Michael Bungay Stanier on the value of being more coach-like

Lisa: So Michael, welcome to the Leadermorphosis podcast. Thank you for being here. I’m super excited.

Michael: You have had so many guests on that I really respect and admire and look up to and have learned from over the years, so I feel like I’m quite honored. I’m like that peasant following Wednesday through the snow going, “Look, I’m standing in hot footsteps here,” and I’m happy to be schlepping along. Well, it’s nice because it’s kind of reciprocating. I also got the chance to be on your podcast which I really enjoyed, so I’m happy to have you here.

Lisa: Yeah, so many things that I would love to talk about with you, but I feel like maybe a good place to start is to open up a conversation about coaching, which is I think what you’re most known for. And thinking about the audience of this podcast who is often leaders in organizations or people in organizations that are exploring new ways of working, maybe self-managing teams, right? And I think coaching comes up a lot as like one of those future of work skills. And you know, I think people are moving away from seeing coaching as a profession and more as like a skill set, right? So what would you say to open it up to listeners who are maybe thinking, you know, why should I be interested in coaching? What has that got to do with new ways of working?

Michael: Well, honestly Lisa, in a perfect world it’s not about new ways of working, it’s about do it now, don’t wait for the future of work to arrive. So coaching does get kind of… it arrives with a lot of baggage for a lot of people. You know, there’s always an inner circle of people, and I bet some of the people are listening here who are already advocates for coaching and acolytes, and they’re like, “I love it, it’s fantastic, and it should be a key leadership and management style.”

And there’s a bunch of other people who go, “I don’t know, you know, had an executive coach and they weren’t that interesting,” or “the HR team is frothing over there in the corner, but they’re all a bit nuts and they don’t even understand what real work is. So I’ll let them get excited about coaching, and meantime I’ll try and hit my targets and worry about my numbers and worry about my team and do all of that.”

So there’s a rightful skepticism around coaching. And the other thing that’s interesting about your question, Lisa, is when coaching does show up in the conversation, it tends to think about everybody except for the person who’s coaching. So you have it’s like, “Here’s how it’s going to help the people you’re coaching. They’re going to be more fulfilled and more recognized and more human and more autonomous and self-sufficient and confident.” And these are all language that we use about these kind of adaptive, resilient future of work organizations, which is like you’re giving people power and autonomy and a sense of agency in a way that classic organizational structure tends to trend against.

And then you can say, look at an organizational level, of course you want your organization to have managers and leaders who are better coaching, or as I would like to say, being more coach-like, which is—for me is simply, can you just stay curious a little bit longer? It’s not even that fancy a definition. It’s like, stay curious a little bit longer, rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly. Because if you do that at an organizational level, you’re more likely to have the two things that you worry about if you’re trying to run an organization: One is, are we working on the right things? And do I have the best possible people working on the right things? Because if you have both of those, you have strategy and culture, and coaching helps and really can contribute to both of those things.

But if you’re a typical manager or leader going, “Ah, you know what, I’m already working 60 hours a week and I’m already doing the best I can. Coaching feels more like an obligation and a burden and latest initiative that somebody’s thought up that I have to bear the brand of.” You know, what’s in it for me? That is actually the essential change question that you need to ask, which is, what’s in it for me? Because you’re asking people to change their behavior, which is hard enough. There’s got to be some reward for them in that.

So Lisa, I reckon three vicious circles of everyday work potentially get broken by being more coach-like. One is, you have a less dependent team. Most of us have over-dependent teams around us, and whether you’re kind of formally leading a team or kind of informally, you’ve become the bottleneck. They keep coming to you for advice and guidance. You keep taking on a little bit more than you should just to hurry it up, because they’re… “God damn it, I just need to get this done, just give it to me, I’ll sort it out.” See, what they’re kind of over-dependent team.

And if you think yourself, “I’d love a team”—and you know, again, think about in the broader sense—“but I love a team that is more self-sufficient and more autonomous and better able to take the lead and take the accountability and take responsibility.” If you’d like that, then coaching can help.

If you feel overwhelmed, like you’ve just got too much on your plate, too many emails, too many tasks, too many KPIs, too many OKRs, if you’ve got too much of that, then coaching can help because it has an ability to figure out what the real challenge is to focus on.

And also, if you’re just looking for a sense of reconnection to the work that matters, you know, we often have that disconnect. If you’re kind of buying into at least some of the language of Simon Sinek and the why of the work, well then coaching can help create a better line of sight to the work that matters in the work that’s meaningful.

So if you’d like a better team, if you’d like to feel less stressed, if you’d like to be doing more work than matters, then being more coach-like can help with that. Pretty compelling case to me. I’m not sure what you get out of work, and I don’t know why you’re listening to this podcast because it doesn’t make any sense.

