2056 – Cultivating Kindness and Courage in the Workplace with Arable’s Karl Martin

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1:05With us right now is Carl Martin. Carl, you are the founder at Arable. Your website is arable.com. That's A-R-A-B-L-E-C-O.com. Carl, it's great to have you. It's great to be here. Well, wherever we are. It's great to be wherever we are. Yeah, especially with our friend that's decided to join us on our conversation. Listen, I would love to get a quick overview of the work you do with Arable, who you work with and some of the impact you've had in the world. Well, we do leadership and culture. And what we tend to do is work with CEOs. Then when we get some trust with them, we work with their team.

1:47And then we work throughout the organization. And basically, our thinking is that there are two major faults in leadership in the world. One is that we don't teach it. So we assume people are going to somehow grab leadership by looking at other people or making mistakes. and so you know our kind of one of our basic beefs is that leadership should be on the curriculum of every school you should learn to lead yourself you should learn to lead other people very early on because it's the sticky stuff that everything flows from that's the first beef and the second beef is that if we teach leadership we teach skill sets we don't teach mindsets so we basically teach people how to do math we teach people how to uh to do profit and loss we teach people how to do who had to sell things, but we don't teach character.

2:36We don't teach people how to be true, brave, kind, and curious. And if you don't have that, you're creating a little monsters in the world by giving them skill sets. Yeah. Well, you know, and I think, you know, if we think of, you know, most of our academic backgrounds, I don't know how much of that curriculum is really focused on leadership. So it's just kind of not necessarily baked into our quest for knowledge, at least from a traditional academic standpoint. So it's understanding that this can be challenging for most of us. Yeah, totally. And what we then tend to do is freak out and then create leadership schools or masters in leadership or PhDs in leadership.

3:22And it's completely the wrong approach. What we need to do is put leadership across the whole spectrum. You want great doctors who are great leaders. You want great accountants who are great leaders. And please, Lord, we want great presidents that are great leaders, right? Please, Lord. Well, because it's fractal, right? Your behavior as a leader is going to spill out into your team's behavior. It's going to spill out into your organization's behavior. It's going to spill out into your culture's behavior. And so the quality and character of the individuals that we're following is not inconsequential.

3:57In fact, it's foundational. You wrote the book, Carl, which I neglected to mention at the beginning, The Cave, the Road, the Table and the Fire, leading from a deeper place. Do you mind just kind of giving us a little bit of a mini TED talk on the thesis of your book? yeah i mean it's basically the thought that leadership is spatial that you find leadership in different spaces and my plea is that we would find the leadership in those spaces on a daily basis so it's about creating a cadence for your life um you know work-life balance is overrated and flow is is occasionally found um but it's everything is found the other side of cadence is that the other side of habit the other side of rhythm the other side of pattern and so we're looking for four qualities true which is about you showing up authentically you showing up with integrity you knowing what it feels like to be the other side of you we're looking for brave which is about you finding the point of you what's the point of you josh and why do you exist in this world and and can you focus on that in a way that actually pushes beyond comfort zones.

5:08We're looking for kindness, which many people think, particularly in corporate America, as I travel around and teach, many people think it's a really weak thing to be kind. Actually, I think it's the strongest of all leadership qualities, the ability to prefer someone else, the ability to be empathic in a room, the ability to build a team, which isn't about self-interest. And then finally, we're looking for curiosity, which is about the ability to catalyze and grow. It's the ability for every day to be a school day. Every experience that remains unprocessed stays unlearned. So it's the experience of being able to process your days and walk and become better next day.

5:48So this is just a way of saying, I can do this in every day of my life. I can wake up in the cave and find my true. I can pause in the middle of the day and recover my brave because the world will come at you and will disorientate you. I can talk with people towards the end of the day and reflect around what's going on in the world. And then at the end of before I put my head on the pillow at night, I can leave behind some stuff that I don't want to take into tomorrow. I can extract the gleanings or the learnings from this day and become better and show up the next day with greater intention. So that's, there you go.

