2093 - Elevating Leadership Through Authentic Conversations with FirstHuman’s Richard Atherton

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1:05With us right now, it's Richard Atherton. Richard, you are the co-founder and your partner with First Human. First Human is found on the web at firsthuman.com. Richard, it's great to have you. Wonderful to be here, Josh. Yeah, looking forward to it. Yes. I should also point out that you are the host of, or you're involved in a couple of podcasts. The first one is called The Being Human Podcast, where one can be inspired by extraordinary leaders telling their stories. And then as well, this is a really interesting podcast. Looks like you just do in seasons. It's called You Should Read This. A lot of really fascinating books that you take on.

1:49So anyway, Richard, tell us just a bit about what being human is. Not the concept, the actually what you do. Well, okay. So we'll start with Being Human, in the podcast being human in the podcast was born of a sometimes of a frustration about what it was okay to talk about in the business context you know there were certain certain limits on what it was uh acceptable to get into uh and i i wanted to blow that open i wanted to be okay to talk about how people's childhoods might affect how they're showing up in the workplace we might want want to talk about spirituality in a work context. Yeah. So these, uh, I'm giving facial expressions shy away from, I wanted to talk about squarely in a, in, uh, within the, within the frame of business.

2:41And so that was what being human is about. What does it mean to be human at work and life? Uh, and so, yeah, that was the genesis of the show and yeah, it's more than 300 episodes now. Yeah. Is that a topic like some of the things that you're talking about? How do many workplace cultures view those types of conversations? Yeah, well, there's a spectrum of acceptability around those topics. And some organizations will be much more open to more deeper inquiries, deeper conversations in the workplace than others. uh yeah so it but i i believe that we're uh we're changing slowly in fact i just had a conversation yesterday on my podcast uh with uh j jacob who is the leader of an institute called the economics of mutuality which spun out of a think tank from mars corporation and a big theme in the work that they do is this notion of the workplace as a healing space, right?

3:51So the world is changing. That's not necessarily what one thinks of historically. Exactly. Yeah. And these guys have got their own private equity arm. Their biggest client is Mars, as well as some other major corporations. And they're talking about healing in the workplace, right? I'm not sure you would have expected that to happen even five years ago. So yeah, I think the conversation is opening up. Yeah. Okay. Well, what is your mission? My mission in terms of the business that we do is to, we want to create a 1 million leaders. We want to inspire the lives of 1 million leaders. that's the mission of first human uh through the podcast uh through our coaching programs and through our in-house development uh initiatives that we do with companies that that's our mission we believe that uh the way to a better world is through better leadership and that's what we're all about as as a company okay well let me give you the floor for a moment and imagine that you're given kind of a little, you know, three to five minute mini TED talk, if you like.

5:06And what there's an audience of leaders listening right now. Let's tell them what they should probably be thinking about, especially now looking at the calendar, the year ahead, some interesting movement, I will say, in the globe and particularly for us as Americans. But all of that said, even given the many question marks that float over our head about maybe things that we can't control, let's talk about as leaders, you know, the impact that we can have. Okay, so let's talk about it from three aspects. Yeah. And the first of all, those is listening. So when we talk about leadership, we talk about the ability to listen and to listen generatively.

5:55and I'll come on to what that means. We also talk about the importance as leaders to expand possibility, no matter the context that we face. And thirdly, something that we talk about is the notion of committed speaking. So let's first of all talk about generative listening. And that starts with us being able to drop our filters. Now, right now, especially in the US, I can imagine either side of the political divide you're on, you're going to have a story about the other person based on their political persuasion, based on who they voted for. And what's critically important, and this is in our personal lives and absolutely within the business, is for us to drop those assumptions about that other person, what motivates them, what they value, what they want to have happen in the world and go into dialogue unfiltered, just really getting to what it is this person has got to say, what's important to them and generate them as somebody with positive intent, who wants the best for the world, who wants the best for the business you're in and take on that orientation as a leader and new things will show up for you.

7:09fortune as as you practice that art you're going to experience other people differently you're going to start seeing the world differently and ultimately you're going to create a greater sense of rapport and connection with the people that you lead in your business which is going to be the fuel for greater productivity it's going to be the fuel for greater morale it's going to be the field of greater innovation dot dot dot so so listening we see is absolutely central uh and yeah as you alluded to earlier especially right now where you guys are out of the states uh never more important uh so the second thing i talk spoke about is expanding possibility everybody has an imagination whether they like it or not everybody is creative whether they tell you well or not and what's so important for us to do as leaders is to engage in speculative conversations about what might be.

8:09Starting with a blank space and simply asking people what do you see as possible? What do you see as possible here right now? Let go of the circumstance, let go of the story you have about this set of circumstances and let's inquire together what could be and i think that's of critical importance as a leader because there's always a place to go yeah i think what you're talking about um it's i feel like it's easier said than done i mean because what we're talking about, I think it's just like how we are just ingrained to, I mean, you know, all we have are our stories. In fact, you know, one thing I've been quite interested in is developing, I think what you're talking about is a non-reactive personality that we don't generally react to events.

9:11We react to our own thoughts about those events. And that's why, you know, someone could hear something like, well, I support this political candidate. And the other person just instantly flips out. And it's like, wait a minute. You know, yes, there's probably a bunch of assumptions that you could make. And maybe that is the story, right? Or maybe there's something else. These are really, I got to be honest, these are tough things to, I think, for people to even onboard this idea of being able to let go of such deep emotional meaning that we put on some of these things. Any further ideas on this?