Lisa: Yeah, I really like what you say rather than coaching is something that you do to someone, for example. And I’m wondering if we can zoom in for a little bit on this this great phrase that you have about “stay curious a little longer, kind of hold back the advice monster.” Say more about that. What’s the benefit of that and how can I do that?

Michael: Well, you know, the first thing is, don’t take anything I say on face value because I’ve got a bit of… what’s the word? Over… I’m over-invested in the power of curiosity as a leadership skill because I’ve built businesses around it. That said, everything I’m going to tell you now is absolutely true, so take notes, right?

So part of my mission, because my company, Box of Crayons—I handled is 19 years old today. Well, actually two days ago. 19… we had 19 years and two days old today. And a big part of the mission for a long time was just basically unweird coaching, because I just gone through this coach training myself, and I’m like, “Look, I think it’s really powerful, but most people are like, coaching is this mysterious black box.” And people were really bad at explaining it or explain about it, kind of understanding how to… Just to make it simple. And it’s not that difficult. Well, actually it’s not that complex, it’s a better way of putting it. It is quite difficult because it all around a behavior change, but in terms of just how to think about this.

It’s like, there’s a real power to you staying curious a little bit longer because if you stay curious a little bit longer, you’ve got a better chance of figuring out what the real thing is that you want to be talking about and trying to solve. You get a better chance at creating the space for the other person to own and maintain ownership of the problem that is actually theirs. You want a better chance at helping them figure out the real challenge that’s going on in the best ideas they’ve got around that. And it just means that you’re working on those two important things, which is focus on the work that matters and build capacity and confidence in the people that you lead or that you work with.

But we’re terrible at staying curious a bit longer. We’re advice giving maniacs. I mean, you know, people will recognize this. Somebody starts talking to you, and after about five seconds, you’ve got an idea in your head and you’re like, “All right, I know what they need. Like, I know we’ve never met before, I know I don’t know anything about what you’re really talking about, I know I have no real nuanced understanding of what’s going on in your part of the world, but after five or ten seconds, I’m pretty sure I’ve got some things you… I need to tell you.” And it feels really persuasively true because, you know, following reasons cognitive biases, always do feel true. But in your head, you’re like, “This is great, and oh, I’m going to really add value to this conversation.”

And you know, everybody’s listening to this world to some degree recognize themselves in that dynamically. So it’s like, “Oh yeah, I do… I do like to give advice. I do… I am a little trigger-happy in terms of leaping and offering up ideas and solutions and opinions and advice and guidance.” And to be fair, we’ve spent a lifetime being trained to having the answer is the way you add value. But you know, the people who listen to this podcast are people who understand or who are interested in, you know, amongst other things, complexity and how complexity works.

And as soon as you get engaged in the kind of nuance of complexity, you’re like, “Oh, nobody knows what the hell’s going on.” My summary of what complexity science is: How the outcomes are going to play out? So you have to kind of navigate your way through emerging phenomena. So how do you… how do you think that? And you know, answers other than the most tactical, practical answers are useful.

So you know, Lisa, if you come to me and go, “Michael, where’s the… where’s the manila folder with the stuff in it?” you know, it’s annoying if I go, “Hey Lisa, how do you feel about manila folders? You know, tell them where the manila folder is.” Then most of the time, if you can start from a place of curiosity, it means that when time comes for you to share an opinion or give advice—and there’s often a time for that—you’re offering up the better advice more easily, more quickly.

Lisa: Yeah, I think you know, I recognize this so much because there’s such a positive association with, you know, if I give advice, yeah, especially if it’s taken, you know, I feel smart, I feel useful, I feel valuable, I feel helpful. And I spend a lot of time doing trainings with people, managers, leaders, you know, people generally. And I find that this is… it’s really hard for people to unlearn this, you know, how quick we are to give advice.

And I find also that it can create a bit of an identity crisis because if I am a leader, a lot of my career has been built on, you know, my… and my self-worth has been built on having answers, giving advice, being, you know… that is how I see myself as adding value, like you said. How do you kind of reconcile that? How can I first of all, how can I start to unlearn that or stay curious a little longer? And secondly, you know, what are your thoughts about this? It’s almost like a loss in it, or it feel… it can feel like a loss at first, you know, giving up that… that kind of quick win of, “I feel like… I think I was useful.”

Michael: A little chemical hit in your brain as you as you you feel good about adding value. But you also feel good about other things like, you know, you maintain your high status in the relationship because you know, you’ve got that. You maintain the sense of control, you maintain a sense of power, you maintain a sense of, you know, “I’m the… I’ve… I’ve got the upper hand in terms of how this relationship is playing out.” All of that’s feeding into this as well.

