercise or it's not important I go for that walk or whatever it is. And the second thing, if the pressure on the job or the need of the work becomes intense.

family suffers.

And I don't think the younger generation, I think they've seen this. I think they've grown up in it. And I don't think they want to have anything to do with it.

Yeah, and it's self-induced. That's the thing that's the worst part of it. I remember sitting about 20 years ago, my wife and I were on a cruise on one of our anniversaries, and I was on a treadmill looking at the ocean. And I did that every day for about an hour. And about halfway through the cruise, it struck me, it said, you know, this is the only real investment in yourself you've made in the last five years. I grew up as a jock. I trained five, six hours a day for eight,10 years of my life. It was a constant part of me. But as soon as I started work, that disappeared. I wasn't able to manage that work-life balance as a single person. It wasn't that I was running around in bars or chasing ladies, but it was work. And that was it. COVID changed all that. Very quickly, management in the United States is still suffering, trying to figure out how to get people to come back to work, and they don't want to.

There was a survey I saw yesterday that said that the average income of a new person coming into the workforce in the United States today, the expectation is $80,000. The other thing, about 10 or 15 years ago, there was, again, Gallup and other surveyed companies. 90% of the companies in the United States fail to achieve their strategy.

And that caused a lot of people concern. So back to surveys, well, why was that? And the primary cause was 95% of the employees in the company didn't know what that strategy was. Yeah. So now you've got leaders that are hiding in their offices, not communicating with the people. And that's starting to go away.

Interesting switch between effective and efficient. You know, everybody, well, what's the difference? Efficient is doing things right. Effective is doing the right things.

The hard thing is to get people to understand that there are skills that leaders need to have that haven't been asked of them in the past. And a case in point, that football tournament in Australia, the winning team from Spain.

Do you want to see a case study? That coach. Got rid of a lot of really, really well-respected, wonderful players. They didn't play for him.

Well, the thing, so there's a leader who really let it all hang out, and the Federation supported him.

And look how it turned out.

So think about business and think of that type of transformation. I call it sacred cows. We've got to shoot all of these old-fashioned thinking, ideas, concepts, systems, methods, procedures, whatever. Get rid of them.

But who has the courage to do it?

Perhaps we need to pay more attention to those as case studies. There's Lewis Gerstner. Have you heard the name? He was a consultant with McKinsey, and he became the chairman of IBM. This is 20,25, maybe 30 years ago now. And IBM was in deep trouble. His first meeting with his direct reports, he went around the room and asked each of them one at a time to stand up and tell him who their top three customers were. After four or five people, not being able to do it. He killed the meeting, gave them a week. They had to come back at the next meeting and they went and they gave them three. You know what he did next? He took those customer names and left the building for six months and went out and visited every single one of those customers and asked them, what do you want from us? What do you need from us? And we need more case studies exposing that kind of utzba, okay? Courage. It can't be about you.

You have to believe in what the heck you're trying to do. And if other people don't want to follow, that's their problem, not yours. But there's not very many people that have that kind of utzba. You did it three years ago.

I did it 40 years ago, you know? It's a crazy world. And the thing, the reason it resonates so much with me, Sonia, the new leadership is your generation is carrying a torch that the world needs to pay attention to. The style that we had, the illustration I've often used is when the electric engine replaced the steam engine. The tool changed. But the processes needed two generations before it changed.

When the Industrial Revolution took place, leaving the farm and going into the city, it took a couple of generations. And there's always problems in transition today with technology, artificial intelligence, chat TPT, data analytics, everything that's going on. It's wonderful, but it's pretty scary for a lot of people. You know, there's another expression that I use a lot. What would you do if you weren't afraid? Getting married, what would you do if you weren't afraid? Having a child, what would you do if you weren't afraid? Everything we do is about transitions, isn't it? It's separations. And I think the younger generation see that more than we in the older generation do.

I wonder how many of the current leaders or leaders that you've been around or that I've been around are in the position that they could train on that. Or do they have different skills that they honed to get to those positions and they don't know how to transition out of it?

Yeah, it's interesting. And there's the people at the top that engage with you. They're the ones that are enlightened. Their companies are going to succeed. Excuse the way this sounds, even without you.

How you can embed yourself in companies that don't know they need you or don't believe they need you. They're OK. That's the real challenge, isn't it?

No, it's true. Everybody needs to adopt new thinking.

