Welcome to a special episode where Bill is featured on another podcast that discusses adaptive learning and Rehumanizing Leaders. We hope you enjoy this special episode and be sure to subscribe and share!
If you have any questions or would like to get in contact with Bill de la Cruz, please email him at: Contact@delacruzsolutions.com
Follow Bill on TikTok for daily content!
Follow Bill on Twitter and Instagram:
Twitter: @BilldelaC
Instagram: @BilldelaC
Visit our website to purchase Bill’s book ‘Finding the Origination Point’ and to keep up to date with new content: www.delacruzsolutions.com
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/origination-point-podcast/support
—
Listen to the podcast here
Special Episode – Adaptive Leadership & Rehumanizing Leaders
We’re continuing on our series that we started in the last episode around leading the dialogue and adaptive leadership. In this episode, we’re going to talk about what is the mindset of an adaptive leader. How do we change our narratives if we’re all going to become more adaptive? We’re going to talk a little bit about what it means to rehumanize ourselves to each other.
As you read this, I want you to think about how fluid is your ability to shift your thinking, to shift your narrative, to let go of some of the ways that you have been raised or grown up to look at leadership. The way that we change our mindset is we have to recognize our narrative, and then we have to decide how to shift it. Think about how you change your own narrative, especially around leadership, because that’s our mindset. If we can shift our thinking around how we lead, then our behavior will follow.
We’re on a much-needed path to reconnecting and rehumanizing ourselves to each other. Essentially, what that means is to be able to see each other through the lens of our shared humanity. This idea that this phrase refers to and that we’re all in it together has been, in some ways, worn out. While it’s been repeated over and over again, the actions don’t show that we’re all in this together. They show that there are some people who are not affected by any of these things that are happening and some people that are affected a lot. Rehumanizing, again, is a personal choice.
As you read this information that we’re sharing with you, think about your own mindset and how you can shift to being more adaptive. Whether you think of yourself as a leader or not, adaptability is going to be a key driver to our success as our society emerges from all of the things that are happening in our world, in our country, and in our communities. Rehumanizing is seeing the authentic person that lies within everyone that you are interacting with and seeing them as a part of your community. I hope you enjoy this and that it leads to some real change in how you see yourself, how you see others, and how you show up in your communities.
—
Builder challenges in any human era but over these last few years, it has been very difficult for people of all shapes and sizes to find a way to connect. It seems that to make that connection a reality now, we need to be looking at how to rehumanize ourselves. When you think about that, what are some of the first things that come to your mind?
It’s something that I’ve thought about a lot. I work with groups all over the world and talk to people on little screens and now, in person. For me, this next era of my approach is the idea of rehumanizing. If you think about what happened when COVID hit, the normalcy of every single person on the planet was disrupted. When people were unable to go out and do the things that they did, go to the grocery store, go for a walk to the park, go to the gym, take art classes, whatever it is that they did, it completely stopped. We have spent the last few years being socialized to fear each other. We’ve been mostly spending time with our own little group of people who reflect us. Now we’re opening things up and people are going out.
For some people, it’s, “I have to go out and be around people.” For other people, it’s, “What a joy. I get to be around people.” You have this whole spectrum of ideology around rehumanizing ourselves and seeing our neighbor as our neighbor, and not that person who has COVID or the person that I can’t talk to. This idea of rehumanizing is a key factor. The idea is that I see you as a person, as an authentic human being that now I have to reconnect with. I’ve been so disconnected from people because we’ve been looking at each other through screens and not feeling the emotion that another human being has when we’re in a space together.
I want to get right to the point you made there about connecting, because while people might be able to say, “I texted or emailed or saw somebody on a Zoom,” when you are in person, it’s an entirely different situation and you have to make a different connection. What are some of those steps that need to happen when it comes to things like trust and other elements that make the connection stick?
It goes back to what we’ve been talking about. We have to be vulnerable. We have to share our fears. We have to talk about how we’ve been challenged. This has been challenging for me, and this is my life’s work. This is what I teach. I find myself sitting here many days going, “Now I have to use all the practices that I teach other people.”
I have to check my biases. I have to be aware of how I’m seeing people. I have to recognize when I’m judging another human being, and I have to create a level of comfortability now in a way that I took for granted years ago when I didn’t even think about the space I was going into. A lot of it goes back to how people see each other and how willing they are to tell stories about how they’ve been affected because that’s real.
