Today I talk to Gayle Karen Young Whyte, former Chief People Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation and currently part of the faculty for the Leadership programs at the Full Circle Group.
Together, we unpack the ideas of Conversational Leadership. In a conversation, there are usually at least two points of view, and movement forward comes through a give and take. The world asks things of us, and we ask things of the world...what we get is the conversation that is our lives. We can demand all we like of the world, we will get what we get. And just the same, the world will never get all it asks of us - we get to choose.
Leadership in organizations is absolutely accomplished through dialogue - leading through dictatorial fiat is not a sustainable model. That old mode of command and control is losing its hold on the world.
Gayle presents us with this idea of leadership as sensing and steering - of getting data and feedback from the world and “turning up the volume on what works”. Feedback loops are the essence of conversation and leadership.
The image brought to mind my episode with Aaron Dignan, founder of the Ready who asks leaders if they would like to ride a bicycle where they get to steer or one with a fixed steering wheel - you can only point the bike in one direction and keep going.
Everyone always chooses the steering bike, the ability to make little corrections to your course, rather than stay in a line….and yet most organizations are led like a fixed bike, with an annual budgeting and strategy process that isn’t conversational or adaptable mid-course.
In terms of the Conversation Operating System at the core of my book, this is about Cadence - having a lively pace of feedback, rather than a slow or non-existent one.
Gayle and I also dive into the importance of Narrative in leadership. Data is critical, but data, in the end, doesn’t tell us anything. We tell stories with data.
There are at least two ways to shift a story - one is with new data and the other is with a new story. And for this, Poetry is a surprising tool. Poetry can give us new words, the seeds for a new story.
My interview with Nancy McGaw from the Aspen Institute is another conversation to juxtapose here - she talks about poetry as a profoundly simple way to start a group conversation with depth.
Gayle offers that:
Poetry helps me tap into a deeper well, helps me get grounded so that when I go on with my day, I'm much more able to be responsive and not reactive.
Gayle reads us one of her husband’s poems, Mameen, which I’ll place in the notes for you to read along with. (It might help to mention that Gayle’s husband is the rather famous poet David Whyte!)
Gayle also helps us understand how to unpack poems with groups and help the words go deeper - starting with a story about why it’s significant to you or allowing people to choose a line that resonated most with them and to share it with another person.
Leaders need to be intentional in how they communicate with the world...and that’s work, to design all of those conversations. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and you use it to deepen your leadership.
Mameen
Be infinitesimal under that sky, a creature
even the sailing hawk misses, a wraith
among the rocks where the mist parts slowly.
Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed
by circumstance, how great reputations
dissolve with infirmity and how you,
in particular, stand a hairsbreadth from losing
everyone you hold dear.
Then, look back down the path to the north,
the way you came, as if seeing
your entire past and then south
over the hazy blue coast as if present
to a broad future.
Recall the way you are all possibilities
you can see and how you live best
as an appreciator of horizons
whether you reach them or not.
Admit that once you have got up
from your chair and opened the door,
once you have walked out into the clean air
toward that edge and taken the path up high
beyond the ordinary you have become
the privileged and the pilgrim,
the one who will tell the story
and the one, coming back
from the mountain
who helped to make it
Links and Resources
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity by Jennifer Garvey Berger
Nancy McGaw on the Conversation Factory on Leading Through Asking
Naomi Shihab Nye on Kindness: https://poets.org/poem/kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
More About Gayle
Gayle believes the world needs more leaders who are “able for” what lies ahead, who have developed the capacity to meet the complexity of global challenges. Working in the field of leadership for the past two decades, it has become abundantly clear to her that there are the visible, tangible, practical, and pragmatic aspects of leadership that need to be executed on a day-by-day basis, and then there is the work of caring for the the spaces between people, of seeing complexity and interdependencies, of understanding relationships and power and all the ephemeral things that still excise tremendous influence on the day-to-day behaviors of people. Thus it is the invisible work of leadership, the work of showing up, setting culture, and creating spaces for others to thrive that is the focus of her work. She believes in meeting people and systems wherever they are, and then developing people to work with the full range of who they are to meet the full complexity of the organizational system and operating ecosystem, working with the intangible but critically necessary human substructures to move a strategy forward.
