How to Build Exceptional Leadership Teams with Martijn Sjoorda - OrgDev Episode 35

How do you build an exceptional leadership team? How do you create enough psychological safety for teams to perform at their best? We tackled this and many other important questions in our fascinating conversation with practitioner Martijn Sjoorda, from System2

💼 About our Guest
Martijn Sjoorda, Founder, System2
https://system2group.com/

Connect with Martijn here:
  / martijnsjoorda 

Email Martijn here:
martijn@system2.nl

Martijn Sjoorda is the founder and driving force behind System2, a pioneering consultancy that partners with progressive organizations to develop their leadership teams and deliver real transformation. With over two decades of experience, Martijn has built a reputation for helping executive committees and leadership groups tackle complex challenges through a unique approach that combines strategy and psychology.

Martijn's expertise is rooted in creating environments where psychological safety, productive failure, and productive conflict drive high performance. His philosophy rejects one-size-fits-all solutions, opting instead for highly tailored interventions that respect the specific context of each organization. He is known for facilitating difficult conversations, recognizing that addressing issues head-on is the only way to overcome the common frustrations of leadership teams: insufficient speed, lack of value delivery, and resistance to true transformation.

Martijn extensive experience and training allows to deeply understand the interplay of system, team, and personal dynamics, he identifies the smallest, most effective changes that yield the largest results.

Thanks for listening!

Distinction is an evidence-based Organisation Development & Design Consultancy designed to support modern, progressive organisations to bring out the best in their people and their teams through training, consulting, and coaching.

Our professional and highly skilled consultants focus on delivering engaging, results-focused and flexible solutions that help our clients achieve their business objectives.

Find out more at https://distinction.live/how-we-can-help/

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Transcript

(00:00) hi welcome to the org Dev podcast so why are so many leaders of organizations obsessed with being efficient and why is this Obsession often bad for organizations and the people who work in them what could leaders do differently to make their organizations more productive and more Humane at the same time this and many other big questions have been the focus of extremely engaging guest Martin Sher Martin Works exclusively at senior leader level which has often been described as a place not for the faint ofart he's head of
(00:29) practice development of system 2 and he's also one of the co-founders of the Fearless organization together with Professor Amy Edmonson Martin works with organizations on the intersection of strategy and psychology and to deliver high performance and his specialities include strategy learning dialogue structural Dynamics large system change he's got significant design and program management experience at the most senior levels in multinational corporations Martin also has an interesting story of being a qualified as a psychotherapist
(00:58) and has been editor of the Dutch edition of Presence by the very legendary Peter S he's also author of The Crack the Code cork Technologies to exceed in Excel in business this gives him a brilliant commercial insight to complement his practitioner experience and Martin is best described as a citizen of the world with a wealth of Intercultural experiences across four continents in fact he actually speaks six languages in Dutch English German and French Danny and I we've opted to do today's interview in English with
(01:27) him but really welcome Martin great to have you en Joy [Music] us welcome it's fantastic to have you with us so we just going to kick off could you just tell us a bit more about the work that you do um and what your role involves I've been interested in how beasts called organizations work from for a very very long time I'm a self-described geek I started reading business books when I was 14 it's always been clear that I was was going to make what I did about working in organization so after my first s of stints in the
(02:01) global supply chain industry U with great many thanks to my uncle who let me Tinker on his company uh and where I basically learned the basics I landed in the IT industry and then at the tender age of 27 I was heading up a business unit in that stock market listed company but I also had a great mentor um who was the chief operating officer and he'd let me Tinker on company as well and um that's in essence how at a certain point about 25 years ago I transitioned and became a consultant so I've been an
(02:36) independent in various connections and affiliations for the past 25 years or so and I think the the main stay is always uh for me although I didn't coin that immediately is how how can you change the context in such a way that change becomes easy and so what I do now with clients quite often with executive committees or book management or whatever you want to call them is is to have the ation on the one one hand about what's what's what's really bugging them what's keeping them up at night and then
(03:06) what where would they like to go and then we have in essence a space where we can do something and then rather than doing classical leadership development we work on business problem and in the wake of working on that business problem it becomes very clear where there is friction between people and then we deal with that that friction by handing them some simp tools I like to call them Lego bricks of human process technology uh that they can then take into their daily practice in working together as leaders
