Nippin Anand 0:01
All right, hello and welcome to another episode of embracing differences with Jenny, Craig Rob and myself. Nippin, you may recall that we did a session a couple of weeks ago, which is called following, leading in risk, and we discussed where we are with a lot of leadership models, the way it is taught, the whole discourse around leadership, which is caught in the what, as Craig very beautifully articulated in the hero myth, which is that we give a lot of power and attribution to to one person, the top leader and and as if they are, they are the ones who are behind all the success. And then the other thing we discussed was that a complete absence of the feminist ethics in in the following leading in the leadership discourse as leadership is taught today. Today we look at the following, leading model and a book that both Craig and Rob have written. And I have the book here in front of me. It’s called following, leading in risk, a humanizing dynamic. And it’s everything in this book, including the title, the subtitle, the images, the icons, everything is significant, and we will discuss that as we go. So let’s start with this conversation. What is this whole idea of following, leading? Craig, what are your thoughts? And then we will, we will all give it our own perspective. Well,

craig ashhurst 1:40
there was something that came out when Rob and I were first talking about leadership. So for my company, I do a lot of work in the leadership area, and I’m used to needing to start with the terminology and the frameworks that people are used to, and so they’re used to the very American individual, Yee, Ha, I’m a leader, sort of stuff, and trying to get them to consider the other people and what they might have to offer is sort of, you would think it’s obvious, but it’s just really difficult to get them engaged. And when Rob and I were talking, he said, Well, hang on this, this whole Booba, I thou the relationship between people is the critical bit. And I was, Yep, absolutely. So we ended up coming up with this model, which in many ways, you can feel you can put stuff into the model that relate to the relationships between people, whether they be leaders and followers or different types of expertise or whatever it is. But that probably enough for me, and let Rob sort of fill it out a bit more.

Rob Long 2:55
You’ve got me switched on, Nippin, that’s good. Yeah, I I’m currently writing this supplement to the book, which Craig and I had some discussions about recently, and it’s occurred to me that in the whole leadership, followership kind of agenda, there’s no book on the market that actually joins the two together. There’s lots of books on followership and there’s lots of books on leadership, but there’s nothing that pulls them together in the hyphen, yeah. Well, there you go. There’s a book on followership, but there’s no, no research on the market that says, in fact, following and leading are one do you can’t have one without the other. Very much a Booba idea of I, thou, and so when we put a hyphen between two things, we no longer have two things grammatically as a part of speech. When you put a hyphen between something, it’s no longer one word joined together, the hyphen turns the two words into one word. It’s considered a whole so if i hyphenate something like I am a son in law, or I have a mother in law, you hyphenate those things so they’re one thing. It’s not mother in and law. It’s one whole person. I have a mother in law, but it’s three words, and by putting together following and leading and joining with the hyphen, what we’ve really emphasized is the joining. And so what we’ve really emphasized, and this was done beautiful. Carefully in Brian and Anand his book on what they called Real meeting is, if you imagine this hyphen is the space between me and Jenny, the question is, how much have I moved into that hyphen to meet Jenny? And how much has she moved into that hyphen to meet me. And so in the following and the leading, we actually have to leave our position of strength, whether we’re leading, or leave our position of strength, which could be following, and come into that hyphen and meet. So we have to leave something behind, and we’ve now got something which is one thing. And I think the book we’ve written, Craig, when I’ve looked across the world of research, I haven’t come across anyone that’s done it yet and said, in fact, that these two things are not two things. They must be joined, they must be active, and they must be together. Yes, Craig,

craig ashhurst 6:11
so an equivalent for me is venues. So you would think venues where people meet would be designed for people to meet, but they’re not. Usually. They’re crappy. But I ran into one venue called dialog, and it was literally based on what they called the third space, where you leave your own spaces and come into a communal space where you can have genuine dialog. Not only did they have that, but for the first six months, they offered their venue for free, as long as you gave them feedback about how best to interact and things like I said, Well, basically you’ve got crap coffee so everyone’s going to be leaving and trying to find a coffee shop. So they actually spent 30,000 bucks on getting decent coffee machines in to do that. And I find that place is sort of the venue equivalent of our book that, yes, there are lots of books on leadership and followership and there are lots of venues, but that’s the only venue I’ve ever run into that was focused on the hyphen, that was focused on how people meet, and everything was designed around that. So that’s all,

Nippin Anand 7:27
sorry.

