Leadership Blindspots & Do-Overs: Your Guide to Improving Any Relationship

Why relationships matter to success, no matter what kind of success you seek

INTRODUCTION:
You’re listening to Tiller-Hewitt’s Leadership Lens Podcast. If you’re a leader - or an aspiring leader - who wants to stay relevant and impactful… YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT PLACE.

At Tiller-Hewitt we believe it’s faster, smarter -- and less painful -- to learn from leaders who have walked before us. That’s why we invite top leaders to be our guests on the Leadership Lens.

Your host is Tammy Tiller-Hewitt – Founder of Tiller-Hewitt HealthCare Strategies. Let’s jump into the podcast.

TAMMY:
My guest today is Dr. L. Carol Scott who believes that relationships are at the heart of all our success.

As a TEDx speaker, international best-selling author, coach, trainer, and keynoter, Dr. Scott’s unique model helps to revolutionize success through self-aware emotional and social intelligence—from your business network to your family, and even to your love life. Dr. Scott’s clients are people with growth goals who are looking for unexpected strategies to achieve success.

Dr. Scott shares a way to receive a free booklet explaining the self-awareness framework she discusses in the interview as well as an assessment you can take to learn more about your own self-awareness.

TAMMY:
Dr. L. Carol Scott, welcome to the Leadership Lens Podcast!

CAROL:
Tammy, thank you so much for having me.

TAMMY:
Do you mind if I call you Carol?

CAROL:
Oh no, please do. I only make my older brothers call me Dr. Scott.

TAMMY:
Oh absolutely, as a sister should. I love that idea!

CAROL:
Absolutely.

TAMMY:
Carol, you're training background and accomplishments are off the charts and so relevant to our audience, and super fascinating to me.

We at Tiller-Hewitt are in the strategic growth business, but at the heart of strategic growth are relationships and all the relationships we form and that's another reason why I am so honored and ready to learn from you today because your mantra is Relationships are at the heart of our success.

CAROL:
Yes, absolutely true.

TAMMY:
Talk to me about the name of your international best-selling book.

CAROL:
I had the great blessing to participate in an anthology called Rising with Resilience. It was compiled by Dr. Karen Scaglione and Cathy Davis. It is inspirational stories through the eyes of people looking at, what happened during the pandemic, mostly medical professionals, frontline workers, some survivors, and people who just moved through these last two years with resilience. I got to write a chapter about my experience and include it with an amazing array of other authors.

TAMMY:
That's super relevant to our audience today. I have a couple of questions for you later related to trauma-informed.

I would be willing to bet the vast majority of our listeners today lived through that trauma as a leader, as a caregiver.

You're also a TEDx talk speaker. What was your subject?

CAROL:
The TEDx stage that I appeared on had a theme for the night of Dream Big: The Lost Art of Dreaming. And so I titled my talk Never Lost Forever because I think that the ability to dream is something that occurs early in our lives. Our capacity for that starts when we're about three years old, and we often lose it before we're adults, but we can regain it.

What I talked about was the sort of magical ability to believe in the impossible, if you will, to believe in the big dreams, to set big, hairy, audacious goals, to put something up on the mountaintop and say, I'm going there. And then to do the work of getting there. But having the faith of a three-year-old child is really what it was about. Can you get past your “yeah but” kind of thinking and realize, pursue the things that you believe in about yourself?

TAMMY:
I love that. Given your speaking to a lot of leaders I sadly think that a lot of them have lost the art of dreaming because business and the kind of the rat race has gotten in the way, so I would love for you to talk even more about that. And we talk about getting your “but” out of the way.

What's some advice that you give to leaders or adults about this loss of the art of dreaming?

CAROL:
Listening for your “but” is the first one. I offered on all of the success strategies that I coach on, I offer what I call Development Do-overs. And the Development Do-overs for the kind of faith that a three-year-old child has is to first notice that you say things that you want for yourself, and then you say, “but”. I'd really love to hike in the Himalayas one day, “but” I'll never be able to do that. I'd really love to be able to learn to fly a plane, “but” I don't know how I'd make that happen. I'd really love to be the CEO of this company, “but” I don't know if I have what it takes to get there. So those “buts” and getting conscious about them because all these success strategies rest on self-awareness, becoming aware of the patterns that we have, and changing them.

