Ep. 48: Transforming Leadership with Guest Carol Sanford

Every once in a while you come across a trailblazer, a pot stirrer, a person who challenges the current methodology.  My guest, Carol Sanford, is one of those people.  My conversation today challenged my thinking and helped me to see things differently.  In this episode, some topics we talk about are

• Different Levels of Authority
• The Importance of Intermezzo
• The Difference Between Being a Leader and Being a Resource.

Carol Sanford is a #1 Amazon best-selling, multiple award-winning author and business educator, Summit Producer, podcaster, and author. She is consistently recognized thought leader working side by side with Fortune 500 and new economy executives in designing and leading systemic business change and design. Through her university and in-house educational offerings, global speaking platforms, best-selling, multi-award-winning books, and developmental work, Carol works with executive leaders who see the possibility to change the nature of work through developing people and work systems that ignite motivation everywhere. For four decades, Carol has worked with great leaders of successful businesses such as Google, DuPont, Intel, P&G, and Seventh Generation, educating them to develop people and ensure a continuous stream of innovation that continually deliver extraordinary outcomes.

Carol is the author of Indirect Work, The Regenerative Business, The Responsible Entrepreneur, The Responsible Business The Regenerative Life,, and No More Feedback: Cultivate Consciousness at Work. Her books have won over 27 awards so far and are required reading at leading multiple departments at Universities including Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and MIT. Carol also partners with producing Executive Education through Babson College, Kaospilot in Denmark, University of Washington, and The Lewis Institute at Babson as Senior Fellow of Social Innovation. For 40 years she’s collaborated with clients to develop people to grow and express their inherent singularity. Google’s Food Lab uses her Responsible Business Framework. Learn more at CarolSanford.com and the Business Second Opinion podcast.

Chapters

• 15:10 Different Levels of Authority
• 18:52 The Importance of Intermezzo
• 28:00 The Difference Between Being a Leader and Being a Resource

Transcript

Ep. 48 Carol Sanford
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Kyla Cofer: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Leadership School podcast. I'm your host, leadership and self care coach, Kyla Cofer. Here at the Leadership School, you'll hear leaders from around the world sharing their stories and expertise on how to lead with balance and integrity. Our goal teach you how to be an extraordinary leader.

Welcome back to the Leadership School podcast. I'm here today with Carol Sanford. Carol is a bestselling author. She has done training consulting around the world on a wide variety of topics. Her most recent book, Indirect Work. We spent a lot of time talking about that in this episode, but what's really interesting about this episode is that Carol spent a lot of time disagreeing with me and calling me out, and it made for a really [00:01:00] interesting conversation.

As I would every single time that I thought that I understood one of her concepts, she would challenge me on it, which I loved, and it made it, it made me really, really think. So she spends a lot of time encouraging us to really get into deep. Thinking and to look at what we're doing with different perspectives and a different mind.

And she explains a little bit about that towards the end, about why she's doing that and why she's challenging me. And we talk about how that feels as well as we're, we're gonna get into that a little bit, but I think you're really gonna enjoy hearing. From Carol who has a lifetime of incredible wisdom and expertise to share with us.

And please make sure you check out the show notes where it's going to tell you how you can find her best selling books, how you can be in part of the communities that she leads, um, and learn more about her process of deep thinking. Carol, thank you so much for joining me on the Leadership School podcast.

It's such an honor and pleasure to [00:02:00] meet you, and especially as I've gotten to know you and your work. I'm just so impressed with all these things that you've been doing, so. Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and then I actually have a lot that we're gonna talk about, I think, especially because right before I hit record, we said some things that I think we might wanna share with our audience too.

You just celebrated something big and have things going on, so maybe go ahead and tell us about yourself and then we'll go back to those things. 

Carol Sanford: Well, I actually hate to introduce myself, so let me do just a couple things. I am a senior fellow of social innovation for Babson College, which means I try and stir things up a lot.

I do that in a couple of other places also are written six books, all about the concept of regeneration and what that truly means rather than kinda vandalized versions we're hearing.. And I have a podcast called Business Second Opinion, which I'll be [00:03:00] closing shortly, but it's got about 150 great narratives, interviews, exciting work.

So maybe that gives people enough about me. Yeah, and we'll 

Kyla Cofer: have the link too, like your podcast and all those things in our show notes for everybody to do. But you just celebrated a huge milestone. You said you were celebrating yesterday. Yep. I guess we're recording this and when this gets released, it might be some time after that.

But tell everybody what you were celebrating cuz it's amazing. 