Gayle Karen Young is a cultural architect and a catalyst for human and organizational development. She comes from a rich organizational consulting background with both corporate and nonprofit clients. She was in process of becoming a Zen monk when she became an executive instead, taking on the role of Chief Culture and Talent Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation (CHRO for Wikipedia and its sister free-knowledge projects) until early 2015 when she joined Cultivating Leadership. From high-level strategic thinking to practical implementation, her skills include leadership development, change management, facilitation, training, strategic communications, speaking, team building, and personal and organizational transformation.
Gayle holds a Masters degree in Organizational Psychology.
Gayle is passionate about global women’s issues and supporting women in leadership. She is also very much a geek that loves attending Comic-Con and reading science fiction, which inspires a passion for technology and its leverage for societal change. She is keenly interested in the intersection of technology and human rights and supports futurist humanitarian causes. She lives in both San Francisco, California, and Whidbey Island, Washington.
Full Transcript
Daniel Stillman:
I will officially welcome you to The Conversation Factory, Gayle. You are a rockstar for making time for this.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Great. Oh, I'm just delighted to be in conversation with you again anyway. I just enjoy meeting you, so yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
Thank you so much. There's an amazing quote on your LinkedIn profile where you describe yourself as the interface between individuals and the systems in which they work. Like your work as a change agent, is that interface. I just love that idea of being the interface in that conversation. Can you expand on that a little bit for us?
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
One of my learnings, so I was Wikipedia's Chief Talent and Cultural Officer, was my official title. Chief People Officer, what have you, for the Wikimedia Foundation. And people don't often realize that Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia and all its sister projects. While I was there we ran Wikipedias in 290 different languages, each with their own governance structures. You could imagine some of the complexity of that. In addition to the different language Wikipedias, then you also had chapters, each with their own governance structures that were geographically based. So Portuguese Wikipedia would be contributed to for instance, by both people in Portugal, but also people in Brazil.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
So, working with incredibly complex, interesting structures where people felt deeply invested because that's what happens with mission-driven, volunteer-led organizations, is that people feel very, very attached to practice of processes, outcomes. And take things very, very personally because they are not just seeing it as a job, but a place that they put their heart and soul. There was the level of work sitting on the executive team that I was accountable for on a monthly, weekly, quarterly basis, with my project plans, and my goals, and my OKRs and all that stuff.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And then there's the work that I called minding the invisible. And it was essentially the relational, personal work of scanning and surfacing, and making sense of the organization and reflecting back to the organization. Which of course is comprised of people, were finding that sense-making and integrating that in terms of strategy, in terms of tactics, in terms of the very tangible. So I also, I would say that we always used to have to work with the mythic and the mundane at the same time.
Daniel Stillman:
The mythic and the mundane?
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Yeah, you had to work on the story-telling. You had to work on the vision. You had to understand what the impact of the origin story was, the archetypes at play. But if you didn't have alignment between that and your rewards and recognition structure, and your values to your pay scale, and your benefits, and all the other more traditional organizational levers formal, and informal, that shift behavior within organizational systems, then you're missing something if you're not attending to the mythic and the mundane at the same time.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And so this work of interfacing, I'd say is having and holding my particular attention on that substructure as the organization is going through its work cycles that were agile technology project based, to keep Wikipedia not only running and having server uptime and all that stuff, but also keep it as a thriving force for free knowledge in the world. The belief system I had there as access to knowledge is a deep prerequisite for social change of scale.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
So it's a little encapsulation. I hope it got at your question.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, it did, and you bring up something that's really interesting because I think there's a tension...making the invisible visible and sensing what's happening, and surfacing what's happening. I always like to say that there's this phrase like the data shows "blank". And I always refute that data shows anything, that it's people who interpret data. And so there is this moment where you are an interface, but you're a lens also. You're focusing certain things and not focusing on other things.