TAMMY:
I love it. I think this is going to be the medicine for so many of our listeners. I mean we have some top leaders of organizations on the line and a lot of people outside the business think, everyone has their act together, everyone knows exactly what they want to be there dreaming big, I mean they're living the dream every day. But that's not the truth. You will serve as the voice of not only of reason, but really just encouragement.

And so, I'd love to just kind of hand over the mic to you and talk about what does self-awareness have to do with our success. And also, given all of our leaders experienced and witnessed trauma during and after the pandemic, I mean it is still going on, the ramifications and the shifts of other issues that happen because of it, but why do corporate leaders need to be trauma-informed and what does that mean?

CAROL:
Oh, so many good questions in there. I wanna start with talking about that self-awareness and tell a little personal story on myself.

When I was a relatively young professional, I was leading a metropolitan-wide program in a big city and working for what's called a quasi-government agency, so kind of a mix between a non-profit and government.

And I was blessed by a foundation sending me to the Leadership Development Program of the Center for Creative Leadership. And part of that program is there's a 360-evaluation performance appraisal basically. Your peers, your direct reports and your supervisors are all asked to complete instruments about who you are as a leader. And then you get that feedback during the course of the week and the Leadership Development Program.

What I learned from that process was that uniformly, across my peers, my direct reports, and my supervisors, people found me to be blunt and abrasive. And I was like, What? I'm like the nicest person in the world, how can they think I’m blunt and abrasive? That just makes no sense to me. And that self-awareness though, that grew from that feedback, was that people interpret certain things I do as being blunt and abrasive.

Well, what is it that I do? That's the self-awareness. And the do, what I do - what I did back then, was I approached each conversation with a very goal-oriented focus. This is what I'm here to get out of this conversation. I did very little connecting on a personal level - before or after getting what I wanted - and when I was done, I simply turned on my heel and walked away. Now I did all of that, not because I'm blunt and abrasive, but because I have a huge amount of social anxiety from a childhood of trauma. And so, people were interpreting me as blunt and abrasive when I was really terrified. Not terrified like a small child, but that was in there from, you know, many many years of being terrified as a small child.

And so just getting the self-awareness that there is a pattern in my behavior that other people experience, in a way that is not helpful to me as a leader. This does not help me lead, it doesn't help me grow into higher leadership positions. As long as people think I'm blunt and abrasive, I ain't going nowhere.

And so that's really why self-awareness is so important, we cannot change what we're not aware of. And if it's a blind spot and you don't know that people interpret your behavior in a certain way that is detrimental to your leadership development, then you gotta find a way to find that out.

TAMMY:
I know many large organizations have the Leadership 360. It’s kind of is in vogue and then it's out, right? It's kind of the flavor of the year with some HR Departments. But if an organization doesn't offer that kind of program, is there a tool that can be distributed internally if you're a leader and you want that kind of feedback?

CAROL:
There's certainly are lots and lots of tools to allow people to evaluate the behavior. I also think that we don't necessarily need those tools because what can happen is opening ourselves to feedback of all kinds is key to self-awareness. So that was one form of feedback, and it was written and it was really surprisingly consistent, which was what made me sit up and take notice.

But what if I hadn't sat up and taken notice of it, what if I had dismissed it? What if I had said they're the ones with the problem, not me? So really, what it's about is opening ourselves up to the fact that people are always giving us feedback, and being willing to look at what it means. Being willing to say, well, what if they're not wrong? What if there is something I do that makes me appear to be that way to them? What if we assume that other people's perceptions of us have some value? That's something we can learn from. Then we can get that kind of 360 feedback every day all day long.

TAMMY:
But what if, as a leader, people aren't really open to giving you that kind of feedback? The higher you are, the less feedback you get because you're a big man or woman on campus.

CAROL:
When I say feedback, I'm not necessarily thinking of direct, clear messaging. But people give you feedback all the time with the way they interact with you.