Let me ask you as a professional. There are so many people going through so many issues. That’s something we all have in common. Affording each other grace lets us talk a little bit about the struggles we’ve been facing, lets somebody else talk about the struggles they’re facing, and then, maybe there’s some common ground there that we may not have known we had, but it’s taking that first step. Is there something to that, finding the common ground of the problems we’re all facing ourselves?
Yes. That’s something that gets missed. A lot of times, what we do in these conversations where we’re talking about how we’ve been feeling, it’s this idea that we call Oppression Olympics where, “My story is much more challenging than yours. Yours is such an easy story. I don’t even know how you became traumatized by it,” rather than saying, “You’ve had this perspective that’s affected you this way, and I have this perspective that has affected me this way. That’s our connecting point.”
Rather than look at whose story is better, worse, or in any way judging it, which all of those are judgments, we need to become more aware of how we’re judging each other and do our best to let that go because it’s not something that we are going to automatically stop. It is something that gets in the way of us creating connections though. This idea of rehumanizing is creating connections that we’ve lost essentially because we’ve been in social isolation essentially for the last few years.
We need to become more aware of how we judge each other and do our best to let that go because it's not something we will automatically stop. It is something that gets in the way of us creating connections. Share on XIt feels that part of that human equation, too. That human element is when we come together in groups way back when the very first humans did to even now, we can help each other. It’s admitting, “I could use a hand and I can give you a hand.” It doesn’t matter what our backgrounds are. We share that need for each other in common. A part of this rehumanizing process is to remember what it is to be human and to need each other. We’re not solo boxes on a Zoom screen. We’re people who need one another.
Adaptive Leadership: The rehumanizing process is to remember what it is to be human and need each other. We’re not solo boxes on a zoom screen. We’re people who need one another.
It sounds easy when you add the element of social isolation and then the idea that for most of us, we’ve been acculturated to be very individualistic in where we take care of me and mine. Now, we’re seeing across the planet that there may be a war in Europe, yet it’s affecting us over here. How do we realize that we are truly connected in so many ways? That connection is either going to drive us to the path that we’re seeing, or it’s going to drive us to reconcile with each other and see that our shared humanity is important.
It doesn’t matter how we’re socialized. It doesn’t matter what your political ideology or your religion is. The impact of us staying divided is going to be what we’re seeing. This idea of rehumanizing and creating connections, realizing that some of the socialization that we’re getting even through the media are all false narratives. We need to start checking those, seeing our neighbors as our neighbors and reconnecting through stories, shared values and beliefs, and community.
Adaptive Leadership: It doesn’t matter how we’re socialized. It doesn’t matter your political ideology or your religion. The impact of us staying divided will be what we’re seeing.
If people have heard this discussion and it’s what their appetite for more, they want to rehumanize. They know they are in a community they want to reintegrate into. What are some of the key next steps you’d recommend?
They need to find like-minded people. That’s probably the biggest challenge. It is to find people who also want to make that connection because there’s such polarization in our country and in our world that people spend a lot of time trying to change others. That’s impossible. Find like-minded people because there are millions of people on the planet and there are a lot of people who recognize what we’re talking about and want to do this with other people. Seek them out and commit to making your personal changes rather than thinking about, “How am I going to change another person?”
Bill, it’s been great to have this conversation with you.
Thanks, Dominic.
—
Bill, let’s get into some of the specifics about the mindset and the tactics when you want to employ adaptive leadership. Where does anyone need to begin when we’re thinking about the mindset you need to have to be successful in using adaptive leadership?
That mindset piece is one of the most fascinating elements of personal growth and changes that I’ve experienced in my journey, and that is available to pretty much everybody. The basic premise is that your narrative or your mindset drives all of your outcomes. People typically think that if they act a certain way, then everything will change, not realizing that our brain will always overrule our behaviors if we haven’t shifted how we think about a particular situation.
In relation to adaptive leadership, if I’ve been schooled in a traditional leadership style where I have the answers where I’m going to lead and everyone’s going to follow, I can’t shift over to now say, “Tell me what you all think,” because it doesn’t feel familiar. The mindset shift is changing the narrative of saying, “What are the practices of an adaptive leader?”
