Attunement/Relational Side of Leadership

Welcome to the leading edge podcast, transforming your leadership with attachment science. Wear your host, Dr. James Hawkins, and Dr. Ryan Reina. Together, we want to transform your leadership by sharing principles from attachment science to put you on the leading edge of leadership. Welcome back to the leading edge, transforming leadership through attachment science. Last week, we covered the structural side of leadership, and we're talking about these two sides of leadership, and those leaders perfectly in balance. But before we get into today's topic, where we're going to be talking about the relational side, I want to make sure we hit seven key points that were really big from last week. And when we talk about the structural side, it's about that push, that leader being able to get the most out of there, whoever it is that they're leading. Sometimes, people think that they've given their all, but they're still sometimes a little bit more. And so there were really seven key points with that, to be able to have that push and offer that structure that really provides people with safety, it starts with first who you are, you being connected in community, connected in relationships, connected in your faith, that as a leader, you're not only about the agency or the organization that you lead. You have to have something going on outside of you that grounds you. Also that permission to push, knowing as a leader, you have that permission, that's why you've been given that role to lead. And so helping people be more than they ever thought they could be. And you being able to stay back and see that in them. But also modeling that too is a leader that you show up and you give your best and you're growing, you're learning and you're committed to your craft. And that will definitely be infectious within your organization. But also two people want to follow a leader who is excited about what they're doing. And so having that passion or that worth work ethic, it's really contagious for a leader. And that provides safety, once again, and good structure for people to follow. But also to do that and have an excitement, you need to have integrity. Those values and ethic about who you are and what you do. That makes sure people feel safe. But also in that is justice. And caring about equality and how your people are treated and making sure that they know that as a leader, you're always looking out for what's right. And then of course, and is fundamental to all of this that seventh point is being able to be adaptive as a leader. Meaning you're not just worried about the actual outcome, but as a leader, what you're doing that makes you really stand out from among the rest is that you are always studying your process. And that as leaders, that's probably the key determinant is not just what the leader knows where they've been in the school, but it's the fact that they're really being masters of their craft and they're studying their process in critical moments outside of critical moments, hot washing, coming out of big situations. And so that really transitions us into today, Ryan, where we're going to be talking about the relational side of leadership. And it's really a multi level process. So can you help kind of break this down? Yeah, the relational attunement side, yeah, it's good. And I'm sitting here listening to you go through that and all those words or words that are used often, they can almost become cliche, but I'm sitting there just taking this in as a leader and looking at myself, and it's challenging, because the fact is none of it, I don't think there's any leader that does all seven of those perfectly well. And that's kind of our point today as we move the dial across to the structure side of, I'm sorry, to the relational attunement side of leadership, you know, and here, when I want to say one thing about the structural side really fast, those seven points and there might be a few more, but those are kind of inclusive in a way, and we're going to come back in future episodes and unpack those more specifically, all right, we've had some feedback, want more specific, more specificity. So we're heading there, just hang with us as we get this going. So what I want to say is, if there's a leader who does really, really well at the structural side of leadership, what's the result of that going to be? I want to be fair, it can work. You can just be someone who does incredibly well structurally, and you can produce a good outcome. The problem is it will not be sustainable because you will not produce a culture which continues to reproduce the good work, but you do, I want to make space for that. You can go be the coach of a football team or a business and just be incredible at do a great job pushing, and you can go have a great season or a great quarter, a great couple of years, but before long, what you're going to find is that your followers are working out of fear only, and out of, you know, sort of desperation or worry about how things are going to happen. And so they'll never really flourish, they'll never really come into their own. They won't have the freedom and the safety to do that. So structure without relational attunement is going to create forms of rebellion. And so that's the piece that we're trying to balance today with our talk. So relational attunement is the concept today. And