Daniel Stillman:
And I feel like in my own current very weak understanding of what the essence of conversational leadership is, is that story-telling is part of making meaning, right? And not just saying what is. Even saying what is, is in fact story-telling. And then saying what should be, is also story-telling. And I think there's a style between yourself and what you're seeing, and a dialog between what you think the organization can or needs to hear. I don't know if that's a question. That's an ellipses.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Well, in dialog, there's an implication there about just what I would sometimes call fundamental reciprocity. And I really love the work of David Abrams years ago. He wrote a book called The Spell of the Sensuous. He was attempting to give a ecologists a language for which to talk about.
Daniel Stillman:
What was the title of that book? I'm sorry, I missed that.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abrams, I think.
Daniel Stillman:
That's a great title.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And he, just talk about the nature of reciprocity and that if you are in touch with something, if you are impacting it, if you are letting yourself feel it, part of the interface piece is realizing that it, whatever it is, is feeling you back. That there is a mutuality there. And it actually reminded me, and there has been born out by leadership literature, that there has to be mutual influence available for people to be happy in their role. So if you're working for someone with whom there is no influence, I mean it could be asymmetrical influence, but there has to be some influence available, that people are generally unhappier and less more dissatisfied with their jobs if they don't feel like there's a mutual influence available.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
So, there's a lot of ways they talk about this, about being permeable, about being an interface. But when you're talking about this dialog sense-making, story-telling moment, that's the human being as a threshold concept. Like when you say data is blank, which I love, that this is the sense-making being. Which is why I also encourage leaders I work with to also be in touch with their own bodies and their own trauma so they understand lenses through which they are sense-making beings. Otherwise, it's all projection.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
I was part of a Zen community a long time ago, and my old Zen teacher used to say that people who are unconscious, it's like they're running through a household filled with hoarder furniture and trash and things everywhere, with two flaming torches, wondering why things are on fire. And I've always liked that mental image. It's like, "Why is everything on fire? I don't understand it even." They're the ones holding the two burning torches. So I think that's often what unconsciousness and unembodiment leads to in leaders.
Daniel Stillman:
We don't know the fires that we're starting, literally we are starting fires.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
You mentioned, I mean this is also in your LinkedIn bio, about you studying to become a monk. Let's talk a little bit about the pull of the spiritual and the pull of the world. Because you're here in the world now, you were fully in the world with your job at Wikimedia, and now you consult. How do you manage those two pulls? Because I'm willing to bet the pull of the retreat is still in you too.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Very much so. The best definition I think I've heard is that, an old monk had told me. That is about being one with your own life. And like many of them sayings, it's a bit of a koan and you can spend a while spinning your wheels on that particular one. Can you hear me?
Daniel Stillman:
I can. Yeah, yeah, perfectly.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Great, okay. When I got the call about Wikimedia from the recruiter, it was just funny, because it was turning more towards the Zen practice. And there was an interesting moment where I had a conversation with my teacher. And in the Zen tradition, everything is practiced, every moment, every meal, every role. And so, that really appealed to me as, can I take on the role of this Chief People Officer at Wikipedia with the sense that it was practiced? And that was actually incredibly grounding.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And it's not something I ever spent a lot of time verbalizing much within the organization, but it's a difference between also, within yourself you have a foreground conversation and a background conversation. There's the place that when I'm with a client, and I'm talking with them about their business issue, or their team issue, or what's going on in their world, I'm not talking to them necessarily about the background philosophy, of the layers by which I'm making sense of it. But it's something I'm aware of. And so, in many ways, I treated my role at the Wikimedia Foundation as sangha, as creating community and creating a place of belonging. And creating a space where different kinds of diversity, including your diversity was really welcomed.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And that we're an organization that struggled like many organizations to figure out how to deal with mental illness in the workplace. To be welcoming of people who have radically different styles. We had engineers who were completely brilliant when they were there, but then would disappear into depressive black holes. And you know what, that's fine. How do we create environments that are wide enough or big enough so that the full talent of these really, really brilliant, brilliant people have a home and have a place? And so this sense of creating communities of belonging, there's a lot of alignment there.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And then this like deity, day-to-day life as practice was a very key thought. And I find it still really relevant. I have a thyroid issue and sometimes when my thyroid flares, I'm aware that I have a different train of thought to what I normally would have, and thank God for all that Zen training years ago. Pun, sort of intended because the witnessing mind has that capacity to be like, those thoughts aren't really yours, you don't have to believe the things you think. And there's a certain level of liberation that comes from that.