If I ask for opinions in a group that I'm leading a team meeting and I'm asking for opinions from the group, and every single opinion in the group agrees with my opinion, which I've already stated, that is a form of feedback, right? If I look at it that way, It’s the form of feedback that says to me, either:

1. My idea was brilliant, and I've got everybody on board already, or
2. People are agreeing with me simply because of my job title or because of something else. They're not really 100% in agreement with me.

and I don't know about y'all, as leaders in the healthcare industry, but as a leader myself, I never want a team that agrees with me 100%. That's not helpful.

So, if I'm getting that, that's a form of feedback that I can reflect on myself, and maybe I can find one person I trust enough out of that group to say, help me understand this better. I really think that if we don't have to wait for somebody to come in and sit down and say, Listen, I wanna give you some feedback, to get feedback. We can observe what's happening and get feedback.

TAMMY:
Yeah, I like that example. Are there any other examples you can think of there that clear, I mean, opinions if everyone's agreeing something's wrong, anything else come to mind?

CAROL:
Well, I think that any time people come in, to meet with me as a leader and all they're doing is asking me what to do or all they're doing is bringing me a problem to solve, that's a good form of feedback about my leadership.

I often use that kind of experience to say, look, bringing me a problem without some potential solutions isn't as helpable to you as an aspiring leader, or to me as the person who's guiding you. So, bring me the problem absolutely, and tell me what you think is the right solution. Give me two or three options here, or you know give me something to work with beyond, I'm here to complain, or I'm here to ask questions. What I'm looking for is an interactive process with people I lead.

TAMMY:
And it almost sounds like a lack of empowerment that people don't feel the empowerment to bring the problem and a potential solution.

CAROL:
Right - and that's a form of feedback - that they don't feel empowered.

TAMMY:
Okay, let's talk about trauma-informed. What do you mean by that?

CAROL:
The Seven Self-aware Success Strategies are all natural strategies which young children use automatically. Then they learn to do maladaptive unsuccessful strategies in place of them. That's the way things go in the early childhood world, from birth to seven, pretty much all the time.

What we leaders need to know is that every single person who works for us developed their brain from birth to five. And whatever happened interpersonally from birth to five, taught them how to be a person in relationship. And so, they bring all of that as an adult into the workplace.

Well, if part of that experience from birth to five was traumatic, if they experienced physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, if they lost a parent to divorce or death, if they had a parent who was engaged in using drugs and alcohol too much, there all these things that commonly create a trauma responsiveness and it's wired into our brains because that's when the brain is developed as well.

So, from birth to five, we're growing everything about who we're going be as a relational being, and it's all getting hard-wired in real-time as it happened.

We don't come into the world with a brain already wired up about how to get along with people, we learn it, and we learn it almost entirely from birth to five. And then from 6 to 7, we sort of practice the persona. We bring that out into the world that we're now in, and we interact with people. And we try using all the strategies we've learned, and either we're using those seven successful strategies, or we're using alternatives.

So, for example, the two-year-old’s, natural strategy is independence. It's to express themselves as unique beings. But what they come away from that year with oftentimes is co-dependent, bullying, being a victim, all kinds of other strategies other than expressing themselves. Because what they learn pretty quickly from the adults in their life is don't express yourself, that's not okay. Your feelings are too big. The things you want are wrong. The feelings you have aren't appropriate. Don't talk like that. It's like the messaging to toddlers about all of their wild, unbridled self-expression is pretty consistently negative in most families. And so, that creates a wired-in, traumatic experience related to expressing what I think, feel and want in the world.

So, how are you going to lead people who don't know how to express what they think, feel, and want? You can’t.

TAMMY:
I'm speechless, both as a parent and as a leader - thinking it's already hard-wired. So, as a parent, did I mess my children up? Did I ruin them? And secondly, then can this be rewired?

CAROL:
Yes, yes. And that's why I called the work Development Do-overs. So, I mentioned that one Development Do-overs for the three-year-old successful strategy of belief, faith, is to notice your “but”. And another one is simply to practice believing an impossible thing.

Let's say what you really do want to do is hike in the Himalayas one day, but you're not a hiker, you've never hiked in the mountains. You don't have any experience of that, but you like feel called to it. Somehow, it like inspires you to think about hiking in the Himalayas, and you can put whatever goal in place of this one that is yours. Then what you need to do is actively engage with that image of seeing yourself hiking in the Himalayas. Reading about, looking at images of people hiking in the Himalayas. Let yourself be pulled into the impossible-to-imagine thing you want to do, and then start noticing what step you can take in the right direction.