And there’s just no doubt that giving advice typically feels better than asking questions because giving advice, even though for many people they’re offering up slightly crappy advice to solve the wrong problem, still feels good. You’re like, “Yeah, take it away and run with it,” whereas when you ask your question, you do have that moment of, “Well, is this adding value and is this actually useful and what’s happening now?” And now I’ve empowered that other person. That means giving up some of my power and giving it to them. So now that they’re owning the problem and owning the… in some ways guiding the relationship and the conversation, it is a little threatening, it is a little unnerving.

But I don’t have a… I mean, I have a glib answer to it, but it’s glib so it’s not going to solve the problem, but it might help a little, which is to say, look, if you get known in your organization as the person who keeps figuring out what the real problem is, rather than the person who comes up with the fast but often wrong answer, then you win. You just… you just recognized as being more strategic, more… more leaderly, more, you know, more… more presence, more influence because answers are just increasingly cheaper and easier to come by.

But the capacity to go, “Let me hold the space, trying to make sure that we’re working on the real thing. Let me work with you to make sure that you understand what the real challenge is so you have a better ability to learn and grow your capacity. Let’s make sure as a team that we’re directing our attention to the thing that makes the real difference.” That’s how you build a reputation. So it is… but it’s a different game, and it there… it is hard to shift because you’re not just trying to unlearn habits, Lisa, you’re trying to tame your short-term ego say part of your brain that goes, “All right, you know what, stay in control, be the person with authority, be the person who seems to know what they’re doing, be the person who gives out orders,” because that fulfills a short-term need for sure, but you pay a longer term price for it.

Lisa: Yeah, I wonder if we could explore that a little bit, because I know there are, you know, I know you have, for example, some great examples of good coaching questions that people can learn and ask. And so there are some doing things that you can do and some habit things, but it also sounds like, you know, when you say be more coach-like, that there’s also like a being thing and maybe a mindset piece here as well.

Michael: So, you know, if I’m known at all… I’m known for a book called “The Coaching Habit,” and that is my… my best attempt at kind of making coaching unweird, which is, you know, here are seven questions. His first chapter is about what a habit is, so it’s like, “Here’s how you understand a basic dynamic of behavior change because we’re trying to change your behavior,” and then here are seven good questions. And they… they’re not going to solve work in every situation for every person, but they’ll work most of the time for most of the people.

“The Advice Trap,” which is a book that came out four years after that to the day, because “The Coaching Habit” came out on the 29th of February, just because of the 29th of February. And then the… the “Advice Trap” came out, you know, one year later. In other words, four years later on the 29th of February 2020.

And I wrote that because there are a lot of people who picked up “The Coaching Habit” and went, “Oh, now I’ve got these tools, I can do this. I get it. This is kind of what I was looking for—a simple… a simple toolkit, a simple road map to kind of be more coach-like.” And of course, there’s a bunch of people who picked up the book and went, “This book sucks and I don’t want to be a coach and you suck, Michael,” and here’s a one-star review on Amazon, and that… you know, that’s fine as part of the… the journey.

But there’s… I know there’s a number of people who picked up “The Coaching Habit” and went, “I like this in theory. I like these questions, I… I get how this can be really useful, but man, I’m really struggling to change my behavior.” So the… the “Advice Trap” was my attempt to try and do a deeper dive into behavior change, what needs to be kind of wrestled with.

And you know, my work is… is influenced by a bunch of people, but amongst others, Bob Keegan and Lisa Leahy and “Immunity to Change,” with their sort of fundamentally brilliant insight, which is you have to understand what you’re getting out of the present behavior. And you have to understand that you’re making a choice to say no to that, the short-term wins, so that you can say yes to the longer term wins.

This is the being that you’re talking about, Lisa, I think, which is really when you’re trying to undertake some of that immunity to change, or as I say in the “Advice Trap” book, hard change, you know, as opposed to easy change. Easy change is additive. You just kind of add the new tool or the new information onto who you already are. Hard changes when you kind of need to rewire yourself, and I think that speaks to the being as that for a lot of people, they’ve got to go, “I’m… I really need to kind of fundamentally reimagine a little bit about how I show up and how I work in this world to level up to be more coach-like.”

So you know, this is the blessing and the curse of this work. The blessing is that it’s actually, whilst it’s simple to say be more coach-like, it’s difficult because of this kind of wrestling behavior change, which means that it’s a good business model because people find it hard. The curse is it’s difficult and people feel it hard, so there’s a frustration that not, you know, you can keep doing this work and not as many people shift as you hope they will.

Lisa: Yeah, I think what’s interesting about this as well is if we add a… add the dimension of people listening who are working in self-managing organizations or exploring self-managing teams, what we’re trying to do there is in a way, create a leaderful culture where everyone becomes a leader, right? So coaching, I think, becomes a super relevant skill, especially if you’re a founder or if you have been a manager or anyone with kind of positional power when we decide, “Let’s work in this self-managed, distributed, decentralized way,” right?

