Minter Dialogue with Kevin Eikenberry

In this 595th episode, I welcome back Kevin Eikenberry, a repeat guest on the show, to discuss his upcoming book, “Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence,” set for release in early 2025. We explore the critical role of confidence in leadership, especially amidst today’s chaotic and fast-paced world. Kevin shares insights on the importance of self-awareness and the often-overlooked value of confidence in leadership development. We delve into the concept of sense-making and the challenges of adapting to a world that is no longer as predictable as it once was. Kevin introduces the Cynefin framework, a tool for understanding different contexts in leadership, and discusses the balance between flexibility and having a strong backbone. We also touch on the significance of purpose in guiding decisions and fostering commitment over mere compliance. 

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Kevin Eikenberry:

• Check out Kevin’s eponymous site here
• Find/preorder Kevin Eikenberry’s book, “Flexible Leadership,” here
• Take up Kevin’s podcast-listeners’ offer of a free Masterclass: Building Confidence in Yourself & Others 
• Find/follow Kevin Eikenerry on LinkedIn
• Find/follow Kevin on X (formerly Twitter)

Other mentions/sites:

• Check out my first interview with Kevin Eikenberry on Remote Leadership here

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Kevin Eikenberry, you’re now on the list of repeat offenders on my show. Great to have you on, Kevin. For those you though listening who may not have seen the first episode.

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, it was a while ago.

Minter Dial: It was. And we, we are allowed to change. I don’t know if it wasn’t seven years ago at least, but you know, we do have the right to change. And anyway, what, and who is Kevin Eikenberry?

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, what am I? I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a farm kid. I’m an author, I’m a business owner. I’m a person who cares a lot about making the world a better place by helping leaders get better.

Minter Dial: Beautiful. All right. So, your new book, which is coming out in beginning of 2025, “Flexible Leadership, Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence.” What struck me about the title was not the uncertainty because VUCA seems to be everywhere, but the idea of confidence. And I just wanted to start with that piece because in the idea of having confidence when you don’t know ship from Cheyenne, what’s going to happen tomorrow, how the geopolitical situation is going around, it is chaotic, it is going at fast speed and the idea of gaining confidence. So, let’s start with talking about this idea of gaining confidence. What do you mean by that and how can you get it?

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, I think the first thing is that all of us, here’s my observation as individuals, we also realize, hey, when we’re more confident, we’re better at whatever it is. Like we sort of intellectually and even profoundly know that. And yet it never seems to be part of the conversation. Minter when we’re talking about developing our leaders, developing our folks as a leader, coaching our team, like somehow we’ve forgotten that sort of profoundly true statement. So, the first thing is I just want to elevate the idea and the importance of confidence in the conversation, which we try to do some in the book. So, that’s the first thing. But if we want to tie it directly to uncertainty, the way that we can build confidence in anything is to have a toolkit that we know has a chance to work right. So, like if I want to be better at, I can’t talk about paddle tennis because I don’t have any data and I know that you’re a hockey guy. But like, if I want to get better at a slap shot, there’s some things I can if I know some certain things and then I practice those things, I’ll get better. Even though during the game there is a whole bunch of other stuff happening rather than me just practicing shots, right? So, so the first thing is we’ve got to have a toolkit or we’ve got to have a model or we’ve got to have some approaches that we can have enough confidence in to try. And then we know that when we try things we have the chance to get better. Right? We call that the confidence competence loop. So, I’m just a big believer in the value of confidence and I think like I said, it’s underappreciated in the world outside of our own heads. And then I think that that’s one of the keys to help us listen. The world is uncertain, right? In those big geopolitical ways, but also in the within our business and within our team, more uncertain, more different, more chaotic in some cases more certainly more complicated than it’s ever been. And so if we have some things we can lean back against to help us in that uncertainty, we got a much better chance of succeeding.

Minter Dial: So, we’re going to get into a bunch of the things in your book. But it’s always struck me, and only intuitively because I’m no psychologist or academic, but the more you know yourself, the more you can have confidence if you haven’t done the hard work on who you are. I don’t really care about your slapshot, but can you truly have that deep long-lasting confidence if you don’t have that self-knowledge?

