TLDR;
With 56% of leaders hitting burnout in 2024 and a staggering 43% of companies losing half their leadership teams, it’s clear modern leadership is heading into a burnout phase.
But the question remains: Why?
On this episode of the Uncommon Leadership podcast, I dive into the core issues with highly experienced product leader and coach — Phil Hornby. Phil’s unique blend of technical acumen, business insight, and human-centric skills makes his perspective invaluable.
Together, we unpack some crucial reasons behind this alarming trend:
↪ The immense pressure to hide our true selves fosters stressful and inauthentic work environments.
↪ A default to rigid command-and-control methods strips away team safety and empowerment.
↪The crippling fear of failure that paralyzes action and prevents vital growth.
↪ An overemphasis on tasks that overshadow human connection leads to disengaged teams and stifled collaboration.
We explore the profound problem of how conventional leadership often inhibits team potential, which leads to worse outcomes precisely when superior performance is most needed.
Phil and I reveal how well-intentioned instincts to “take control” can actually sabotage creativity, innovation, and overall business success—leaving an organization vulnerable.
If you’re tired of seeing your team’s immense talent go untapped and your efforts leading to more exhaustion than impact—then this conversation is for you.
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Your Key Learnings From This Episode of Uncommon Leadership:
- The power and the true meaning of bringing your whole self to a leadership role.
- Learn why small, intentional steps remove the fear of failure by turning every outcome into valuable data for growth.
- A deep understanding of the control paradox: loosening control often leads to better results!
- Find out how a deliberate approach to building relationships creates effortless trust and deep collaboration.
- Understand why micromanagement and rigid leadership can stifle a team’s potential.
- How to design intentional structures that encourage collaboration and mutual support.
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About the Speakers:
Phil Hornby
Phil Hornby is a highly experienced product leader, coach, technologist, and facilitator with a career spanning over 20 years across diverse sectors including SaaS, IoT, InsuranceTech, MarineTech, Advertising, Manufacturing, BioTech, and Automotive.
Phil has directly helped thousands of individuals across hundreds of companies to think clearly, make strong decisions, and take powerful action that drives high-impact outcomes.
His approach centers on collaboration, context-driven leadership, and continuous learning. As a coach, Phil serves as a trusted sparring partner for senior leaders, helping them gain clarity and perspective on challenges related to change, uncertainty, and team effectiveness.
Get in touch with Phil Hornby↓
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philhornby
Resources for further exploration: https://www.forproductpeople.com/ | https://www.talkingroadmaps.com/episodes
Michael Hunter
Michael Hunter is the founder of Uncommon Teams and the compelling voice behind the Uncommon Leadership podcast.
For over 35 years, he’s guided leaders across six continents, helping them navigate the demanding realities of burnout, overwhelm, and the multifaceted challenges of today’s global business landscape.
He champions the creation of truly authentic and resilient teams, guiding leaders to align their personal fulfillment with profound business success. His unique approach enables individuals and teams to move beyond merely surviving daily pressures, into a state where they can truly thrive and innovate with ease.
Michael’s mission is to help leaders, CEOs, and founding teams create and inhabit their legacy, elevating themselves in a way that is safe and sustainable.
Want to build an uncommon, unstoppable team? Get in touch with Michael Hunter:
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/humbugreality/
Website:
https://uncommonteams.com/
Newsletter:
https://uncommonteams.com/newsletter-archive/
Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/@UncommonLeadershipPodcast
Presented By: Uncommon Change
Transcript:
Michael Hunter
Whether you want more innovation, more easily, you’re feeling burnt out or overwhelmed, or you simply know that something isn’t quite the way you know it can be. You are not alone. I hear the same from leaders every day. On Uncommon Leadership, we explore aligning personal fulfillment with business success, creating authentic teams and cultivating the resilience, adaptability, and ease necessary to move beyond simply surviving today’s challenges into thriving. I’m Michael Hunter, and today we’ll uncover fresh insights into what it means to lead teams today. Joining me is Phil Hornby. Phil is a highly experienced product leader, coach, and technologist with over 20 years in the industry.
His career spans various roles including product management, project management, operations development, sales, marketing. Is there anything left?
Phil Hornby
Maybe I don’t know, UX, I guess didn’t work in manufacturing. I’ll give you that.
Michael
Across diverse sectors, like SaaS, IoT, and Automotives.
Phil is a regular speaker at product events and co-host of the Talking Roadmaps YouTube channel and podcast. He’s also writing a book encapsulating his philosophy and practical insights. Phil has helped thousands of individuals across hundreds of companies think clearly, make strong decisions and take powerful action that drives high impact outcomes.