(03:39) and managers uh to do interaction better and that the main thing of my work as a couple of examples for the last couple of years been working for for a really large pharmaceutical company uh in the Immunology space but I'm also working for a very small Immunology startup I'm probably likely to start doing some work around team Effectiveness for one of the leading tech companies in the world so it's it's very very varied but it's actually always I think about improving the quality of the interaction because
(04:07) if you improve the quality of the interaction you likely improve the U your outcomes exponentially and you work with senior team so why that focus and and what Drew you to that that kind of lens so when I was going through my therapy uh uh training uh one of the main stays in the the the latter part was working with the masks as defined by Reich and one of them masks is the masochist Mark and I guess I must be a masochist working for very senior uh teams is not as you said in the introduction G not always with a faint
(04:43) of heart but the the reason why I like doing that is because you can make so much impact if you are actually able to get people engaged from the top H and then it's not to say that you need then do stuff top down but it's really helpful if uh it's not about they need to do they down there need to do the change it's about we're actually as an executive team driving the change so so that's the why behind it and also organizations often not out of bad intent it tend to be quite terrible
(05:16) places to be in so the the quickest way to make them better places to be in is to start with people who have the biggest levers for influencing and changing that do you think the senior leaders often underestimate the influence and impact they have on the rest of the organization that's a really really good question because I think they both under estimate and overestimate it and where they underestimate it is where in what AR Kleiner has defined in core group who really matters as the amplification phenomenon which is that that people
(05:48) think that they say something with the dial on one but because they have a certain position it lands at 11 and therefore is taken very seriously and all sorts of things are put put in motion and it was actually not necessarily the intent of that senior executive to do that that's a space but it also works the other way around in the sense that what comes up through the layers in the organization and which should sort of land at 11 tends to be dialed back to one so they can brush things aside so that's the underestimate bit the
(06:25) overestimated bit is that they think they are running often think because they've been trained to do that in business school they think they run a machine and as a result they can they can design things to make to make the machine work differently and then push that into the machine and then it will happen and and and I think that's where they overestimate their influence and that's why I'm always working with the notion of trying to find people who are willing to do change and to engage those
(06:56) people uh in co-creating the change rather than than driving in a mechanistic way from the top down it's a really interesting thing isn't it how the power of how you conceptualize the organization can have an H impact in terms of how you lead it as well why do so many leaders have the definition or metaphor of an organization the minds of of it being a machine because often practitioners will often describe it as anything but you've read my article but the the listeners haven't but the the article I completed uh towards the end
(07:26) of last year was called the efficiency fallacy and in it one of the things I call out is how uh Frederick Taylor is actually a fraud and but uh there is a vested interest in in the whole industry around Consulting around leadership development around business schools around yeah the the big four consulting firms to perpetuate the the myth that you can do scientific management as per per tailor because it pays the bills for an inordinate amount of uh people but the the the metaphor and the ensuing methodology are for driving efficiencies
(08:05) from the notion that if you drive for efficiencies things will get better but as dear old Peter duer has rightfully posited one there is uh no reason why organizations couldn't be made to be more productive and more Humane at the same time and secondly you need to understand what is effective before you can be efficient and I I once famously said to to the CF of a large airliner when he was just explaining that he was going to do a transformation which in essence was just a mega cost cost cutting operation I said so Frank what
(08:40) you're telling me is you're going to shrink your way to growth can you can you please tell me how that's supposed to work so I often say good good intentions bad outcomes because it's it's not that these people have an ill intent it's just that they've been taught to frame things and look at things in a particular and spefic specific way that is actually usually not helpful to achieving the goals they State they want to achieve so so that's quite often a hard hard but a very worthwhile conversation to have with
(09:13) people yeah is is it's a really interesting paper we'll put the the link to it in the show notes if you're happy us to do that there was a couple things that stood out for me um because you do talk about the fact that organizations often sort of create really difficult conditions so and like Innovation versus efficiency as an issue like we're trying to achieve both things at the same time but there's one particular thing that you stood out that you mentioned which is you talked about how um you often challenge leaders
