Leadership and Emotional Connection in Changing Times with Dr. Guy Lubitsh

In this episode, we consider coaching and assisting senior executives on how to improve organizational performance by increasing their ability to develop personal impact and connect with others on individual, team, and organizational levels.

Our guest this time is Dr. Guy Lubitsh, a Chartered Organisational Psychologist with a sizeable track record working in the areas of organizational change, management, and leadership development. He is a Client Director and Professor of Leadership & Psychology at Ashridge Executive Education (Hult International Business School) and has extensive experience working with Executives at the highest levels of international companies in Europe and the Middle East.

Guy draws on eclectic approaches including human psychology, appreciative inquiry, psychoanalytical and systems theory. He builds long-term partnerships with clients and is highly valued for his dedicated, insightful, appreciative yet appropriately challenging approach. 

He has published articles in the areas of talent management, collaboration across organizational boundaries, organizational consulting, and the role of emotions at work.

Guy’s book ‘Connect – Resolve Conflict, Improve Communication, Strengthen Relationships’ has been published recently by FT/Pearson and shortlisted for management book of the year CMI. He’s currently co-authoring a new book ‘The Leader’s Guide to Collaboration’ with Mike Brent to be published by Pearson at the end of 2024.


We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.

Chapters

• 0:03 Coaching Executives for Performance and Collaboration
• 13:32 Leadership Skills in Changing Health Care

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

In this episode of the HR Chat Show, we consider coaching and assisting senior executives on how to improve organizational performance through increasing their ability to improve personal impact and connecting with others on individual, team and organizational levels. Hey, this is Bill Bannam, your host today. My guest is Dr Guy Livich, a chartered organizational psychologist with a sizable track record working in the areas of organizational change management and leadership development. He is a client director and professor of leadership and psychology over at Ashridge Executive Education, slash Holt International Business School and has extensive experience working with executives at the highest levels of international companies in Europe and the Middle East. Guy's book Connect, resolve, conflict, improve Communications, strengthen Relationships has been published recently by Pearson and shortlisted for management book of the year CMI. He's currently co-authoring a new book, the Leaders Guide to Collaboration, with Mike Brent, to be published by Pearson at the end of 2024.

Speaker 2: 1:39

Guy, welcome to the HR Chat Show today. It's great to have you with me. Great to be here, bill. So, beyond my introduction just a moment ago, perhaps you can start by sharing a bit about your journey and what led you to specialize in organizational change management and leadership development.

Speaker 3: 1:57

At the start of my career, I trained at the Tavistock Center. I learned there that there are business realities, structures, strategies and stock price. They are all on the surface. But what intrigued me in the Tavistock? That there are things that happen underneath the surface, like fears, anxieties, politics, how conflict, whether it's addressed or not, and this approach really resonated with me.

Speaker 3: 2:23

Later I joined the Ashridge Health Business School and there I learned that the main issue that leaders have is how to connect with their followers, and that was around how they can connect with their emotions and their emotions of their followers, and I started teaching skills like empathy, listening and coaching, and that worked really well and I was really happy with that, which then led me on to get interested in this idea of emotions at work and we wrote the book Connect just after the pandemic, and what I learned there was this issue of loneliness. What we're seeing at the moment is 70% of the workforce is feeling signs of burnout, of depression, anxiety that can lead to diabetes, lack of sleep, blood pressure, all sorts of problems, and we are, at the same time, hardwired for connection. So in that context, being involved in change management, leadership development has been fantastic and quite powerful in this particular context.

Speaker 2: 3:35

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at HR Gazettecom. And now back to the show. Okay, wonderful, thank you very much. So in your role as a client director and professor of leadership and psychology, you've worked with executives at the highest levels in international companies. Guy, how do you approach coaching and assisting senior executives to enhance all performance and personal impact?

Speaker 3: 4:11

Executives today are facing what I would describe wicked problems. So those problems do not have simple solutions, they only have potential options. It could be a new product, creating an engaging culture, having a difficult conversation with someone so there isn't a recipe that you can apply. So my role as a coach is to provide a safe environment for those executives to think through how they can resolve wicked problems, how they can bring people together for different disciplines to find creative solutions and what. I make sure that there's a good degree of support and challenge. And I ask my coaches and those executives to extend their range and impact. And we, in any coaching assignment, we focus on both resilience at home how can you stay strong in your home life, but also in your work life, which is a massive area at the moment and, of course, in any coaching assignment, we also make sure that people try out new behaviors, practice and learn from those experiences.

Speaker 2: 5:16

I think you've given that answer before, sir. Very good, okay. So what prompted you to write the book? Let's talk about your book now. It's coming out next year. It's called the Leaders' Guide to Collaboration. Tell us the reason for writing it and why is this theme important right now?