So, the Development Do-overs imitate the natural process in the young child and allow you to repattern your behavior, which sort of reverse engineers back to your brain wiring. So, your nervous system can be rewired by the repatterning of your behavior and your thinking. Change your thinking, change how you feel, change what you do. It all goes together.

TAMMY:
All this sounds really great. But does it all start though with self-awareness?

CAROL:
That's the role of the coach then, it’s to be the objective, outside observer who can ask the questions and hold up the mirror to say, Look at this about yourself. Look at this thing that you do and think about it. How is that an impact on your leadership?

So, here’s a good example, now, this is a personal one. In a personal relationship in my life, I know someone who has a consistent pattern of ignoring anything she doesn't want to know about, anything she doesn't want to see, anything that's uncomfortable or painful or just inappropriate in a relationship. She'll just ignore it. She'll just pretend it didn't happen. She won't respond to it. She doesn't notice it. It's like her awareness that it happened is there, because if you ask her later, did you hear that thing that he said? Oh yeah, I heard it, but she just ignores it. Okay, so, if that pattern is not visible to her, she can't change it.

But as soon as somebody asks the questions or notices something about it, as soon as the coach says, I noticed that you didn't respond when he said that mean thing to you, when he was rude to you, when he criticized you, I see that you didn't respond to that. Tell me about that. Let's look at it. Let's build self-awareness. Our blind spots run around behind our heads and when we turn to look at them, they run around behind our head. So, it's very difficult to see blind spots. They're blind. You need a mirror, you need someone to help you. And so, here's the Development Do-overs.

TAMMY:
Okay, so you're suggesting that in order to become more self-aware, if you don't have some leadership development system in place at your organization, or have access to one, hiring a coach is probably the best solution for you?

CAROL:
I do think that one on one coaching relationship has so much to offer. In that leadership development program back in my forties, that was when I first really got it, having one person sit down and give you an opportunity to really sink through from a moment of self-awareness to a logical conclusion for change is very valuable. It's so helpful to not do that with people who know you well, you know what I'm saying? Because people who know us well are already engaged in a sort of mutual projection. So I'm projecting what I think on to you, who I think I am who I think you are, you're doing the same to me and the longer we've known each other and the better we knew each other, the more we do it frankly. And so it's so helpful to have that stranger, that outsider who can be objective and can say what needs to be said and ask the right questions. I really think it's a valuable, valuable tool, a coach.

TAMMY:
I'm in health care, I can speak specifically to that. But, a lot of health systems are really picking up on the notion of the value of mentorship, leadership mentorship, Specifically talking about young leaders and bringing young leaders up and positioning them, could a mentor serve as this kind of self-awareness coach?

CAROL:
I think so. I think it depends on who the mentor is in terms of the structure of the company if it's somebody in the company.

And it depends on how good they are at being the objective mirror. It's very easy to be codependent in a coaching kind of relationship and a mentor relationship, to solve the problem, to tell the person what to do, to listen and say here's what you ought to do. A coach doesn't do that. A coach says, here’s what I noticed. Here's what I think I hear you saying is your pattern. Is this true? You know, the coach doesn't say this is true. The coach says, is this true? And lets you develop your own self-awareness.

TAMMY:
Okay, so probably the mentor program is not the appropriate way unless these mentors are really trained to be more on the coach side.

CAROL:
Because they're just bringing their trauma history and their lack of self-awareness, all of these dynamics of interpersonal relating, they're just bringing all of that to the mentorship.

TAMMY:
So, maybe one new program that needs to be introduced in health systems and large physician organizations is self-awareness training. Start there to raise awareness if you will, on what self-awareness is and the importance of it around success.

CAROL:
Right. Well, I think that's why mindfulness training and programs related to mindfulness have become so popular in the corporate world. It is because they foster self-awareness about what we're doing. When I drop out of the busy, you know, monkey mind talking to myself all the time, and I just pay attention to where I am and how I feel right now, it allows for a kind of self-awareness that I don't have when I'm up there in my monkey mind.