Rob Long 7:29
It reminds me of church or a courtroom. You go into this place and there’s no meeting at all, you’re all lined up in a row and the magistrate sits out front or the clergy sits out front. There’s no engagement, there’s no connection, there’s no joining of the space between and there’s no dialog. And you get lectured by a person in front, and you have all these people who receive, who are the followers. I think that makes a wonderful point, because a lot of people think and conferences run like this as well. A lot of people think a wonderful conference is having a keynote speaker and 350 people sitting at chairs and tables, you know, eating sweets and drinking tea. And they think somehow that’s a learning experience. And of course, there’s no meeting, there’s no joining, there’s no communication, there’s no engagement. And yet that’s a popular model.

Nippin Anand 8:31
Yeah, you know, love to hear Jenny’s thought on this. But one thing that comes to mind is when I was in India last year in December, and because it’s such a community based society, what you’re saying is something that we take for granted. So when you are installing, for example, simple things like benches in public park, you will always find at least two or three benches facing each other. And so it’s an invitation, you know, we call it affordances, for example. It’s an invitation for people to come and sit together. It’s a symbol that that’s how things have always been. But what’s also interesting is, in the same park, you will find individual benches like you do in the Western world. So here you have an opportunity to sit on your own, introspect, reflect whatever you want, but there’s also an opportunity for you to sit around, and it’s such a simple example. But what’s interesting is that thought simply does not exist in many individualist societies. So I think community based societies have always looked at leadership in that way that it’s always happens in relationships, something that we struggle in other societies, for instance. And I’d love to hear Jenny’s thought, what she thinks about it.

Jenny Krasny 9:53
Boy, my head is running. It’s like a bubble machine on steroids, right now. I. Often, I often would tell leaders when they’d come to me and we’d do some coaching and and we’d often talk about this, this concept of leadership. And I said, so who are you leading? And because, quite frankly, I’d say to them, who are you without your people? Who is a leader without people? Who is a leader with when no one’s following. And what, what strikes me is in many other not every but in many other contexts, there is a recognition that there needs to be a co existence, a co inhabitation, a co creation. And yet, for some reason, when it comes to the work context, and not not in isolation, but at least in the work context, there seems to be this, this forgetfulness that people and the conditions in which they work in are interacting all the time, and yet we treat them as deeply independent. There is an assumption that an individual will perform irrespectively of the conditions that surround them. So there is a distinct absence of the hyphen, at least in the work context that I encounter. And if there is something of a hyphen, consider it a bridge. And people say, Well, you know, we need to meet in the middle. Over time, I’ve come to realize that there is no meeting in any middle. There is usually someone having to leave their spot completely to get to the other side. There is no meeting. So that’s what strikes me in the conversation, there’s this desire for people across all disciplines and even in the work context, to be seen, to feel understood. And yet the context we work in, in the workspace, tends to assume that individuals and the conditions and the context around them are somehow independent, so fascinating.

Nippin Anand 12:11
Indeed. What are your thoughts? Craig, as you listen to Jenny,

craig ashhurst 12:17
amen, it just sounds great. And I think what is coming up that all four of us have different but overlapping perspectives on the same thing. And you see that often, Rob and I, we go into a place we do some training, and you can see they already had a glimpse of that, but they didn’t have any words for it or a model for it, or whatever. And at one level, you’re not teaching them something new. You’re giving them the words and the model to articulate what they’re recognizing and some work that I’m just currently doing, one of the comments about this particular organization when I asked them to compare it to other ones, and they said, Look, you may not pay as much, but the people are real, and you know, they have your back and that they’ll listen to you. And I thought, yeah, in terms of what we’re talking about, that is an element of following leading, just in the sense of the reality of the relationship. Whereas their comment about other places was, you were literally just a number, you’re just a robot.