(09:40) in the moment about how you actually work with them you said something along the lines of do you asking leaders do you like being told what to do could you just pick up that thread for us I just laughed out loud what I say yeah what I say in the article um is what I actually often do I I once famously had a conversation that's another example with a with a a business group president and I said do you think change starts here in your office or do you think they need to do it outside and then he said well I
(10:09) think it's mainly for them to do it well and then I stood up and I said well then I'm going to have to shake your hand because then I'm not the right person to work with you because if you don't participate and start this uh the likelihood that they are going to do it is not very big so so that's an example but another example is and that's in the article is is I I often also literally ask people in the sea Suite do you like being told what to do and they go no right did you get to where you are today
(10:41) by doing what you were told no okay can you explain me why then most of your models for doing things with people in your organization bace is based on telling them what to do and then I shut up and then just wait for the the wheels to turn then quite often people go yeah that that is rather remarkable yeah because well I guess it's it's surfacing the implicit rules that govern um how people work isn't it and that's quite an important way of challenging people and I guess that's that's the the really
(11:15) healthy role of a a great facilitator and a g great coach isn't it the ability to ask questions that maybe others and their peers don't ask them yeah and because as part and Par of that amplification thing that we talked about earlier there's also the there's also the the the space where most of the time the more senior people get the less feedback SL push back they get so hopefully they pay people like us be to to be behind closed do doors and to do admit that it's perhaps good to take in a more a different angle one of
(11:53) the things Gary mentioned in your kind of introduction was The Fearless organization that you co-found one of the co-founders with Professor Amy Edmonson a name that a lot of people will have heard of and will associate with the whole kind of Psych psychological safety how did that come about uh how that came about was in um did just before I quit my last real real job there was somebody who said mon you should do something with dial so an xkm pz consultant we were working with at the time on on doing OD in The Firm
(12:22) where I was employed and I said okay that's interesting but then I talked to somebody who'd done a program so I got sent to was then still the uh Center for organizational learning at MIT uh so I had some training from Peter Sanger uh I became involved in the society for organizational learning but I also did this program with um Peter Garrett and and Bill ISX around uh dialogue and that's where I also met David caner and David caner is originally was originally a psycho a psychologist who did a PhD
(12:56) and he uh did some fundamental Research into sort of Personality profiles and he did a really cool one because he got a grant from the National Institute for mental health in the mid 70s um of the then astronomical amount of $250,000 with which he then went on to install tape recorders in the houses of 21 ordinary uh American families and recorded every single interaction for for six weeks and then took all of that material with the team of phds start codifying four layers of people's personality so David's work finally
(13:36) found its way into organizations because uh a coup of children's shoes um the the team at the MIT Center for organizational learning wasn't functioning optimally so they were looking for a coach and um and that was David and that's how this whole language around what probably most OD practitioners will the four player uh Model A Move follow oppos bystand will will probably know found its way into organizations so I've been working with David until he died uh and I'm one of the the people who safeguarded that
(14:12) his legacy uh landed with the Dutch from I was affiliated with uh so you can still get those boundary profiles and that Amy and U her colleague um Joe uh in the executive NBA were using David's instrument and that work uh to um to help people understand how a boardroom uh uh Dynamics work and then dve Amy published her her book the fs organization and I read it and I had been in contact with her and I found I found a really Scrappy B trick survey somewhere hidden in the 2008 uh HR article and I said to her but but Amy
(14:58) this is way too important to to live in a book and a scrappy uh qual service so so I helped found and built the Fearless organization at its Inception and um that's probably been um an important part in uh in really putting psychological safety and measuring it on the agenda so basically just staying in touch and then iterating on yeah on relationships and how important is psychological safety when it comes to to teams and particularly at that senior level incredibly important but it's been scientifically proven through project
(15:34) Aristotle uh at Google with 180 teams across five years with 12,000 data points that there are five factors that influence the effectiveness and the well-being of a team but the absolute bedrock and Foundation uh because it also weighs for 39% over the other four factors is psychological safety because if you don't have psychological safety you cannot have sustained high performance period and as I like to frame it for senior Executives uh when I do Keynotes about it fear makes you dumb so it's an incredibly dumb management strategy