Kevin Eikenberry: I think if we want to talk about underappreciated, if we want to talk about, you know, so here’s one of the big premise premises of my book is that we’ve been working, a lot of smart people, including you and I have been trying to figure out how to help leaders be more effective for a long time, like longer than I’ve been alive, people have been trying to figure this out. Smart people, well intentioned people, been trying to figure it out. And a lot of good stuff has been learned and a lot of good stuff has been tried and yet the overall return on investment organizationally for leadership development efforts, not so great unfortunately. And, and I think that self-awareness is another big piece of it. Like we’re going to send everybody off to some leadership training, whether that’s at the front line or whether that’s in the C suite. And what we send them to might be different and it might even always be a 2 anymore. It might be to a web page rather than to a location, but we’re forgetting what’s underneath that, which is where is that person, what’s that person’s readiness, what’s that person’s awareness, what’s that person’s level of caring about getting better at all of this. So, so whether you call it self-awareness, whether you call it mindset, I would call it probably both. It’s critical. And if we want to, if we want to be more confident, we have to have a better sense of who we are. To your point. And, and, and some people say, well, I’ve looked at myself and I don’t think, you know, and I have a lot of guilt and shame and I’ve low self-esteem and. But even if I’ve got that as a starting point, again, I’m not a psychologist either, but even if I’ve got that as a starting point, and I know that’s where I’m at, if I have a goal that I want to head toward, I’ve got a shot, right? But until if we’re sort of living in the murkiness, trying to walk through the quicksand, we don’t, we won’t even take any action.

Minter Dial: In, in your chapter about sense making it, I started off with the chapter with this first thought, which is I feel that the world’s problem is that we’ve, we’ve run out of sense. We, we, we don’t know how to make sense of what’s going on. And part of that is obviously uncertainty, doubts about many things, but there’s a, an ungroundedness to so many businesses and so many people that we’ve run out of sense.

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, I think that so many people are, are hoping or thinking that it will somehow be like it once was, right? And, and, and I’ll use a concrete example first and then we can go back from there. But. Well, I’ll say two things. Number one, a long time ago when I worked in corporate America, one, for a very large, very successful organization, tremendous amount of effort put around figuring out best practices. Well, best practices are awesome when we know all the parameters, right? And so that whole idea of best practices, while it made more sense, made some sense then it makes way less sense now because, because the world isn’t as simple, it isn’t as clear as it was then, right? So, now, so let me take another example, one that we’re all familiar with, right? We were all going along, minding our own business, living our lives, running our businesses, and then we had this virus that sent everybody home to work from home, right? And so we knew what work looked like and then suddenly work looked different, and so we needed to do it that way. Because of health and ethics and government mandates for some period of time, right. We had to work from, many of us had to work from home. And so, the world’s view of work changed just like that. Now we could have a long conversation about how the, how the world and society is viewed work over history. And I’m happy to do that if you want. But in this case, what happened was it happened like that in an instant, literally in an instant or in a week. And so then through all that uncertainty, people did amazing things to figure out how to make it work. And then once the virus worries went away and the mandates went away, what did a lot of people want to do? We got to get everybody back to the way it was because that’s what we know, right? And to try to go back to that by itself. And listen, I wrote three books about working at a distance and leading at a distance and all that. And yet I’m not the zealot that says we should never have to go to an office. That’s not what I’m saying. But what I’m saying is to blanketly say we’re just going to go back doesn’t make sense given that the context in which the world lives is now different. And so the uncertainty comes because everyone wants to try to get take it back to someplace where they knew it and we’re not. That’s not what’s going to happen. We have to, we have to think about allostasis, which is how do we find stability in the change rather than trying to roll things back to the way they once were.

Minter Dial: This notion of context is so vital even in the days of best practice sharing. And I would argue for most consultants when they come in to try to change some company bringing in some other ideas, if not best practice from other companies. The reality is the only way that that best practice is really going to work is if a, you know the exact context in which it happened in the first place and two, you are conscious of the true issues and context in which you’re trying to place it. Because ultimately it could be because it worked, because there were two CO CEOs or there were two people that hated each other, or there were, it was in the middle of a catastrophe and now you’re going to try to implement the practice that they used in that context into this other company that has one CEO. People like each other and there no particular catastrophe or whatever. It’s the translation into the context that actually is everything.

Kevin Eikenberry: I think you’re right. I mean I am more and More convinced that context is the most important thing we have to figure out. Because when we figure out context, we get a lot smarter. Right? When we take the time. And so you talked about that chapter on sense making. It’s really about giving us a map so we can understand where we are enough to make sense of it and to look at the context we have in such a way as to say, okay, given that, here’s a bit of a roadmap around that. And too often I had this conversation with someone last week, Minter and actually I tested this with my team. I told you before we went on hit the record button, that I was with my team last week for the first time in a year physically, and, and I tested this with them as well. And the comment that I got from a client was, I, I used to say that busy was a four-letter word. Now busy is a four-letter word that’s capitalized that, that the scurrying and the running and the expectation of activity is higher than ever. And as long as we’re living in that mode, it’s going to be really hard to figure out context because we’re only going to really figure out context when we slow down, look at things from different perspectives, talk with other smart people. And we can’t get there by living on automatic responses.