Speaker 3: 5:35

This collaboration, or lack of collaboration, I would say, at international level. We are living in a world that is polarized and fragmented. We have seen the poor international response to COVID-19. And from my point of view, a similar problem arises in organizations. There is real difficulty to collaborate. We actually, when we are looking at the research, 80% of the time managers spend in meetings. Those meetings are usually around seeking consensus rather than doing real work, which leaves them very little time to do the serious, important work that they need to do.

Speaker 3: 6:16

And there's a recent study Microsoft looked at 60,000 employees looking at hybrid working and they've seen that there's been negative impact on collaboration. Cross-group connections have dropped by 25% to pre-pandemic levels and the workers, interestingly in the current environment, feeling more insular, more silent and less connected. So this is very difficult because all of this has come in a period that we cannot work solo. We've got those wicked problems that I mentioned earlier. They require multidisciplinary efforts to improve difficult organizational challenges. So when we look at the books Mike Brent and I, the current books that are available they seem too theoretical. So we wanted to write a practical guide that can help leaders to do effective collaborations.

Speaker 4: 7:23

Fidello Inc is a consulting firm specializing in improving human performance and we're proud to support the HR Chat podcast. We help identify strategic competencies and behaviors that drive results. Our team offers an HR web software to manage systems, reports and data for HR people that need the best insights to make the right decisions and achieve better results. Learn more at Fidellocom. Love it, thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 7:51

Okay, I'd like to mix things up in these conversations, guy, and I'm going to do exactly that now. I'm going to challenge you to answer in 60 seconds or less for my next question, and my next question goes as follows what are the required skills or behaviors or attitudes for collaboration in a changing and somewhat turbulent world of work right now? 60 seconds go.

Speaker 3: 8:12

Okay. So first thing is softer skills and collaboration. Pearson have found out in the recent study that they are more important than ever before. The next thing is around keeping personal resilience. We're living in a world of crisis, as one of our CEOs clients described it to us, so keeping personal resilience and team resilience will be key. And two more One is the idea of job. Forever is gone, so we will seeing a new generation coming into work that will need to change jobs and retrain, so the need to be curious to learn will be also very important. And finally, we know in the digital work it's very easy to avoid conflict, so we will need people that are able to de-escalate conflict.

Speaker 2: 9:02

Oh, loads of time to spare, guy. Good work, good work. Okay, let's do it again, but I'll give you two minutes this time. In under two minutes, guy, talk us through the idea of the tyranny of the tangible. I love this, and how it relates to collaboration at work.

Speaker 3: 9:19

The idea of the tyranny of the tangible comes from traditional science, from where, which means that you privilege facts and data over things related to the emotions and the soul. So when we talk about the tyranny of the tangible, we mean that it's for leaders easier to focus on measurements, key performance indicators, new initiatives, things that you can see, rather than having conversations on feelings and emotions that are always put in the irrational, too difficult box. And when we are faced, as senior leaders, with difficult decisions, in my experience, senior teams tend to change the structures, do things that are on the surface, but actually what they need to do is have difficult conversations around performance or even deal with painful emotions. There's a great deal of management time, leadership time that is not accounted for Talking to someone, sending emails, planning. It's very, very important, but not tangible and in many cases, management ignore it and does not take it into account.

Speaker 2: 10:29

Wow, we are flying through these answers today. I feel like you've done this before. What do you? Let's give our listeners some tips now. I always like to make sure that we give our listeners some tangible takeaways. What are your top tips for effective team or organizational level collaboration?

Speaker 3: 10:46

You should not collaborate if there isn't any psychological safety, and that's the work of Amy Edmondson from Harvard. So if people feel that they may be punished for things that they're going to say, or they feel difficulty speaking up, raising their ideas, concerns or even mistakes, you should not collaborate. In that context, and also if I quote another excellent professor from Berkeley Hansen, and he says that some tasks and some projects do not require people to work together. So before even collaborating, ask yourselves and assess whether collaboration is actually required, and our book will give you a checklist to help you with that. And research also shows that similarity.

Speaker 3: 11:35

And if we have people with similar backgrounds, mindsets, it will be very difficult for us to resolve wicked problems. So you need to look at your team and your collaborators and see whether you've got enough difference, in particular, people that are willing to challenge and have ideas and different perspectives, before you enter a complex collaboration on a difficult topic. And, of course, the goal of collaboration. If it's not clear, you will have problems. So you need to ask some challenging question what is the common goal, what is the task to be performed before jumping into collaboration and what I would say when it is a tough project, a complex project, it's very important to make sure that there is some commitment from the heart and passion for the collaboration. Without that commitment, thinks, we'll get stuck in difficult moments. And finally, I would say I would really encourage you to look at your interpersonal skills within the team because that will carry you through when you're stuck and through difficult moments.