(16:10) because what happens is literally your executive function shut down you end up in your reptile brain and unhelpfully that starts pumping unhealthful hormones down your spine with a 3 second Head Start over your executive function so screaming at people putting the fear of God in them not very useful management strategy and how just a question like know's going to come up how do people get out of that situation so they've created a Culture of Fear they are you know they have teams that are terrified of them where do they start unpacking
(16:45) that and kind of making it better yeah also yeah because just a build on that as well because you sometimes leaders can find it quite surprising that they create fear don't they because they can almost be 95% nice and 5% aggressive and that and that can leave a shadow as well it's it's quite complicated isn't it it's very complicated also because I think once you get into the sea Suite you can you can just calling a spade a spade you can afford to be nice because there are other people right below you
(17:13) or in your uh in your staff that are willing to do the unpleasant bidding and you can just be nice and gregarious from there on up um assuming that you are are not a psychopath and so that that is that was one aspect but another aspect to your original question it um starting by looking at uh what's going on in their in their own team which often isn't a team but more a group that follows a ritualized agenda um and to have the conversation about how that plays out and then hopefully having the skill as a consultant as facilitator to
(17:56) really gently sort of highlight what's going on in the room and the most famous one was the one of the first ones I did for a financial institution where the head of trading said wait wait what we have low psychological safety I thought it look really great and I went well Joe look you can look at the data and you know we've just explained you The Benchmark and you can look around the room what the impact was of what you just did because you could see people's body language shift quite significantly fair
(18:32) point but this is often why working with senior leaders is not for the faint of heart because there's always these sort of minor risks or major risks that you're taking constantly trying to sort of couch that feedback and get them obviously not that you hold the feedback it's obviously that you're cating Fe but it's still that as the vessel that passes it on there's always that danger isn't there yeah but that's I think that that's the important part and that's one of the terms I came up with I think what
(18:58) if you have a good process or a good instrument and a good process um what it affords you to do is to put the thing that we're supposed to talk about in the middle so in dialogic terms rather than being in the lower quadrant which is breakdown you want to end up in inquiry which is the the top right quadrant in the model and the the way to do that is to um have people realize that they don't don't have to be their point of view but they can have a point of view and you do that by skillfully putting
(19:35) what you're looking at in the middle and saying it's not about it's not about a a blame game or saying that I don't know you are too um you're too too directive or you are not forthcoming enough it's about putting it in the middle and then figuring out and that's hard a new way to talk about that and you got got such an interesting background you know that that fundamental kind of at a very young age sort of leading you know in really highly responsible positions and then you became a psychotherapist and um what
(20:11) was your kind of your journey into where you are now what drove that well frankly I I was and I am I still am failing uh in in many domains of life um because I'm human so so um around 2010 or so uh I thought yeah I can go into therapy again or I can actually just do fullon therapy training because I keep bumping into dysfunctional Dynamics in myself but it's there's dysfunctional Dynamics in groups in people I coach individually so I might as well go the whole nine yards and and complete proper training
(20:53) for it also because I just find it endlessly fascinating and and you you've probably saw the things one of the things I like to say in in groups is well you know you your parents tend to have more influence over your business results than you do um so it's it's useful to to understand because in David Canter's terms when we're clashing in a team what's clashing is not two adult people but it's two childhood stories and the stories we we've subsequently sto telling ourselves about um who we
(21:30) are or how we think we should show up and and how do you kind of introdu do you go as far as introducing that in the work that that's that's what's happening here or is it just through questioning I guess I'm intrigued like that kind of there kind of really deep questions need consent don't they well there's so there's there are two ways in which I do it one is um quite often a workshop with me with any team will involve something that I um learned somewhere along the way which is called the musical dinner
(22:04) and what we do is we ask people to pick a piece of music and the instruction is quite specific because it is pick a piece of music and be willing to share the story about why that piece of music is important to you or why it moved you and be prepared to go a little further than you would normally go in the work setting whilst guarding your personal boundaries and that is so those are magical evenings because then without slapping a whole body of theory on people they're in effect sharing a part of a large part of their
(22:41) childhood story and how they came to be where they are today and then quite often there are tears and there is hearty laughter and there's also the iy if IID known that about you I would have treated you so radically differently which goes to show that one once you have shared your stories with each other you can't hate each other anymore um and then the other bit is just really pragmatically taking at least the four player model slapping four placards on the ground explaining in a team session um what those four positions are and