Minter Dial: So, you talked earlier about having practice, let’s say your slapshot, and having a common framework. That’s how I interpreted what you talk about. And you, you brought to me something I’d never come across, which is the Cynefin. I don’t even know how you pronounce it because it’s Welsh word.

Kevin Eikenberry: Yes, it rhymes with Kevin, at least I can tell.

Minter Dial: Framework. And, and we’re going to get into this in a moment, but let me just start with this. I’ve always been jealous of people who can say I make complex things simple. I, I think if I were to be truthful with myself, I make simple things more complex. That’s how I operate. But the people who can synthesize, you know, a 60,000-word book into one sentence or know how to give an elevator pitch without practice of a, you know, one year of experience, that those are talents I don’t seem to have. But this Kenneth Better. Yeah, framework is, seems to be all about this.

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, it really is. And you know, there are people that have been studying this. It was originally created by a gentleman named Dave Snowden. And I’ve been studying it and using it for 25 years. And what I tried to do was bring it into the context of leadership. Specifically, it’s often used for groups to look at contexts together to help communities and organizations to make sense of their worlds. And what I’ve tried to do is bring this idea that there are basically four domain, in simple terms for those who are listening to us, into four domains, that of clarity, of clear, complicated, complex and chaos. And, and of course we spend some time talking about what each of those four are. But I think the fundamental reality is that most of us and most leaders try to act like everything’s in clear, which is, we got a best practice, we know how to do this, all the knowns are known. Let’s rock and roll. And then we go in.

Minter Dial: Here’s my budget. It’s the exact budget for next year.

Kevin Eikenberry: Exactly. And next year I expect if I use all of these dollars, I’ll get an extra 4% or 10% or 2% or whatever. Like it’s like. And like that’s not really where we are. So, people either act like we’re there or we act like or believe we’re in total chaos. And I think the premise that I would say to you all is that much more of the time we’re in a world that’s more complex or complicated than in one that’s chaos. Truly chaos or clarity. And here’s the other big picture idea of that. If we look at leadership thinking over the last 75 years, 75 years ago, a lot of talk about sort of command and control, the scene, the leader has got the knowledge, the leader has been there before, the leader knows what to do. And if the context is clear, that works just fine. And if the context is chaos, where we need someone to just make a decision right now, as my dad used to say, make a decision even if it’s wrong, we in in a sense of chaos, that’s sometimes what we need too. And so that model of the leader as the smartest one in the room isn’t completely awful in those two contexts. But unfortunately for people who, who like to think that way, that’s not the context we’re in most of the time anymore.

Minter Dial: One of the things you talk about is, is having a common language and you sort of around this framework, you allow everyone to understand what each of these contexts are and what situations and allow for that. I was wondering to what extent the notion of purpose is a clarifying, guiding light or principle in order to bring some form of clarity to the decisions that need to be made in notwithstanding the complexity or the complication that we’re living in.

Kevin Eikenberry: I think it’s the, it’s the overriding factor. So, the first thing I would say it, what purpose can do for a group is, can be the thing that coalesces us to say this purpose is important enough for us to figure out the context, right? Like it’s important enough for us to slow down and figure out like what do we really need to do to make this work rather than just do what we’ve always done and sort of cross our fingers and hope. And so to me, purpose, meaning whatever words you want to put around that if, if that exists for the team and there is that common purpose, it becomes the, not only the clarifier but also and the touchstone, but also the, the reason, the engine for us to look at context. Because the purpose to get to our purpose is so important that we’ve got to make sure we, we take a good, our best shot at it rather than just doing what comes naturally or what we’ve done before.

Minter Dial: My observation, Kevin, is that in any of these discussions I have with customers or clients, boardrooms about purpose, there is frequently a lack of time to properly anchor that purpose into the organization and certainly to make it relevant at a personal level. So, it sort of becomes a. Oh yeah, well, sure, that’s what it is. And, and then when you try to coalesce around it, if you haven’t done the harder work of understanding how it is, what it is exactly, and to what extent it relates into the personnel, it can be a lot of purpose washing and therefore a pretty flap in the wind kind of sail as opposed to a guiding anchor or rudder.