TAMMY:
That's a good point. Really, pre-pandemic mindfulness was in vogue, if you will, and it's kind of taken a backseat with all of the larger fires and issues that have risen because of the pandemic.

What about any other feedback or advice you would give to leaders about starting to really lead, encourage and foster this self-awareness journey?

CAROL:
You know, I think my perspective with the framework of the self-aware success strategies is to become more informed about how your brain got to be what it is. How did your brain develop from birth to five? How did you practice a personality at six and seven? What were the steps in your life? What were the things happening in your life? So, learning something about your early development, and really spending some time reflecting and developing your own awareness about how your brain got wired is a crucial thing to do.

If I could just briefly mention what those success strategies are, and the developmental continuum, it might give some more clear context for what I'm saying.

Babies are born with nothing as a strategy except to trust that they'll be taken care of. And so your foundation of trusting other people to meet needs is in the first six months of your life. You don't remember anything about that, of course. But you learned whether the world was there for you or not there for you fundamentally in your first six months of life.

Trust is the first Success Strategy, and trust is essential in leadership relationships. You have to trust that people know what is needed and will meet the need of you, as the leader, of the organization, of the program, of the initiative. You know, it's like this is about meeting needs.

So, trust and then the independence, that I mentioned of the toddler. Expressing what you really think, what you really feel, and what you really want has mostly gotten lost for most of us.

The Success Strategy of the three-year-old is to believe, to have faith that everything is possible. And if you know a three-year-old, you know what I mean? Because they're like, I'm going to grow up to be a unicorn, and they completely believe it. So, if what you want to do is grow up to be a unicorn, a different kind of leader than anybody's ever seen before, then you need to have faith in yourself, you need to have faith in that dream.

Then at four, your Success Strategy is to negotiate, to figure out how to solve a conflict with win-win solutions. Real simple basic, you want this, I want that. How do we both get what we want? That's a four-year-old’s world.

The five-year-old Success Strategy is vision, having a specific goal and enrolling people in your vision, getting them on board to do it with you.

The six-year-old Success Strategy is compromise. Letting go of some of the things I want in favor of things I want more. It's a values-led kind of compromise.

And then finally, at seven, the Success Strategy is acceptance. Acceptance of life the way it is not trying to change it, not being a victim of it, not trying to control everything, and not complaining about it all the time, right? but accepting it, this is what's happening. This is what we're working with.

So, trust, independence, faith, negotiation, vision, compromise and acceptance are the seven strategies that make us really successful in our interpersonal efforts in the workplace, at home, in the neighborhood, at church. It doesn't matter where.

TAMMY:
Okay, so we learn all that when we're seven. If we had a bad experience growing up, some of those will not be as strong as we want them to be, right? So, we don't have the trust, we don't believe everything is possible, we aren’t good at negotiating, or whatever what do you do, then?

CAROL:
It doesn't have to be anything really terrible bad, just kind of standard American parenting doesn't do any favors to most of that. You don't have to have had trauma, but you just have to have kind of standard family life because we are not good with little kids in America, frankly. Other countries do better with little children, and we're getting better at it. We've been getting better at it for decades, but we're not good at supporting this natural development.

And so, if it all kind of went wrong either because of trauma or because of what I call, just sort of missed opportunities. Missed opportunities to support the kids. Then I am left with this sort of mish-mash of strategies that I developed as alternatives to try to get through because I can't get along. All I can do is sort of get through the social tangle, and survive it. I don't know how to make it work for me in the same way that I would if I was using those Seven Success Strategies.

We begin then, as adults often, to develop the self-awareness about how do I trust people? How is trust working for me right now? That's where I start with everybody, as their coach. What is it that you do right now relating to trusting people? What do you need, first of all.

Let's take a look at your leadership job. In your leadership job, as the head of a healthcare organization, what do you need from other people, relationally? What do you need from them? And make a list. Let's make a concrete list of the things that you need and get very clear about what those look like to you. And then we look around at your life and say, are you getting the needs met? We look around at your job relationship, and we ask is your need for, let's say mutual problem-solving.

One thing that a lot of leaders need is someone that they can sit down and brainstorm and talk through a problem out loud, that they don't have a solution for and really think about it. Sitting with someone and working through a problem is something that a lot of leaders need. Do you get that need met? Who meets it? Who's good at that where you work?