(23:17) that you can do all four of them um and then just getting people to uh saying to people well so um if if you if you can't stop yourself and what you do normally where would you go stand so now just go stand there and that gives you an immediate light-hearted snapshot at uh of what what people think the Dynamics in their team are in the dialogue and sues and then they typically take that on board and start inviting those four behaviors as in where appropriate and useful really good Stu D do you want to go on the leadership development
(23:55) question yes so I was I spotted a post that you I think Steve H had had highlighted one of your old posts about why you hate why I hate leadership development so I was just just wonderfully provocative I just wanted to unpack that a bit and just see what what do you think we're getting wrong about traditional leadership development and what alternatives should we be looking at so I've I've formulated rather crassly but that that's entertaining um and it's also for the purpose of entertaining and provoking people into
(24:26) thought it's a good thing but in in essence if you look at classical leadership development programs and I've run them so I'm guilty as charg I I I I did them as well um the feedback is overridingly somewhere four out of somewhere between four out of five and five out of five and it's all all good and fine and then the the if you look at the qualitative feedback it's it's always something like it was so good to finally connect SL reconnect with my International uh appears and it was marvelous and at a certain point I
(25:00) thought well if that is really the overriding sense why don't we just you know book a bunch of EasyJet tickets drop 25 Grand on a on a nice venue and a and a DJ and have a great party and all get get smashed and then we have the same outcome likely uh so and also quite often and they still happen like that the the the the I I mentioned helmet in the article who's going to be who's like going to be your manager somewhere in the next three years and he's going to be in the same room with you and then
(25:34) quite often still there are these two nice ladies from Global corporate HR who are observing so so the chances that that is a context where you're going to go full out and work on your demons is not very big so what I'm arguing for in the article is that there are two th two ways in which you could do leadership development the first one is um it's the program where where you get sent to where you're likely not with your peers and where you actually get to work on whatever it is that is standing in the
(26:07) way of you being um um a fully functioning happy and mentally health healthy professional and you just do group work um and the boss pays for it or you pay for it yourself but nobody gets insight into what actually happened there that's that's one way of doing it and the other one is uh and I think I referred to it earlier is is you know rather than spending money on uh doing horizontal uh rungs of leadership development as people progress through the Matrix uh invest that money and less actually invest that money in a team and
(26:48) get people internally trained up but also use people like us to work with your team on an actual business Challenge and then Infuse that program uh which can be a 90-day program with a couple of waypoints in it uh where you also measure where you're getting at with with your outcomes is Infuse that with some building blocks like dialogue the dialogue model and practicing with that like practicing with hey what's going on in the room uh and how can you be more effective at having um balancing advocacy and inquiry in your
(27:23) conversation and so on but in a in a really lighthearted way and then you tend to get much better outcomes but you also make Direct business impact yeah because I think you talked about like the three hours of Rhythm rigor and reflection being a core component of that can you just open that up a little bit so one of the things that I did with um with a management team in the in the pharmaceutical industry in the last two years is we created a specific Rhythm so I think agile is a church but there are so going fullon agile and not
(27:57) contextualizing and just taking the good bits I'm not in favor but there are the notion of building a rhythm that's in agile but in other methodologies as well is a really good one because I think what you should what we tend to do is we have these standing meetings that are part of the tradition and the rituals of a company and just because we never look at them and we have as humans we have addition bias so we'd rather slap something or rather take something away we don't don't examine the meeting withm
(28:30) but I think you should regularly look at your meeting rhym because I think that's also a way for organizing uh the future of work and not getting bogged down and it's either in the office or it's fully remote no it's not it's creating a rhythm that works for a specific context and there is probably status which is short and sweet then there is um just your regular meeting but within with a backlog and the discipline to not do 17 things in an hour but to do one or two or three and to actually have an outcome
(29:04) at the end of the meeting because then it's useful to have the meeting and then the last bit is there's you you have to figure out a way to um certainly the more senior you get you have to have reflective space and Collective reflective space so one of my I one of my proudest achievements is that these uh this spe specific executive committee has chosen to spend four hours a month without an they together and they've now up their game because they're going to be in their headquarters uh for two week