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, you know, as a. Certainly I work with large, large organizations like you do, but even on a personal level, you know, with a company that has my name attached to it and people that are out doing work that I hope is on and in alignment with purpose, it’s a question I think about all the time. Like it’s extraordinarily clear to me, right? And I can draw the connection to other people’s work very clearly whether they have, whether they’re customer facing or not or any of those sorts of things. But it isn’t, it doesn’t even. So, so first of all, I, I have to make sure that I don’t assume that they’ve got it because I’ve got it. And then secondly, I can’t assume that they see what I see. And then thirdly, it doesn’t matter if I see the connections between their work and the, and the purpose they have to see it and their words and their why can be different than mine, as long as it’s all pointing us in the same direction. Right. So, like that’s the other, the other mistake that gets made, I think, is that like, like in a change situation, well, we want everyone to understand the why. And so here’s the organizational why, you know, which is like a subset of purpose. Right. Which is fine, but that’s not the biggest driver for people themselves. It’s their personal why. That’s the biggest driver. My job as a leader is not. Is to inform them of the, of the larger why and help them find theirs, not tell them what theirs is. Yeah, but to help them find theirs. Help them find that connection between where we’re headed and why that’s meaningful to them. And when we get that, then things get way, in many ways easier and certainly we become more powerful as a group.

Minter Dial: Yeah, I took that. I mean, I feel like this is the Valhalla of leadership, frankly. And I wrote a piece recently in an attempt to be a little provocative, Kevin, saying that happiness is not a goal at work. Happiness is a state that you might experience on occasion, but that the deeper sentiment, the deeper emotion, I characterize it as joy. And the idea behind that is that it’s fulfillment, a sense of accomplishment, contributing to the world. And that ability for the CEO to help the employee connect into the bigger why that’s related to the personal why is actually where, where more work could be done.

Kevin Eikenberry: I, I completely agree. Because, you know, listen, we, we have probably all. I know I have experienced joy when things were hard, but I’m not necessarily happy when things are hard. Right.

Minter Dial: Amen. One of the. So, of the. You have many paradoxes in the book. I want to get into those in a bit. But when we talk about flexibility, other words come to mind like agility and, and you know, being open minded and other things. And yet a. Decisions need to be made. And two, where’s the backbone? Because I don’t know about you, but my backbone and my bones are getting stiffer by the day as I ain’t getting any younger.

Kevin Eikenberry: However, I’m just not going to comment.

Minter Dial: That’s exactly: Pas Touche. But the idea of having a backbone is I feel desperately needed. So, how do you. Because you, at one point you talk about the need for consistency. On the other hand, the requirement for flexibility, I put it in the same bucket. Consistency but backbone. Where you aren’t going to get this business because it, it rubs you, your values the wrong way. You’re not going to get this business because they’re just a piece of shit. I don’t want to work with them. You’re not going to get this business because they, they are sided with another competitor. Whatever the decisions are, where is the backbone and how does that fit into the flexible leadership mindset?

Kevin Eikenberry: Yeah, and I addressed that early in the book because I think, you know, it’s one thing to say, oh, being flexible sounds good. And until people say, well, wait a minute, does that mean you’re flip flopping? Does that mean that you don’t have a backbone? Does that mean, you know, if you can’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything? What are you saying, Kevin? And what I’m saying is that flexibility and approach, in a world that’s more complicated and complex than ever, we have to be willing to flex our approach. That the way we’ve always done it, is not likely going to get there. That’s different than being clear on our principles, being clear on and consistent on our, on our purpose, on our why. And so to me, we can, we can be clear on our principles and flexible on our approach and find, figuring that out. I mean, I addressed that right at the beginning of the book. It’s critical. And if people can’t get past that, they’re going to have a hard time being able to adapt and be flexible in a world that requires that we can’t just do it the way we like it, the way we’ve been successful in the past with it, or the way that is most comfortable for us.

Minter Dial: Yeah, this comfort piece is, is perhaps where it’s most difficult, I feel 100% where a lot of things that were part of the, let’s say, old fashioned world that I was brought up in, just speaking for myself, where we’ve got so many new variables, regardless of the uncertainty. I’m talking about new ways of speaking, new geopolitical landscapes that have now been around for a little while and, and our ability to stand for something. And that means at some level stand against something. Which means that I would like to characterize it as exclusive at some point. It’s not a fully inclusive approach because fully inclusive is you accepting everybody kind of thing, whereas exclusive means. No, no, no, I don’t take, I stand for this, I stand up for this, and I can’t stand up for everything. Therefore, I’m going to be exclusive to this, not to everything, which means you have to make choices. And some of those are, are not the popularity choices.