we're going to run through this and then again, unpack more specificity in future episodes. So relational attunement is a process that has multiple levels and may apply in different ways. We know that we're talking about leadership in a little bit of an open way, not necessarily focusing on one application. So we're counting on the listeners to apply this in ways that fit them. So I thought what we'd do is start off a little bit with science today. We talk about attachment science. We want to throw out one concept. We have multiple research projects that we want to talk about in this podcast that we'll just do one today. And that is the concept of mirror neurons, mirror neurons. So this is still relatively new. If you want to do some research on this, but a psychologist and Italian psychologist named Joseph Rizalotti in the early 90s was studying monkeys and looking at their behaviors. And he would notice how monkeys tend to mimic each other. And so he began to study this more and more and more. Long story short, he moved to the States, stayed in Pennsylvania for a while, also worked with people at UCLA. And so mirror neurons, as he described, are these microscopic neurons in the brain that are highly related to our visual cortex. And Jim Cohn at the University of Virginia, Alan Shore at UCLA have written prolifically about these processes. And so I love Jim Cohn's metaphor. He says mirror neurons are these microscopic neurons in the brain. They kind of float around and they kind of have this movement. And what they're doing is they're looking for other people that are on the same channel as they are. So to speak. So I'm going to take a look at some of the other things that are in the brain in the brain. And I'm going to take a look at some of the other things that are in the brain. I'm going to take a look at some of the other things that are in the brain that are in the brain. And I'm going to take a look at some of the other things that are in the brain that are in the brain. And that's what attunement is. It takes work. It's not just going to happen naturally. I have to know what I'm doing. I must be intentional as a leader to always be resetting my attunement with my organization and/or followers. So if we can find each other, whether it's him coming to 102.1 or me coming to 92.1, which will vary from situation to situation, by the way. And we can be on the same radio station. We hit what's called residence. We tune in. We become attuned. We have repaired our misattunement. At that point, human behavior changes drastically. When people are in attunement, that's when curiosity, security, that's when the brain opens up space to learn something new. When attunement is off, the human brain tends to shut down and prevent new movement. This is part of learning theory. This is one of the key points in education. You look at why some kids learn more effectively than others. Sometimes it's intelligence, oftentimes it's not. And so we can talk more about that. But mirror neurons really inform a lot of what we're talking about with attachment science and leadership on their relational attunement side. Have you ever had a follower who you can't get to move? They're not growing. They're stagnant. They're not producing like they could, or maybe they're not very healthy for the team. All of us have. And sometimes it's hard to make sense of. And I want to say this, it's really, really easy to blame that employee for that follower, whatever the case may be. And sometimes that is true. Sometimes they have something going on their personal life. But a lot of times we need to look at our process. Is there resonant ability blocked? Are we as an organization or as my leadership style? Am I working outside of resonance? Am I working in misatunement? So these relational tool aspects of leadership we find are the most important way to reset, to help someone restart their role, their experience as part of the team. What I would estimate here, we talked about how leadership is an inherent choice to be, to embrace the fact that you're out of balance at all times between structure and attunement. What I find through multiple levels of being a part of leadership is that most leaders vastly overestimate how attuned they actually are. The relational attunement is typically much less than we think it is, which is a great challenge to us. Yeah, and I have a great, as you're saying that, it makes me think, and this is me telling on myself a thinking of a specific example. I had a troop when I was in the military, and I had a mission that I was clearly focused on getting done, and I was becoming irritated by this troop's performance. And I remember this troop was doing something that they weren't moving as fast as I wanted them to to get something done, and I just let them have it right. But here it goes, a part of my empathy was blocked, and I was focused on the structural side. But when I went back and paying attention to the process, I recognized I was blocked, I went back, talked to the troop again, come to find out there's all kinds of personal issues in their life going on, and that this troop really wants to be able to perform, and what it was is they were going through a hard time that they didn't feel like they could talk about. We processed it, asked for some forgiveness for me, it's a leader for missing it, and then it was amazing how that