I have to shift my thinking to, “I’m no longer the all-knowing leader. I’m the collaborative leader.” To start to behave and create collaborative practices or whatever the dynamic is that a leader wants to change, whether it’s being collaborative. Vulnerability-based trust is about sharing your stories. They could start to shift their thinking to say, “I’m going to be more vulnerable.” The action or the practice of that is to tell a story to share who you are. That then gives permission for the people that they’re leading to share their stories or to be more collaborative.
It starts up here where our brain will always overrule our behavior. To shift to behavior, you have to shift the narrative or the mindset. Adaptive leadership is looking at all the elements that we spoke about and then creating new thinking around that, which then leads to behavior that is sustainable because the brain supports it.
To shift to behavior, you must shift the narrative or the mindset. Adaptive leadership is looking at all the elements and creating new thinking, which leads to sustainable behavior because the brain supports it. Share on XWhen you talk about vulnerability, I imagine that you were also talking about bringing emotions into leadership. That’s part of the human experience, but probably not the first thing you think about as your typical leader has to do this and this. Adaptive leadership is going to embrace those other areas. How do vulnerability and your emotional state as a leader interplay?
Typical leadership isn’t about being emotional. In fact, especially for men, the idea of being emotional is not always rooted in the dynamic of being a leader. Vulnerability-based trust is about sharing your stories. To share your stories, there has to be some sense of feeling or emotion that is emoted by telling your story. It’s not that as an adaptive leader, I have to think about the emotion that I’m bringing.
Adaptive Leadership: Vulnerability-based trust is about sharing your stories.
Through the course of telling a story, it brings up emotion depending upon the story. Whether it’s a story of something that created a lot of angst for you and you learn from it, or whether it was something that was joyful, it brings up emotion. The idea of vulnerability-based trust is around acknowledging that it’s okay as a leader to share that emotion or to be emotional.
It doesn’t mean that I’m going to dump, go crying, and be emotionally distraught in front of the people that I lead. It means that I’m going to use my emotion as a tool to model what it is that we want to create because the people that we lead are living in this same divisive crazy world that we’re all experiencing right now, that everyone’s normalcy has been disrupted.
It gives people permission to say, “It’s okay for you to feel whatever you’re feeling in the workplace.” I’ve had this conversation over the last few years, especially with so many different people. The way the conversation ends is that it’s almost like we have to redefine what professionalism means because it’s not rooted in vulnerability-based trust. It certainly isn’t rooted in sharing my emotional stories.
That last word you used piqued my interest because when you tell a story, it’s almost like you are initiating the handshake. You are saying, “Here’s a little bit about me.” You’re taking a step out and hopefully, you can build some trust with somebody because, “I want to give you some of my experience and I’m going to be open to your experience. Together now, we have something that we can both relate to. We’re not simply trying to check things off of a list.” It sounds like there’s a big trust element to this. Is that one of the key steps when we’re talking about the mindset and tactics of adaptive leadership?
Building trust is one of the key elements, outcomes, and strategies. It’s pretty magical when I’m in a room with a diverse group of people and one person shares their stories. All of a sudden, this person raises their hand and this person raises their hand and they say, “That’s my story,” or they connect to one thing that somebody said and it creates this emotion within them. It takes them back to a similar story. We don’t often get that level of connection because we’re so rooted in what we know and not who we are. Who we are is what adaptive leadership is all about. Our roles and titles don’t define who we are, and they certainly aren’t the totality of our stories.
If this conversation hopefully has piqued the interests of somebody reading, what do you recommend as a next step to learn more about the mindset and the tactics for successful adaptive leadership?
In this day and age, you can google anything. I would suggest Ron Heifetz, who talks a lot about adaptive leadership, and Patrick Lencioni, whose work is rooted in vulnerability-based trust. I’ve started reading a lot from Joe Dispenza who talks a lot about the brain and how our brain functions and the importance of our narrative and mindset. It’s also important to develop yourself.
Our company, De La Cruz Solutions, supports leaders at all levels and people of all levels to be able to do these practices, to work together, and to create a comfortable environment for people to practice some of these strategies. Think about what their first step is. The first step is always this, what we started with is the mindset and realizing that we want to make a change. Once you do that and you put your heart into it, the answers that you need are going to develop. You seek out groups like ours or other people to have the conversation with. That’s how change happens.
Adaptive Leadership: De La Cruz Solutions supports leaders at all levels and people of all levels to do these practices, to work together, and to create a comfortable environment for people to practice some of these strategies.
Bill, thanks for the great conversation.
Thank you. I appreciate it.