10:02Because again, this is a challenge. Yeah, I mean, it really is a challenge and in some ways you could say that leadership is simply what people call people who engage in self-mastery right if i if i manage myself i show up as a leader and people experience me as a leader and yeah of course it's this is something that's extremely difficult to do uh in the first instance like anything uh but we can develop a habit we can develop that muscle we can get better at catching our internal dialogue befriending it sometimes we talk about letting go of that dialogue but another way to think about it is is to befriend it and say hey I hear you I get that you have that opinion about that person because of how they voted it's okay and I'm going to listen and I'm going to inquire deeply into what's important to this person and so we we indeed find it difficult and we indeed can develop the ability to refriend that inner voice and not ignore it not not resist it uh but ultimately move beyond it uh and uh yeah i think this is a this is a great skill there's a there's a brilliant book by written by a guy called David Hawkins called Letting Go.

11:27The book's called Letting Go. And one of his students, who was a partner in an accounting firm, was so inspired by this principle of letting go and the skills that he'd learned through working with David Hawkins, that he left and trained other people. And one of the first clients he worked with was an insurance company. And he taught all of the insurance reps this art of letting go of that internal voice 30 % top line increase in revenue in 12 months as a result of the agents learning that skill. And so it's critical in business to be able to master our internal voice. No joke. No joke. Okay. Well, how can being human, the the the car from sorry excuse me first human uh uh we being human the podcast probably going to help a great deal as well yeah but but do tell me how first human actually works like how do you work with your clients how do you make this change happen yeah so we work in a number of ways we work in one-to-one coaching uh where we'll as the don't suggest we'll just take an individual and work with them over time, usually three to six months, and apply the same set of principles in working with them.

12:48We will work with clients on structured leadership programs where we'll take a cohort of maybe 15 people. And again, we'll work with them over a period of months in discrete sessions of two to three days off site, usually where people get to go deep on their whole orientation to leadership, their whole worldview. We go deep with people. We get into how they tick. And we equip them to create a new version of themselves as leaders and to show up very powerfully in the workplace. And like I said, a big theme of that is listening. A second aspect of that is the ability to engage in speculative conversations for possibility.

13:34And the third aspect of that, which I know a lot of business leaders really struggle with, and that's this notion of committed speaking. How do I, as a leader, powerfully commit to an outcome? And how do I elicit commitment from others? And so that's a major focus. Yeah, yeah. Well, how long does transformation take place? So we tend to work three to six months when we work with a cohort of leaders. And, yeah, we start to see shifts in the first few months, generally, of people working with us. Yeah, and some of the stories have been remarkable. We helped one logistics firm over a period of a couple of years working with us close a$400 million profit gap, which they needed in order to IPO.

14:27and the CEO of that company put the program that we did with them at the center of that transformation of the company. Yeah. Do you work with just enterprise level companies or who do you typically work with? We work with all level of companies. So we work with some very large companies. We work with, we're currently working with a medium-sized engineering firm. We occasionally work with solopreneurs on a one-to-one basis. In fact, we're working with somebody right now who's building a brokerage business. So yeah, we work across the spectrum, yeah, across every imaginable sector. So yes, it's a broad swathe of clients we have.

15:10Yeah. Hey, let's talk about your podcast here in our final minutes or so, because someone's in our podcast app right now. Certainly love to make a quick connection here. The Being Human podcast. Tell me a bit about that. And again, I know that, again, the other one you should read this is a seasonal podcast. You just did. You had seven episodes in the first season, six in the second season. Listen, what I would just say to a friend is on that one. Just go look at the book titles. And if you are interested in books like Thinking Fast and Slow and Anti-Fragile, I mean, And these are, oh gosh, and then in the second season, I'm fascinated.

15:51The Man Who Broke Capitalism, Nazi Billionaires, The Tyranny of Merit, really, really fascinating, deep kind of concepts and books to talk about. You don't mess around in the shallow waters much, do you? I guess you could say that, John. But tell me about your main podcast. Tell me about the podcast. So yeah, being human, it's been fascinating journey that we've been on with the show. And again, you just use the word deep. Yeah, we tend to get deep with our guests. And we've had a number of people in the field of trauma recovery, trauma release work. And that's been very important to me in my life.

16:39and my ability to expand as a human being is to release a lot of that early trauma. We all carry it to some degree. And it's a choice for all of us whether to go there and work on it. But to the extent that we do, we're rewarded. And so we've had a number of experts in trauma recovery, all coming at it from slightly different perspectives. But that's been fascinating. We've had a number of economists on the show who are thinking differently. about how we orient ourselves in capitalism. The one I mentioned yesterday, the guy who's out of Mars, who's looking at the, not the triple bottom line, the quadruple bottom line, thinking about how we can measure the value of businesses, not just in terms of their human capital, but the contributions they're making to the community outside, their social capital, natural capital, and finally, financial capital.

17:36But yeah, so a more holistic look at capitalism. We've had a number of psychologists on the show looking at looking at how we tick and how we can use that to our advantage as leaders. And of course, leadership itself as a specific topic. That's been fascinating to delve into on the show as well. Great. And for our friend that they're ready for conversation, they'd love to see if maybe First Human might be a good solution for them, their organization, the work that they're doing. What are the next steps there? And I failed to mention, again, you worked with some big brands, Adidas, BBC, the Olympics, Volkswagen, Heineken, just to name a few.

18:20And so PwC, Merck, UNICEF, the list goes on and on. But what's the next step there? Yeah, I mean, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Richard Atherton. You'll find me on LinkedIn, firsthuman.com. You can get in contact with us there. You can put right into my calendar and get a one-to-one session there. So, yeah, I mean, I'm easily found and I'm open to conversation. Love it. Richard Atherton, again, co-founder of First Human, found on the web at firsthuman.com. And, of course, the podcast, The Being Human Podcast, which you can search for right now on your podcast app. Richard, thank you so much for joining us.

19:00Thank you, Josh. It's been fantastic. Thank you.

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