Daniel Stillman:
I do know. You don't have to believe everything you think.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
So it's been really helpful.
Daniel Stillman:
It's a deep truth. Let's talk about this idea of leadership as a practice. It's so interesting because I feel like with leadership development, some of it can be, I use the word "Woo-woo," because there's some people who look at some of the things we talk about and they're like, oh self lens, and sangha. And that's not they, they want tools. They want a framework. And tools and frameworks do help. And I'm sure you have tools and frameworks.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
I love tools and frameworks.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. I feel like there's a dialog to use the term, between these two being and doing. And I'd just love to explore what you see as the practice of how can people improve their practice of leadership? How can people practice leadership?
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
You know, I am in that sense, a deep pragmatist. It's, when you work in complex organizations, part of the way you navigate, and you sense, and you steer, is to see what works. And turn up the volume on what works, and turn down the volume at what doesn't. But part of that, believing what you think or not believing what you think, is getting actual data. And so many leaders and people in general, get lost in their own assumptions or their projections. "This is how I think the situation is." And so they'll bring that lens in, and miss reality, giving them feedback. Reality is actually different than they want it to be because they're not actually getting data.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
So I'm a big believer in ... There's a woman named Jennifer Garvey Berger who's actually very brilliant at this. She talks about in her book about these habits of mind. But it has to do with how do you test on an ongoing basis? So if I'm going to try design an initiative, or to see how I'm showing up in a room, anything from the deeply personal to the systemic, how do I test it? Get some data, tweak it, expand it. And so I'm a very big fan of seeing if it works for you, and then letting it go if it doesn't. And tweaking it if it does.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And then we were working with super complex systems like the Wikimedia Foundation, coming in and pronouncing on high that you know the way, and this is what has to get done because you saw it work somewhere else. Organizations are different. They have their own unique DNA. They have their own values, and embedded practices, and organizational culture, which acts as an iceberg. And so, navigating that, has to be an act of dynamic steering, of paying attention to the weather that's around you. And doing a sounding, see if it lands, see if the language lands, see if the concepts land. And if it doesn't work, don't go there.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, I mean, it's interesting because there's this boundary between you have to ... An experiment still, you put something out, and then the sounding is what is coming back. That is the process of practicing an experiment.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Yes.
Daniel Stillman:
What is currently coming my way from that? Which means you have to be able to sense externally, but also sense internally as well.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Well I think, the sensing internally has to do partly with being in integrity. If you're trying to drive change in an organization, people are really good sniffers, in general, for bullshit.
