The 6 Adaptive Leader Behaviors with Ebenezer Ikonne

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0:58Welcome to Built Right, a podcast by Hatchworks where we help you learn to build the right digital product the right way. In each episode, we'll deconstruct the layers of successful product development, break down popular trends, and offer real advice to help make sure your product is built right. We may not have all the answers, but we've built a lot of digital products across a lot of industries, and we've seen a thing or two. Let's get into it.

1:33Welcome, Built Right listeners. Today, I'm joined by Eb Ikone, AVP of Product and Engineering at Cox Automotive. And he's also an accomplished author of the book, Becoming a Leader in Product Development. He's got 20 years of experience in product development and is passionate about fostering joy at work, even as a YouTube channel by the same name. But welcome, Eb, to the show. Thanks for having me, Matt. Glad to be here. Yeah. And the local Atlanta guy over at Cox, where Hatchworks is located as well. But today, we're going to deep dive into what you coined the six adaptive leader behaviors from your book, Become a Leader in Product Development.

2:16So we're going to go through some of those and just checking out the book, a big thing you kind of hit on, it's becoming increasingly challenging for product development leaders to effectively lead as workplace demands continue to increase. rate of change, as we all know, is getting crazy, whether it's technology, society, business. There's a lot of pressure on leaders to ensure their groups are moving in a direction towards a common goal. And this is what some of this stuff's going to start to hit on. Like, how did you become an effective leader? But to kick us off, let's go into the first adaptive leader behavior and kind of give us an overview there.

2:53Yeah, sure. So maybe I should set some context for this as well as we go to the behaviors that we expect leaders who create a situation where adaptation happens often to put in place. And I should give some credit to that. There are several individuals whose research I worked on or read on to really come up with this, but one of them was Ron Heifetz, who has written a number of books on adaptive leadership, and his thoughts and perspectives are quite insightful. And to a large degree, these behaviors are lifted from his work, but applied specifically in a product development sort of context. And like you rightly said, the challenge today is we have a lot of situations that face us, and we go about trying to solve them sort of the wrong way.

3:48And so the basis for a lot of this adaptive approach is to really recognize that in the workplace, we all have a bunch of challenges. Some challenges are really straightforward, but some challenges are not straightforward. They might be wicked problems. They might be paradoxes. They might be situations where we have to balance tensions, right? We want to deliver quickly, but we want to deliver high quality, right? And these kinds of challenges or problems just require a different approach. But it so happens that for the most part, and I kind of blame, if you will, our academic and institutions for this, we are raised as problem solvers.

4:29And so we generally approach every challenge thinking like there is a specific solution, an answer to this question, and everything becomes a math problem. But there are just challenges that don't lend themselves to that kind of situation. So it's really first identifying that not every situation is a math problem that can be solved. There are problems that we need to dance with. And those problems that we need to dance with are referred to as adaptive challenges. There are other names for them, but in this context, they're referred to adaptive challenges. And then as leaders, our teams need to dance with these problems as we do.

5:10And so these are sort of behaviors you as a leader can adopt and encourage that can help your team dance, if you will, with the challenges that confront them. So I hope that's a good context before we get into the behavior that I don't know if you, anything you want to get there. Yeah, that's perfect context. I love the, you coined it like dancing with the problems. It's like, there's some rhythm to it. Right. And I think like, I love how you said too, there's never like one right answer like the core like i'm a strategy nerd and that's one thing with strategy is there's no perfect strategy there's no one right strategy there's multiple strategies you can take and it's really all about increasing your odds of success with an effective strategy no that makes a lot of sense all right so let's so let's dump let's jump into the six behaviors that we're looking at here.

6:05So the first one is referred to as like getting on the balcony. And that's really just attaining some distance. If you've ever been to a program or show and you're kind of in the middle of things, you might notice that you don't have a great perspective on what's going on, right? You don't necessarily see the forest for the trees. Quick break in the pod. If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you've been thinking about how to actually use AI inside your business. And that's exactly why we built the AI Opportunity Finder. It's a free tool that helps you uncover high impact, tailored AI use cases based on your business, your goals, your pain points, and your industry.

