J: Welcome to Slingshot25’s Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that will feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Jackie. And I’m Courtney. Something that we have been thinking about is thinking. Thinking or thinking about thinking. We’re thinking about thinking. See how we did that? Yeah. I think that’s called metacognition. Thinking about thinking,
C: That’s what we’ve been thinking about. ’cause we need leaders to think, oh, don’t we know? We teach leaders to think, we say we teach leaders to think differently. That’s right. So, we’re going to talk about thinking.
J: We thought it would be useful if we, um, I. Described why we do that. Why we teach leaders to think differently.
C: So sometimes people don’t get it. Should I tell my Darren Knock joke?
J: Oh, do we have time?
C: Oh, we do,
J: Because he tells long jokes. From what I understand.
C: He tells unfunny jokes, but he tells me sometimes unfunny jokes and he’ll say, Courtney, it’s a thinking man’s joke, meaning I have to pause and seek to understand it. Now, I don’t think that’s true. I think that his jokes aren’t that funny. But I think we believe the same thing that sometimes in leadership, our power is in pausing and stepping back and then deciding how we want to respond to things and that’s the work. And instead, people want something else.
J: Yes, it is a thinking person’s job, isn’t it? This thing called leadership requires a lot of thinking. One of the things that we know about the leadership job in most modern corporate workplaces is they don’t get a lot of time on their calendar. And I don’t know about you, Courtney, but I’m guessing that in some of the classes that you’ve hosted that as we are introducing some of the new ways we, we are suggesting leaders approach the job of leading someone is inevitably going to say, you know, I really don’t have time for all of this.
C: Yeah. And the people supporting them say to us, Can you just give ’em a checklist?
J: Oh yeah.
C: Because what, what they’re saying is they don’t have time to think. Yeah. So just give them, just give ’em a checklist, which we kind of grimace at because it’s a thinking person’s job.
J: That’s right. So yeah, I think about it as like, see how I did that? I’m thinking about it. You are a thinker. We’re gonna do that through the, the rest of this episode. The answer isn’t to create solutions that fit into this time challenge. The answer in those is things like checklists and conversation scripts, where you just fill in the blank on what you want us to say. The answer is to, is to sort of redesign how you approach leadership altogether. That starts to solve that time challenge. You know, I like to come back. It’s, it’s kind of glib. I, you know, I do tend to, you know, than, then describe this more, but I say, I don’t think you have time not to approach leadership this way.
Because we know that when we teach leaders to think differently, to take some time to do a little bit of what we call deep thinking. You know, stare out the window for a minute. And just, and literally, if you have a window in your office or in your workspace, you know, just literally stare out the window for just a minute and kind of let the, you know, let the, everything else in this moment just fall away. And just give yourself a minute to think about this person in this moment, in this leadership moment that you are in. Give yourself a minute. To think, and sometimes it is just a minute, two minutes, three minutes.
C: Yeah. There are several times what we teach in the Truth of Leading Others class. Like when we teach how to give feedback, the preparation that we teach is what, 85 to 90% thinking.
J: Yeah.
C: Thinking about what your goal of the conversation is, thinking about. The perspectives of other people thinking about how people are gonna respond. It doesn’t take that long to pause and think about that. The other place we teach it is in the Navigating Change Masterclass, an impact assessment. We say, think about the people around you. What have they lost? What are they gaining? How are they gonna act as a, in response to that? And all we’re asking, all we’re inviting is. Rather than just either avoiding it, which is one way we go, I have a problem.
I don’t know how to solve it. Let’s avoid it. Hope it goes away. Hope is not a strategy. Mm-hmm. Or just in the moment reacting and, you know, cleaning up the mess later. No, pause and respond. And there are, I think, we’re just constantly inviting leaders to think differently. Pause and think, think about the other people, think about how they’re reacting, and then take your action from that place.
J: Yeah. And. It’s, it’s all of that because we know that when you do that work on the front end, you were referencing the feedback prep guide that we share with our clients of how to do that thinking on the front end of a difficult conversation, one that has higher stakes, one that you’re nervous about, one that you need to take into account other perspectives.
Don’t blunder into those. One of the first things we say is, is do not have. A difficult conversation is difficult unless you can prepare for it. Like take the time to do that. Um, because we know when you do that. You know, it might feel like you might spend an hour preparing for what becomes a five-minute conversation, but that hour that you spend preparing and really thinking through the nuance of the situation, how might they be thinking about this situation and how am I gonna factor that in?
What might they say to this? What’s likely to be some of their responses? How am I really thinking about this? What story am I telling myself here? That kind of prep work. Will save you an enormous mm-hmm. Amount of time that then gets invested in, you know, chasing this issue around again. And sometimes for years. Sometimes for years I’ve talked with clients who, because they are, they don’t take the time to do that. Stare out the window, deep thinking, you know, maybe use some structure for that thinking if necessary, but, um, because they won’t take the time to do that, they end up chasing some of these problems often.
Not oftentimes. I don’t know about oftentimes, but certainly sometimes for years.
C: Mm-hmm. It’s absolutely true.
J: Oh, thinkers. We need thinkers out there. So we encourage you all to do some deep thinking this week. And I think that’s all we have for this episode, this episode of our Shotcast. But we always have much more to say. If you want more, drop us a line at Slingshot25.com.