Daniel Stillman:
That's a good technical term, I love that.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
If you're trying to implement something and you're doing it, and you don't believe in it, people have a real sense of that. So I think that being in integrity with yourself, and carrying that through into your day-to-day actions, is going back to leadership as a practice, is really important. If you say you're welcoming and never have an open door, that shows.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And the thing that people don't realize is that leadership is a choice to become really visible. And I work with a lot of new leaders coming to that space, and they are often just surprised at the level of eyeballs and noise about them. If they walk into the elevator, and they're preoccupied with their phone, and they don't say "Hi," the level of noise around that. There's a difference between if they were individual contributors versus being an organizational leader, is a huge job. And so every action is put in an amplification chamber. It has every opportunity to be usually misinterpreted. There's a clarity necessary around alignment, is important in part so that your organization around you spends less time on organizational churn about you, than on having the tools and the ability and the grounds to get their work done.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. How can leaders practice more visibility and transparency? They seem like really important components of leadership. Because you are going to be seen in intentional ways.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
One is learning how to strategically cue people around you as to what they're seeing. So, the difference, I'm just going to make up this example, [inaudible 00:17:32]. If you deliberately come in at 10:00 every morning, versus 8:00 AM every morning, because you want to have two hours of very quiet work from home time, because you get inundated. And you don't signal to the organization that, that's what you're doing, it sets up a very, very different organizational reverberation than if you do signal to what you're doing.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
If you start a weekly meeting, and you start off asking personal questions without signaling what it is you're doing, then people are like, what is this? And in their uncertainty, people don't like to be surprised, so in their uncertainty, they're more likely to be defensive. If you start by signaling that you are wanting to build more teamwork, wanting to create an atmosphere where people know one another personally, so that when times are rough that there's some buffer zone, and you start with yourself, that sets an entirely different frame than if you just start a meeting asking random people personal questions.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
So, as you design, there's a design, and then there's the signaling around the design, that helps people hang it into familiar frames. Then they don't spend that excess energy making things up. Because the capacity of people to make things up about what they think they're seeing in a leader, creates so much organizational noise.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah, and it seems like, and I love your use of the word design, the idea that we can design that frame, design that communication so that we show people the whole arc of what's happening. And they are oriented in this safe space, it smooths and ...
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And it's so easy to forget to do when you're busy. That's something that I remember in my, just being bewildered sometimes when I get misinterpreted. And it's like, oh I forgot to do that because it was so caught in the trap of busy this week, that I forgot that. And that's part of the danger of really, really, overly segmented lives where you don't have time to touch base.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And you asked a little bit about the role of poetry. Poetry helps me tap into a deeper well, helps me get grounded so that when I go with my days, I'm much more able to be responsive and not reactive. When I'm in a reactive, frenetic mode, when I've read Twitter, and the news that morning, then go straight into meetings, and come at it with this ungrounded place, it's a very different environment that I set as a leader. And leaders cast weather.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
A friend of mine, Jim [Geiger 00:20:10] said that. And I think it's so true. People cast weather in offices. And people are aware of the weather that people cast in the office. You don't have to be a leader to cast weather, everybody can do it. Some people cast more weather than other people. But as a leader, I think you have a particular responsibility to be aware of it and manage your weather.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. It's so interesting. I grew up watching cartoons and that literal cloud that people carry above their heads is there. And it can expand to other people. I want to talk a little more about poetry for many reasons, but bringing poetry into our work is, I had Nancy McGaw on from the Aspen Institute a couple of months ago. And she's very firm and clear about her bringing poetry into her work. And I was just talking to a mutual friend of ours about this. The idea that as a facilitator, as a leader, running an experiment that you don't feel safe in, people can sense your own lack of certainty. And whereas with Nancy, she's like, we're going to start by reading this poem, and we're going to talk about it. And it's going to ground us in something.
Daniel Stillman:
And so I guess, if somebody wants to get started in that form of grounding and sounding, how do we start bringing more poetry into our work? Because it seems like a useful thing to do.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
I go back to where we started with our earlier conversation around practice is, start it at a restaurant with your partner. Start it at a dinner party, and see what the response is. Because if you have a few cycles of positive affirmation, or good responses, I think it's really, it can be really affirming. And you even just have to get the words in your mouth, the way that you might want to rehearse a difficult conversation first. It's much easier to do it if you've got the sense of the words in your mouth, before you speak it out loud.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Because also, I think poetry, most people haven't read poetry. I had a teacher who I loved, Mrs. May, who was our high school honors' teacher. I'm still in touch with her. It was only in her class that I remember, being subject to a lot of different people having to do Hamlet's "To be, or not to be." And it's so easy to read it badly. And so, getting even a sense of the kinks down and the practice of it, even if you're not certain of how it'll land, you have some small ground for which to move from, is really, really useful.