He combines technical business and human skills to empower teams and leaders to develop complex solutions that elegantly solve customer problems at scale, always emphasizing collaboration, context-driven leadership, and continuous learning. Welcome, Phil.
Phil
Thanks for having me, Michael. Wow. I’ve just heard you read back something I wrote a while ago and it’s like, well, actually sounds quite impressive.
I’ve done a few things and I’ve, yeah, wow. You don’t often re-read things you write. But yeah, it’s been an interesting journey and teams have always been a core part of it.
Michael
And starting with the team that is you, when did you first recognize that integrating your whole self, bringing that into everything that you do might be a valuable approach?
Phil
I don’t think there’s a single point that I can identify there. I can identify very, you know, various different aspects such as the first team I was part of post university, post college.
I was very, I very much treated them just as colleagues. They, over the time we worked together for 10-ish years, they became like family. And I know that’s a cliche statement that people make, but we were a team of 35 people in the company as a whole. And when we all stopped working together, ’cause we were all closed down at the same time after being acquired and then you’re kind of downsized.
I missed them all and we all kind of crystallized as a group and still are friends to this day, and that’s going back 15 years now from when we kind of all stopped working together and that relationship there and kind of not realizing that I kind of put a bit of a barrier between me and them is one of those aspects, whereas I didn’t need to.
On the other hand, I do think it’s all right to hold a little bit of yourself back, to keep some of yourself private. However, you’ve gotta always be authentic. If you are not being your real self, that’s just hard work and stressful, and if you are constantly working to manage the public persona or the persona you are playing to the audience and not just being you and embracing who you are, that’s just hard work, and that, that’s something I’ve seen throughout lots of times. I’m a big fan of a technique called Belbin Team Roles, a certified practitioner. And one of the strong sort of principles that Meredith Belbin kind of identified is being the greatest of your strengths, not the least of your weaknesses, and kind of things like that have resonated with me over the years.
It’s like, well, my greatest strengths tie into me being authentically me. I’m a fairly loud, gregarious character. You want something subtle and probably not the person. That’s okay, but I’ll have some more subtle, some more nuanced people around me that I can partner with that can deal with that side of things and deal with the situations that need that more directly.
And having that self-awareness to say, maybe I’m a blunt instrument for this one. That’s powerful. So I guess it’s more that self-awareness and self-understanding that I’ve kind of picked up over the years, and knowing that just means I can bring my whole self to work. Like I’ve never been a fan of the, what I would argue is the false dichotomy of work and life.
To me, work is part of life. And you get different fulfillment and different benefits from each of different aspects of your life. There’s a model called The Wheel of Life that I’m a big fan of in terms of another way of looking at balance. And you can put different factors on there, but sometimes it’s physical elements or financial elements or learning or growth and these sorts of things.
And finding that balance there is far more important to me. Sometimes you’re gonna get fulfillment from your work. Sometimes you get it from your personal relationships, sometimes you get it from just you yourself, and knowing that it’s okay that any of these aspects can come from any of those different aspects of your life.
And so you might get tons of fulfillment from your work, instead of a hobby. Like, yeah, I have hobbies, don’t get me wrong, but I’m look so, so lucky to be able to say that my work is my hobby. Like, I love every minute of every day that I’m working, so it doesn’t feel like I’m working because it’s me embracing that and that’s a privilege.
The sort of work I do and the way I work enables that. But I worked hard to create that situation for me to be able to say that because I wanted to just be able to enjoy your life. You know, if you spend on average eight hours of your day, you know, working and another eight on what people would your term life, sometimes, which includes doing all the chores and this sort of thing.
It’s like, well, let’s maximize that really 16 hours of waking time and make all of that fulfilling, as much as possible. I guess, me embracing not just the bringing it to work to life and to my role, but just bringing it everything to everything.
Michael
180% everything you just said. It’s so important to remember that being authentic doesn’t have to mean sharing everything, and in fact, sharing everything, unless you’re a person who wants to share everything isn’t being authentic because there’s parts of things that you wanna pull back. What is important is sharing, letting people know that things are going on and you don’t have to go farther.
Yeah, it can be as simple as atm, got a lot going on right now. Most of it’s not work. A little bit of it is. Don’t wanna go into a lot of details now. Want you to know I’m gonna be distracted.
Phil
So true. I mean the, and if you are a great team, like I have a collaborator that I work with a lot and he’s going through a bunch of health problems right now and like we had a message exchange earlier today where he was just, he was thanking me for carrying more of the load on some of the projects we’re dealing with.
It’s like. That’s a team that’s, you know, there’ll be other times when you are carrying more of the load and it balances out. And heck, even if it doesn’t, I don’t care. I chose to partner with you, I chose to be a team and therefore that’s okay. And I don’t, as it happens, I know pretty much all the details in this context, but it’s mostly alright if someone says they don’t want to share.
