[0:08]Good afternoon. Today I want to share with you my leadership Utopia. And when I was discussing this with a friend of mine, he was asking, "Leadership in Utopia?" Would we even need leadership in Utopia? Isn't Utopia finally the place and the moment where we can get rid of all of these leaders and live free? Well, I don't know. I think in a Utopia, there will be humans, hopefully. And if there are humans, they will hopefully still be social beings as well. And whenever there are social beings, they come together as well and form sometimes groups, sometimes organizations as well. And when there are these organizations, then I think the words of Peter Drucker are true. "Only three things happen naturally in organizations: Friction, confusion, and underperformance; Everything else requires leadership." So I do think also in Utopia, we should look at a leadership, but the question is what kind of leadership? Should we look at the hero model of leadership, where the shining stars, the ideal person? I don't know. Today, I want to explore with you a different kind of leadership. And for this, I want you to do a little thought experiment. Think about the best leader you have ever worked with. Take a couple of seconds. Think about that person. What did he or she do, say, and so on? Now, all of you will have experienced other people, but I would dare to say, I don't think you will have things like, well, you know, the way that person yelled at me in the morning, that was excellent, that was that was just brilliant the way, and I wanted always have more. Probably not. Probably that person will have done different things. And I want to explore that today with you. Now, I do think leadership is an interesting thing and sometimes it's over glorified, but whenever you you become a leader, now I have the chance to lead small teams, large organizations, non-profit, profit organizations. Whenever you become a leader, you have like a rendezvous with reality. Leadership is a bit like parenting. Right? You have all these visions and ideas what you will do, and then you're in the moment, and then what I would call the leadership problem formula kicks in. And probably the people you have thought about just a second ago have mastered this formula. What does that formula look like? Every leader and every of you who has ever been in a leadership position might have faced these challenges. I think every leader faces the leadership problem formula and that goes TLT times people times power. First one is TLT, which for me stands for too little time. There's just not enough time to do things and you can't pass around, oh, somebody will take care of it. No, it's you, and then you need to do something. And what many people then fall back in is what I would call the headless chicken syndrome. They run around and say, "Oh no, no, you do that, you do that, you do that." And that might not be the greatest leadership. Then comes as well people. All leaders have to deal with people, and for me, I'm always reminded of my very first official leadership position, more than 10 years ago. So I would have my first direct reports and my first direct report was coming into the room, and I had it all lined up. I had the vision. I had the team spirit. I had the story to tell, basically. And that was a very assertive young gentleman, who came to me and said, "Last, that's all nice, but I have a question for you. Actually, I studied the email policy of the company. And you know, I have a motto I live by. And I always include this and I have this for the past five years, I always include this in my email signature. "Can I do this as well in this company?" And there was, with all my stories and with all my vision, and so on, it was like, "What? Is that what leadership is all about?" So I was just studying the manuals for two hours, and so on. Finally, we said, okay, let's go ahead with this one. But everybody who has ever lead will see like, it's not always about the glorious and shiny things, but it's all about the little things, the little discussion that we have to do. The last element is power. And that's an interesting one. There's a very interesting study done University of Berkeley in '98, and they brought in random students. And selected them randomly in groups of three. And from these groups of three, two of them had to do a two-hour assignment, and one of them was randomly assigned to be the supervisor. And then, as social science experiments goes, there was a special twist to it, at half an hour the researchers then brought in cookies. And of course it was videotaped, and then they observed what happens, actually they had some hypothesis, and sure enough, the people who were randomly assigned to be supervisors, significantly ate more of the cookies, but not only this, they actually left significantly more of the bread crumbs as well on the table like, "I'm this, that was very visually measurable." And that just shows, after 30 minutes of random higher status, this power thing kicks in. It's something within us in humans, and I think that is also something to be need to take care of. Now, I do think these are the classical leadership problems that are not very often taken care of, but I think in a Utopia, we need to address those. So how do we do that? What is the way out? For this one, I think we need to travel back in time. Actually, almost 18, 1900 years, to Rome, to a person called Marcus Aurelius. Now, some of you might know Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is one of the predominant figures of the Stoic school of philosophy. The Stoics, like the Zen of the West almost. But Marcus Aurelius is interesting for leadership, because he was running a little like, you know, a little side business, also on the side. He had a little side job in the moonlighting. He was, and that's why on the statue, he's also, you see in there on a horse as well. He was at the time as well, on top of being a philosopher, he had the side job of being the Emperor of Rome at the time. And the historian William Irvine called him actually, the true beacon of enlightened leadership. He was supposed to be one of the last of the five good kings of Rome. Now, Marcus Aurelius, what we know of him, said things like this: "The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts." He said, "So act virtuous, use your time well, and be cheerful. Then, when you drop from life's tree, you will drop like a ripe fruit." Now, can you imagine these words being uttered by some of the leaders like Trump and so on today? Most likely not, really. What did he do? And we know a couple of things that were transmitted from this one, and I think that is a sign for Utopia leadership that we can dive into. He was focusing a lot of his time on a field, which I would call self-leadership. Leading oneself first before going out and leading others. And I think that, in my leadership challenges, has helped me enormously to actually face some of the challenges of the leadership formula that I've shared with you. The founder of Visa, Dee Hock, once said, "If you want to lead, invest at least 40% of your time in leading yourself first, before you go out to others." Now, how do you do that? And what I want to share with you are a couple of strategies that I've tested, that I've worked with, and so on, to really try to see what can we do with that field of self-leadership? The first strategy and the first field of self-leadership that's out there is self-awareness. When you become a leader, it's actually some of the crucial things to be self-aware of yourself, but it's getting more and more difficult. Any of you have ever been a leadership in a leadership position, if you've ever asked, tried to ask for feedback, that's not so easy, huh? You ask, "Hey, team, hey group, do you have some feedback?" And very often what you encounter is the silence. Like in these ancient Western movies, with these dust balls. "Come on, some feedback!"