Kevin Eikenberry: Yeah, yeah. And they’re not always easy, right? And so if I want to stand for what we’re trying to accomplish as a business, and that’s what I’m going to stand for, then the question is, am I willing to adjust what the way we approach it in order to be, to, in order to be consistent with that purpose? Right. And so, the idea of being a flexible leader is flexible in approach on our way to reaching our most valued goals. And that we have to be willing to live in this world of paradox, in this world of what we call flexors, to help us navigate the other key word in the subtitle of the book, right. To navigate in this uncertainty.

Minter Dial: Another term I enjoyed digging into was this idea of organisms. And you talk about that organizations could think of themselves as organisms as opposed to some sort of rational, you know, money making thing. What, how do you, how do you describe organism and what, how does that change the way you as a leader should be thinking and doing?

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, you know, that idea is not really new, but here’s what I’ve noticed. I read that a lot. A lot of people were thinking about that a lot. I think a lot more maybe, I don’t know, 15 years ago than you’ve read more recently. And in a world that is that again, more complex, more uncertain than ever, then we really need to think about how do organisms react, which is they’re able to adapt, they’re able to change, and they’re willing to change even if it’s hard. And when you have a rational, logical framework that you operate in and that we think about our business as a factory model and there are customers and suppliers and all of it is, to use your word, rational, then that sets up a level of inflexibility in the, in the, in the guise of structural integrity. But if you look at a, if you look at an organism, there’s still structural integrity, but they’re able to be fluid, they’re able to adjust whether that’s at the microbial or cellular level or whether that’s at the sort of the whole-body level. You know, I started to chuckle when you said when we think about organizations in a rational way, I’m like, well, organizations are made up of individuals, which is where that logic immediately fails because we got human beings who are wonderful and amazing and phenomenal and messy and unpredictable. So, to assume that inside, if those are the players that are running this rational model, we’ve already got a flaw, don’t we?

Minter Dial: Well, I was talking a little bit ago about backbone, which of course make up human beings and many Organisms, not all.

Kevin Eikenberry: Which yes, of course is now back to, is a biological idea. Right, right.

Minter Dial: And yet I suppose having a flexible backbone is also part of survival. And so you need to know where to flex. Because at the end of the day, pragmatism would say that if I don’t take this contract, I’m going to go out of business by the end of the month. Then at what point do you say, well screw that, I’m going to go out of business, or oh, well, I’m just going to have to put my little pride and my values aside and stay in business. So, that finding that kind of flexibility, I think is also salient in this world.

Kevin Eikenberry: And you know, given that context of which as you just described it in 12 seconds is still not rich enough for you or I as consultants to say, well, this is what you should do or this is what you should do. But it would lead us, us to more questions to help that person think that through. Because again, context is everything. Right.

Minter Dial: All right, so another zone that could be quibbled with is the both/and mindset I’m a big believer in and especially as opposed to, but the idea of both and for CFO or CEO who’s trying to make choices because resources are limited. Oh, we just have to have, you know, get another person to run this other social media and we’ll, and then we’ll do another social media and then we’ll do another campaign and all of a sudden you end up with a tentacular and thinly spread resources because you’ve been both ending everything or more things. So, navigate me through that one, Kevin.

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, so an underlying principle of a flexible leadership is that if. So, look, so the, so I’ll start here. The specific example that you’ve described is at some point a decision needs to be made, right? About do we need more social media, less social media? Is having everyone doing social media the right answer? No. Is having no one doing social media the right answer? No. Where’s the right answer between those two polarities? Right. So, our thought, thinking around, around this idea of both and is that you’ve got two sets, two polarities and the right answer is rarely at either end, but somewhere in the middle. And so decisions still need to be made within that. We’ll call it a flexor, the tension between those two things. Right? So, because the, if you, if, if you live in only and solely in either or world, right. Then we got social media. We don’t have social media. Well, okay, maybe, but the right.

Minter Dial: You’re sounding like A teenager. You’re sounding like a teenager. It’s either that or I’m out of here.

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, right. And yet so much of what we do is that’s how we look at it, right? Well, this is good and this is not. Well, so, so I’ll give you an example. So, for a long time when we work with leaders, we’ll ask them a question. What are, what are some of the biggest mistakes leaders make when they take on a new team, when they move into a new role, whatever, whether they’re frontline leaders where they’re CEOs, like, what are the mistakes? There’s a common set of mistakes that they make. Here are two of the mistakes that we hear over and over and over. One of the mistakes is they don’t change anything. Another mistake they make is they change too much, too fast. Those are both mistakes. The right answer is somewhere between those two things, right? Some amount of change at some speed, how much and what change is what contextual based on that, the need in that situation. But coming in and changing everything on day one, probably in very rare cases, is that the best answer, right? Changing nothing and sitting back is in very rare cases the best answer, the right answer is somewhere between.