Daniel Stillman:
Some small ground for which to move from. That's a great phrase.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Yep, little ground. And start with poems that you know, that resonates, that are relevant to a particular moment. Whether it has to do with change, or whether it has to do with grief. And having a few of those that you have a sense of yourself. I think that you have to love it yourself before you want to actually introduce it. I think if you opened up a random book and read a random poem, you're a goner from the start, right?
Daniel Stillman:
Would you feel comfortable reading a poem for us that maybe we can ... Is there a leadership poem? I mean, we can talk about the one that you read before we started. But I'm just wondering where to start? Where to begin the conversation?
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
I have a lot of poems that I really love. I'm trying to just recall to mind a specific leadership poem. No surprise, there's an easy one of my husband's that pops into my head because it's a great opening into a couple different thoughts. And why don't I just start with it, and practice it. And I'll do it imperfectly, just to model doing it perfectly, because we all get to do that, right?
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And this one is called, "Mameen." He starts it with, "Be infinitesimal now. A creature even the sailing hawk misses, a wraith among the rocks where the mist parts slowly. Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed by circumstance, how great reputations dissolve with infirmity. And how you, in particular, stand a hairsbreadth from losing everyone you hold dear. Then, look back down the path to the north the way you came, as if seeing your entire past, and then south over the hazy blue coast as if present to a broad future. Recall the way you are all possibilities you can see. And how you live best as an appreciator of horizons, whether you reach them or not. Admit that once you got up from your chair and opened the door, once you have walked out into the clean air toward that edge and taken the path up high beyond the ordinary, you have become the privileged and the pilgrim, the one who will tell the story and the one, coming back from the mountain, who helped to make it."
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
I chose this one because as a leadership role, it holds the deep paradoxes of who we are. The fact that we are here to make an impact, that we're here to make a difference, and that yet we're ephemeral at the same time. That this life has a lot of the mundane. We have bills to pay. I just got jury duty summoned. And yet, we've got to also navigate deep challenges. A good friend of mine is having a really difficult pregnancy, and so her reality is very different than mine at the moment. And so these weights that we put on, we're all collectively dealing with coronavirus right now, so we're always navigating these different tensions and polarities.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And I do like this invitation in the midst of this poem, it's a reminder, "Recall the way you are all possibilities you can see, and how you live best as an appreciator of horizons, whether you reach them or not." This invitation to remember that we're ephemeral but we're also, we're bigger than some of this. We're bigger and broader. And I think that in really dark times, we close down on possibilities. I started my career as a psychologist and so I studied post-partum depression research. I was doing post-partum depression research in mainly Latino families, emigrant families in the Bay Area. And what I know deeply about depression is that it really is anxiety, it closes down your sense of possibility when you most need it. It's when you most need access to it.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And so this remembering that your possibilities whether you reach them or not, I think is a super, it's a beautiful reminder. And that's what poems do, is they remind us of things, they ground us of things. Mary Oliver has so many great beautiful questions in her poems. "What will you do with your one wild and precious life?" Or, the way that she asks, I think it's actually David [Igmatel 00:28:13] that asks this, he's talking about the beauty of leaves as they fall, and he says, "Who are you beautiful as you go?" Because they ask it using different words and different framings, I think it penetrates. And again, we're going back to that permeability conversations that we began with, that I think it penetrates more deeply than if I just said, "Hey, who are you beautiful to as you go?"
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
It has a chance to sink a level deeper, because your mind has to work at it. You can't speed read poetry, it doesn't work that way. So, I've really appreciated then as a consequence, creates grounding, creates spaciousness, because we need spaciousness for creativity and possibility. And I think leadership is fundamentally an act of, at its best, is an act of creativity. A bunch of acts of creativity, it's not really an act, it's a lot of full acts of creativity.