There’s, you know, this… I think this what we’re talking about here is a really valuable skill set. And also what you’re describing there about it being a difficult journey, a hard change is true, too, that you know, if I’m a founder, for example, it’s that… I’ve talked to many founders who talk about letting go, learning to let go, learning when to step back, and also like… and also learning to step it, you know, because it’s not abdicating either, but it’s like that dance off when do I step in, when do I step back? How do I show up as… as a leader, which I guess is like a coach-like leader is what we’re looking for in these kinds of organizations.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, coaching and being more coach-like isn’t the whole answer to this, but it goes a long way. I mean, you know, I know you know Aaron Dignan and his work and revenue work. And on his podcast pretty recently, actually, myself as the founder of Box of Crayons and Shannon is the CEO of Box of Crayons, who took over two years ago. We just talked about what it was like for me to give up being founder. And it… it’s hard. And like, I’m pretty reasonably aware of some of the complexities of this, and you know, I know a bit about coaching. Still really hard for me to kind of untangle some of the power dynamics and what I want to give up and what I don’t want to give up.

Because you know, I’m really excited about giving up all the crappy stuff I don’t want to do anymore. That’s easy to give up as a founder. There’s all these little nuanced stuff where I’m like, I’ll just stick my finger into that pie. And we had to kind of work through a bunch of that process.

But I do think one of the things I am most excited about coaching, and I don’t talk about it that often, has to be the right audience for it, is it disrupts power. It really disrupts power. It disrupts hierarchy because traditional hierarchy is kind of answers cascading from the top. And it’s like, “Here’s the… here’s the strategy, here’s the solution, here’s how we’re delivering this.” And you know, as… as that kind of falls its way down the waterfall of the hierarchy, there’s like, “We don’t really need you to be asking questions so much. We just need you to kind of understand the rules and understand the parameters.” I’m sure there’s a bit of autonomy within that, but we’ve made most of those decisions for you.

And I think what coaching does is it… it kind of… it’s a way of sneaking in this kind of disruption to power and disruption to hierarchy because it is an act of empowerment when you ask a question and then you shut up and listen for the answer and you allow that other person to figure some stuff out. That is an act of empowerment.

But you know, I mean, this will sound maybe bleedingly obvious to some people, but when I… when I had this kind of insight for me that empowerment means giving up some of your power so somebody else can have it, you’re like, “Oh, that’s why that’s tricky.” Because I’m like, “I’m all for empowerment in theory, but in practice, giving up some of my power, you know, I think others should do that for sure. But me? I don’t know, it’s a little more complex.” So that’s… that’s part of the tension here, Lisa.

Lisa: Yeah, what are your thoughts on, because some people really don’t like the word empowerment, and I’ve heard… I’ve heard people say that if I empower someone, it means I can take that power back.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, it’s… there’s a kind of complexity in the word because “I am empowering you” is an inherently contradictory statement. Like, look, I… it doesn’t feel like the power’s really shifted. It feels like you’re… you’re damn lucky that I’m blessing you with even just giving you some miscellaneous tasks. It doesn’t feel like empowerment.

But it also… it works, it can… it can work as a helpful shorthand, which is if you think of empowerment going… and I think this is… this is the goal we have when we embrace, you know, understanding complexity as a kind of the context in which our organizations are really growing, and self-managing teams and the like, witches, I’m trying to find the best way for people to fully express their potential and their skills. I’m trying to ensure that the organization has the right people holding the right amount of responsibility and accountability at the right level of that organization. That is all an expression of empowerment, which is like, I want… I want your best, and I want you to be taking on the stuff that is yours to take on.

And I’m okay to say as part of a leader, my job is to create, co-create that empowerment, empowering culture. And if in shorthand it means I’m empowering people, I’m fine with that, knowing that it’s also slightly contradictory to say it. Quite aligned on that thing.

Lisa: Yeah, a lot of these words have a lot of baggage, but for me it’s… it’s a shorthand for them. I think it can be useful. Like… and it’s like… it’s an utter waste. I mean, it’s like, they’re better battles to be fighting rather than the nuances of whether empowerment is a good word or not. It’s one of those things where, like, look, we are actually all on the same side. We should be figuring out other things to be taking on rather than some of the language games.

That can… I mean, again, this is tricky, Lisa, because you know, language defines reality. So it’s worth thinking about the language that you use. But you… you can sometimes lose sight of the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest, or whatever that saying is.

Lisa: It’s interesting hearing you say that, you know, even as… as a coach, and I guess you have decades of experience at this point, that it was still challenging for you, and there was still kind of blind spots in this succession experience that you had handing over the CEO role to… to Shannon. What are some of the lessons that you’ve learned from that, or what are the ways in which you’ve grown that you could share with us?