6:44No fluff, no generic use cases, just real ideas that fit your business and the rank by ROI potential. It takes about three minutes to run and it's like having your own personal AI strategist for free. If you want to try it for free, check out the link in the show notes or go to hatchworks.com backslash AI dash opportunity dash finder. So getting on the balcony is really creating the space to almost step back and reflect on what's going on and happening around you. And really not always making decisions in the heat of the battle, if I can use that metaphor, but just attaining some distance and trying to gain some perspective.

7:24And I would add that I think it's also important for leaders to not, you know, get on the balcony by themselves all the time. Like find people that that you trust, people that bring maybe a different perspective and have them join you on the balcony, the metaphorical balcony, so that they can kind of give you a perspective of what they're seeing and what they're observing. And as we all know, we all have our biases. We all have things that stand out to us that might not stand out to somebody else just because of our experiences, our history and life. So the more we can get diverse perspectives on what's going on, the better that we have or the better opportunities we have for really identifying what's in front of us and what we need to go and address.

8:15Yeah. So, Ed, let me ask you this. So you are at Cox Automotive. And for those that are not familiar with Cox, there's Cox Automotive, Cox Communications. There's so many different brands and things within that. So is there like, when you're in a large company like that, is there like a balcony using the metaphor within kind of your specific group? And then there's another balcony that's an even higher level kind of strategic one. Because all the different groups within Cox, I'm sure, kind of play together. and there's things that you have to consider throughout. Yeah. Yeah. So everybody, everyone as a leader is responsible for a scope and you need to get on the balcony that overlays the scope you're responsible for.

9:00So my scope is not the scope of Cox Enterprises. So I'm not supposed to get on the balcony and reflect on Cox Enterprises as a whole. But I have a scope within the product development group within Cox Automotive. And my job is to, on occasion with people, take a step back and reflect on what's going on. So leaders at every level in the org, for whatever scope they're assigned to, have to get on the balcony and identify the challenges that they have to address and lead through for their immediate context. And everybody's supposed to be doing this at every level within the org for sure. Yeah. And it's great context is the forest through the trees, which is so difficult.

9:48I've struggled with that in the past to, you know, trying to get out of the tactical day to day and get to the, like, why am I doing this? Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that I was just going to say, and I think that that's why it's important that we get multiple perspectives. You know, sometimes we think as leaders that I got to do it alone. and I got to figure it out by myself. I need to see the entirety of the forest for the trees when it comes to something regarding my org. And this is where I think the idea of distributed leadership is really important. And this view of leadership is not what a single individual does.

10:24Leadership is actually produced through the interactions of a people on a team. And yes, I might be the designated leader and have certain expectations that people have of me, for sure. But when it comes to leadership as a whole, everyone needs to participate in leadership. Again, getting on the balcony, we should have more people really together. Let's talk about what we're seeing. Let's talk about what we're perceiving as a group. And then that helps us understand how we should go forward. this is you know off sites and like sorry off sites and things like that you can kind of think about those things as like tangible examples of when people are trying to get on the balcony right one of the challenges sometimes with things like off sites is that people get distracted with pressing emails in the moment and so they don't give themselves the time to be on the balcony to do that reflection but when you change your space when you step out of your normal routine that's When you get off the dance floor is kind of a way to think about it.

11:32When you're no longer dancing and you get on the balcony to watch what's going on, that's what it's like. Yeah, I wish answering email was as fun as dancing. That's great. I love that as a starting point there. So let's jump to number two. Yeah, identify adaptive challenges. And I talked a little bit about that in the intro. And it's really making the distinction between what is a challenge that has a straightforward, easy answer. Maybe there's a well-known established pattern and recipe for that challenge. And really all you need to do is adopt it or maybe go hire an expert who can show you and teach you how to do those things versus a set of challenges that are really either paradoxes or tensions within the org or require like just wholesale paradigm shifts in the way you do things.