Speaker 2: 12:43

Thank you very much. I want to talk a little bit about your expertise in the health care sector now. I want to preface it by saying that I've got so much respect for health care workers. I think we all saw during the pandemic what heroes of those folks in the public sector within health particularly are, and also private sector in terms of helping with the research and whatnot and getting us through the other side of the pandemic. That sector offers a lot of unique challenges for its leaders and for its employees. That the stress that a lot of those folks are still going through. We're actually recording this particular conversation during the junior doctors strike in the UK. As someone who specializes in the health care industry guy, what skills and knowledge do you believe are crucial for leaders in a changing health care sector, especially in the context of quality improvement? And just add to that should we as consumers be get a little bit more forgiving when it comes to quality improvement compared to other sectors, given the extra stress is placed on a lot of the healthcare sector?

Speaker 3: 14:02

The healthcare sector, like you were saying, bill, is going through a lot of change In the next decade. There's going to be many opportunities and changes in healthcare, so it's very, very important that we train the leaders in healthcare so that they have suitable skills. And for me, there are four domains that you need to focus on when you talk about healthcare leaders. The first one is context, and we need to teach and help our healthcare leaders to understand the macro context, changes in regulation, in funding, in policy, and how that relates to the local environment. The second area is a technical area, which is around Six Sigma, lean, fear of constraints, understanding quality improvement methodology, not actually to implement it themselves, but to be able to be informed enough so they can bring the right methodology to the right context. And what we've been finding in the last 15 years is that in a healthcare environment in particular, which is a people sector, it's very important to have strong interpersonal skills because you need to bring together multidisciplinary teams. We've seen that in the pandemic the importance of bringing multidisciplinary expertise for the vaccine. So similarly in hospitals and also in the private healthcare sector, they need to work through different disciplines. So very important that leaders have good skills, facilitation skills, coaching skills to bring those teams together.

Speaker 3: 15:34

And finally, I believe it's very important for those leaders to understand their impact on others. So, in some cases, they need to understand their strengths, their weaknesses, their values, their drivers and, in particular, how they show up to meetings. Are they showing up in a helpful, constructive way, which encourages debate and conversation, or are they overstressed and limiting debate and at times, we are coming across even bullying others? So, understanding your impact, your personal impact, is very important. And in terms of being compassionate to healthcare leaders, yes, I think we should be, because healthcare is, in my experience, one of the most challenging sectors. So we should bear that in mind, that it's a sector that is cash constrained, a sector that is suffering from shortages of staff in all areas pharmacists, nurses, doctors so it's working in a very challenging context. So we need to understand that and show compassion to that. And also, we should invest in those leaders, in the skillset, because it's such a unique sector that requires special skills. So I think there is need to invest more in the leadership development of those people.

Speaker 2: 17:02

Guy, you're not going to believe this, but we're almost out of time. I've got two more questions for you. I am therefore going to challenge you to answer the next one again in under 60 seconds. And the question is how do you see the future of executive coaching evolving and what role do you believe it plays in shaping effective leadership? Go.

Speaker 3: 17:22

Managing relationships and collaboration, in my view, is the number one issue for leaders and managers and businesses. So how do I manage a difficult relationship with a stakeholder? How do I lead change? So this will continuously going to be the most difficult challenge for leaders today. So having coaching in a safe space allows you to consider options, to see where you are and to understand what can you do in a very kind of complex environment.

Speaker 3: 17:56

The second thing about coaching is that it helps you understand yourself I touched on it earlier and, in particular, understand your shadow side as a leader. So you could be a directive leader that gets things done, but you may not be aware that you're bullying others in the process or you're creating a lot of stress around you. So coaching can really help you see the shadow side. Or let's say, you're a facilitator, you're somebody that creates good harmony, but you don't make decisions. So, again, coaching can help you understand your impact and adapt your behavior so that you're more effective. And finally, the center of creative leadership. That was done many years ago showed us that derailment of careers is usually not because of cognitive ability but mainly because of interpersonal skills, and coaching is a great way for you to get connected to your own emotions, but also to connect more effectively with others.

Speaker 2: 18:58

Awesome, and if folks want to connect with you, how can they do? That? Is that LinkedIn? Is that email? Are you all over TikTok? What are the best ways to get hold of you?

Speaker 3: 19:08

Best ways is LinkedIn, and I'd be very happy to talk to anyone who heard the podcast and wants to share ideas and views.

Speaker 2: 19:15

Perfect, and there will, of course, as always, be links to guys LinkedIn profile and other links to hold international business called and such in the show notes. That just leaves me to say for today guy, I think you're awesome. I can't wait to do more things with you in 2024, get you involved with some of the events we're doing and get you on other podcasts I'm involved with and all the rest of it, but for now, thank you very much for being my guest, my pleasure. Thank you very much, bill and listeners, as always, until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 19:49

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