Michael: Well, I think one of the key things is it’s just not enough to have good intentions. You need structures and you need support to kind of work your way through this. So we hired a coach, to… a transition coach, and she worked with us for two years, the year leading up and the year following, to prepare, get us ready for this, and then kind of keep us on track in… once… once she’d taken on that role. And that’s really helpful because I… I tend to have a classic visionary style of working, which is overly optimistic, utterly devoid from, you know, disconnected from reality along how hard these things are and how long they take, and kind of going, “Speed will cure all.” So we’ll just skip over the awkward things. And Jill I kind of allowed me not… not to actually fall for that.

And then the thing that really helped us was we set up a structure, and we spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out the answers to it. Based on something that Susan Scott wrote about in her book “Fierce Conversations,” I think. And it’s a decision tree. And basically, it just describes a hierarchy of decisions, which is twig, branch, trunk, and root. And we just… and we still use this, you know, two years later around deciding what type of decisions fit where.

So twig are decisions that I don’t ever really hear about or know about. Branch, decisions that probably I’ll read about in a newsletter or as an aside from somebody or… or the like. Trunk, our decisions that are Shannon’s to make, but she will come to me for conversation and guidance and my opinion around it. And root, decisions that are mine to make.

And of course, the really interesting conversation is what’s trunk and what’s root? Because so I’m the founder and I’m the owner. My wife and I co-owned the company, so what do we get to keep? And we also play the board where the… my wife and I basically the board in a very loose… we are the board. So in the end, the root decisions that I have are only two: one is whether we sell the company or not, and the other is whether I fire Shannon or not. And that’s it.

It means that, you know, in the first two years of running the company, Shannon has reinvented the business model. She’s re… and she’s reinvented the values. They’ve redone the values in the company now. You know, that’s a bit destabilizing as a founder because basically, your… your corporate values as a founder, it’s just your values. They’re like, “This is what I think is important in the world. I’m going to call them our corporate values,” and then declare that that’s, you know, that’s the universe.

So when Shannon worked with the… the team to kind of go, you know, “These values don’t really work for us in terms of how we want to… that they’re okay, but they don’t quite work,” and going through that process, it’s one of those moments of me having to let go of stuff and mourn for stuff.

And… and also as a founder, I… for me to really want Shannon to thrive, I had to give her full permission to fail. So it means that one of the things that may happen with Box of Crayons is it just fails as a company under her watch. And I am good with that because all organizations have a life and an arc, and they come to an end at some stage. And there are so many things that, you know, just cause the demise of companies that are above and beyond what the CEO can do. But if she’s being smart about strategy and I’ve been involved in those conversations and she’s making the best… best she can, then it, you know, it works or it doesn’t work. And sometimes it can be catastrophic.

So part of it’s around going, you know, “This is not the outcome anybody wants, but I have to be used to the… the idea of it being a potential failure with her.” And I think those are the three critical things from… for us: having the coach, having the decision tree and pushing stuff up—she wanted to keep pushing stuff down a little bit into trunk, and I’m like, “That’s not trunk, that’s branch. I don’t really need to or want to hear about that.” And then understanding that allowing her to fully succeed requires me to allow her to fully fail.

Lisa: Thank you for sharing that, and I really love that full conversation on the Brave New Work podcast because it’s brilliant. And I think… I think this is really relevant to listeners because in a way, if you’re a founder or a CEO and you want your organization to become self-managing or more decentralized, in a way, what you’re trying to facilitate is a… is a number of small successions where you’re trying to remove yourself or… or have things be less dependent on you, right? Because you know, when I’m working with founders, for example, it’s amazing just getting that awareness of, “Wow, look at all the things that I’ve got fingers in, right? And how long… and how long your shadow stretches.

Michael: Yeah, and how… how heavy your gravity is, you know. One of the things that I… I get to mourn is being a founder who is no longer a CEO is I just don’t show up very often at Box of Crayons. And I… and I don’t email anybody a Box of Crayons. And that’s quite sad for me because a bunch of those people are friends or people I hired, or certainly I worked with.

And but you know, every… if you get an email from me as the founder, I… I distort reality and I undermine Shannon. So I only get to talk to people after explicitly asking Shannon’s permission about, “Can I reach out to engineering, Chief Legal Officer, General Counsel,” for instance. But I have to ask for permission for that, and I have to… and it’s part of those barriers that… part of that learning because, you know, first year, I kept occasionally sending off a quick emails to… or whoever. And you know, at some point, Shannon sent me… I went, “Nah, stop that.” I’m like, “Yeah, I have to… I have to unlearn that.” It’s not… I… everything… like nothing I do as a founder is casual.