Carol Sanford: Well, on October 3rd, the party was just on the 12th of October, we celebrated my 80thbirthday. Which is a bit past the average, and I have lived a glorious life. So I feel like I've gotten to make a difference. I've gotten to take on all the things that we used to call a bucket list.

Cause I've worked all over the world with corporations from Google to Noom to Seventh Generation. All helping them [00:04:00] build powerful new kinds of organizations. So we celebrated with a lot of those people. We showed up from around the world, some in the middle of the night and sang and danced and. They made fun of me, but in a most loving way I've ever experienced.

So it was a grand celebration. That's awesome. 

Kyla Cofer: That's so fun. I mean, and I was saying you have accomplished just in your life a lot of the similar goals that I have, and one of those is to live, to be 80 plus years old. So I just, I love talking to you about that, and I think that that's just wonderful to be able to celebrate a full life.

And you've got plenty of life ahead of you. Um, you do have a diagnosis. Did you wanna share? 

Carol Sanford: I was diagnosed with ALS, which is Lou Gehrings Disease, which as I said, the good news is it takes a few years usually to take your body away from you that you were alone for a while. So you can all hear that I'm already having a [00:05:00] quite a bit of trouble speaking, although I think I'm still intelligible.

That's an amazing learning journey because you watch your functionality kinda disappear and all the ways you had to reach out and access people, but you also get to learn about yourself, and I'm doing everything I can to engage in a conscious dying process. 

Kyla Cofer: I think this attitude of joy that you have and perspective of joy is just really admirable because you're like, Well, the good news is, and this is great because of this, and that's not the typical response to a diagnosis like ALS.

So I really admire you for that, and I think that's some of what we kind of wanna talk about today. So you have this extensive leadership experience. You are currently working on your seventh book. Several of your books have been bestsellers, and the most recent book, Indirect Work I read. As I was reading it, it's a very deep thinking book.

It's not a novel. You can't like read it and go, Ooh, that felt good. You know, like you have to really put [00:06:00] some effort into it and it's not a book that you can like in just one sitting go and be like, Oh, my whole life has changed. You know, you have to put some work into it. Which as I read it, I found that I more than just changing who I was, I finished and had this overall feeling of I feel a lot more confident and capable ofmyself.

And that was a really cool feeling. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about that book, the one you're writing, but I just want this to be a conversation about your experiences and what does it mean to you to really truly be a leader? How do you define that? Because you have a great deal of.

Incredible in-depth leadership experience and you have been teaching these skills for a very long time now and I think that you just have so much wisdom and I'm just wondering how we can even scratch the surface of that 

Carol Sanford: today, . Well, at first I have to disagree with two things, and I know you're open to that cuz that's who you are.

I don't believe in leaders. I believe [00:07:00] leadership is a process. We all engage in. And it's something that more has to do with us getting clear about our direction as early in life as we can and being able to lead ourselves and then, If others, it's on their path, we may find ways we lead together. So when I enter a company, I don't talk about leaders.

We don't have hierarchical processes that all the educational events that are run are a mixture of people who don't represent, but reflect the organization as a whole. So let me tell you a fun story. I took DuPont Corporation, a TIO two. Group of hierarchical leaders and a couple of operators to visit Kingsford Charcoal, and I've forgotten for sure which event we Burnside, Kentucky, I think we went to.

And [00:08:00] of course TIO too they make is a white powder and everything. Kingswood Charcoal makes it a bike powder made into briquette. And that's symbolic of the challenge of seeing things in black and white. Not seeing subtleties or layers of. And in the room where we met with the, um, Kingsford folks who had been working with several years ahead of the people, I wanted them to talk to them.

There was the groups sharing stories, bouncing around the room, asking Du Pont question, question, taking him on a tour. And they were all so excited to share. And then when we got in the van to go. the Du Pont guy said to me, They didn't even have their CEO president there. I said, Sure they did. Well, who was that? I didn't see anybody.

We, we didn't do a traditional introduction. Just names and a few other things that wouldn't make sense to you right now. [00:09:00] What was startling was them to understand. The way they work now was not hierarchical. It was not the leaders introducing and leading the discussion. It was a team we call market field teams, had presented work they were doing on the new grill that Kingsford created and they were, even if we kept driving along the road, they said, Well, it was very hard be getting.

Our questions answer cause we didn't know who was in charge. Right. So that's a pretty good description of why I don't believe in leaders, right? And it was stark in terms of black and white difference. The uh, way that I guess myself, I think about is I have more work to do on leading me to not have my own, I guess, arrogance, hubris,

out in front that thinks I'm in charge [00:10:00] of something. And so for me, every piece of work I do has no program. I don't tell people what to do. I educate them on how to think. Now I have something to lead with. I have ability to lead myself again, not other people. I think that minute we think we're leading other people, we're in a behavioral paradigm.