(29:36) for two weeks three times a year so they have time to bump into each other and actually do business with each other so that's about that's about building uh the Rhythm then the riger bit is it's a very specific definition but it boils down to that you we have a habit of being so chronically busy that we don't do the thorough deep dive on things and I think we could be much more effective if we looked at hey what's really going on so what's what's what's actually going on below below the water line and
(30:09) let's not CH choose the first order solution but let's see what the second order solution be that rigor in that sense and then rigor also in terms of carrying it through and then the the last bit is reflection so if you're in if you're a team I think you should have you should have a refle reflective practice because otherwise you never be a good team this has hurt my neck because I'm nodding so much this is brilliant it's so true isn't it I guess I'm really curious what you're saying
(30:36) though like so you said like so the senior team comes together for four hours without any agenda yeah and they can yeah they can take they can take they can take they can choose to hang out they can choose to take one big chunk that they want to look at or they can conclude sometimes that they don't need the four hours and address one smaller thing but it's just that if you make because a a global corporate agenda is such cence if you don't put it on the calendar it'll it'll be driven out I'm
(31:07) there's probably a lot of people listening into this going that sounds brilliant but how on Earth would I convince my senior team to have four hours together with No Agenda because we like you said we live in such an action bias how do you sort of get people to understand the value of that and what can emerge in that time because it is it's critical space isn't it yeah I think the the the thing is that that we're all until it get KN gets knocked out of us in in primary and secondary school we're all by Nature systems
(31:38) thinkers because that's how we learn to walk and do all the things that little humans need need to learn to do and that gets driven out of us but inherently we still have that capability to look at things from a whole system's perspective so quite often the the the when I start working with a team um we run an exercise that was once conceived by Peter S and I've amended a little but it's in essence it's a an exercise called what's the real problem and it takes about an hour and a half to two
(32:11) and a half hours and what you do is you go through a series of questions um and the end point is always for that specific context we have seen the enemy and he is us and you do it by looking at what's working well what's not working so well and then you focus on what's not working so well so that's a relatively safe space if well facilitated to put all the elephants uh in the room on the Whiteboard and then you start unpacking that not by saying okay what are we going to do to solve this but you say in
(32:40) a couple of rounds the first one being what is it in our behavior that rewards us to keep these problems alive and then the second round is there are implicit and explicit rules and structures in this company so what is it in our implicit and explicit rules and structures that rewards us to keep these problems alive and then typically we have values and we have spoused values and we have values in use so what between values in use and spouse values is it that rewards us to keep these problems alive that's slowing down but
(33:11) it's slowing down to go faster because it yields two things in terms of output one is over the course of say a two or threed day workshop that's in essence the the the the gold dust that you take into okay this these are the problems below the water line that we're going to solve for with each other and we're going to come up with three two or three simple initiatives that we're going to work on from there on up and then the other one is okay we really need more time with each other to prevent us from
(33:41) coming to this point where we are actually basically stumbling and we're not hitting our corporate strategy goals or whatever it is you're trying to do genius but too much too much honor but it's it's really about facilitating a text where people can go yeah we we need to do these things differently what do you enjoy most about the role that you do and the work that you do I I always say in one sentence I love s solving Wicked problems with cool people and and that's what I get to do for a living so that that's what I enjoy
(34:19) Mo most about it is that wildly desperate challenges i u I've been lucky to work for um when my life was a little bit unstable uh between 2017 and and 2019 I worked as a principal for k jamini for for two years and I encountered the What's called the uh accelerated Solutions environment which is based on the um the design shop model work of mg Taylor mg Taylor and uh and Rob Evans and um as an example on lots of things there is um there's a little barcode and there's a an Institute called gs1 that that brought that about
(34:58) and organizes that around the world and then stuff has progressed and one of the coolest things that I did was we uh we got to work with uh organization to conceive a global data model uh because that would be the next step because if you want to move stuff seamlessly through a supply chain and it's really useful to to have a global standard so we did the Inception workshop with people from competitor uh be competitors in the industry working together to to standardize uh and come up with the basic tax only for global data model and