troop was able to come back online and perform the mission at that point. And that's what's going through my mind as you're talking about this. Yeah, well said. Had to let my body, what it was for me going back when I as a leader had to willingly choose to allow my limbic system to be impacted by that troop's emotional world, but still maintain the focus on the organization. And that's that adaptation we're talking about, and that balanced integrity like you're talking about right there. I didn't plan to ask you this, but what was the mission of that team? What were they trying to do? In this particular time, it was just running a daily clinic, but we had to hurry up, see the troops that were needing to come in that be seen, and we had to get the records processed and everything done. And I just, I was just so focused on, Hey, here's the time coming up. Let's get it done. So medical medical. It was medical. So it would be so easy to just focus in on the tasks, medical medical, medical medicine, important stuff. This is the health of the troops. I mean, that's a really important mission, but you can't fix processes like this by over focusing on content. You have to step back as a leader and go, what have I been trying? What's working? What's it like to be on the receiving end of me? It's a great question for relational attunement. We use a metaphor of a tennis player who is, you know, tennis is strenuous. A ball is hitting the corner. It takes all your speed and energy to run over there and hit the ball. And the first thing you're thinking about then is sprinting back to the middle of the court to receive the next shot. But what you never paid attention to is how the ball comes across. What's it like to be on the receiving end of my leadership style? But the fact is, that is usually a bigger predictor than even your ability to be a content leader. So that's a big theme here. Through all our podcasts, it's focusing on process and not over focusing on content. Obviously, content's important, but it won't be delivered without, it won't be delivered effectively without healthy process. And going back to what you were saying, and so I was pushing to get something done in a certain amount of time, and this is just me going back and watching it. And it's actually, if I had been able to do what you were saying and come alongside that troop and say, because really when I looked, it's like this person is a good performer normally. And I should have been curious and asked the question, what changed here? But I was so caught up in getting something done by a certain time. Obviously when I look back, if I had come alongside this troop and attuned to that and help clear up that block, maybe if I could, which it did just by talking and responding to it, I probably would have gotten the mission done if I had leveraged my leadership different. Well said. And Kudos to you that you were willing to step back, right? That takes that humility, like we talked about on the structure side, to be able to do relational attunement. Let's get specific here, right? On the structural side, we gave seven sort of walkaways. Let's do the same on the other side. I'm an old baseball player, right? So we're a little numerically superstitious. So let's look at seven points on the relational attunement piece. And we can just kind of jump in here as we want to. The first one actually is thinking about your time. Now, this is one that really varies a lot from different roles. If you lead a team of five people, then time functions to fit that. If you lead a team of 50 people or more, as a leader, you can't spend tons and tons of time with each person, right? So then it gets into back to structure. How do you set this up where somebody does, right? So obviously, whether that's you want to use terms like middle management or put people in teams or pods, which has become popular in the last 15 years in the corporate world. So but I think you got to really think through that. Do does your team get enough touches? Do they feel connected? Do they fit somewhere? Do they know where they fit? So one hard truth is, which is found in a lot of leadership positions, you know, you kind of referenced our talk from, I think that was the first podcast when I use the analogy of a drill sergeant, a mom or a CEO, as having a lot of differences, but also a lot of similarities. You know, one of the things that we like the idea of is, well, we're going to focus on quality time. But the fact is there's no such thing as quality time without quantity time. There has to be enough touches there. So it doesn't necessarily have to be from the top leader, but we have to set our organizations up to where there is quantity time of contact with people. And what's funny is the less relational the job is, the more important this is, if you work in IT and people are clicking on computers all day, you may not think that that's that important, but it's the opposite. Their productivity will directly correlate with how connected they feel, how important they feel, and quantity time of connection with you, whether it's directly with you or indirectly with you through other leaders in your organization or team is a big predictor. Staying with that theme here, quoting Dr. John Gottman, John Gottman is a very famous psychologist. He studies relationships, he studies marriage, and so forth, and he put out