And a behavioral paradigm says things come from the outside and we are conditioned by those rewards, incentives, et cetera. So I spent a lot of time trying to help people watch themselves, and it's amazing how easy it is to work together when we're not thinking one person's in charge and then there's some reporting authority..

Kyla Cofer: Yes. So I love that you are a shaker. You said you like to shake things up. So the very first thing you did was disagree with me . And that just makes me really giddy. I like it. So you're talking about that you teach people to think, [00:11:00] which is in your book Indirect Work. I mean that's, that's what you're doing and you talk about how you lean heavily on your background and philosophy and that it is really is about this process of thinking and becoming resources.

And I about cried in your introduction when you led off with Plato's Allegory of the Cave, cuz. That particular lesson was a pivotal moment for me in my college career and in my life, learning that and yeah. And you mentioned that. And so when you're teaching people to think it's not that when you do.

Offer that in trainings and workshops in careers, and you're educating people on a thought process that empowers people to make the decisions for themselves. It empowers people to become something great for themselves, not because you're asking 

Carol Sanford: them to. So let me disagree with one other thing, just for fun.

The word you're using in regard to me is not one I use, which is to teach. Now, let tell you why. My [00:12:00] seventh book, the one that I hope to finish before this crazy disease, decides they revoking my program on my body. That it's about how it is. We learn. And what our epistemology is of learning. That is how we come to know how we come to make sense of things and our pedagogy, which is how we transfer or help other people learn.

So that book gets about the difference between a self-determining epistemology. In other words, I'm in charge of what I learned, how I learn. And a authoritative one, which is what 99% of it exists in the world in schools, businesses, military, where an authority decides what the truth is, the models, the answers to question the science, and then they transfer it.

So it's all about knowledge transfer [00:13:00] from the authorities, and in fact, we aren't even allowed to grade ourselves on how well we're doing to acquire it. We take tests from a young age and then our teacher, quote unquote, Grades us and our boss grades us and the military has people graded. We're not in charge of, we're allowed an epistemology and in fact, with lots of educators, elementary school through college, high levels, Stanford, Harvard, other places , and the important thing I have them look at is how do they remove themselves.

As the expert and make people, experts in charge of their own knowledge. Now, why does this matter and why am I writing this book? I believe it undermines about everything we hold dear, like democracy. So if you look at how people come to know what the truth is right [00:14:00] now, it's, and it doesn't matter what your politics are, left, right, middle center, somewhere along the scale, you go to a source, the same one over and over again who predigests

does all you thinking for you, and because they are your source, that's where your understanding comes from. So I'm working on. Everything I can to help people see that the behavioral model of education and knowing and teaching all are undermining democracy. So we end up with the pockets of experts who are followed, who are, quote, thought leaders, right?

And we have almost no one who helps people learn to think for themselves, assess, and make sense of what's happening. The need to change our epistemology will change our ability to manage climate change, injustice, inequity, all the racism, [00:15:00] because all of those ideas are coming from pockets that people go follow who are their leaders.

So I'm trying to also undermine if its all idea of a leader.. 

Kyla Cofer: Yeah. Well, in your book you mentioned, and I think this is what you're talking about, is the different levels of worldviews where you've got the authority, and can you tell me just really specifically, like what are those three different levels and maybe how do we move from one level to another?

Or is it even moving from one level to another? Because I mean, I've noticed in my life how I've kind of done that and I've gone from the authority level to different ones. So let's be really explicit about what those. Three levels are and how we move in and out of those. 

Carol Sanford: All right. I may give you a different version.

Cause every book I write I outgrow the minute I finish it. I know, right? Yeah. And one of the things I put in the book to illustrate it. Well, let me tell you what you're talking about first. I may give you four paradigm. [00:16:00] And they include the ones that were in there the most base. One is the authoritative or the extract value where someone is in charge.

And guides others. 

Kyla Cofer: That's kind of what you were talking about a second ago when you were talking about like the teachers teach us things and then we regurgitate 

Carol Sanford: that. Yeah, yeah. Now there are some who are in the classroom. Do two others in the middle. Rarely the top, but next one up is what? And the book I called Do Good or the.

Or humanist, the view of where you're trying to do good in the world, be a philanthropist, help open others up. But there's one I didn't put in the book below it, which is a rest disorder. So you go from the one where you. Observe ideas from others, so called experts. And by the way, science isn't a guaranteed that you're getting right answers, but that I'll do more of that book seven.[00:17:00] 

It doesn't mean you're not getting something right. So I'm not arguing against, don't ever trust science and all that, you know, fake news and stuff, but you have to learn to examine. So that level of rest disorder is where we decide a bunch of things are wrong and there are a bunch of things wrong, like how we treat the planet and how we treat, treat people that are not our class or our color order.