(35:34) that's it's outlandish but it's it's really cool to work with people at a very senior level from across Industries and then to uh find the way forward and now seeing some four five years downward that is actually being standardized and it's starting to find its its footing and there's there's lots of things like that and of course obviously always doing a new strategy for an organization but with the the the organizational Health side very much embedded in that is is fantastic to do it's the power of
(36:08) collective IQ isn't it when you're actually able to leverage all of that together to focus on one thing incredible things can happen can't they yeah I think one of the nicest compliments someone and it sounds really simple but that makes it incredibly difficult at the same time one of the one of the things somebody said and I took that as probably one of the nicest compliment I got was ah I see what you do you create circumstances where things can happen you work internationally so how different is it working in different
(36:38) International contexts you see the senior teams very wildly across International boundaries or some commonalities but it's probably because I'm I'm Dutch and we have such a long history of of being the Tradesmen who just go around the world I mean if the French and the English were fighting we sold muskets to both sides um and and the advantage is nobody speaks Dutch Bar for a few people in Belgium and some in some of the countries we colonized so so you have to immerse yourself in a different culture because otherwise
(37:10) people just simply don't get you so um and I'm I'm I'm interested and you mentioned that I have quite a good facility with foreign languages that's helpful and having said all that you know some of the stereotypes about culture and the context you walk into countries are are are are true but in the end it's about we make a human connection and if we take the space to make a real human connection I've not seen culture as in National or Regional culture even if if if such are things
(37:44) but at least National culture I've never seen that sort of get in the way of people finding a way to connect that said there are persistent patterns that have cultural origins in in in companies that are not always useful for do doing being effective that totally true so if you look back at your career so far what would you say some of the biggest lessons that you've learned are that you'd share with others get good at doing two adjacent things well because if you do that you know then you you can
(38:18) be pretty unbeatable so it's not always easy for me to sell myself but once people see what the benefit of somebody who brings a strategy and Psych angle to a process or a team it is really really useful for them and they they love it so so get get good at at develop well get good at being an independent thinker and and learn to think for yourself and find uh tools and methodologies that to that help you do that that that's that's that's one thing and the other one is my first Mentor was David ogi the the
(38:54) founder of of ogi because I wrote him a letter after I read his book when I was 14 and he W be back and we became friend and one of the things he said in a note that he wrote to me is like you have you have insatiable curiosity and I thought I was the original nosy Parker but but I'm handing the title over to you and I think have being empathetic on the one side and being incisive on the other side is really important because if you do that in in our business in od then if you know what you're talking about you
(39:27) learn to ask the right questions but you do it from a standpoint of empathy and respect you can almost not fail as an interventionist and also senior people will take will will take stuff from you so to say how do you invest in your own Learning and Development I'm very fortunate that I have built a a group of people not all of which are on the on the website so we in essence the Friday here is always um a two and fro of lots of people uh both clients and and uh colleagues just coming to the office and we just we hang out we have lunch we
(40:02) talk about anything everything but part of it is a structured process about talking about what's going on in your life and where do you where where do you think you need help so that's the the that's just that's a rhythm we're drinking our own champagne as the French would say and uh the other is I I regularly try to do from a standpoint of curiosity some form of training or a course that just keeps me and I'm a fucious reader so I I love reading and increasingly because I'm I'm coming I'm
(40:35) going to be 55 in September increasingly my way to actually capture my own learning is also simply by writing so I can hopefully pass a couple of things on but while I'm writing and also doing research and then incorporating that in it and I think that's a good one too is there a particular book or a podcast or a resource that you you'd like to recommend encourage other people to to look up read I'm going to say I'm going to say an outlier because it's just so delightfully weird um there's a guy
(41:04) called Rick Rubin who's one of the most famous um record producers in the world but he's just created a he's just written a book about creativity but he has a podcast and the podcast is is called tetr Graton but they're long form interviews with weird people from all works of life so there's a three-hour conversation with Rory sand a friend of mine the vice chairman of Ogle V about Behavioral Science which is brilliant there's um uh there's a two and a half hour interview with Edward Norton the