12:30Maybe you had a sales strategy that was one way, but now you want to adopt a new sales strategy, and that's a big change for everybody in the org. And adaptive challenges are tricky sometimes because they often require that we make changes to the way we think about the world, to the way we kind of act in the world. There isn't necessarily expertise that we can just go by and apply and just have it work for us. We really need to come up with our own solutions in that situation. And leaders in that context need to help people understand, like, there are no easy answers here. There are no easy answers here.

13:16We all have easy answers. We're all dying for easy answers. But there are no easy answers in this situation. We're going to have to kind of dance our ways and maybe not solve the problem, but be in a continual engagement with that problem and manage it better. Yeah, it's that whole idea of shifting your mental model. And our own human nature and human behavior acts against that so many times. You hit on the topic of paradoxes. I love a good paradox. Is there any paradox out there that you're like, no, that's one that I find the most compelling or interesting that you've encountered? Wow. I mean, we deal with paradoxes, you know, every day, like an obvious 20-fearing product development is finding that balance between building the right thing, if you will, like in the right way.

14:08And we want to get something out as soon as possible, but we also want it to, you know, stand up to scrutiny and be solid and have the quality that it needs to have. it in. So that's just a very obvious one. I think we figure out, we deal with in product development. Even if you get more tactical, there's always this tension between how much do we need to know before we start versus starting and learning as we go, right? And if you just start without any kind of trying to understand what you're going after, you waste a lot of time. But then if you spend all this time trying to fully understand what you're going after, you also waste a lot the time because you can't do either.

14:51So paradoxes show up very tactically. They show up more strategically and more organizationally as well. Yeah, that's good. I like the nod to build right there, build the right solution. That's right. Yeah. All right. Number three, what's number three? So number three is regulate distress. And this is an interesting one because we often view stress as being completely negative, but there's good and healthy stress. And if you, I use a sporting metaphor here, or if you are exercising or playing your favorite sport or doing something like that, you know, there's a stress that comes at a certain level if you're doing it.

15:34But because you're enjoying it, you know, we don't recognize it as stress. We generally recognize stress, negative stress as being stressful. And the point here is that when you take on adaptive challenges that require changes to mental models, maybe require changes to belief systems, require people learn new ways of doing their job, maybe having to put away true practices that people have developed over the years, that can lead to a lot of anxiety, can lead to a lot of nervousness, and then distress enters. So as a leader, you want to make sure that you just foster an environment where people, it's not like people won't get stressed because what you're doing is a change.

16:23So people will be stressed, but you want to regulate that and pay attention to that and be sensitive to that. And just recognize that everybody is going through this change probably at a different pace. Like one of the things I tell leaders that I talk to is remember that whenever you're leading a group through the kind of change we're talking about right now, it's quite likely that you've had days, weeks and months to process it emotionally. so they're behind you and so I'm always it surprises me that leaders expect like the people on their team to be right there with them emotionally and forget that they've had time to like deal with the emotions and they need to allow for people to sort of catch up emotionally if you will as they try to embrace the new change that's they're about to embark on yeah I want to go deeper there because it's an interesting point.

17:20I've encountered this too where to your point, you've been thinking about it for months, you know, talking to other leaders and working through the change and you have this great plan and then you roll it out to the team and they're seeing it for the first time. So they're, they could be blindsided. They could be caught off guard. They could be excited for the change. How do you help foster that in a, a positive way to where, Because really, at the end of the day, it's your people that are going to execute the change. And if they're not clear and on board, it's probably not going to be successful.

17:51Any thoughts on how to make that successful pass from idea strategy to execution? I really love the point that you made there that change only succeeds because the people who have to do the change actually do the change. So my first thought there is we should always be preparing the conditions for change. And what does that mean? Like if people trust you, they know you generally have their best interest. If you follow through on what you say you're going to do, then you're creating an environment in general that is conducive to change. And I think what happens is we often make change exercises very eventful in nature.