And children who are different in the choices or the life experience they have. We put them beside, those are particular paradigms or worldviews, they get us in trouble. So we've got three of the lower ones, all of which are about externally determined either by an authority or by a set of, uh, agreements we have with one another.

So sustainability is one of those arrest disorders, and [00:18:00] that's because all it does is try and stop the bad and then do good. It's the third one, but all of 'em come from an external idea of somebody else to decide. The one I'm working on, getting people to look at, and I can't remember in the book that I call it evolved capacity or regenerate life.

Do you remember which one I called? I don't remember which one you called it. No. Okay. Well the idea is the same. They are, you start from the essence of an individual, from themselves or a place in its story or a business in its story, and you find the essence of what to work there and help it be expressed, not you impose on it with authority or the program or your ideals of do good if we build schools.

In a way that people could self reflect, they could work on discovery and testing. [00:19:00] So when I quote Teach and I teach at several universities in Europe and here, and I always say my opening line is, Don't trust me. Don't accept anything I tell you without testing it with your own life experience in a reflective way, not in a pushing back, cause you're gonna argue with me, but go test it in life and don't accept anything I give you without testing it.

And that's what I did in the Indirect Work. The book you read where I created at the end of every chapter, something called inter metso. An inter metso happens in an opera or theater. We often in states call them intermission. But in Europe and in places where there are people who create little, uh, conversations in those windows, they're using 'em to reflect on the meaning of what just happened and [00:20:00] what they're thinking and questioning.

And I encourage people who read Indirect Work and we'll have a version that in the new book too, to, uh, not take notes. We didn't underline, We didn't say, How does this fit with my life? Well, I think I'll go try that and now reflect on it. Don't become the adopter. That's what I mean, because it's called a bestseller or something.

The inter metsos are examples of getting to the top regenerated life level of paradigms, where in every situation you are in charge of your own self-determining process to. Think better, think deeper question. And only after you've really done that, you have a right to go or an obligation to go the next chapter.

Cause now you're going forward with your own thinking, not just [00:21:00] what you adopted from me. And I had a hundred and something hundred 20 people who pre-read the book and I gave them the instruction. Do not read past the intermetsos without doingthem. 50% read through and sent me back and said, Well, I know you said not to read that, but I wanted to know all your ideas before I went back and then tried unload and figure out what I wanted to keep.

That's like the whole opposite point of the book, right. So unfortunately self-selected people still didn't do the work. 

Kyla Cofer: well, doing the work is sometimes scary and hard. Oh, yes. And we like to avoid those types of things. Right. And that thinking for ourselves can also be scary, especially if we come from backgrounds of maybe being abused or being told that there are severe consequences by not following certain way, like in religious life or just in family life.

There are consequences of sometimes thinking for ourselves. And that [00:22:00] can be really scary and can take a long time through adulthood and sometimes we never get there of, Right. I can take these thoughts and make them my own because you feel like you're gonna lose something if you do. So how do we approach our careers, our life, our our thought processes with the courage to make these thoughts our own when there might be consequences?

Carol Sanford: Yeah. Well you've just hit on the nugget. About why this epistemology we have of knowledge transfer is so dangerous. Individuals have a very hard time doing this alone. I long ago stopped doing any work with individuals. And part of this was a trigger. They could see that it was a great idea, but it meant they might have to give up their tribe, their community, their family.

And you know, if you have family members who, when [00:23:00] you go home for holidays and just, Yom Kippur a guy was just telling me, I have my way of celebrating it. My family has a more traditional way. And it was very hard, Because I love my family, and so what I did was being quiet. So what's the answer? Your question? What do we do?

Here's what we do. You join a community that's working on building critical thinking skills alongside personal development. Because if you don't work on the personal side of all the conditioning that you've had and the development of your own critical thinking skills or regenerative thinking skills, I call them, and personal self-management, you can never, ever, ever be who your essence would need you to be in the world.

You're always reactive. To the community or the tribe you're in and you're identified with them. [00:24:00] I and them are the same, that they reject me. I'm not me anymore. Learning to see that and learning to also quit doing fabrications in our head of how awful it will be. I mean, people go to therapy for nothing else for decades.

Right. Well, I'm not opposed to therapy, but I think the more powerful way to do it it's being in community. So I quit doing any individual and I'm trying to also, as a psychologist, have degrees and things like that, and I quit doing a psychological path. and moved towards more of the philosophical paths with communities of people.