That safety to be able to say there’s something going on is important. And knowing whether and being able to choose whether you share or whether you are gonna feel then the pressure to share and is important. But there’s also the opposite side as a leader, spotting when someone isn’t fully turning up and having the awareness to say, there’s probably something going on there.
Now I don’t need to probe but also being ready to say, we gonna make sure they’re looked after. Like maybe it’s about, it’s a subtle conversation with the rest of the team saying there’s some stuff going. I think we’ve got, there’s some stuff going on with X.
Maybe we should just, kind of cover for ’em a little bit and give them a little bit of air space because we’re a team, we’re working, we’re here to together to look after each other and be successful together.
Michael
I like that. To me it feels a little bit like it might be inflicting help on that person. What I would probably tend to do, is go to that person and say, you seem a little distracted right now. How can we help? That way you let them know that you recognize that they’re showing up differently and you’re giving them the opportunity to share as much or little as they want, and to let you know how they’d like you to help.
And then as you said, as a leader, it’s important to keep watch over this. And if they keep showing up distracted and they keep not letting you offering, giving you ways to help them handle whatever’s going on, then it’s your responsibility to dig a little deeper because their distraction is affecting the team and you have a responsibility then to that person.
You also have a responsibility to the rest of the team. Helping everyone work effectively, efficiently, all the adverbs that your particular team is optimizing for is as important as helping each person feel supported and loved.
Phil
And I reflect on your comment there about inflicting health and help, and you are right. There’s not always the easy opportunity to go and have that conversation, so sometimes you have to be more proactive. Other times you can have that conversation, and sometimes these conversations are a lot easier to be had in person. I mean, I’ve been a remote worker since 2008, like this just, this way of working is normal to me, and I do find that sometimes a little bit more proactivity is needed in that context ’cause sometimes it, those harder conversations are even harder to have virtually.
Michael
Absolutely. And I still always bias towards letting the person know I see them and giving them an opportunity to tell me what they’d like.
Phil
Totally agree. I’m not disagreeing that sometimes you can only have, you can only give them that awareness. You maybe not be, can be able to go that next level. Yeah, for sure. I’m thinking about the responsibility to the team.
Sometimes you can be a bit more proactive, but every situation’s different. Like there’s a reason why I say it depends a hundred times a day.
Michael
Absolutely. One of the reasons I love working with people is that I’m never gonna get it all figured out. There’s always more to learn and every situation is full, is chockfull of those new opportunities to learn something new.
Phil
Yeah.
In fact, I think a few years ago when I, you know, as my careers pivoted over the years, I didn’t consciously recognize it, but I subconsciously recognized that. I was an engineer and I was finding it easy. I was finding people harder, and that challenge was what attracted me.
Hence most of my work has ended up being more about people, even as a product manager or a product leader. Like the reality is most of my work came back to people. And I loved that challenge because I think it’s far more interesting. At least that’s that for me anyway.
Michael
Same. I say that I started out debugging coach, and then I transitioned into debugging people, and now I help people debug themselves.
Love it.
It’s just my own journey of realizing something’s going on, inflicting help, and then we’re doing, then switching over to offering and inviting them to tell me how they’d like me to help.
It’s just part of why I am so vehement about not inflicting help is because I know how much harm I did when I’ve done that and when I still do it.
Phil
I mean, it’s interesting. I’m reading a book right now and I’m literally just trying to remember the title, it’s called ‘Helping’ and it’s very much about that social contract around offering and receiving help and so on.
And it’s, I’m literally just towards the stop, but it was, I saw good friend, Christina Watki shared about it recently. I thought if she thinks it’s good, I’d have to go and read it. And it just resonating with the conversation here.
Michael
Sounds like a great book. Everything we’re talking about is building cultures where people feel safe and empowered to bring their unique talents into everything that they do. What do you explicitly do to help build these cultures?
Phil
Well, these days as a coach, I guess I’m more a little bit like yourself helping people. I’m helping them do the debugging as opposed to doing it directly myself. But when I was a leader, I would always start by just helping people establish a relationship, like really simple stuff at a human level. One of my favorite onboarding techniques was to take anybody new on a tour of the business, and by that I mean literally I would physically take them around all the sites and introduce them to everyone personally and tell each other just a little bit about each other.
You know, a safe, kind of nugget of information that they would kind of then, would give them something in common. And I remember one person that I was, when I was doing this, there were two people sat on two desks next to each other and, someone on the other desk sort of commented, I’ve sat next to this person for 20 years and you know more about them than me.