Minter Dial: And may I add then that the narrative that you carry with you throughout that change, whatever course you take, is actually central to the success of it.

Kevin Eikenberry: 100%. Yeah, I agree with you 100%.

Minter Dial: Has to be a storyteller. So, in the last zone. I have always enjoyed the notion of paradoxes. In one of my books, I talk about four paradoxes. You on the other hand, have a different set of four that it really.

Kevin Eikenberry: You know, to me, at the end of the day, we talked about this with my team last week. There’s a, we got a whole bunch of these flexors paradoxes is. And, and someone on my team said, well, there’s an awful lot of them. People can’t remember them all. And like I, I said, I don’t really care about that. What I care about is people getting this idea that we have to be able to hold these two things, whatever it might be in your given situation. Right. So, whether it’s 4, whether it’s 12 or whatever it is, it’s getting this, I getting to this idea of, of a both and paradoxical tension-based world. And how do we, how do we live within them? Right.

Minter Dial: Well, what’s funny, and I haven’t done say an exact mathematical equation, but there are certainly parallels between the paradoxes that I pulled out. And one of them is exactly the same, which is this notion of belonging. And frankly, I put the belonging one at the highest level because it’s existential, this notion of who am I, how am, how am I different, and where do I belong, who’s my tribe? We use even that word tribe anymore. And because belonging means, ipso facto not belonging or someone else is not belonging.

Kevin Eikenberry: Yeah.

Minter Dial: We do not belong to the human race. I mean, we can think we do, but we don’t. It doesn’t take long for you to see that there is no such thing as a combined human race. We don’t all have the same idea of what is the human race. So, you, you want to belong, but you can’t belong to everyone. You have to belong to someone or some body. And that ability to manage that tension, how do I exist as an individual, I feel has subsumed or taken over this notion of belonging. And I feel like that’s the, the driving paradox. I was wondering how you looked at these paradoxes in terms of is there a hierarchy to all of them or is they, or do they all each have in context their own work?

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, I think they’re, they’re connected and you know, we are not, we’re not in a situation or a context right now. Well, let’s, well, let’s look through all of them and do that. But I will say this, that I do think that there are overriding ones, right. And much like what you’re describing, and those to me would be the higher level ones. And some of the other things that we talk about in the book sort of fit naturally inside, but I wanted to do them at a level that made it practical for people. Right. So, here’s to me, an overriding one. Am I trying to lead for compliance or commitment? Right. Like what’s inside of what I’m trying to do? What is my belief about leading? And what I find is that most everyone, at least when I’m in a workshop setting, and I know that at some level that’s, that’s a pre, predetermined group, right? But if I ask the question, do you want your team to merely comply? And there’s something we want people to comply with, right? Like safety, legal, ethical. But is that enough? Or do you want people to be committed? And most everyone will say, well, I want people to be committed. And yet we can look at the behavior of leaders in total and say that we’re not very, as a total group of leaders. We’re not leaning toward the compliant, toward the commitment side. We’re leaning more to the compliance side. All the Gallup research, everybody’s research about engagement and commitment and all that stuff tells us that we may desire that. That’s not where we’re headed. But until we desire it, we got no shot to get there. Because it’s way easier to live in that clarity of I just want them to say yes sir or yes ma’am. You know, if I can just get everybody to comply, we’d be okay, but we probably really wouldn’t be. That’s the lowest common denominator of what we could possibly get. Right.

Minter Dial: Right. So, what is it that then provides that glue to have a combined or a belonging to that commitment? We, a little bit, we talked about confidence at the, at the outset. You’re trying to develop confidence in a team, confidence in yourself. How do you get people to switch from compliance to commitment?

Kevin Eikenberry: I think it comes back Minter to one of the things that we talked about earlier and that is this idea of purpose and meaning. That ultimately that’s what it comes from. Like I believe that 95% of people want to do good work on the job 95% of the time. The problem is they don’t always know what good work is. They don’t really know what’s expected of them. They don’t really understand what that is. And they don’t necessarily have that clear purpose and commitment. And if we as leaders can be clearer about and help them find that connection to meaning and help set some clearer expectations about what good looks like, we got a much better chance. Because I think that that helps us help others ascribe to their high, to their highest potential and build their own confidence at the same time.

Minter Dial: Yeah. Well, this comes back to this idea of sense making meaning. How do you put meaning into what we do? And Kevin, I wonder what your experience is, but how many people that you interact with actually are using the word purpose in the way that we would like to make it used, which is to do something bigger than just make money. Because I still feel, I mean there’s a pragmatic thing you have to make money. If you don’t make money, you serve no purpose yet you’re not going to.