research about 20 years ago that I have since applied in multiple aspects and that is that there's a predictable math ratio of what it takes to have a relationship in attunement. And he says, for every one coach or criticism, there has to be five points of attunement to keep the relationship healthy. So in other words, if I go to an employee and I write them up, or maybe less than that, maybe I just say, hey, Chad, you're going to have to get here earlier or whatever it is. That's fine. As long as just sort of a sum total in their relationship is, he also gets five points of attunement where there's investment in relationship or just a sense that he's a part of things, or maybe it's a pat on the back. Maybe it's an occasional thing of, hey, I appreciate you, or a nice job. Just some reference from me or those that represent me as the leader to keep that relationship in balance. That's a big challenge. It's a big challenge, but as you say that, it's worth it if you've got the right people in place and you want to keep them in place. Otherwise, you're going to get half of the productivity as you get otherwise. So a lot of leaders, again, the trap of getting focused on content and not looking at the process, because while I may save a little bit of time, or it seems like I save a little bit of time, I've actually cost myself because I'm getting 50% out of my followers. But the five to one is a great challenge, but here's the badness. That's only if the relationship is already healthy. I'm using Chad. He's a good friend of ours. I'm referencing Chad, him off. He's a fantastic employee in our organization who I know it wouldn't hurt his feelings to say that. That's why I use him as an example. So if Chad is doing a great job, then it's five to one. His sense of being included, his sense of that he's respected, whatever it is. But if things go sideways with that person, with me or with the organization, now John Gottman's research says it takes 15 to one to facilitate what is the ultimate point of attunement, which is the ability to repair. So let's just get that out from the start. The number one predictor of a relational attuned attachment-based leader is the ability to recognize when you're misattuned or your experience disruption and actively move to repair that. One of the signs of a really unhealthy team will be they do not repair problems. They just stay in a state of disconnected repair. So that takes work. That's a theme here as well. It takes work and 15 to one once we're sideways. You want to comment on that or are you going to keep rolling? No, I love it. That's once again because when we're talking about attachment science and leadership, what we've been making clear and I think it goes with that point is, it's not just leadership and things are well, numbers are up and people are happy. It's the leader really stepping up even more so in those difficult moments. So a leader is needed for repair. You can't just leave it out there and think it's going to fix itself. It's not going to happen. Correct. I'm not saying you have to jump at every single issue but you've got to be paying attention to studying process. So moving us along here, you told a bad story on you, I'll tell a bad story on me. I was brought in a leadership position. This is 20 years ago or a little more and there was an organizational problem and it was a big problem. That was keeping the organization back. The CEO brought me in for whatever reason. She said, "Hey, I think you're a good problem solver. Jump in, can you help this?" So I studied it for like six weeks and I came up with a really good plan. And so I went into the team of 14 people, which was a subset of the organization. And I said, "Hey, good to meet you guys. I've been given this position. Here's the plan." Guess how that went. I felt that in my body. Yes, thank you. That's good. Yeah, so I never said I was smart, right? Okay. So that was a bad order of structure. So part of relational attunement is you have to make people feel heard, which is a little bit different than listen. Notice how I said that. You have to make people feel heard. I don't mean that in like trick them. What I'm saying is just not get enough to listen because people don't know if you're listening. It's the ability to be responsive in such a way that creates the experience that I have listening to that matters. I have to spend time at times, especially during a time of repair, validating their experience. Even if I disagree with them, I have to look at how their response and how their experience does make sense. I have to give them the experience of being heard or why would they follow me. And I was really out of order. What I should have done is gone and had multiple meetings with them one-on-one, meetings as a team, getting all the feedback of them about why they're failing and they were failing as a team. And from that place, sort of co-create solutions with them because it doubles the buy-in and it creates attunement. So sometimes, as I just mentioned there, the fourth point here is the importance of one on one time on occasion, obviously not all the time, obviously not if you're the CEO of a big leadership. But if you are, we have to build in structure back to the structure side because this is about adaptation back and forth. That someone is checking in with that person on at least a semi-regular basis to make sure