It’s like, I’ve made a conscious effort to build relationships and, you know, the most amusing thing, at my core psychology, I am one of the most task oriented people you will find, but I realized that the reality is that getting anything task oriented done means working with people. And I realized that therefore I had to really embrace that people side of everything.
In the early days, it was very contrived. Like I essentially kept a CRM about people and was like, ah, this is this person that’s their wife’s name, their husband’s name, their child’s name. They just went to high school, they’ve got this dog, et cetera, et cetera. After a few years of doing that in a very contrived and very prescriptive, literally writing it down manner, it started to become second nature.
It started to become, oh, I just know this thing about people and I can help build relationships. And I would find those nuggets that I could use to build relationships, and then I could see how other people could find that initial connection and as much as remote work is a big thing these days, like the human connection comes so much faster in person as well, so helping them get in person early on in their relationship because it’s so much harder to say no or ignore someone once you’ve seen the bites of their eyes in real life and so.
And that if you take that, just listen to my language. There he is saying no, well that’s actually going back to that task oriented nature of, well, we’ve gotta get stuff done, we’ve gotta work together, but let’s grease the wheels and make it a better environment. But then it was also, it was things like, there’s subtlety there.
Well, I am personally introducing people that’s essentially saying, this is one of my team. One of my family, like if you do something and you are helping them and you’re working with them, that’s the same as you’re working with me. And okay, I’m a more senior person in the organization. I’ve got more political capital.
I’m essentially, I’m saying they can take out my political bank, like I’m giving them my backing tacitly by being in a room and things like that would just help them immediately get much more help from other people and putting them in a position where they could make decisions quickly and, make them themselves.
Like so often I would find myself going to a meeting where I was the person at the right level in the organization to attend that particular meeting. I didn’t have a particularly strong opinion on the answer there. What needed to be taken into that room, but members of my team did. So to me it was about me sometimes just having to be the voice of the team in that case.
And like, so we would have a lot of collaborative conversations for me to understand their point of view on why and what the perspective I should take into the room is. And that, that to me was all about really, me saying, I’m gonna represent you, not, I’m gonna turn up and it’s like, it’s the Phil show.
It’s like, this is your view and I’m just taking it with me. And sadly, the, yeah, I always found it sad that I had to be essentially the representation. Sometimes it’s like, can’t you just bring the person who actually knows all about this into the room? Instead, it had to be, you know, at the right level in the hierarchy to sit in those rooms.
In fact, sometimes I was lucky enough to even get to skip a level up because I was my boss’s right hand, and if he wasn’t around, I got to turn up. And so like that gave me a, again, a lot, another level of influence. Yet still, I was mostly representing someone else’s view because they were the people doing the work.
They were the ones who I trusted. They were the ones who ultimately were empowered by me. Did they always make the decision I would make? No. Did I back them a hundred percent on their decision? 99% of the time. Every once in a while I’d look at it and say, that is just dumb. And then we’d have a conversation, but most of the time it’s like, I have no better information than you.
But what a few times it was dumb was because I had information that they couldn’t have. Therefore I could, see from a different perspective as soon as I could, if I could share that information, usually that sort of conversation would surface it. Then we’d end up on the same page, in fact.
But it was about, yeah, it kind of comes back to that word in the question of empowering, like sometimes the only way you can empower is by representing other people. But wherever possible, bringing them into the room with you and backing them, being their sponsor, their supporter was a key part for me.
I mean, product management departments tend not to actually really be a team. That’s part of the challenge as well. There are a bunch of people who all do the same work, but on completely separate things or at least completely separate parts of the product. And so when you’re leading a department like that, you’ve gotta actually create that team environment. If you want to have a true team, you’ve gotta create the interdependency, you’ve gotta get them collaborating. I remember when I was, as the team was growing, I found, I started to hit a scaling problem, like I was running outta time for one-to-ones, and I was also finding the one-to-ones less effective because I had people turning up and saying, I’ve got this problem, I’d look at them and say, the person who’s got the solution is sat next to you. Why aren’t you talking to them? It’s because they were just a work group. They weren’t really a team, and so like creating just simple structures like stealing from the agile playbook and having a daily standup for the department helps there.
Like, okay, we’ll all come together. What? Yeah, what happened yesterday that we need all need to know about? What’s gonna ha, what are you focusing on today and what help do you need? And then what I call the office hours that followed on 45 minutes. We’re all available to help each other. And by knowing that we’re all there to help each other, like maybe me and Keith went off and did something over here to deal with that problem, or Emmanuel and Priam, two people in my team went off and did something else over here, or, Anna and Amir and Dominic went over and did something else.