[8:14]Oh, brilliant, brilliant, everything's fine. And you know, that's not right. There are, I mean, you you're signing the the paycheck, basically, and they're like, no, great, brilliant. Now, there are some ways on, of course, to learn to ask also for better feedback, but one of the things I think every leader can do is to check that for themselves. And one of the tools that I have is what I would call the character traits check. A character traits check. You can do that on a rainy Sunday, and do the following: Ask yourself, for example, what was the worst leader that you ever had? And then think what your face does then with this. This is me reflecting upon this. And then go further and ask, like, what did he or she do, actually, to be such a worst leader? Did he yell or did she yell? Or did he maybe withhold information? When I was doing this exercise, I was like, well, that bad leader, withholding information. And here comes now the trick in this tool. Give yourself a score from one to five for yourself, how good are you, for example, at sharing or withholding information, how bad are you at this one? And for me, that was like, oh, I'm actually not very good at this. So what is my plan to move that up to become very good at this one? Because we what we find bad in others will very often resonates also with ourselves. One of the key things to do from time to time. But if you do that, you will see also the vapor trail effect. To do that the next morning, you're fully engaged, but then, like one of these trails at the beginning, it's very sharp, but later on it goes, it fades away. And that's why what you can do is a strategy that Marcus Aurelius did every day. And that is self-reflection. Yeah. Taking just a couple of minutes during the day, and thinking about the challenges that you have achieved, but also that you are maybe about to have during the day. Marcus Aurelius was famous for doing that in the night. For me, this five minute reflection sometimes I did in the evening, sometimes all the morning, going to have a quick coffee, and then just opening my black book and just asking a couple of questions. What are the challenges that I'm about to say? How did my leadership go yesterday? How would the leader I would like to be, do and face the challenges that I'm about to face today? And then asking this and putting this answer, and just one or two minutes of those, actually, there are interesting studies, University of California, just one or two minutes of those can help raise your compassion level as well for others. And maybe beat that cookie problem that we've talked about easily earlier as well before. Self-reflection, two to five minutes. And then we come to the last one, and that is self-regulation. You know, you've done your awareness, you've done your reflection, but you still will encounter the moments. You will still encounter the meeting, the discussions that you have, where people come in who've promised you, yes, I will do everything, I will have everything ready, and they come in the room and say, and let's talk it like, let's talk what? The report you said it was already. Oh, oh, sorry, I don't have this. And all the other things, the people who challenge you, think they should be on your side and you should be on the other side and so on. And all these moments that you that you will face as leader, when these moments you think like, "Ah!" Stop doing this. Do what I told you now. Well, this is of course not the best leadership. But how do we do best do that? Self-regulation, and one tool that has helped me enormously is what is called reframing. Reframing, a simple tool, where you think like, where you have these, this coming up like, "Ah, I want to you know?" You stop and ask yourself for one to two seconds, well, on a scale from one to ten, how important is that issue right now, with ten being really my life goals, so to speak? Where is that? If it's a ten, well, then you better engage really fully in it, but maybe very often it's more like a two or three, and so on. And that reframing, that taking a step back, can help you enormously, and actually addressing the situation. Small strategies, small things, but what I would encourage you to do is think about this when you have a leadership position. Invest this time in self-awareness, self-reflection, self-regulation and in self-leadership in general before you go out and lead others. Because very often we hear about leadership like, people want to lead others, who want to do everything. Why not start first with leading yourself? I think if we all did this, this will lead to leadership Utopia that we can strive for. And I think we can start all by doing now. And hopefully, if you all start doing now, and somebody asks in 10, 20 years, maybe in our Utopia, the question, who was the best leader that you've ever worked with? Then maybe they think of you. Thank you.