Kevin Eikenberry: Be able to stay. We can’t, we can’t keep doing it. Right?

Minter Dial: That’s right. But I do still feel that for many their purpose is to exist. Sometimes it’s just to survive and they get into that mode and literally it’s a one way track. But moving from the purpose of making money to a higher purpose I still feel is A stick in the mud that people aren’t pulling on.

Kevin Eikenberry: Oh, I would agree. You know, again, speaking from my own work with our own team and leading and leading an organization and writing and making payroll and all that stuff, I often think about and try. And so in working with clients, I try to do the same thing. Let’s talk about making sure that your missional goals and your commercial goals are in alignment. Like, if we’re only doing it for commercial purposes, we have to be careful if we’re doing it for missional purposes. But there’s not a commercial connection. There’s. We’ve got to be. We’ve got to be aware of that. And so to me, that’s the way I like to think about that tension between those two things. To, to directly answer your question, though, mentor, I do think that there’s a lot of folks who are still sort of stuck in, well, we’re here to make a profit or we’re here, you know, to take care of the stakeholders or whatever those things are. Those things are prudent, those things are important. But when we can tie those to something missional, if we can tie the missional and the commercial together, that’s where we can create magic.

Minter Dial: Super. I look at it a little bit differently, but I really like the way you synthesize that, Kevin. So, another word that I. You had lots of things that really sparked my, my mind. And that’s what the benefit of reading a book is, is about abductive reasoning. And so ab. That’s from in Latin, from, From deduction. And I, I don’t have any intuitive understanding of abductive reasoning. And why do you believe or do you write about how abductive reasoning is something we need to rehabilitate?

Kevin Eikenberry: We have to, we have to be able to think about. And I like to liken that to what I personally call plausible cause analysis. Like, what are the possible.

Minter Dial: That sounds. That sounds like you’re a lawyer, Kevin.

Kevin Eikenberry: I know, but it’s, it’s my best way. As opposed to probable cause, it’s plausible cause. Like, like what happens is we all say, well, this person did this. And so I deduce that this is why they did that. But there could be 20 reasons why they did that. And so rather than. And the minute that I say that’s why, then I’m losing the chance of considering what the other possible reasons were. And here’s the thing. My reaction or my response, if, if my guess was right, then my response will be okay, but I’m guessing based on. And I’m using my own filters, I’m using my own experience, say, well, that’s why they did that. Excuse me. But if I understand what could be the possible reasons, the plausible reasons, like, I don’t know what the reason is, but there’s a bunch of ones that it could be, and if I can make a list of those, then what my response. If I make this response, how many of those does that address and does that improve? Basically, what I’m trying to do, because as a leader, I’m trying to. I’m always leading is about influence. Right. So, how do I improve my odds of success? And so the better chance, the better way I can look at all of the possible reasons we’re in this situation, then the better chance I can pick a response that has the better odds.

Minter Dial: In this notion of flexible, if I sort of had to take a step back, it feels like you’re not saying be totally flexible just in the way you look at the four paradoxes. You have the performance paradox, which means you have to manage between different stakeholders. You have the learning paradox, where you want to learn stuff. It’s great because everything’s changing. You need to know new stuff and be curious. And yet you got to do stuff. And you’ve got to do stuff with the legacy stuff you have, too. So, it feels like it’s. It’s about being more flexible than only flexible.

Kevin Eikenberry: It’s about. It’s about recognizing. Yes, I think that’s right. I don’t know that I would have said it that way before right now, but I think that’s right, that too many people are not willing to even consider flexibility because of the need for consistency. And so if I can bump people off of that as a starting point, it’s a pretty good starting point. And from there, it’s a matter of recognizing that there’s a range of possible responses in every situation. And what is the context tell us rather than what does my habit, comfort, or prescribed style tell me I should do?

Minter Dial: Yeah. Or my past experiences. Listen, I’ve been successful for 30 years. Why should I change anything now? Because that’s why we got to bring.

Kevin Eikenberry: Everybody back to the office. Because it worked. And that’s not even a negative. Like, if I’ve been successful and the business has been successful and I’ve grown to my role, the only way I know that that works is for people to be together. So, I want to bring people back together. So, not only so that I can be comfortable, but so that they can be Successful. And this a way of looking at it says maybe, right? Rather than going with my past experience, my comfort, my style, my habit, to start by being intentional and saying, well, what does the context tell me? And should I do this a little differently here?