18:37And we just don't have an environment that's like conducive to change. We haven't created organizations where people trust. They believe that what the leadership is doing is generally in the best interest. And when leaders make mistakes, they actually say, hey, I made a mistake. And so people are, for the most part, like suspicious, like, you know, do they really have our best interests at heart? You know, it's like people walk around thinking about that. And so when a change now shows up, people are already starting from a place of, you know, distrust, as you said, or suspiciousness and wondering what's going on here.

19:19So I think as a leader, you know, we need to ask ourselves, what kind of environment am I like just fostering every single day? And then when it comes to the moment where I'm introducing a change to recognize that people are going to respond to this differently, like you said. And I need to give time for people to kind of go through the emotions. And that will differ depending on what's going on. like, look, if it's a change that needs to happen in the next 24 hours, because if we don't make the change, we're going to go out of business, then we're going to have to, you know, like people are going to have to get on board quickly.

19:54But if it's a change that's going to be something that's going to go on for a while, and we really need people to be engaged, then we need to give people an opportunity to express themselves, remaining firm that we're going to go through this change, but also respecting that each individual is probably going to go on the change at a different pace and also understanding like the change might not be for everybody as well like that's the that's maybe swinging the pendulum too far sometimes where we we feel we need to get everybody on board when you've when you've done your work to create an environment that's generally trusting and all those other things and it's time for a change and you've given people the opportunity to express how they feel and kind of work through their emotions then if there are people who you know that change you know i'm big on joy at work if there are people who that change basically erodes all the joy at work then you probably even for them want them to find something else to do too so yeah no that's a great point i don't know if this is like a good to great reference but it's like the the main job of a leader pointing the bus in the right direction getting the right people on the bus and then getting them on the right seats like that's such an important piece especially when you're changing course and doing something something different the other thing too that was interesting you talk about like good stress like and just as like a side note i feel like you need to coin a term for good stress i feel like stress has such a negative connotation like it's got to be a better word because like you mentioned that the sports example The same thing with like working out.

21:29It's painful in the time, but it has benefits over that. So we need a new word for it. That's maybe a tech one. Well, there's a new word for it. I think I might have mentioned it in the book. I think it's eustress or something like that. E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S. Generally considered as beneficial stress. But you're right on point that the fact of the matter is, You know how some words are ultimately defined by how they're used in society? Stress is a word that's primarily considered or primarily defined as a negative right now. So while there is a positive version of it, I think you and I both be challenged to get people to take it.

22:14People find it hard to think positively about stress, but there is positive stress. And like you said, working out and enjoying the workout, it's difficult. it's stressful but it's a beneficial stress for sure yeah all right let's go to number four maintain disciplined attention it's probably uh straightforward when we're asking ourselves to do things that are different that are difficult that challenge our way of being it can be hard to keep focus on those things i don't know if you've been a part of uh initiatives where you're trying to adopt something new. And it just, it seems like people are not doing it and they're coming up with a whole bunch of reasons why they can't do it.

22:59And so this is exactly what this behavior is about. As a leader, you need to keep pointing people to the work that we have to do. And I think it's Edgar Schein that says one of the ways you transmit culture is by signaling what matters most to you when you're a leader. And, you know, there are evolutionary explanations for this. There are other kinds of explanations for this. But we know that people look at the leaders in the organization in large degree to a large degree and then emulate what they're doing. You know, you may wonder why this is the case, but it is the case. And so if my leader, if something's come from on high that we're going to do X, but I observe that my leader is not paying attention to it, I probably won't pay attention to it, except I'm very passionate about that thing, right?

23:54That's the exception. But when I'm not passionate about the thing or the thing's going to introduce some stress, some negative stress into my life, I'm probably not going to be as attentive to what I need to do. And so a key point here is when we're dancing with these adaptive situations, we need to really keep people focused on the task in front of them, the adaptive work, if you mean. We need to set up the right incentives. We need to talk about it all the time. We need to let them know, help them see that this matters to us and that we want them to stay focused on it. Yeah. And I think I draw a comparison in marketing and really in leadership like you're talking about.