If you have a need for someone to listen to you, when you're totally off the rails about something, like you you've gone around the bend and you're upset, you're angry, your emotions are running the show for the moment, and you need someone to listen to you just sort of blurt all that out until you're done with it. Who can you trust for that where you work? Can you trust someone where you work with that, or do you need to find that need to be met elsewhere outside of work?

That's the way the work begins, is here's the Success Strategy, how are you using it right now? How is it working for you? And then let's break it down the way the infant does. What do I need? Well, the infant needs food, the infant needs to be fed. You don't need someone to feed you, not food anyway, but you need someone to feed you in different ways. So, what are the ways you need to be fed in your workplace? And, are you getting those needs met? That's how it begins.

TAMMY:
And then you just go through the seven steps?

CAROL:
Yes, I can start at the beginning, and we can just work through them. Or we can also identify based on what's happening for you as a problem state which one is missing. Let's start with the one that's the problem. But often I find that the two that are missing most often are the first two: trust and independence.

We have lost track, most of us, of what we need from other people, what we really think, how we really feel and what we really want. We have curated and trimmed that down and turned it into a package deal that appeals to other people, but it's not really who we are. We figured out how to get people to like us, and to stay with us, and to be partners with us in life, but we haven't learned how to be ourselves through that process. Very often it begins with just learning how to be who you are and how to take that into a work context.

TAMMY:
I love it. I'm hooked. If our listeners want to reach out to you because they would like to talk to you about your coaching. Is there a best way to contact you?

CAROL:
Absolutely. And what I would love is anybody listening, and this is evergreen, no matter when you listen to this, just send me an email at carol@lcarolscott.com and I will send you back a little 28 page booklet I call it, a little pdf that explains this framework, the Success Strategies and asks you some of those self-awareness raising questions about how you're doing with each one of them. In the email that I reply, there will be also an opportunity for you to click through and schedule a chat with me if you want to learn more.

TAMMY:
Well, that's worth the price of admission right there. That's awesome. Thank you so much.

CAROL:
You're welcome.

TAMMY:
Well this has been fascinating and I could continue talking. In fact, I am going to ask if you would be interested in doing a webinar where people can tune in and really take a look at you visually as well and kind of walk through some of these Success Strategies, if you're open for that?

CAROL:
Oh Tammy, I would love to do that. Yes!

TAMMY:
Good deal. I generally close the podcast with a lightning round of questions. And so, if you don't mind, I'd love to ask you a few of them before we close up for today.

What is your favorite leadership quote?

CAROL:
Be the change you want to see. Gandhi said, Be the change you want to see in the world. I would just say be the change you want to see, right here, right now in front of you, in whatever person you're interacting with. So, if what you want is a more honest conversation, get more honest.

TAMMY:
I love it. What's your biggest leadership pet peeve?

CAROL:
Having direct reports who cannot seem to get past complaining about what is, to the point of looking at solutions. It's like tied in in first place with the pet peeve about people who want to say that we can't do something because we've never done it that way. The status quote holders.

TAMMY:
What is the top value that guides what you do?

CAROL:
Kindness. I would like for the world to be a kinder place. And I think that starts with how we raise children. And my hope is that every leader who works with me and develops a greater strength as a leader, also becomes someone who treats children differently because of what they've learned about themselves as a child.

TAMMY:
Given what you've shared today, and how the early child development is a real deal, I think that opens a lot of eyes and scared a lot of people simultaneously.

CAROL:
I did want to mention quickly back to your question about did I ruined my child? Probably not. What I want to say is, I grew up in a family full of trauma. On the list of 10 really terrible things that can happen to kids, I had seven of them in my life, and here I am. I'm fine. No, I mean a little bit wonky, but mostly I'm fine.

I'm a leader. I write books, I get up on stage and I talk to people. I have done the work of self-recovery, self-awareness, strengthening myself. So yeah, you don't ruin kids always just because you didn't know what you were doing.

TAMMY:
Well Dr. L. Carol Scott it has been a pleasure having you on the Leadership Lens Podcast. Thank you again so much.

CAROL:
Tammy, thank you again for having me, and it's really been delightful.

CLOSING:

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