Lisa: True, and I think founders and CEOs say to me like, you know, “I’ve… I’ve given people permission to self-manage. Why aren’t they stepping in?” And I think often this is one of the reasons why is that even if you have said that, there are so many things that we… again, it comes back to this being thing, I think, you know, that you can say like, “Lisa, I completely delegate this to you. This is yours now, you own it.” But if I even in the slightest way sense that you’re gonna step in at some point, or you’re like, “Yes, how’s it going over there with the thing?” then I’m never going to be able to fully step into that because I’ll always sense that you’ll… you’ve… you’ve got it. If I step away, you’ll still be holding it. So it’s… it’s amazing how strong these… yeah, these powers are, like you say.

I know there’s a self-managing company in the aerospace engineering industry in the UK called Matt Black Systems, and the two owners of the company told me that they never… they never walk around on the factory floor, for exactly that reason, that they know that people… people can’t sort of see them detached from that power in that context. So they do… they do have kind of coaching conversations with people, but it’s away from the… from the factory floor away from the site, because that separation helps.

Michael: Algorithim because you’re like, “No, guys, it’s just me, I’m just… look, I… and look, from my perspective, it’s like, if I’m just a guy stumbling through life, trying to figure stuff out, not really knowing what the hell is going on, I’m as confused as anybody here, probably more confused.” But that’s just not… you’re an icon and a symbol as a founder, and you… you distort things as you… as you go along.

Lisa: Yeah, I think it’s also interesting this conversation because I’ve had on the podcast before a guy called Peter Koenig who has this theory about source and… and the… and the role that the founder often plays. And you mentioned before about, you know, being the visionary. So as I understand it, you are still… it sounds like you’re still playing a role as… as founder or… but you’re… but you’re not CEO. So you’ve differentiated those roles. Shannon’s CEO, and… and you’ve used this decision tree to kind of clarify what you’re involved in. But are you still holding that kind of source role where people… do you still… it’s like, do you still receive the… the information about the vision, you know, do people still look to you for that?

Michael: They don’t look to me for that. My… as the… as a… as a… as a board member, I guess my job is to ask Shannon to spend a good percentage of her time—I reckon it’s 40 to 50% of her time—looking into the future because… and… and that’s hard because there’s always demands on the CEO in the present. There’s always stuff going wrong. That’s the nature of an organization. Put one fire out, another fire pops up somewhere. It’s just… so our system works.

So and part of where I feel I can support Shannon is by finding interesting things in the future with her because that’s where I like to play as well. So Shannon and I have a monthly lunch where we just talk about stuff, and I’ll often just send her interesting articles and stuff around what I think is possible. But I don’t really get to… I don’t get at all to decide how much of that she takes on, how much she finds useful.

You know, there’s… there’s one particular market that I really would love her to take on. And they’ve just sent me their strategic planning document for the next three years, and… and it’s like, “This won’t be happening till 2026 at the latest.” And I’m like, damn it. But that’s… that’s… this is a… this is a trunk decision, it’s not a root decision. So I’m like, “Okay, that’s, you know, the board sets a… well, the board comes to an agreement with Shannon around a financial target that we’re trying to strive for. But how they get there is that their… their play, not my play.”

Lisa: Yeah, that must be… that must be challenging. And… and as you said, it’s like, it sounds like you’re mourning some things and… and clearing the path for others.

Michael: Well, that’s it. And you know, I started a new company, mbs.works, which is more focused on individual B2C rather than B2B work. It’s like helping people be a… force for change in the world. And… and in part, I started it as a thing to do so I don’t get tempted to go up and… and meddle. I mean, literally, it’s like, we need to distract Michael because if he’s bored, he’ll wreak havoc, you know?

When I used to work as CEO at Box of Crayons, the team would be terrified every time I get off a long plane trip because I’ve had like eight hours, you know, uninterrupted chaos making slash idea having. They’re like, “No, don’t… don’t send us anything.”

And in a way, mbs.works is that. It… it provides the next thing for me to be focused on and be future focused on, which is really helpful for me. And it just removes some of my capacity to actually go back and meddle because I’m too busy with all this other stuff that I’m trying to do.

Lisa: So what… what is giving you energy at the moment? What is… what does it mean to how people feel possible change?

Michael: Well, so I’ve got a new book coming out in January, which will be about this. It’s like, how do you start doing something that matters? And the broad concept is helping people define what a worthy goal is. And a worthy goal has three elements to it: it needs to be thrilling and important and daunting.

So thrilling, meaning it wakes you up, gets you super excited, but it’s not sufficient just to be thrilling. It needs to be important, meaning it gives more to the world than it takes, which is not my phrase. That phrase comes from Jacqueline Novogratz and a book of hers called “A Manifesto for a Moral Revolution.” But it’s like, it needs to, you know, it needs to make the world a bit better than… than it is at the moment. And then the third element is it needs to be daunting, meaning you’re like, you get a bit sweaty thinking about it, going, “I don’t even know how to take that on. It’s hard,” but not impossible, but hot.