24:37It's that idea of repetition. And it's tough because in the marketing side, we may talk about something over and over again. And just to about the point where we're just completely dead tired of talking about it, that's when it's just starting to catch on. It's the same thing in leadership too. And I think back to previous experiences, leaders would keep harping on the same thing over and over again, but that was intentional right because you're kind of signaling to your point like where the priority is where the focus is and it's so critical because you're trying to get a large group of people focused in the same direction yeah like they say you know repetition deepens the impression and so that's just important you need to keep talking about it keep highlighting it keep tying it back to why it matters for sure so you repeat it but you also tie it back to like this is why this is so important at this time.

25:33And if we don't do what we're trying to do here, this is how it negatively potentially impacts all of us here. So we need to really take this on. And I just want to say, sometimes in orgs, we don't want to let people, we don't want to tell the truth, right? We take this kind of parent-child relationship. And as a parent, there are things you don't think your children are mature enough to handle that are important. And you keep that information away from them. And, you know, I can totally relate to that as a parent of three kids. There's just information I wouldn't share with my kids at this particular point.

26:12But in the workplace, we're not dealing with children. These are mature men and women, many, you know, making big time decisions every single day. And so if their actions can impact negatively or positively the orgs. I think it's important. It's healthy transparency, but I think too many orgs err on the side of trying to protect their people by not giving them important information they need to know. No, that one hits in my core. That's a very good point there. I like that. All right, number five. Give the work back to the people. Hopefully this is a bit self-evident. This is really saying like the adaptive work needs to be done by the people.

26:59And you hit on this, I think, when you're making the comment that, you know, you need the people who the change needs to be done by the people ultimately. And so giving the adaptive work back to the people is making sure as a leader in this context, you don't step in and say, hey, I got to make all these changes by myself. In a sense, it's not really practical, but I don't know if you've worked for a product, micromanaging product person in the past who wants to do everything by themselves. That's just not a scalable approach. People need to have a sense of ownership. This is a part of almost letting people be citizens in a way, right?

27:43Just having people be active in shaping the outcomes that we all desire. So giving the work back to the people. Another maybe important nuance here is often leaders think that it's their job to come up with the solution and then have other people implement the solution. And there are certain challenges where that might be the case, where it's a challenge with a clear technical solution and the leader might be the expert and all they need to do is tell people what to do. But these adaptive challenges, in many cases, there isn't a defined solution and we need to figure it out together. And so you want your teams to really own figuring it out together and really taking ownership of the work and not becoming like order takers or just following instructions on an instruction sheet.

28:42Yeah. Any examples in your past experience, whether that's Cox or other places, where either you've seen that done effectively or maybe not so effectively, kind of giving the work to the people and where it either worked or didn't? Yeah, I think product development is a great example of this because the whole thing about product development is you're trying to provide a product of some sort that helps somebody do something they want to do. So every product in the world is really an enabler. It helps somebody meet a need of theirs ultimately. Like the product in of itself is not what they desire ultimately.

29:23What they desire is something else in that product to use jobs to be done. Framing here enables them to do the job they want to do. But in understanding what the right product is, there are really two big schools out there. We have a school where you have some very senior product people. And they make all the decisions on what the product is going to be. and then they have a team that just implements all of their decisions. And that's an example of not giving the work back to the people because a lot of product development is adaptive work. We don't know exactly what's needed. We need to talk to people and learn and iterate over what's done.

30:08So the great examples that I've seen is leaders who connect their teams with people that have problems, give them all the support, all the resources, all the funding, and say, you own developing and delivering a solution for this customer in this situation. This is your adaptive challenge to own, team. I'm here to provide support, provide guidance, provide resources, maybe contribute where it makes sense, but this is yours to own versus I'm going to decide maybe in an ivory tower what the solution is and you're going to implement it. Yeah, so many parallels in the product development space there.