6:26You don't need to buy the book now, Josh. You got the whole thing. I want to, I'm hoping, Carl, you could talk a little bit more about kindness and especially, you know, thinking of kindness as being among the strongest of all leadership traits. Some might consider that to be antithetical, as you'd pointed out earlier. But how might kindness look in our role as a leader? You know, if you think about the typical, you know, schedule of activity that we might spend in a week and engaging, you know, with our core leadership teams, our clients, our shareholders, etc. Yeah, I think I think it starts with the perspective.

7:08And the perspective is that people people are your business. They're not people that they're not vehicles that help you do your business. They are your business. and that your job is not to grow followers. Your job is to grow leaders. And so as soon as you begin to realize that, you then begin to realize that the currency of building a team is trust. And trust is built by kindness. Kindness is about me saying, Josh, I see you, I hear you, and I honor you. And it doesn't mean that I let you get away with things. Niceness, nice is not kind. In fact, nice is antithetical to kind. It's the opposite.

7:50Nice is kind of brushing over problems. My kindness to you is being able to support you and challenge you. I guess, Josh, it's the way in which we raise kids as much as the way in which we build businesses. It's the same thing. When you're raising kids, I have four, so I kind of know a little bit about this. When you're raising kids, you have to create a safe place for them. And that safe place means they belong. It doesn't matter what they do. They're always going to be part of our family. We love you. We love you. We love you. But that's not the end game. The end game is never safety. Whatever they tell you, the end game is stretch.

8:26The end game is if I can help you become so safe that we can begin to provoke you, catalyze you, and stretch you into your best life, that's the end game. And so kindness is about that. Kindness is being able to say you're the most important part of our business because you're the people. you carry all the stuff of our purpose towards our vision and actually me getting the best out of you and seeing some things in you that you don't necessarily see in yourself is going to catalyze our business and it might even be the force multiplier in our business in becoming everything we might be because leadership as i said earlier is fractal like if if if in my organization if you're in your organization the person the person who touches the people doesn't carry the values doesn't carry the purpose doesn't carry the vision then give up and go home if you're the founder and you've got all these great ideas so if i want to go in and find out what a culture is like in an organization i walk straight to the front desk and find how i'm greeted am i honored am i seen are people am i looked after am i cared for and that will be the culture of the business and probably the culture of the CEO.

9:38Yeah. Carl, with Arable, you've had the opportunity to work with organizations like Sotheby's, the Office of Secretary of State for Scotland, NBCUniversal, Toyota, BBC, DHL. What are these larger enterprise level leaders, what are they concerned about do you think over the next year or two ahead um you know as you've had these intimate conversations with them what are they worried about well the smart ones are worried that the world went and changed on them and uh and therefore rinsing and repeating the same old tricks is not going to work people changed um uh the culture changed um the pandemic has a lot to do with it, but it's not the only thing.

10:31And that actually going back to first principles around things like, why do we exist? Let's remind ourselves why we exist. Going back to principles like, what are we actually shooting for? What difference are we really going to make in the world? And understanding that, you know, Peter Drucker once said, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And actually, I think that's like 50 % right and 50 % nonsense. Like I know what he was trying to say, But basically, culture and strategy sit down for lunch. You cannot do a good thing in a bad way and call it great. So your spirit, the spirit of your organization is as important as the strategy of your organization.

11:11And everything is your culture. Everything you do, everything you think, everything you say, every artifact you produce is your culture. And so people are beginning to realize that actually, well, here's my play. Every organization that's worth being part of starts off with a bunch of great and compelling values. You want to be part of it. That's why you joined. It wasn't just the money. You joined because I want to be part of this. Within one iteration of that original organization, you have created a whole bunch of vehicles. You've got to have people who have got to be paid. They've got to have a building.