And so that, for me, there’s an interesting tension between those, you know. This is where, like, complexity, in part because it’s all about what are the tensions and what emerges from the tensions. And I think in those three elements, you have forces that pull you somewhere that could be interesting because if it’s… if it’s thrilling and important but not daunting, it means that you’re doing work that matters, but you’re in a bit of a comfortable rut, and you’ve stopped growing.

If it’s important and daunting but not thrilling, then you’re on the track to burn out because there’s none of that sort of self-renewal that comes from you feeling that this speaks to some values. It’s… there’s… a you’re doing it out of obligation. It’s hard and it’s obliged, so that’s difficult.

And if it’s… what’s it… what have I got… what have I missed? Thrilling but… daunting but not important, then it’s a bit… it’s a bit selfish, you know? It’s a little bit kind of like, you know, what I’m making… this is good for me, but it kind of has the, for me, the… the incensey smell of the… of the… the self-help stuff I’m least inspired by, which is all about, you know, find yourself and screw the rest of the world. And I’m like, you know what, at this age, we need to be contributing to the world, not just making ourselves feel better about it.

So that’s part of what it’s… that’s a big part of what I’m trying to figure out now. And you know, it’s… it’s… it’s probably almost exactly six months to the date when we’re recording this that the book will come out. So I’ve now got… I’ve got six months to finish writing the thing, and then… writing a book is really hard, except compared to trying to market a book, which is really, really hard. So I’ve got all of that kind of ahead of me.

So that’s giving me energy sometimes, and sometimes it’s making me want to curl up in a fetal position and hide. It’s my own worthy goal. It’s all very meta.

Lisa: I’m wondering, because you strike me as someone with the work that you put out into the world, and you know, I’ve been listening to your “Two Pages with MBS” podcasts, for example. And it seems to me that you’re someone who is… who enjoys learning and growing and being curious about things that are tough or challenging, like learning edges. So I’m wondering, what… what’s your learning edge at the moment? Is there one thing that you’re really feeling into that feels sort of crunchy?

Michael: It’s a great question, and that’s true. I do love being on the learning edge. I… there’s a bunch of things that I’m wrestling with in terms of mbs.works, which… tricky, but I’m not sure they’re really a learning edge for me. I mean, things like marketing and social media, I just don’t… I just from the conclusion that I just do not understand social media at all. And I’m not sure I really want to be involved in it.

So I’m trying to figure out what is… what needs to… this is a Roger Martin question: What needs to be true for social media to be something I’d be interested in actually doing? Because, you know, adding to the noise and the… the sense of BS, in the sense of insecurity that I think social media can so often contribute, I don’t want to be part of that. But I’m wondering if you have to play the game. But I’m not sure that’s totally a learning edge.

I feel like a learning edge for me is… being more ambitious. So there’s a… there’s a Rilke poem that’s going to… been rattling around my head for the last six months. It’s called the translation of it’s called “The Man Watching.” And the last few lines… I’m just going to grab them because I got them a little… slipper paper on my desk. It’s such a good poem. And it… it talks about… it kind of references Jacob wrestling with the angel. And you know, he says, “Look, the angel just doesn’t choose to wrestle with most people. You have to be taking on something that is important enough that the angel will wrestle with you around it.” And you always lose when you wrestle with the angel.

So the… the last three lines of the poem are these: “Winning does not tempt him. His growth is to be that deeply defeated by ever greater things.” And that’s what I would like to be. I would like to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things. And you know, I’ve had, you know, just enough success in stuff I’ve done so far that I can conjure a win out of a bunch of things, because you know, I’m old enough and wise enough and I’ve figured some stuff out.

So the question for me is, so what are the ever greater things for me so that I can be deeply defeated? And then how do I be deeply defeated? Because I don’t like being deeply defeated. I like to win.

Lisa: It’s very inspiring. It kind of… it sort of awakens something in me too, to… like, think what are the greater things that I could be defeated by? Am I playing it safe? Playing it small?

Michael: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and this is… this part of what’s interesting around, I think, trying to figure out what a worthy goal is for you, because there’s a way that doesn’t work, which is you just… you just expand what you say you’re trying to do. She’s like, “All right, I’m trying to… I’m trying to have half the world’s population listen to my podcast.” And I’m like, “You will be defeated by that,” but is that actually an ever greater thing? Is that just a kind of extreme version of a goal that… that is unrealistic?

It’s like, what… what could you step into going, “This is… this is the… a wrestling match that I can’t… I can’t… I can’t win this wrestling match, but man, you know, I can stand in the arena of this and… and… and take some steps towards it, perhaps.”

Lisa: Hmm, anywho, it’s all getting a bit metaphysical here to the practical then.

Michael: Yeah, reality.