(41:38) actor who is a a brilliant human uh there's an interview with Tom Hanks U who's just so thoughtful about so many things so it's just that's like if you want to get new signups is for it's tetron um uh and it's available on Spotify for example and it's it's a delight and we always asked this question at the end of every session because we really want Inspire the next generation of OD practitioners or change agents or facilitators to top teams what advice would you give someone just
(42:06) starting out in their career now either considering it or they're just taking their first steps Pi the leader you like and make sure you get to work for her for a couple of years I'll share that I'll give an example I did that at some point in my career and that got me to be the head of a business unit then Secretary of the board with a made for organizational development somewhere in my career but there one of my juniors as they're called in the internal vernacular at a ke Gemini was a really
(42:36) brilliant guy studied um organizational science and uh and change got a master's degree in it but really sharp guy uh was always picking my brain still calls me but took that advice and is now uh in a really really senior uh OD transformation role globally because he obviously on his own Merit but he followed that path well Mart I want to say huge thank you for today it's been it's been great it's been wonderfully practical you're intensely well read so we've got some brilliant references to take away from this as
(43:13) well and there's a real sort of honesty to it as well which has been which has been brilliant and and you are Master of the sound bite I think we've got like 20 really good qu to take away from today which is part of my takeaways today so I guess one of the takeaways I've got I've got three dny but I could have at five I got um I love the phrase fear makes you dumb it it's so true isn't it but it's so so lost easily that that that sense that so many senior leaders have the metaphor or the the mental model of a
(43:41) machine and what that does and the importance of challenging that as well um and then also looking at how you sort of challenge organizations and making sure that there's real Clarity particularly in teams around Rhythm rigor and reflection and those being the core ingredients um Danny what are you taking away from today think so much of some of what you've said already but I think the ampamp amplification point that you ra you mentioned at the early stages of that about how leaders kind of underestimate the amplification but also
(44:08) in Reverse dial down what they hear what's coming bottom up I love the point you made about having a point of view and not but but not being that point of view I think you know if we can encourage more people to take that stance that would encourage the quality of dialogue and then the point you made about the space for human connection how that that's so important and overrides everything or kind of is the foundation for so much of the work we want to I think we should start a campaign all organizations have senior teams that
(44:31) have four hours of unended time together would be a much more different place wouldn't it there's a there's a great story uh back in the days when when uni L was doing in the early u0s when uni was doing a lot a lot a lot a lot of um Standalone very beautiful wonderful leadership development work and then there was Ki D who who grown up through the Rings I think through hindon lever who was also in the board and then he went well you see I think at the beginning beginning of your career the idea is that you drive around in your
(45:02) Ford Focus with the Lipton brand on it and you just compete with whoever we're competing at for the Shelf space and if you want to take out two two and a half hours on a Friday afternoon think about how you can do that better and how you can progress your career good on you much more than that probably not so useful at that stage in your career however at my stage the stage of my career where I at I I probably should be spending three time three days a week staring out the window talking to other people about what the course of the
(45:30) company should be and so it's so it's a balance and it it it'll grow and Shrink over time through your career but just take some time to think people it'll do your world of good and and if people want to reach out to you obviously there's we're going to share the paper that you shared with us today but if you want to follow your work or connect with you what's the best way to do it um I'm uh very open to connecting on LinkedIn and if you have a direct question for me then it's Martin which is
(45:58) we had a whole little skit about my my name my first and my last name which is very complicated for non-dutch people I apologize for it but my email is m a r t JN system2 system and then the number to DOL and send me an email or or find me because the benefit of my first and last name is that I'm actually the only Martin Sher in the world so you can you can not not find me on LinkedIn and or contact the the wrong person really we make sure your details in the show notes as well and I think that's a very fitting I
(46:33) think you are the only one it's such a brilliant connection of all these different insights and experiences coming together um so thank you so much for your time we really appreciate it um it's been a really engaging conversation and we love all the tools that you share it's been really really practical as well my's interview now goes into the collection of brilliant guests that we've also got I think Danny went up to episode at the moment 33 is that right I think that's correct yes we've got a
(46:56) whole range of the guests booked in and it's just brilliant that that people like Mar are just so generous and sort of sharing their insights so we hope you really enjoyed it um subscribe to the channel and if you we've earned your like then please hit the like button with your listen this on YouTube or on buzzb as well thanks very much [Music]