Rob Long 13:28
Yes, I think there’s another thing there. I think a lot of people confuse the idea of the word itself. So I can have a meeting. And in fact, lots of people in organizations their whole day is run on meetings, back to back meetings, and they say, Well, I’ve had a meeting. Having meetings has nothing to do with meeting. And this is an important part of the book that Craig and I wrote, that little hyphen is about meeting, real meeting, not having a meeting, but about substantial to human, to fallible connection between two people that actually doesn’t have a word for it. That’s why the hyphen has to be used. There is no word. There are some languages, the Hebrew language, have a word, has a word. It’s the word yada, y, A, D, A, and it means to know. But even then, in that word to know, I can say I know Craig and I know Jenny, but that’s very, very different when I say I know my wife, so we really lack a word, and meeting is a confused word. That’s why the hyphen is actually incredibly powerful. Because. It’s a joining thing. It’s not a word, it’s a it’s a part of grammatical action, and it joins me. So if I get my name, and I know people have got hyphenated names and their name is Susie bar Smith, and Susie keeps her maiden name and the name of her partner, and now it’s one word, and you can’t do that without the hyphen. And so I think, I think, and I think in our next book, in the supplement Craig, we’re going to write a lot, lot more about the power of the hyphen. I think, I don’t think we emphasize that enough in our first book, but it, but it helps bring the point of meeting to the front.

craig ashhurst 15:51
I think others would disagree. Rob, a lot of people said, What is it with the hyphen? I think what I do really, yeah, explain more about why it matters.

Rob Long 16:01
Okay, all right, maybe you’re right. I I get excited by it because I think language is more important than we we make particularly in the world of risk and safety and the world of leadership, I see so much stuff that’s spoken that is just nonsense, nonsense language, you know, like, apparently everyone in Risk and Safety is a thought leader, you know. And I just think, what the hell is a thought leader? And the stuff that I just heard on that podcast for the last 30 minutes was rubbish. There was no thought leading anywhere. So I get concerned that in leadership now we’re using lots of this nonsense language, and in the end, it makes language meaningless.

Nippin Anand 17:00
I’d love to hear Jenny. What do you think Jenny, as you’re listening to Robert and Craig, what are your thoughts this whole idea of the hyphen?

Jenny Krasny 17:17
I ever since I met Rob, there’s always been a hyphen. There’s always been a hyphen. And then when I read Uber, oh my gosh, did it open my eyes? All of a sudden, I thought someone, someone is speaking to something, and Rob’s right, someone is speaking to something that is so either misunderstood, so overlooked or considered insignificant. For me, it was two things, actually with Buba. The first thing, it was the shift from I and it, and then I it, talking about, what’s the relationship that between I it, and then changing the it to thou. I thou and I remember that profoundly impacted me, because how I am seen and how I present myself is also reflective of the context and the dynamic in the and what exists between us. We are creating a new identity together. We are, we are literally like, I say to these leaders, you are essentially nothing. And I don’t mean that in a rude way. You are nothing without your people. As a leader, who are you leading? If you’re not leading people, and who are we if we’re not in relationship with somebody and someone? I mean, yes, we can be. I can be sitting on a chair, but I’m not in relationship with it. It’s that classic I eat, but i The hell it. We exist in relationship with everyone. We come across and Gosh, gosh, do we miss? Do we miss some real opportunities? So the hyphen has always been there, ever since I’ve known Rob, and it’s been amazing.

Nippin Anand 19:05
I mean, any successful relationship, marriage relationship, will tell you that the hyphen is is the key to all of this. And how much do you change because and it comes so naturally too. How many do you change because of of your partner, of your spouse, of the one that you love. It comes so naturally to you and and yet we do not realize any of that. I mean, I was a very different person before I met with dharma. And over the period of time, I’ve seen me, you know, becoming a different person, her becoming a different person. And I think that’s the key to all happy relationship, all successful relationship. Probably the word understanding comes to mind. Yes, Rob, you want to say something?