It created that helping environment across the team as well. And we ended up ultimately kind of adding also some responsibilities like defining the roles to help to create that cross collaboration. I called it, for example, my three hats. Hat one was their portfolio. The thing that every product manager knows they earn. Hat two being a specialty, like one person took cloud computing.
You know, we’re going back a few years, once took mobile technology, I took weight of working and practice in product management. Then we had a thing we called the focus subject where it’s about growing our capabilities. One of my team wanted to learn about contract law, intellectual property. I couldn’t think of anything more dull, but he was super enthusiastic about it.
It’s like, perfect. I’m gonna pay for you to learn about this. And then every time there’s a contract to be negotiated, I can skip being in that meeting, ’cause you can be there. But over the next two years, everything you learn, you need to teach to the rest of the team. And so if there’s a contract negotiation in their product area, they and you are gonna be there.
You are gonna be bringing the knowledge and they’re gonna be bringing the context and together we’ll get good outcomes. But just creating that collaboration with all was the foundation to me. Like just little mechanisms like that had a disproportionate effect.
Michael
If I were to summarize everything that you’ve been saying, one word that pops into my head is, that comes to mind is encouragement. You encourage people to identify with the entire company, not just the little part that they were hired into. You encourage people to bring their knowledge in person to the meetings rather than piping through you. You encouraged some people who were asking you to show up with all the information to recognize that you weren’t the one who was the smart person about this, that there was someone else, and that would make way more sense to bring them in than to have it all translate through you.
You encouraged recognition within a team of all the ways they’re collaborating already and how that’s been helpful, which then encouraged more collaboration.
Phil
You said that somewhat best, much better than me. I think the one word I would overlay on top of that is intentional as well.
Michael
Yeah, intentional encouragement.
Phil
Actually making a choice in designing how you’re going to do that encouragement and designing how you make those engagements work.
That was key to it. Now, some of it, it was, it went through experiments as well that each of those mechanisms I talked about was an experiment that ran for a while, and if it didn’t work, we tried something else. I was lucky that some of the, most of the, first or second experiment I ran was super successful.
But I was prepared to keep changing until we found the formula that worked.
Michael
Yes, I talk about everything in terms of tiny experiments and because if it’s tiny then there’s no fear in taking it. And if it’s too scary to take, then there’s always a smaller step as tinier experiment we can make. An experiment because experiments don’t have success or failure, they just give us data.
So if it’s tiny enough that I’m not scared to take it and an experiment that it’s just gonna give me data that removes all the fear of like doing something and seeing what happens. And even if it blows up, it’s a small explosion.
Phil
I don’t think there is such a thing as failure. It’s just failing to learn. It’s like as long as you learned that it was work, this worked or didn’t work, you succeeded.
If you didn’t take the learning, then that’s the failure. That’s that. That’s to me the perspective, at least.
Michael
That’s just about that.
Phil
But I guess what your, one of your points there was that, you’re trying to take the fear away, you’re trying to create more psychological safety and therefore taking away the word failure help can help there. I like to emphasize that we’re ultimately, we’re doing an experiment to do, to create some learning.
Michael
Yes. So thinking through what the piece that’s off here for me, so I agree. If we do something and we don’t learn anything from it and we realize, we recognize that well didn’t learn anything from that, then we still learn something. So they’re still learning there. If we do a thing, I think what my objection is what, what’s coming up for me that’s strong here is that we’re always learning. We aren’t always conscious that we’re learning. If we do a thing, we don’t consciously recognize what the outcome was, what we’ve learned from doing that, we might do that over and over and over.
Some part of us still understands what’s going on. And a lot of what I help people do is make those unconscious learnings conscious, making what’s invisible, visible.
Phil
And that comes back to that phrase intentionality to me. It’s like, I’m intentionally aiming to learn this and if I feel, if I don’t learn that, then maybe I learn that did the wrong experiment, but if I don’t, if I don’t survive the learning intentionally from it, then that’s when I probably kept going down the wrong path.
Michael
Yes, intentionality, always critical. And one of the, this is one reason that a key piece of the experiment for me is doing the reflection afterwards of, Hey, what does this mean? What did I learn explicitly asking that so that we always are looking at that examining and then what does, how does that affect, what does that mean for what the next experiment might be?
What other easy ways to get started in helping people feel safe and empowered, would you suggest for people who are realizing that their environment is nothing about safety or empowerment or maybe only a little, and they want to so encourage that to grow?
Phil
The really hard thing is to build relationships you have to show vulnerability, but showing vulnerability is risky. Humans build relationships through kind of showing that little, just giving a little bit and then getting it reciprocated. Someone else shows a note a little bit, which is why I like to bootstrap that by showing that little bit in a safe way for them.