Minter Dial: All right, so now I want to get. The last zone I wanted to get into, Kevin, was around hiring. We’ve talked about employee engagement and how so many HR professionals are complaining, A, about mental health and B, about being able to hire and keep a good talent who are motivated to stay because they all think that they can just run off and do their own Internet business or the like, which requires a lot of hard work all the same. But when you’re wanting to create a flexible organization or at least have a flexible style of leadership, what does that mean for recruitment?

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, I think it means so like I’ve long believed that we can teach people skills, and the skills that we need and folks for folks in their jobs are going to continue to change. Like, we don’t need to go down that path. We all that. I think we can agree on that. So, that means I’ve got a hire based on a mindset more than a skill set. Right. And so, you know, I have a team that I’m very proud of and largely have been around together for a very long time. And yet I’m not by any means saying that I’m an expert in hiring because I haven’t hired hundreds of people, and I haven’t done that in the kinds of ways that some people find themselves in. But I do think that it’s. That it’s every bit as important for us to get people that we think have the mindset that matches or have a belief set that says that they’re willing to try, that they’re willing to learn. And then if we create an organization where we give them the chance to learn and grow, we’re less likely to lose them anyway. And, and, and quite honestly, we want to have. We want the people to be here that want to be here. So, we need to create a place so we could have a whole conversation. We don’t have time for about culture. That that is the next piece of that. I don’t think that we have to try to make everyone that we hire be a perfect match for our culture because we want our culture to adapt and change. But I do think getting the right mindsets, the right attitude, if you will, that matches where we’re trying to go and what we’re trying to be is an awfully good place to start. We can teach people skills.

Minter Dial: I agree with that. I absolutely, thoroughly agree with that. And the skills are going to need to change. As you, as you indicated, I was talking to a Ukrainian chap about what it is to succeed and how to operate. And in this flexibility idea, you’ve got individuals who could be experts in a field and then you have others that we call more like a pie, which is two legs of depth. And then you have the comb personality that has little knowledges, but of a lot of different topics.

Kevin Eikenberry: Yep.

Minter Dial: And. And just to add one more piece of that is liberal arts or let’s say non. Non. I don’t know what you call it. Non. Scientific type you want to call it.

Kevin Eikenberry: Yeah.

Minter Dial: Non stem study. To what extent do you believe or how do you respond to that with regard to the idea of who you should be looking for with a. A mindset of flexible leadership?

Kevin Eikenberry: I think, I think that breath is really important. Right. If I’m following your metaphor, the comb is a really important thing. Like do we need some people that have some tech, some deep technical expertise. We may have that need that in our organizations, depending on the nature of our organization. But the importance of breadth rather than solely depth I think is critical not only for our organizations, but for us as leaders. And I would like to hope actually if we sort of use this as a way to kind of close us, move us toward our conclusion, that the ideas in the book “Flexible Leadership” and the ideas that we’ve been talking about today are ideas that are about breadth, that aren’t about getting really good at this one thing, but getting really getting better at being able to move across a domain in a way that, that might not always be comfortable but will likely get us better results.

Minter Dial: Beautiful ending, Kevin. All right, listen, how can people track you down, get reorder your book because we’ve coming out before it comes out and or you know, see your writings, hire you for work. What the best links to send them to?

Kevin Eikenberry: Well, Kevineikenberry.com K E V I N E I K E N B e r r y.com that’ll take you to all things about our organization. And if you like what we’ve talked about, you can certainly go follow me on LinkedIn. But let me just tell you I’ve got a special gift because I’ve had the chance to be on the show and it’s and Minter has been a pleasure to be here. So, people can go to kevinikenberry.com gift and of course from that link they can go order the book, which we’d love you to do. Please go order your copy of the book. If you don’t want to go to kevinberry.com gift, you can go to Amazon and buy your copy. But if you go to kevinberry.com gift, you can get a free gift. We’ve built a masterclass a year or two ago about being, building confidence in ourselves and others, and we’re giving that away to you for being, for having the chance, Minter, to be with you for, for all of those of you listening, you can go there. You can get that masterclass for free. And there’ll be stuff there about the book as well. And we’d love to. We’d certainly love to have you get a copy of the book for sure.

Minter Dial: That is beautiful.

Kevin Eikenberry: And we’ll give you that free gift.

Minter Dial: Yeah. Well, I suppose I should not call you Knaffenbury.

Kevin Eikenberry: You can call me anything you want.

Minter Dial: All right, that’s very kind. Great to have you on the show again. Look forward to staying in touch, Kevin.

Kevin Eikenberry: Thanks so much, Minter.