Rob Long 19:44
I think of the umbilical cord. Yes, I think, I think if you’re looking for a physical joining, you know, when you’re joined to your mother, how much greater intimacy Can you have? Have then her blood flowing into you and enriching you, and your life and nerves flowing into her, and you’re joined as one. What an amazing image, because it’s very physical, and we all know it. Yeah, and Craig might be right that they probably think I exaggerate the hyphen, but I don’t, I don’t think there’s anything more great. And my brother uses the word awesome. He says, When you finally discover meeting and you really know what meeting is. You’re so co joined with the other person that you’re lost for words. He says, then you finally discover what it means for something to be awesome. You’re in awe of that feeling of that joining together,

Nippin Anand 21:02
yes, and perhaps this is a good time to start, you know, with the foundations in the hyphen in the connection between the in the follower and the leader, or following and leading. To be more precise, now is the time to probably expand on this model little bit more to say, what does that really mean within the leadership context, Craig, would you like to say a few words?

craig ashhurst 21:26
Happy to introduce it. I think Rob has the model we’ve developed and is going to fill it out. But fundamentally, what we did when we looked a lot of models, the like we looked at last time, the funnel model, so you’ve got the leader at the top and the followers down the bottom, and everything’s flowing one way, and maybe the followers are going, yeah, yeah, but it’s that sort of thing. We shifted it much more to the side, and had the follower and the leader in a zone of reciprocal relationship, whereas a lot of the follower ship stuff just more or less says everybody’s a leader. We’re all lovely. You know, everybody gets a participation prize, whereas this was recognizing no that in most organizations, a leader still has an authority and a role and so forth. But if they’re in a reciprocal relationship, not just a one way relationship, then the two are meeting. So the hyphen starts to get spelt out by what is happening in the reciprocal nature of what they’re doing. And we highlighted particular aspects that we wanted to put in the book. I think our supplement is picking up some other things, certainly from my side, having finished my PhD, I’m bringing in a whole lot of other team stuff that hasn’t been there before. But in one sense, you could put almost anything in there that is related to a reciprocal relationship within a work environment. And again, that means, when we’re talking to people, quite often, what we’re asking them is give us an example of where it works, and then they will give us something. May not have the same label that we’re using, but it’s something they’ve experienced where the leader and the follower have interacted, and it’s been positive and constructive, often called collaboration or whatever. But I think Rob has the actual guts of the model for us.

Rob Long 23:29
If you do you want to see it, or will we Okay,

Nippin Anand 23:33
why don’t you just talk about

Rob Long 23:35
it? Yeah, we decided in the book to to basically magnify this hyphen and pull it out and expand it and say, Well, it’s a little dash and it looks like that. What would happen if we expand it out and looked at it, what actually is in it? One of my favorite words is the word mutual. That what happens in this zone we so we’ve called the hyphen the zone of reciprocal relationship. It’s a it’s just a phrase we used, but I like the idea of, what do we share mutually? Well, okay, so there’s Jenny, there’s me. We don’t share the same gender, but we share the same skin, we don’t share exactly the same world view, but we do share some common values. And so what the model does is it looks at what kind of things in this joining are mutual, and rather than looking as I guess a lot of people now in social media are looking for how they’re different from others. Buber’s book. Is, in fact, the reverse. What do we have in common? What do we share? What is mutual? And if I’m mutually connected to another human being, how on earth can I harm them or hurt them or want to turn them into an IT. The I it. How can I possibly want to turn them into an object when we share so much in common, and so Buber and the model that Craig and I put forward is the leader should be looking for what they’re sharing in common with the follower, and the follower should be looking for what they’re sharing in common with the leader as they meet. And so we do have this model, perhaps in the final product Nippin, you can bring that model up in the podcast, in the visual podcast, but yeah, this idea of having things mutual and in common, and we named some of those things. We we named things like we share an unconscious we all share the will to learn. We all share a view of ethics and power. We all share a common sense of social contract, and we all share a sense of resilience. So there in the hyphen those things we named, and if all leading and following looked at those six things, it would transform what leading and following was. So anyway, that’s a that’s my brief,

Nippin Anand 26:43
yeah, and Jenny and I had a podcast just last week talking about connection and conversation and the connection between connection and conversation. I think that was a fabulous conversation to bring in now, because you know what you’re talking about is something that Jenny has, she told wonderful stories around that amazing things happen when we look at another person as a whole person and create a sense of connection. Jenny, would you like to add something to that you have so much to share? I know