As an example, I don’t want to go down the angle of the cliches of go to the pub, go, out with people like that can be also misconstrued. Like it can be, quite gender biasing as well. Like going for a beer, two men is not misconstrued. If you go for a beer with a female colleagues that can be misconstrued, so then you start limiting the options and you start coming down to going for a coffee and it’s like, but it feels like forced socializing then.
And I don’t think that helps. I always, I genuinely feel like it comes down to creating the conditions of these and modeling what great behavior looks like. You know, modeling how to, how to do these things like show up and do it yourself as the leader. Don’t expect other ones, other people to do it.
Go first, I think is the phrase that someone that one of the big thought leaders, uses. Like model what you, how you, want people to show up in a way that makes it safe. Like, heck fail in front of them yourself could sometimes be the easiest way. It’s like, let them all rush you and then cool.
Yeah. Okay. Now, let’s go and now we’ve got that all dealt with we can rip the bandaid off and move on. Make your, show yourself to be human really. I guess, is what’s really behind that because it is all about connecting on a human level. That’s where I find is the most important parts, and creating that environment that allows people to show up as fully imperfect humans.
Michael
I like this. This takes us back to where we were early on was anyone can show up to any meeting and say, I’m a little distracted today. If I appear to not be so engaged, I’m not as engaged as I usually am.
I’ll be better tomorrow or don’t even have to say it. Think about where it’s gonna go. I just want you to know I am not as engaged today.
Phil
There’s a book that I think it was a podcast a while ago I listened to that was a parenting one, about parenting and, spousal relationships, you say.
And there was a technique that was talked about how this person with their partner would basically say, I’m on a one today. To kinda let their partner know that they are really low, they’re not feeling motivated. They haven’t, they just haven’t got it in on them today. And if the partner said, well, I’m kind of on a six, but okay, today’s my day to pull it outta the pan and to carry it.
And knowing that like we’re, there’s gonna be days where he goes the other direction and that’s okay. And kind of just having that, some way, some code of being able to get it across that, I’m down here, I’m asking for some help. And a simple numeric skill can be an even simpler way of, than saying I’m not feeling good or whatever else.
As a way of sort of saying, you know, can you pull it out today and cover for me ’cause and tomorrow it’ll probably be the other way around and I’ll get you then. And knowing what that, just having that system I think is powerful.
Michael
Yes. Something similar I found to be really useful is to start meetings or conversations with this.
Each person says one word that’s true for them. Right? Then this is, it seems like it would be super scary ’cause you’re asking them to be super vulnerable, but everyone can do the socially acceptable thing of I’m good. And some people will be a little more vulnerable and say, I’m distracted. Some people will go all the way and say, you know, my dog died this morning. I’m having a really hard day. And over time everyone opens up a little more. And even if they never, even while that’s happening, even on that first time, it gives each person a little insight into whether they’re a one or a 10 or somewhere in between.
Phil
Yep. That actually reminds me of how I behave in meetings.
So in the old world where we were all in the same room, you’d go in, you’d sit down, you’d have a bit of chitchat at the start, and then when everyone arrived, you’d start the meeting. Now in the virtual world, too many teams turn up and then sit there silently until everybody’s there. I don’t do that. I have the chitchat virtually because to me it is no more uncomfortable someone arriving into the virtual room as it is them walking through a physical door that they join halfway through a conversation.
That simple again, human interaction or where you are not in that formal right, we’re in the meeting, we’ve gotta follow the agenda. Just helps build relationships and get everyone much more relaxed.
Michael
Yes. And it helps people remember that are there living beings on the other side of all those little squares?
In person, we feel their energy, we feel their presence. We know that’s, or we’re more aware that that’s a human being. Virtually there’s another filter or many more filters in between, and it’s harder to remember sometimes that still here on the other side of this moving 2D flat thing is a living human being who is hours different in time zone from I am at the end of his day where I’m starting mine and isn’t necessarily at the same level of energy or in the same place or all sorts of things may be different for him than it is for me.
Phil
Yeah. And I think because I’ve been working this way so long, I’m so relaxed.
Like I remember working virtually when we didn’t have cameras and so like I got used to just interacting purely on voice. Now where I’ve got cameras, I’ve now reached a much more rich level of interaction than I got so used to that it feels great for me, but I know for many, they’ve gone the opposite direction from all in person to, you know, losing the fidelity, over the last four or five years.
And yeah, it makes it more challenging.
Michael
Yes. And also less challenging for people who have a harder time being around people, whether that’s being around people takes energy rather than gives it, or I feel awkward around people for any number of reasons, or I just don’t feel like being around people right now.