And if they can't adopt it, they have to adapt their thinking. Yeah. And if that doesn't work, the one that's more painful is they have to abandon their thinking because it doesn't work.

You know, it's a strange world. It's kind of we're. 45 or 50 years past continuous quality improvement. And in Japan, Kaizen is something that I very much admire, that everybody every day tries to do things a little bit better. Yes. And they're encouraged to do that. And in the Anglo-Saxon world, that's not so much the way we think. Here's your job. Get good at it. Don't get pushy.

Be obedient. Do what I tell you to do, damn it.

That doesn't work. I got a 22-year-old granddaughter and an 18-year-old grandson. Those two have no interest in that whatsoever. And they're sharp like tax. And the 50-year-old, actually, it's not. In America, what's happened, Sonia, that's interesting to me, we have delayed the generation of leadership by about 10 years. We've got people that are in their 70s continuing to run businesses and institutions instead of people in their 50s. And that's retarding this whole thing. That's slowing this whole thing down.

Please say it's not an age thing.

Yeah. I don't know how we tap that mindset because we're not teaching it at school.

There's a guy that's written a lot of books by the name of Patrick Lencioni.

And I remember a talk that he gave where his graduating class was really recruited heavily. A lot of people invested a lot of time to hire them. And the executives came and they did all of that stuff. So he's hired and he's in the company and he's working in San Francisco. And one of the guys that interviewed him walked right by him and Lencioni said, hello, good to see you, sir. And the guy just kept on going and didn't even know who the hell he was.

It's not impossible. Not

Oh, what? Other than that type of thing, the communication and the engagement with the employees, what else is important for leaders to do? Is there anything that is as important as that?

We're shifting. As we speak, we're changing our website where we've got assessments, the evaluation tool for people with their job to know what the skills and knowledge is and also the education piece. And what we're doing is breaking it down underneath those two major categories. into subcategories, one's operations, one's human resources, one's leadership. And in the leadership side, you mentioned reflective. We have an associate, John Carlson, is leading a company called ReflectEF, which stands for executive function. Executive function is a tool that's been used in universities for three, four, five decades to measure the capacity of a student. And what it allows, it's got a bit of a bad reputation because it was used in schools for autistic learning. It wasn't a very good application. But in the commercial sense, understanding whether you're a giver or a taker, understanding what emotional intelligence is, not IQ, EQ.

When a large group of people are, well, my brains will get me there. It has nothing to do with your brains anymore. It's that coach from Spain, you know, who got the best out of a group of people. It's all teamwork, but there's no start. That's hard for people like, oh, come on, you know, Michael Phelps is the best swimmer, you know. Ian Thorpe is the best swimmer. You know, there's always a best. Not true. The attribute that's interesting with a good individual sport competitor is they don't compete with others. They compete with themselves.

And that's a very rare thing. I think it's a blessing. I think it's a wonderful thing to learn at a very young age. You don't need to be better than anybody else. Just be better. a version of yourself every day.

It's pretty scary, actually, because, you know, you're never good enough in that case.

You know, it's almost like I swam and, you know, I used to say to people on the blocks, you might beat me, but, boy, it's going to hurt.

Isn't that something?

You cannot win something like the Tour unless you've got a whole bunch of people that are breaking the wind for you.

You know, and people don't get that. I don't know. Do you remember the name Eddie Merckx?

That's the guy I grew up with on the Tour de France. And he, I don't know how those guys did it in those days because it was all cobblestone roads.

Yeah, but, you know, it's like everything. The records that we're making today that are beating things are 20 or 30 years old. The only thing that, and let's not go down this path, but the only thing that bothers me is transgenders. breaking all kinds of records in different ways. So we need another category for those folks. Sonia, this has been a great opening on a need for change in leadership. And I would encourage you to put another blog out and maybe in a month's time, we'll take to the next chapter of this, if that's okay with you.

I think this has been very beneficial and I thank you very much for it. This is... afternoon in Australia, right?

Yes, and it's evening here. I don't know what it is now. I guess close to six, but it's great to see you and continued success. Sonia is a marathoner. She's going to be in Chicago running the marathon in October. Yes. This is a lady who walks the talk and does what she says. She balances her life very nicely. So thank you very much, Sonia.

thank everybody in the audience for your participation. I look forward to seeing you at another Candid Conversation in the near future. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.