Jenny Krasny 27:14
I’m also conscious that this is not my model. I just love it. However, what it does open up for me now is if we take the context of safety into it, so many customers and various organizations are looking at ways to evolve. I’ll use the word evolve loosely. What they’re they’re doing in the name of safety. And so many are throwing around the word, maybe we need to start caring. How do we care? And as you were talking, Rob, it reminded me that, not that I’d like to replace the hyphen with the word care, because it’s not the same. However, the secret is in the hyphen. How do I care? How can I care if I if I don’t know, if I don’t find what, what brings us together and what mutually interests us beyond the fact that we work in the same facility and we share the same uniform and the logo, so it very much resonates around, how do we translate the hyphen, and how do we translate leader follower into a real struggle that many organizations are having is, how do we care and and also, as I say, that is how many are actually asking themselves, how Do I care? Not. Why do I care? How do I care?

Rob Long 28:44
By what method?

Nippin Anand 28:46
By what method? Yeah, and I think I, when I look at this whole idea of I, Dao, or connection, I, the first time when I, when Rob you talked about it, the first thing that came to mind is that, where is that connection? And I think the first connection is between the conscious and the unconscious, which is, which is within the self. You know, if you don’t have a connection within the self, how can you connect with other people? How can you connect with the environment around you? And I think a lot of it is the result of losing connection with our own bodies, that we have ended up in a place where we don’t feel the connection with other people. And I think that once you become connected with your own self and you feel the pain within, it’s only then you start to feel the pain and connection in other people and the environment around you. And I think a lot of people live life above the shoulders, as I say, they do not connect with themselves at all, and hence they don’t find a connection with that. In fact, the whole idea becomes very absurd, that if you have never sat in contemplation, if you have never listened to your body, if you have always treated. Your body like you know, with disrespect, how is it possible to see a connection with another human person or with the environment around you? I think that’s a fundamental question, in my view, to to address

Rob Long 30:11
absolutely

craig ashhurst 30:13
that links to some of my work, which is that I focused in my PhD on teams of mixed expertise, and part of what they spoke about was that teams fragment, often around areas not related to the work, but because they’re made of different groups. So if I expand from nippins concept about the self to the most immediate group, so whether it be standard sociological things of gender, race, you know, whatever. Often it’s not that. It can also just be there are a bunch of IT guys versus a bunch of legal guys or a bunch of operators. Or the one that always gets me when you get a group of construction people together is the Sparky is always the one that’s on the outside, so that the team, even though it’s made up, everyone’s meant to be doing stuff, fragments into the smaller groups, and often the associations, or the hyphen is really between the person within the team and outside of the team to the group that They feel associated with. And that is where I coined a term of collective coherence, that the group makes sense and it’s coherent for that group, so that, for example, with going back to the sparkies, one of the reasons why they’re different is that they’re often in their natural work dealing with high voltage, which is deadly, whereas other construction form workers, there are risks, but it’s not the same sort of thing. So there’s a different way of viewing the world that is coherent for the Sparky, that doesn’t make sense to the other guys. So then, within a following and leading environment, what we’re needing to look at is to consider, for the leader, to consider the different collective coherences that are operating within the team, and how do they relate to them, and how do they help them relate to each other, so that the mutuality that Rob spoke about is recognized even though they belong to different groups, a simple one for me was working on a hospital redevelopment where we got into risk registers. And all the different groups that were involved all had their own risk register, and I had them all in different you know, there’s like 30 or 40 people in the room all in teams, and they could not agree on a project risk register. And I said, Why do we need to you’re doing that. So in the end, they came up with a traffic light system. A green was something that everybody had to have. Amber was something where you recognize that that’s probably going to influence me, but it’s not our main thing. And red was, we don’t give a shit, but you do, so we need to take that into account. And we didn’t create a new risk register. We created a traffic light system for identifying risks that were relevant to everybody. So it was a way of recreating a new zone of reciprocal relationship, even though each of the groups were still in their own thing.