So this last weekend, my birthday party yesterday was planned by my communities of, have thousands of people and we come together debating on which two streams you're in. Business stream or change agent. We come together eight times a year [00:25:00] for a day, day and a half, two days, depending on the group and the event. And I bring experiences and papers that have intermetsos in the form of active exercises where people get used to discerning their own brainwashing and become over a series of years, very courageous, but never judgemental.

That's the real thing when we think we have to judge others to reject, we don't.. We can help them learn to think for themselves. So in order. For this fear, you're talking about rejection and all those, what I call energy drains. They drain us, right? For those to be seen and managed and slowly dissolved into at least a femoral kind of thing.

You have to be in community that's working on development, not complaining, [00:26:00] not talking to each other, not commiserating, not networking, but deep development. And I describe. I think in the back of this book, I can't remember. I have made the back of most of my books how to work from community. What do you think of that?

Hey, thanks 

Kyla Cofer: so much for listening. Since you've listened this far tells me you're really enjoying the content and I'm so, so grateful. I work really hard to bring you some awesome resources to help really enhance your leadership game. If you're liking this, can you pause really quickly, make sure you're subscribed, but then also share with one person or more people who you think could really benefit from the content.

My goal is to really bring this into some of the top podcasts on leadership in the world, and you can help get there and help us grow by sharing this with everyone you know. Thank you so much. I'm glad you're enjoying the episode.. Well, I think that's beautiful. And if I think about the times in my life when I have made significant changes, it's because of the people that I [00:27:00] was surrounded by and it was because I was able, right?

Um, to be supported in community. And one of my values is connection and. That's both internally and externally connecting to the world around us, but connecting to myself as well. And I just see that, I really believe that we cannot grow and have wellbeing, cannot have personal development, cannot have, I still believe in leaders.

Even if you don't, that's okay. Have that strong leadership without strong connections. And that's one thing you're talking about. We've gotta have that type of community that kind of supports us and that we support and we are encouraging each other. I mean, when you say, When you're in a community and you can tell somebody with confidence and courage to say, Don't take my word for it, figure it out for yourself.

And when you're opening line for your talks that you give, that really allows people the freedom to disagree with you and freedom to think for themselves. And it gives you the same thing within that context. You guys are allowing each other to open yourself up to new ideas, and that's where innovation and creativity can 

Carol Sanford: happen.[00:28:00] 

So let me talk about what I do with the leaders at N Cause. Leaders are hindrance if they are saying to other people, whatever, knowledge transfer. So I convert all leaders, whether they're supervisors, managers, facilitators, whatever they are to resources. Resource is that gives you spell it, r e hyphen, S O U R C E.

It means you return people to themselves. As a source, and all you do is give them a process and you may ask some questions, not cause you have answers, because it's designed to help them explore using what I call framework, living system Framework, which enable people to do their own work and there are no external authorities.

It's ability knew better because people rotate who's the resource.. There's no person who is always [00:29:00] in that role, so I encourage you to think about the potential of transferring all the ideas of leader into resource, because that is a epistemological shift of putting people. In charge of themselves, and it's very hard to do.

And it was hard for me. I had to give up being an expert. My God, I worked for 50 years to be an expert, and then I was proclaimed as one. I was whole bunch of bestsellers and a thought leader, and then I figured this out. Oh my God, this is the worst idea on the face of the earth. And I had built leadership training.

I worked with top leaders, CEOs, of Du Pont, a bunch of smaller companies or midsize. And I, to work on giving up, being an expert and a leader took me, uh, pounding me into the ground and going and searching every paper I'd written and try and [00:30:00] remove where I introduced myself as a leader. So being a resource.

Means I now have humility enough to know I need to be resourced and we can rotate in the next run and I'll be happy to do what I can for you. But I don't know more than you, and I'm not in charge of more than you. 

Kyla Cofer: And I love this, and I think you've even said this before of we are not in charge of other people.

And that's kind of basic boundaries too. But just remembering it's not our job. I know you've said this, it's not our job to do things that people change or trying to change people and be in charge of other people, but just being that space for people to support, to share what we know and to learn what they know.

No, Nope, nope. 

Carol Sanford: To go back and forth. No. None of that. No, none of that. You don't share. Sharing is an external. I have a thought for you. You ask questions. They're based on a framework. You don't do anything that's externally seen as transferring. You [00:31:00] don't tell your story. You don't encourage them. All of that takes you into a role that's playing something to there's, and this is so hard to see.

Kyla Cofer: Yeah. So how does that play out though in real life? When we're at a major company or a small business, or we're running an organization and we are working towards goals, we have to be on the same page for those goals. We're trying to accomplish things. We're trying to like get the product out the door. I mean, how does that play out?