11:44They've got to have structures. They've got to have systems. They've got to have policies. The problem occurs in the third iteration when we forgot the values and we're obsessed with the vehicles. So it becomes about the building. It becomes about the policies. By the way, policies are organizational scar tissue. You know that, right? Every policy you have in your organization is because someone screwed up. And the problem is you put a policy on top of a policy on top of a policy. And an organization that used to be entrepreneurial, used to break ground, used to do something different, has now become suffocated and stifled and can't do the things that it used to do so it takes smart leaders and i think this is a moment for leaders take smart leaders to be iconoclasts to go we got to break some of this vehicle stuff to get back to some of our values for two reasons one the world changed and we're stuck secondly the people we're trying to employ right now don't buy into the vehicles, they definitely buy into values.

12:44And we have to start thinking differently about the way we operate. So that's some of the stuff that's going on and people are thinking smartly. And particularly, they're buying into the relational piece to say, look, leadership is relational. To be a great CEO, it's not just about being a strategic architect or a brand evangelist. I have to be a relational magnet. I have to learn how to speak the language of my people. I have to learn how to grow them because that's the future so yeah some of that stuff is what's going on yeah uh so carl your website is arableco.com uh and so do you mind maybe sharing a little bit about the programs um that you offer what does engagement look like uh also too um it looks as that uh you do have some great resources uh on your site so if you want to share any of those that'd be really interesting to learn.

13:36And it looks like you're our podcaster as well. So the arable leader with Carl Martin. Yes, sir. Yeah, we just started the podcast. We're trying to feel our way through stuff, but no, it's great. Yeah, so what we tend to offer is, our business is very bespoke. We're very, anti is probably too strong a word, but I'll use it. We're very anti the kind of cookie cutter. Our system will work with you everywhere we go. You know, we want to go into an organization and say, so what's the problem that we're being asked to address? You know, a problem only continues to exist in the absence of the right conversation.

14:13So what's the conversation that we need to have to help you move from here to here? And how can we partner with you? So I tend to work with founders or CEOs of organizations who recognize either they've got stuck or they've got a problem they can't answer or they just need someone to. oftentimes just someone to be able to talk to that isn't their partner or their business partner because that's not that helpful sometimes so we then we would then build a program for them based generally on those four qualities true brave kind and curious which we then ladder up through an organization to be about purpose trust development and connection and and we build something that i think in the past many organizations would have said was a lot of soft skills i think people are beginning to realize that the soft skills are actually the hard skills, that they're the things that bring return on investment.

15:06And so we will help them build a system for their organization, which they'll be able to measure over time and see whether they can grow individuals who become great leaders, who lead great teams. So yeah, that's what we do. Yeah. So arableco.com, for someone that's listening to our conversation and they'd like to maybe kind of continue on to the next stop, you know, where they can learn more, or maybe a conversation is appropriate. What do they do? Or what would you recommend they do? So you just need to email us and we will have a conversation with you and probably start a diagnostic process where we say, well, what's the problem needs fixed?

15:44How can we have a conversation? Who would we best put in touch with you? And what do you need from us right now? also you could read my book because that and probably that's probably that's the way in which i nearly forgot i'm not very good at selling the book actually to be fair that's the best and simplest way to understand whether you like me and if you don't like what we're doing then then why call us but but if you if you like the cave the road the table and the fire you like the concepts that are at play there you like some of the exercises in the book by the way the book is a book you need to read with a pen because I want you to scribble all over it.

16:22I want you to disagree with it. I want you to rip it up. I want you to throw it in the corner. I want because it will provoke you to think in different ways about who you are, why you do the things you do. Why do you have the same repeated reactions in your organization? Why do you continue to make the same mistakes? How do you really build trust? So those kind of things will be things that you'll have to address when you read the book. Carl Martin, again, CEO of Arable, your website, arableco.com, the podcast, which our friends that can listen to or look up right now, it's called The Arable Leader with Carl Martin.

17:01And again, Arable's A-R-A-B-L-E. And of course, your book, The Cave, The Road, The Table, and The Fire, Leading from a Deeper Place. It's available on Amazon. And again, you can get to that from arableco.com. Carl Martin, thank you so much for the conversation. I've enjoyed it. Josh, it's been brilliant. Thank you so much.

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