Daniel Stillman:
It's continuous. It's like a three-act play of creativity. A multi-city tour of creativity. So first of all, thank you for reading that. And it's really beautiful. There's so many lines that just go straight in. And I guess what I'm left with is, as a facilitator, I say when I teach facilitation, doing an activity, it is only as good as the unpacking of it. And how do you get a group to, not just listen to the poem but to continue to unpack it and to encounter it? How do you facilitate that conversation?
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Sometimes I'll have them choose out a line that speaks the most to them, that's often a great one, just to get them engaged. And they'll read it more deeply. And then the discernment process of yes, this one, but this one more. And it's great with so many poems, because then it personalizes it, what about the thought or the idea?
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Sometimes it's a matter of choosing the right poem for that moment. So, the upside of having a repertoire of some poems is, in facilitating a group, and say they've gone through a day to check in, it's on a day-one check in, where they're just telling each other who they are. But a day-two check in or day three where you're starting to get into some real meat about what they're experiencing, that's often a good time to listen for a few things, and just try to pull out a poem that touches those things that you already know has got a resonance in the group.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
If there's a lot of conversation about grief, I might use Naomi Shihab Nye's poem on Kindness. It's such a beautiful poem. She's got a line in it, "Before you know kindness as the deepest thing you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing." And so, it's this really beautiful riff on the deep relationship between kindness and grace and sorrow, and it's got such a beautiful container for grief in it. So finding the resonance, was it already there, is another way into it.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
I also like to create a bit of silence around the poetry because it's hard to just dive in and then dive straight out of a poem. So, if I have bells, I'll it hang. And then ring the bells afterwards. Or ask people to take a deep breath. And sometimes I'll just use a snippet, and that creates a bit more of a pulse. If I just talked about being the one who will tell the story, and the one who helped to make it, being both of those, what does that mean for you as a leader? That might create a little bit of pulse into the rest of the poem, and the rest of the context.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Or if you, yourself have a story around the poem, that's another really wonderful one. Like I was on the Inca trail for my 37th birthday, to Machu Picchu, and I remember memorizing Rainer Maria Rilke's, one of his poems that goes something like, it's been a long time since I've recalled these lines. "Here among the disappearing in the land of the transient, be the bell that shatters as it rings." And that poem had a totally different set of lines and different context in this really ancient place, amidst this loss civilization. And the call to presence in the midst of this very, very, very ancient land rang differently there. And so bringing your own story to it, I think is another thing that helps people access it.
Daniel Stillman:
And to connect to it in a human way. We're getting close to the end of our time together, and the thing we have not talked about for me enough is, I would like to explore conversational leadership a little bit more. And whether that's something that you define internally, or if it's, we talk about frameworks and having frameworks, is it something that you work with people on, where they know it? Or it's internal to you, where you're trying to bring people's deeper awareness to these concepts more subtly? I don't know if that's a sensible question or not. But I have my own ideas about what it is ... [crosstalk 00:33:52]
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
It's a beautiful question.
Daniel Stillman:
And I want to know what you believe it is.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
There's such a both ends to that, right? Because if you realize that, I use a framework [inaudible 00:34:06]. I think it's a 360, it's called Leadership Circle 360, and it has based on a model of leadership that recognizes two wings of a bird, the leadership is both about getting things done, and deeply relational. And both of those, in order to scale as a leader, in order to, particular if you rise within an organization, your ability to get things done with and through other people, has to grow.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And so, fundamentally, conversational leadership is about so many facets of that. It's about bringing people along with you because people are much more motivated if people are much more able to support it if they know what it is they're doing and why, at a very, very simple level. And that happens in the conversational space that happens in the story-telling space, in the rhetoric space. And the conversations are verbal as well as non-verbal. So it's the things you say, and the things that you do, the way that you lead, the way that you are in your leadership role. So the conversation can be something, one of the things I used say about being at Wikimedia is, that I thought that leaders had a particular requirement because it's so influenced based, because its a distributed relatively flat organization.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
But you had to be willing to be a face that people turn towards. And I worked for a leader once who said, "Don't bring me problems. Only bring me solutions." And I appreciated where she was going with that. I got what she was trying to do. But I don't think what she realized, and the thing that made me just cringe a bit was that she, by putting that in the organization, it had a chilling effect. And she was diminishing her ability to even if people brought her just problems to make patterns amongst those problems. And so being a face that people turn towards rather than away from, increases what I call a, because I'm part of a free knowledge movement, increases data flows in the system.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And because every human organization over sine the beginning of time, has been fundamentally a conversational endeavor. I even think about there's these gorgeous, this standing stone circle in the north England called Castlerigg. And it's absolutely beautiful, and it's been there since the Neolithic Bronze era. And it's set within this gorgeous valley, and I look around at it, and I'm like, "Who is the guy that just decided to convince a bunch of Neanderthals with no real tools that they should take a lot of multi-ton rocks and set them here?" That had to be an interesting series of conversations to even get that going.