they feel heard. The next point five is the ability to separate behavior and performance from their identity. It's a crucial mistake that leaders think they are leading performers. You are not leading performers. You are leading people. And you must value their humanity more than you value their performance. And here's a funny thing. You can ask any follower on any team at any time, does my leader value me or does he or she value my performance? And if the answer is they value my performance, you will not get their potential. So and it doesn't even have to always be, you know, a lot of hugs and kisses. I mean, it's they can tell. Does this person really care about me? They know I exist. How do they treat me when I'm sick? How do they treat me when I make mistakes? It comes through all the time. It's implied and implication is the most powerful form of communication, by the way. So we've got to we got a value humaneness over performance. Number six. It's kind of along the same line. We have to see our followers as valuable people and assets. So leadership, so stewardship becomes, I think, a really important paradigm of how we think about leadership. We are stewards of important people who are also important assets. And so when you think about stewardship, it hopefully it triggers words like don't waste them, you know, get them on the right seat on the bus. Find a place where they can thrive, seeing them as assets as opposed to people that we constantly have to motivate because they don't, they're not going to do it right. So that paradigm comes through whether we want to or not. Ryan, that was so powerful right there to communicate value that they are assets and people feel that that's going back to this relational attunement side. People feel when they get that sense of that leader does and they rise to the occasion for them. I felt that as a family member, I felt that in the military and I felt that in religious sectors and in private sectors as well. Well said. All right, point seven, wrapping us up here, you're ready. The ultimate point for relational attunement is, we've kind of already said this, but it's the willingness and ability to repair when disruption happens. I'll use an analogy, a football analogy, sorry, if this is coming across as a two sports oriented, that's a risk with me. But if you're a defensive back in football, if you're not a football person, that's the person that tries to prevent passes, especially deep passes, they say to be a great cornerback in football, you have to have a short memory. And that's the, that's true for leaders as well. Leaders who are constantly bringing forth past failures with their followers will never have followers. They will not work for you. So we have to be able to reset ourselves, whether that's your personal, personal habits of forgiveness, whether that is your personal maturity, because it's an immature thing when a leader continues to hold grudges. We deal with the situation, we put it behind us. And we notice quickly, when there's relational problems, we notice when there's disruption, we move towards it in one way or another, whether it's you or someone that you supervise doing this. So your ability to repair their sense of self, their sense of connection with you, their sense of connection with the goal of the organization is everything. When those are blocked, you will not reach potential. So the ability to repair problems is really, really key. In future episodes, we're going to unpack more of what it looks like to work with blocks. When there's a blocked connection, a blocked sense of self or a blocked sense of relationship with the leadership. But those are our seven points today. What do you think about that? I think it's good. And as I feel this for the leaders, it could feel like, even as we've just done a few episodes, it could feel like a lot, but that's why we're doing this. We want you to recognize sometimes this aspect of leadership that isn't always given as much attention and to actually, to help give you moves in this place, like we said in another one, we want you to be able to have your values and kind of like who you are as a person and being able to be flexible and adaptive. So as a leader, there's a lot that's going on, but it's very doable, especially when once again, you're studying your process. And so we think it's a privilege on this podcast to really come alongside you because you are leading valuable assets, people. And so once again, this helps you and helps you lead the people well that are under your care. And just wrapping up, most of us as leaders tend to overestimate how attuned they are. So I think it's a great time to pull back and really evaluate and if you're not sure how attuned you are, ask, because I promise you your followers know whether we know or not. So we're looking forward to unpacking with more specificity of these concepts as we go forward. All right. Thank you. Thank you for listening. We hope the principles discussed on this podcast help transform your life and leadership. You can contact us at push the leading edge at gmail.com and follow our Facebook page at push the leading edge. You can follow Ryan Rainer on Facebook at Ryan Rainer Professional Training and on his website RyanRainerTraining.com. You can follow James on Facebook and Instagram at dockhawklpc. You can also check out his website dockhawklpc.com.