Phil
And you know what? Like, that’s the interesting thing. We, could probably start throwing in words like introvert, an extrovert here, which get very vastly misused.
Like I am very much an outgoing personality, like pretty gregarious, but I’m actually an introvert because being around people drains me on one-to-one. I’m about level on my own my energy goes up. In a group, it drains me. I enjoy being drained, like I go and speak at events and this sort of thing, and I love it, and I’m a big character on the stage, and then I come home and I need my cave time.
My wife’s the opposite. She’s a shy extrovert. She gets all of her energy from being around other people, but she’s relatively quiet in the room. And so there’s really a two by two there that most people are used to the stereotypical, outgoing extrovert and shy introverts. But understanding and you know, that’s one model and one way of looking at it, but like this understanding the person and you can use some of these models to get an idea and then think, how do I adapt to showing up with them?
Michael
Absolutely. And those are all reasons that I stopped using introvert extrovert and talking about the underlying, the more fine level details of what tend to get rolled up into those two terms are. To gain energy or lose energy from being around people. Do you enjoy talking to people or not?
I know extroverts who have to around people to get energy and never want to talk with them. They lived their whole life in a coffee shop in their own little table, ignoring everyone else that would be happy. So there’s always people around they never have to talk to any of them. That would be horrible for me and I suspect you.
Phil
I mean, I love to go and sit there for the buzz when I’m trying to write. It helps keep my brain stimulated, for example.
Michael
Yeah, you and in all these cases, reusing it very strategically and tactically both you know exactly what you’re doing it, you know how long you can be there and still it be productive for you, versus when it goes over the red line and now it’s doing more damage than it’s helping.
Phil
I mean, and I guess that brings us back to that first question of knowing yourself and kind of showing up as your true self. That knowledge of yourself takes years to refine. Like I know my energy cycles. I know when I’m gonna be productive or when I’m not gonna be productive. Like don’t ask me to do thinking first thing in the morning.
You know, everyone talks about don’t check your email in the morning, or there’s books about that. It’s like that’s the perfect time for me to check email because my brain hasn’t switched on yet. I am a true night owl, right? 11:00 PM till 1:00 AM that is my most productive time of any day ever.
But I pay for it the next day because I then have to get up, ’cause I’ve got a 6-year-old daughter and that makes it hard. If I didn’t have a child, then I could shift my entire day and I’d be able to take advantage of that productivity. But recognizing when that energy cycle is for me, and scheduling the right meetings at the right time with the right people helps me show up in the right way as well. But then you’ve gotta also recognize that similar cycle for different people and try and find the happy medium as well.
Michael
Yes, there’s always a way to bring our whole self into everything that we do in a way that is safe for us and for everyone else.
Phil
Just sometimes end up with a very complex matrix to work it out.
Michael
It could be very complex. Oftentimes yes. Even we’re just looking up for ourselves. Yep. Let alone bringing everyone else’s complex matrix, and I guess quantum computing is gonna make us all a piece of cake and AI’s gonna solve it all for us. Right? That’s what they keep telling us.
I’ll be amazed if that ever actually happens. I don’t believe it.
Phil
There’s a joke from many years ago that says, you know, if we figure out the opposite gender, if any, if anyone in one gender figures out the opposite gender fully, then the universe will spontaneously combust and recreate itself in a more complex form.
And I think that’s true. If AI ever does or quantum computing ever does, then the same thing will happen.
Michael
That’s pretty likely. I agree. We’ve spent a lot of time today Phil, talking about how to help ourselves and our teammates and our people bring their whole self into everything that they do. What’s the business value of doing this?
Phil
Better performance. Really, it’s as simple as that. Teams with psychological safety, trust, higher diversity, particular cognitive diversity perform better.
They deliver better business outcomes because they are more creative. They find better paths to success. They collaborate better to find those paths. It’s like it, it all just kind of snowballs together into we get more done better and faster. And yet it’s the exactly the things that people resist. Like when we go to a command and control style leadership, it usually because we’re in a wartime, like everything’s going wrong, and so we go to those methods that take and strip away people’s ability to turn up in their best as their best self. Strip away their ability to have safety and empowerment because we wanna move fast and we want to get stuff done and ’cause we’ve just gotta do it, which actually generally leads to worse outcomes. But it’s scary because there’s less control.
And you know, I have to admit, I’m a bit of a megalomaniac at heart if I go back to my real core psychology. So making that choice to say, I’m going to trust that it’s going to be a better outcome, and yet I’m not going to control that outcome. That’s hard. It’s a leap of faith that takes a maturity, that takes a long time to build.
Michael
How can people for whom this is super hard or even a little bit hard, just probably most of us, how can they get started on loosening that control a little bit?