Daniel Stillman:
And the powerful invitation, right? The invitation that the leader had of, "Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions," I don't know if it's a she or a he, I might have missed that.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
She, yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
If they had said that, when you bring me problems, bring me three solutions.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Yes, yep,
Daniel Stillman:
Which has always been my dream for interns. Tell me the problem, and then tell me three things you think that might help. That's a very different invitation to a very different conversation. She was being a conversational leader in that moment, she was just inviting people to a very limited conversation in some sense.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And, it came from, so a little bit of the background context on that, was someone relatively new in a role, first time in it, inundated a bit by all of the demands on it. And a few months in was attempting to control that by saying, only bring me this. And so even though I understood where she was coming from in it, like unintended consequence, we all leak of human things. I think we're very leaky in the first place. So trying to control your message too tightly I think is a really useless proposition.
Daniel Stillman:
How are we leaky? What is that? What does that mean that we're leaky?
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
We're leaky, we're leaky. Yeah, you think you were telling the world one thing, but people really do view as a, know you much more than you probably even like some [inaudible 00:38:27]
Daniel Stillman:
That's terrifying.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
So we leak. So integrity helps because it means you're at least leaky in the right direction. I even lost my train of thought, oh well.
Daniel Stillman:
You were giving the backstory, and I think it makes sense. She over-indexed.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
Right.
Daniel Stillman:
When we talk about sensing and responding, she sensed and she reacted or responded very strongly. And then she sensed and responded again, right? And it's this process.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And you can imagine that in that moment, that what she was trying to sense or respond to, the out of integrity piece was not [inaudible 00:39:10]. The subtext that was real, that people probably really heard was, don't bring me things anymore because I've got enough. So, you've got the conversation that her body and her being was trying not to have with the organization, and the words that came out, lived on top of the message that was actually there. And it's a little bit of what I mean by leaky.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
And so being strategic about your messaging actually does help in getting feedback. Or having a place to express, to people, for whom it's safe. And I do think leaders really need a safe container whether it's other leaders or friends, with whom they can be leaky and out of integrity and to get to express that because it needs to get refined. We want authentic, but sometimes authentic and overly raw isn't actually authentic. If people have a limited opportunity to read you because you're a leader in an organization and they don't have much access to you, part of your being authentic includes an obligation that they get the more refined bandwidth than the overly leaky messy ones that your friends might get. Because your friends have the time to refine it with you, as opposed to necessarily broadcasting it to 500 people when you've only got 20 minutes in an all-hands once a month.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes, clarity.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
You have an obligation there to get both authentic and refined.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. That's really beautiful. Well, Gayle, I am so thrilled that you made time for this conversation. I'd love to have another one just about conversational leadership, another time I hope. But I'm really grateful for the time. It's been a real delight being in conversation with you.
Gayle Karen Young Whyte:
This is so fun. I'm like, are we done yet, really? Can't we go on? So thank you for creating this opportunity. And it's just really fun having a conversational partner with whom to riff and explore some of these ideas that are mutually so interesting. So, delightful to know you and your work in the world.
Daniel Stillman:
Thank you. And likewise.