Lisa: And it’s kind of funny because I was thinking about, you know, I always conclude my podcast conversations by asking people, you know, what… what advice would you give listeners who are on this journey? And it feels like an ironic question to ask the man who wrote “The Advice Trap,” exactly. But yeah, I suppose, you know, it could be a provocation or a prompt or something that you would like to offer listeners who are interested in, you know, again, like reinventing how they’re working and being with… with colleagues and fellow humans.

Michael: I think well, one of the… one of the questions… so one of the… one of the people I had on the podcast—you’re one of them—but another guy who I really enjoyed a conversation with is a guy called Matthew Barzun, B-A-R-Z-U-N. He’s a… he makes money in the dot-com boom. He helped Obama get elected. He became the Ambassador for the US versus Sweden and then to the UK. So he’s a pretty successful middle-aged white dude like me. And he’s just got a new book out called “The Power of Giving Away Power.” And it’s… I think it’s a… that’s a really great title.

And I haven’t read it because I’ve literally is not available in Australia, and I flew back from Australia 24 hours ago. So I’m a little jet lagged. So if this whole interview’s been entirely incoherent, it’s because I’m jet lagged. But I think it is a powerful question for people who are privileged enough to go, “What power do I have and what power and how do I give that power away?”

And I guess people… you get to choose if you’re listening to this, how you want to react to that. Because there’s a way that many people are like, “But I’m trying to get power, I’m… I’m on the margins, and I’m trying to step into power.” And I think that’s right. For many people, that’s the… that’s the question to be sitting with. But I think for many people, perhaps more people than… than might be asking this question at the moment, which is like, you already have the power you… you need. How do you give some of that away? How do you step… you know, we’ve talked about the trickiness of empowering, “I’m empowering you.” It’s like, “How do you give away power? Is that… is that even the answer?”

Matthew Barzun would say that’s not even the right question. It’s about how do you co-create more power for people in the room. But that’s… that’s… I don’t know if that’s useful for anybody. It’s useful for me, though. That’s what I’m sitting with.

Lisa: Yeah, I… I was listening… listen to that episode earlier… earlier today, actually. I haven’t finished it yet, but… but I’m also exploring that question. And I’ve just been recommended another book called “The Power Manual” by Cindy Suarez. Yeah, so this question of power and how to share power, how to create more power, yeah, for me is… I think a really valuable question to be asking right now, right?

I mean, it gets… it gets to the heart of self-management and self-directed teams and… and organizations. It’s like, you just can’t… you just can’t do that without wrestling with power, trying to surface what power is, what… how power works in your organization or in your part of the world.

It’s just not enough to go, “Oh, okay, I’m giving everybody… everyone, we’re self-directed now, carry on.” They’re just… it’s like, it just doesn’t work, as you’ve demonstrated a thousand times in conversations. So yeah, it’s a really interesting thing to wrestle with, but it’s slippery, innovative, and invisible most of the time.

Michael: She talks about giving away the authority, so it’s a… kind of similar idea. And she was talking about that, you know, in the 90s, and… and then it really upset people and provoked people. Now I think it’s… you know, not in the mainstream, but at least there are people sort of starting to wake up to the idea that this is important.

Lisa: Yeah, it… it ebbs and flows, right? You know, there’s like hippie communes in the 60s are all about, “Look, we’re… we’re trying to figure out how to live together.” And you know, some of those were successful for a little bit, but mostly they fell apart because they’re like, “Yeah, we should all be hippie commune.” But as the man, “I’d love you to do all the cooking and washing up and have sex with me whenever I want.” I’m like, “Yeah, actually sounds fantastic as a man.” Wow, but I’m like, “It also not so great on many other ways.”

So, you know, the more I think people in this community and this podcast can spread this word and do this work, then… we… when we make the world a bit better, I think.

Lisa: So in closing then, is there… is there anything else that you would like to say or offer to listeners that we haven’t talked about yet?

Michael: I’m not sure. I don’t think so, Lisa, but what… what was most useful for you in this conversation? What struck a chord? That’s one of your coaching questions.

Lisa: Yes, it’s a good one.

Michael: If any… you can say nothing.

Lisa: It’s like so many things, but how do I choose? I think, and perhaps it’s because it’s most present because we were just talking about it, but… but I’m really exploring this power concept. And I… and I like… I like this idea you just shared about less sharing and giving away and more co-creating.

Michael: Yeah.

Lisa: That to me also sort of takes care of a little bit of the slightly dirtiness of “Let me give you my power here, you go. I’m such a good person,” right?

Michael: Exactly, like an entanglement around the moral righteousness of how superior I am by giving up my… my power, yeah, and therefore kind of not quite giving it up. It’s… it’s very… it’s slippery stuff.

Lisa: Yeah, for sure. Great, well, maybe that is a good place to stop then. So thank you so much for… for sharing so… so generously, and it’s been really enjoyable conversations.

Michael: Thank you. I was really excited to be invited onto the podcast, so thanks for having me.

Lisa: My pleasure.