Like in real life of, Okay, I can't tell you what I know, but I know how to use the software. Like, you know, I know how the program works. I know what we're trying to do here. That's a 

Carol Sanford: different, Alright, I'm not talking about that at all. What I'm talking about is having an ongoing learning process inside of an organization.

Okay. That works in a way that gets people to develop their own thoughts, and mostly in my companies, I usually own stock, but they're not mine. What you're doing is working in communities or groups around [00:32:00] particular customer. Or a particular distributor and you're making decisions about who has what capabilities needed to pull that off, and who wants to grow and do something better.

Now what we do is when the minute we wanna grow, what we do is switch as much as we can into a learning community. And there are certain times when there's training. Training is not development. It's you learn how to run a machine safely or code safe. and what you can still within that new resource development where you give people a framework to think about it.

I always start with finding out what people know. Having them know what they know and then what is is they wanna learn next. So you're kind conflating two things. Thing one is the running of the business. And the other is the [00:33:00] development of thinking capability. 

Kyla Cofer: Well that makes sense. I'm glad you distinguished that cuz I don't know how that got like mixed up for me, but it does make sense.

So what I'm hearing then is what you're talking about is more of like bigger picture, larger goals. Moving culture, moving the way that we interact with each other, moving our thought processes, the way we approach situations and decisions. And that seems to be more what you're talking about, is that right?

Well, 

Carol Sanford: it includes all that, but it's always in natural teams where they're actually applying it immediately. So it's not a training. You know, I've never tried to describe this and it's not a good idea because it so much removes eventually the hierarchy. It's not like you go be in the hierarchy and one side and learn another when you're in the learning group.

The hierachy's mixed up. And you are in a team and no one's in charge. When you go out and you , [00:34:00] all the work is redesigned for day to day and I haven't talked about that at all. There are, besides the fact that there are no hierarchies, We work with something called Promises Beyond Ableness. Yeah, well 

Kyla Cofer: I think it's also because you get really excited, you're so passionate about these things too.

it's beautiful. I'm, It's so fun to hear that your passion behind everything, because you've put a lot of work into it. I don't 

Carol Sanford: have passion, , I don't have passion, and if I do, I'm in trouble and I can feel that happening right now and they're trying to manage it. Cause passion is means pain. Literally means pain and it comes from people suffering.

So what I do is worry about my ability to say things in a way that will confuse people. And so I feel like I'm doing that right now. But more this disease also affects your. Breathing, it eventually suffocates you. So it is literally me having trouble breathing [00:35:00] and we'll see how much longer I can talk before I can, I wanted try and get one thing clear.

Cause the work design becomes individuals and teams committing to do something for a customer or a consumer or distributor or earth in a way that they have to learn something to do it. So, for example, in South Africa, . This young man who was a black African, who ran a detergent tower where they made laundry soap, and I think also committed because Colgate, the company was supporting all this happening and he wanted to take their product.

And create a new kind of business in the townships. Now, he had never been to high school or any kinda school cause they were forbidden to do that. We by then had no bosses, no one in charge of delegation, I think said, I [00:36:00] wanna create oral health. In the townships. Now, that's not part of his job description, but everyone, a hundred percent of people came up with something they wanted to use Colgate's platform for to change, and a lot of it was about the townships then, and he built.

A system that worked with women who are respected in becoming oral health educators, plus being able to make money off of selling toothpaste and oral health products. And he attended special development session we had about how to learn to work with people, how to design processes, how to design education.

And then he went out and did them. and he worked with dentists and economic development people, so this is so different. He was no longer working on detergent towers with what we taught. A hundred percent of the [00:37:00] people in Colgate had a project, I guess you'd call it, and that was a two and a half year project for him. So you change what people work on every day, and you don't have bosses who tell you how to do it.

You have resources. So everyone who used to be a boss, a supervisor or manager now was a resource to Isaac and to the 3000 other people who worked there. Can you feel how different that is? 

Kyla Cofer: Yes, that makes sense. That's a. great picture and perspective of, of how that 

Carol Sanford: operates. And the, my newest book, in every book, I talk a little bit about South Africa because it's so radically different.

Than most of us think about working. And because it was in a transition and we had Mandela support and he gave Colgate a big award for what we did in changing how people thought business could work. But when I [00:38:00] do have fewer stories in the US because the US it's less open. To really redesigning Reconceiving, getting rid of everything we call a hieracrchy.