Rob Long 33:23
Yeah. And part of that Craig is language is sometimes we find mutuality different because we can’t speak or even share a common language with the other group. And so sparkies speak in a certain way. And this is where leaders have to be very careful if you’re going to do leading and you’re going to speak in leading language and leadership speak like, you know, these military type leadership books that are out there. You can speak in that as much as you like, but you won’t connect with anyone. And so the language you use, the very language we use, has to be the language that draws you into the hyphen into connection. And the language has to connect with how the followers speak and see the world as well. So you you need a common language, and you need shared words. And I don’t think people are that aware of of that so much. And so you find these sub cultures in organizations that struggle to come to mutuality because they can’t even talk to each other.

Nippin Anand 34:38
Jenny, I’m just looking at these two very wise men talking and giving us so much to think about and in the kind of world that we operate, you, being a woman and I, being a brown skinned man, you can take the following leading model, following hyphen leading. You can put it into the realities of. Life, and it will quickly become a political weapon, precisely because of its name, because I’ve had people struggle with this whole idea that, why should I be a follower, and this person should be a leader? And I think it’s very important, Jenny, that we think about these things as we because once it leaves my mouth, the word following, leading. I have no idea how this is going to be implemented within the realities of what we face today in this world. What do you think? Jenny,

Jenny Krasny 35:32
oh, it is so true. And I think, I think there’s also, we’ve been talking about the hyphen, it creates a link. It speaks to connection, but it speaks to space. It speaks to time. It speaks to the world, for a moment to stop and for us to just be I was reflecting with some leaders recently, leaders by name recently, and one of them said Jenny, a time in motion study you know, we did years ago revealed that most leaders and most supervisors, after all, things are said and done, probably only afforded 10 seconds every day to do this thing we call connect. So I think one of the challenges is, for some there’s a desire, but then the assumption is that to do it, we need space. We need to honor space and stillness and just being an in and in a context that is very much about being efficient, being productive, not wasting time. And you know, if you are going to stop and just be how can you create a business case for that to justify its existence? And so I think there’s, you know, there’s an one, people feel unable to do it given the time they’re they are afforded, or they afford themselves. And then when they are created, when they are given the time, it is uncomfortable, because it is so foreign to many people. And we know, and I, I’m not very good at cliches, but I do remember distinctly that even though I can, I can almost touch what amazement and beauty and wonder sits on the other side, the fact that I need to experience, hypothetically, 10 seconds of discomfort to finally touch and experience that’s too much, so we back away. So this constant game of, I want to, but I don’t. I want to, but I don’t. And few venture into the space of, actually, let’s, let’s traverse this hyphen together. So that’s what strikes me as I listen to these wise men. Nippin Anand will tell you, this is not, this is not a new idea, but I think very much in the world that we live in that everything’s time bound and time based and measured, and fewer people are valuing space and silence and just being together, and Sometimes in the hyphen the connection can be totally silent. That’s okay, but that’s not rewarded and recognized and incentivized either. So it’s a real paradox.

craig ashhurst 38:31
So on that, Jenny, have you found? What I found is trying to find stuff that helps them gradually move from where they are, so things like, I say to them, what is legitimate in your diary that nobody interrupts and then saying, Okay, well, we’re going to relabel that time, that label and but it’s, but it’s not well, actually, it’s the same priority. And so everybody will now understand that if it’s, you know, a meeting with the GM or whatever, or preparing strategy, or whatever the term is, and they suddenly go, oh, okay, yeah, I can use that. So they know that it’s not actually what you’re talking about, but they also know that it’s now making it equated, and they can legitimize what they couldn’t before.

Nippin Anand 39:24
Yeah, and this is something that we will build upon in our next podcast, where we talk about how to put this following leading model in practice. By the way, I have also experienced some aha moments as we start to give it a try. And as Jenny very rightly said, it’s not the God in the current world, you know, it’s not the God to slow down and actually listen and connect with people. So it’s something that sits outside of imagination, and one has to, you know, give it an incremental try, as Craig said, and put it into some kind of ritual and see if it works. And when it works, it works. Heavens we know. We all know. For. Of us know that, but maybe this is a conversation we will need to build upon when we meet next week and take this forward. What do you think? Yeah, I think it’s, it’s anything. Is there anything else that anyone wants to add or contribute?

Rob Long 40:15
I think that’s a good place. Good place to stop.

Nippin Anand 40:18
Wonderful. Okay, great.