Phil
It all goes back to, I would say, what we talked about earlier, little experiments. Choose an area where you don’t have to have complete control. While you are happy to let someone else take the reins, or you’re happy for the team to make a decision or an individual to make a decision, just do it.
And don’t worry too much about the outcome either, and just worry about seeing how that individual grows and how much their confidence grows, goes off. Focus on coaching that individual to make a better outcome instead of telling them to how to get there. Like most of leadership in reality is coaching or good leadership.
It’s like it’s helping people be better at what they’re doing, not telling them how to do it, or at least it is in the modern knowledge worker world where you and I operate. If we’re operating in a manufacturing plant where the knowledge isn’t in the people who are doing a lot of the work, then it’s a subtly different environment.
But even then, there’s probably a lot of knowledge in the people on the line who actually see better ways of doing things. So just engaging and having that conversation. Sometimes finding the experiment through the conversation with people like, asking them where they see things that could be done differently or better.
And if they’re passionate about it, they’ll show you. And if they’re passionate about it, they will put the work in to do it well. And so your risk goes through the floor as well. So it is choosing those experiments in a way that maybe has lower consequences in the short term, and therefore you’re allowing people to learn through that experimentation.
Just, it ultimately all comes back to you’ve gotta make a choice to do it. It’s not gonna happen if you don’t.
Michael
We’re back to that intentionality again, the thread through this whole conversation.
Phil
Indeed. And you know, I kind of reflect as I think at the end here. Intentionality is something that came in later in my career. A lot of it was bumbling through and guessing and making mistakes, and finally realizing if I actually was intentional, I could design this and make it more effective.
But before that, I didn’t know. I didn’t have the guidance in many cases to form that perspective. So I guess there’s also a little bit of don’t beat yourself up if you just look out on the bad way or a good way. Like it’s, that’s also part of the human experience.
Michael
Right? It’s just outcomes give us data. It’s not good or bad.
How do you help people find their way through all the change, uncertainty and overwhelm it seems to be life these days?
Phil
Fundamentally, as a coach, I act as a sparring partner. I help people think like I spend my time talking to people. I bring a structure, I bring a framework. I just bring another brain to engage with. I’ve literally just come out of a coaching session with a CPTO before we came on this call and we were talking about various things around how to get his team more engaged on changing some ways of working.
And so we sparred about, well, how would this work? How would that work? How do you think? Or how do you think this and that would work? What’s the real challenge you’re trying to overcome? What are you worried about? What could go wrong? And just kind of going around those loops a few times and usually by the end of one of those lots of conversations, there’s like two or three epiphanies that have come out. It’s like, yeah, this is the thing to try. This is the thing to try. Ah, this is absolutely the thing to try, and then we can think about how to prioritize them. A lot of it comes down to context.
Like I can be a sparring partner, but the person I work with has so much more contextual information than I have because they’re working in the business, whereas I’m external. So really I’m there to ask the hard questions sometimes to ask the dumb questions as well, to help them understand what’s going on.
And that usually ends up going down, how are things gonna change, what’s the uncertainty, what’s the risk, et cetera. And so it just, that’s the subject matter of the conversations usually.
Michael
So we might say that you are, you’re helping them gain in a broader perspective.
Phil
If we all go all the way back to when you introduced me, in that introduction, I help ’em think clearer, make power powerful decisions and take action that drive outcomes. And the thinking clearer is the majority of the coaching activity because they’re all senior people.
They can make decisions once they’ve got the clarity of thinking.
Michael
For people who would like to engage with you more on these topics, maybe use some of that clarity inducing that you bring in such great quantities, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?
Phil
So finding me on LinkedIn would be one approach is just Phil Hornby or forproductpeople.com would be the other place that’s my business name.
Think of it as Four Dummies, but we were replace it with product people. It’s not the number. Or you could also, if you wanted just to listen in I also have a YouTube channel that I co-host called talkingroadmaps.com, where we talk to lots of people about lots of different subjects, predominantly road roadmapping historically, we’re just about to do our second series, which is all about product operations. So listen in there and you’ll hear lots of different bits of wisdom from me and other people.
Michael
That’s great, and I’ll have all those links in the show notes. What Phil, would you like to leave our audience with today?
Phil
I think if I was to distill down what we’ve talked about, it’s create the environment for intentional help through connecting on a human, truly human level. I think that’s the thread that’s gone through it all. So that’s what’s distilled in my own mind.
Michael
Thank you Phil, for a great conversation today. Really enjoyed it.
Phil
Likewise been absolute the pleasure.
Michael
It’s been great. And thank you audience for joining us today. Phil and I are so curious to know, what helps you bring more institutionality to the relationships you build? Thanks and have a great day.