Although we don't get rid of hierarchies I keep you saying that they dissolve 'em when they don't make sense. I don't have any design for you. Get rid of all these people. We never had one person fired. Not one, no one left. Um, one guy left, but he was so racist he couldn't get beyond what we were doing, so, Wow.

Kyla Cofer: So approaching our work without having hierarchies means that we're all working together to support each other and 

Carol Sanford: to grow, no, to support customer. And the market, that's a big shift. You don't support each other. You work together. Support. The customer community, the township. When you do that, you have to read out how work together, but that's a problem with most work.

Good design. It says [00:39:00] work with cooperations, with supporting each other. That's all internally focused. What you want is people working so that customers lives are transformed, consumers lives are transformed. Distributors, businesses are transformed, and you become their strategist and their marketing and r and d.

So, It's all fundamentally 

Kyla Cofer: different and it's not really about like the product, the money, the power. It's about making the world better and about transforming things and transforming people in the world and doing what in our mind. We understand what it takes to make the world a better place. 

Carol Sanford: Well, yes and no

Sorry. 

Kyla Cofer: No, this is great. Yeah. I'm learning so much. It's, you're making me really think, and it's, this isn't just a conversation of like agreeing with each other. It's a let's push to think more and to think [00:40:00] more deeply and think more creatively really about how we're approaching the work that we do. 

Carol Sanford: I know and I love talking to you.

Because you're up for this and it helps your listeners cause it disrupts them when they're listening in a way that I can't do, I can't reach 'em and can't them directly but's engaging this way a all right, so why interrupted this them my clients grow their business. Even when they are frontline, like seventh generation making baby products and household products, they grow their businesses in revenue terms, 35 to 65% a year.

The first five years, that is easily 10 times what an average business, working directly on making more money would make. They contribute more. Cause they have no [00:41:00] sustainability programs, no d a EI diversity programs, no Equity and justice program. What they have is learning how all that works, when it's working well and we make it happen.

In the process of doing work every. Person who creates a promise, like Isaac has to say in their plan how much they expect to improve earnings, margins, and cash. So everybody thinks when you go work on making the world better, you stop talking about money. No, you talk about it in a different way. Cause what improves revenue, which is the big growth door, uh, cashflow, is being able to match exactly what the market.

Is a needing in terms of life changes, what makes things work for them. So you are not working on trying to make the world better directly. You work on making the stakeholders to the business more [00:42:00] successful. And my gosh, what it does is it grows earnings, margin can flow through the roof. And the way the payment increase happens for Isaac is he agrees to get a certain return on having made that happen.

So you don't have competition for pay increases and there's only so much to go around. If you produce an enormous amount in the market, you get to participate in that and to gain sharing counter program, but not the way that they're normally described. You can't say this is not about the money cause you don't get to keep playing in the world of business, you don't have investors.

You don't have customers if you're not paying attention. But money is a reflector. Of your ability to make things work better for your stakeholders. There, there 

Kyla Cofer: is just so much to think through and, and I know you've put them in your books and you your [00:43:00] trainings, and so this is clearly more than we can talk about in our conversation.

So I'm so glad that we're scratching this and really I think what we're trying to do in this conversation is just to change the way we think and to change our approaches and to push ourselves to, yeah, think deeper. To allow ourselves to think more creatively and to question the way that we've done things and think, Well, maybe there's other ways, and what other ways can we do this?

What are other approaches? How many ideas can we possibly come up with Here? No, 

Carol Sanford: you don't want to have any ideas. No. That's brainstorming, which is very destructive. What you want is. The more precision in thinking you the kind, and it's not a 20. I do. I do development work in improving your ability to use frameworks and manage your mind so you aren't generating an idea a minute that will scatter your energy will destroy the company.

I've watched people get so excited about brainstorming. What I'm [00:44:00] doing is teaching people a set of framework. Which to plant the mental models they have, the ones they've learned in business school or from some consultants who bring in tons of those kinda things. You learn a very method focused way of developing yourself and really learning to self observe.

That's a but least 50% of the work. We are our own most destructive contributors. So, let me give an example of how we do that. We learn to watch all the time while we're working through a framework called Modes of Behavior, which is, I didn't create, it's very ancient, Pythagoras had a version of it, and John Bennett had a version.

Socrates had a version, and here, here's my current words for it. Can we see when we're reactive, that means [00:45:00] we're being told. Or engaged and inside of us we go crazy and we get upset. You're a be example of not doing that. Cause if we can't learn to manage our reactivity, you'll feel, uh, put upon by me.

Cause I'm actually challenging your work, how you make a living. And it means that I'm asking you to question what you are identified with. Cause most people are. Most people know what they're getting into when they invite me, so maybe if you do invite me, they aren't willing to put up with me, but they're learning to notice that when I challenge them, that they feel scared or angry.

Or confused. 

Kyla Cofer: I would say also 

Carol Sanford: inadequate. Inadequate. Right? And none of those are true. My job is to disrupt certainty. That's my essence. And I do it everywhere I go cause it's [00:46:00] so needed. Cause we're so identified with our paths and our language and our lesson plans we give people, right? Our curriculum.

So learning to come and work. In a way that you are not only learning about a new way to do strategic thinking and a new way to do performance indices and finance, and a new way to define what our customers are that are not niches and not in categories, and learning new business models. And a thousand other things is not easy cause we mostly translate it.

And you can hear you doing this, I'm sure you hear me say something, you think, Oh, I know what that means. You say it back to me and I say, No, that's not what I mean. Yep. So Right. Most people do that. We translate, through the lens, we've got, we have to learn to not do that.. So that's what my work is, is helping stop some of those [00:47:00] things that get in our way by giving you instruments that allow you to do so.

Kyla Cofer: Yeah. Actually, I just have the last two questions for you. Okay. If that's okay? Yes. I wanna ask you my two questions I'm asking every guest this season and it's what does integrity mean to you? 

Carol Sanford: All right. So my biggest worry about the world and the consultants and teachers is they work on from fragmented worldview.

So fragmented means we decide we wanna work on nature, which isn't even a thing, and we top it up in studying trees and rivers and so forth, pieces of something. And then when we get an idea that we're actually fragmenting the world, we say, Well, I don't wanna do that. And we go to the next level. Which is integration.

Now, that's not far enough, but integration means I try and stop myself and put [00:48:00] things back about how they're connected. Now, I do think the word integrity means that I'm living consistent with what my beliefs and values are of some sort. But what I really want people doing is going beyond, beyond integration..

And working from holes. And the way, the way to learn to do that is to watch it work. So if you wanna see a child as a whole, you watch them trying to help the family and help work with another child, if we try and teach them. How to behave with integrity. They're not in a value process. So for me, I've got, again, a third level that I think takes us beyond integrity.

Anyway, that's my interpretation. Oh 

Kyla Cofer: yeah. Well, my other question that is, what does it look like to you to be balanced? Do you have traveled all over the world? You have raised children, you are now a [00:49:00] grandmother, you. Writing books, you've got tons of things going on. What does the word balance mean to 

Carol Sanford: you?

To me, balance comes from you having your essence leading. Everything, and I don't divide by most people, divide up personal or work life. That seems insane to me. My daughter is my business partner. My grandson is in my developmental groups. My son, I'm on his board and we work on his business and where he's going.

And so I don't understand what, when people say they're out of balance. I assume they mean because my disease, by the way, it's not from poor lifestyle. We think it's from brain injuries. Right? And I did fall quite a bit and had a bit of abuse as a child, so I couldn't have lived a healthier life. But what I did do, Is made sure [00:50:00] that I knew what my work was from a young age, and it wasn't my purpose.

I don't believe in me having a personal purpose. I believe I serve purposes of a greater whole. If I'm serving something greater and I'm growing and learning, and I don't divide up my life in pockets, then I can keep on course. With my essence, with my direction, and that's probably some of my best way to describe what balance is, is it's about doing the work you came to do until you take your body back and you don't get to do it anymore.

Is there 

Kyla Cofer: anything that you just feel like that you really want people to hear? People are growing learning. People who are listening to this podcast are really just trying to do their own personal development work and really challenging who they are and the way they go about things. But with all the things that you've said and mentioned, all of the work that you've done, is there any like one key piece that you wanna make sure that [00:51:00] we get this point across?

Carol Sanford: Do it in community and take your whole family into the community. You can't do it alone. There's no human being alive who's ever succeeded. We think they are. But even Mandela, who I met said all the people. He wanted, the people quit honoring him. Cause he said, I just happened to write and speak more, but there were so many of us.

So find the community. You can find advice on that and you can look at whether or not some of the communities I run would support you. As long as I'm still alive, I will keep doing them. So make sure you're in community. That's awesome. 

Kyla Cofer: Thank you, Carol. All of your information is going to be in our show notes so we can make sure we can find you and read these amazing books and really do this work of deep thinking and transformation.

I just, I thank you so much for being willing to challenge me today and Yeah, and disagree with me and have a [00:52:00] great conversation and just being willing to take your time out of your day. I'm very, very grateful. 

Carol Sanford: Well, Kyla been great to be with you.. 

Kyla Cofer: Hey, thank you so much for listening. If you've liked what you heard and you want some more tools and resources to help you on your journey, go check out kyla cofer.com/free stuff.