Radical Humility is The Leadership Strategy for Stronger Teams and Open Culture

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. This is Jeffrey Am Roche here with the holistic leadership future of work and education and health care and all other aspects that we care about here along with my cohost. He's back, and it's his birthday. Doctor Travis Hearn is with us, and so happy to have Travis back. And we are so excited, to be here this morning and, this day with you. We are truly blessed to have an amazing guest with an amazing story. And so I wanna share with you that today we have Urs Konig. He is a seasoned leadership expert, has his PhD, like doctor Hearn, and also his MBA. He is a military peacekeeping commander, an ultra endurance champion. He does like black coffee. That that will be up for discussion. Loving brother, son, and dad, and best selling author. I also wanna just add that when you, as you will hear us talk about today, ours is a has a message of radical humility. And and today, we will further dive into that to understand his experience, particularly as a UN military peacekeeper and NATO military peacekeeping commander, certainly at a time in our world, where I think we need more peace. And so so, fortunate, Urs, to have you here with us. And, obviously, I'm sure Travis is gonna have a lot to add as a marine, into this conversation, but what I will say is, you will see and probably maybe have read, Travis is unique, in in how he approaches everything as a leader. And so, blessed to have him here with us as well. Or as I wanna start out in understanding how you approach radical humility. You know, I have not yet had the chance to finish your book, but I'm super excited to dive in, as my next book. I had promised somebody I've gotta read another one first. And so, but I'm so interested for you to share that. And what what compelled you, to to dive into that topic based on your experience? Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me, and happy birthday, Travis. Good to be with you this morning. So I've always been drawn to humble people in general. So in my ultra cycling career, people, competitors who let their legs do the talking versus their big mouth. So I will always on a personal level was drawn to that. And then when I deployed to my first peacekeeping mission in my fifties in twenty seventeen to the Balkans, and then the second one a year or two years ago for the UN in the Middle East. Counterintuitively, going back into the military, what we all often think as top down command control actually showed me that the best leaders, the best commanders I had displayed deep humility. They had great self awareness. They understood their strength and weaknesses and then hired, you know, hired or commanded their team around them accordingly. So deep self awareness. They built meaningful relationships with people up and down and across the peacekeeping force, relationships they can then rely on when crisis hits. So, and they they had a growth mindset. So, you know, mistakes and failures will always happen. You know, I don't buy the frankly BS. Failure is not an option. You know, it's it's just they always happen. And so so going back into the military really sort of opened my eyes to the importance of humility in leadership. And so then when I came back two years ago, I dove deep into the research around humble leadership and combined that with my own experience, you know, also in the ultra cycling world and then, you know, wrote the book based on that. Yeah. Urs, I I wanna follow-up on some of that stuff. You and I, like, we have very similar stories. For me in Iraq two thousand ten with the Marine Corps. And my passion my leadership passion drives from the full spectrum of leadership where you've seen at one end of the spectrum, you see leadership that could potentially cost life. And then at the other end of the spectrum, you see leadership that can save lives, that does save lives. And when you look at that spectrum, you see on the far that that can save lives spectrum, those leaders are humble. They fail. They try. And they they they do things in a way that's just different. And in in your book, you talk about failure. You have a chap chapter five is on is on a failure that you had, in your ultra cycling career. And you break down the ABCD model. And I was what like, I it's it's amazing. But I I want you to describe that that that failure that you had and then that and how you created that model for for overcoming failure. So yeah. So I almost died during the race across America. That's a nonstop transcontinental bike race. And so I was diagnosed with severe pulmonary edema. You know, it wasn't it wasn't pretty. So I failed. And I had poured my heart and soul into this race. I love was living and breathing Ram. So I was nothing more I wanted than to finish the race. I ended up in ICU four days in. So what happens when we fail? What happens when we fail publicly? And this was pretty public. You know, I raised money for charity. I had ten crew support me. We are flooded with strong emotions. I was flooded with strong emotions. Shame, embarrassment, guilt, regret. So then when we're flooded with these strong emotions, it's really hard to learn from our failures. And it took me a long time to actually learn, but the a, b, c, d model that you referred to really helped me. And so if I may quickly go through that, so the a is adversity, sort of failure, right? So I didn't finish my lifelong dream, almost cost me my life. B is we have beliefs about our failures. So I believe I let everybody, everybody down. I believe that, you know, I let the whole world down. And then we have c, consequences, emotional consequences. I've talked about that. Right? Guilt, shame, embarrassment, regret. And then the key is the fourth, the d, to dispel the unrealistic beliefs and emotions. And that is actually getting out of our hearts into our heads through reframing. So reframing can help us to go from the unhelpful frame of being flooded by our emotions to actually learning from the experience. And so talking through my crew members, my family, my counselor, doing a lot of deep introspection through journaling, I was slowly and over time able to reframe and dispel the unrealistic beliefs and emotions that I had and see this as an important learning stepping stone in my ultrasonic career. So I, you know, I did a lot of sophisticated tests with high altitude medical researchers and learn Actually there's still a paper. There was an academic paper published even about my case. And because I was able to learn all these lessons and go back and dig deep and and reframe, I then actually had the most successful ultrasacling season the next year with numerous course wins on records. That would have not happened if I didn't experience the failure the previous year because I wouldn't have implemented some of these learnings. But let me be crystal clear. It's easy now to talk about this, you know, and go through the framework. It was emotionally super taxing. Like, let's not kid ourselves. Nobody likes to fail, period. You know, we're deeply loss averse as human beings. The question is, do we re re like, do we, stay in this unhelpful frame of being flooded by the emotions or do we choose to reframe and learn? So that's and, you know, it goes on to this day. We have to practice this our whole lives in every single day. Yesterday, you know, I've been very vulnerable here. I gave a speech. It was okay. It was not my best speech. And so now I need to go back. And so what can I do better next time? Okay. So it's something that happens ongoing, and we constantly have to push ourselves to do the reframing. Such a powerful message there. I wanna dive in a bit more into the radical humility framework. You know, we sit here, at least in the United States, at probably the most challenging time of culture in the workplace. Most surveys suggest that I've seen over seventy percent of the workforce say their culture is the worst. Many are saying it's not psychologically safe and healthy, which we'll get to a little deeper, in in a in a few. But what is the radical humility framework from how you've developed it? And how have you seen in your work when organizations implement it? How does that change culture in a way that is better for everybody? So I the framework has three legs to the stool. The first one is deep self awareness. So, you know, and when people think of humility, that's what they often think of. Like I see myself accurately, right? In line without a see me. And by the way, it doesn't mean that we're overly modest either because that is not accurate either. So as I have deep self awareness, it's also is the having humility to know that I can't do everything, but I can do almost anything. I put my mind. So it's a, the the issue of focus. So deep self awareness is the first leg. The second one is building meaningful and collaborative relationships with our team members. So that's leading relationally versus simply leading by expertise. And so, you know, when I went back into the military after having been out for twenty two years, I was I was out for twenty and I rejoined. My military knowledge was outdated, so I had to work my butt off to get up to speed. But in the meantime, I still had a command. I have people reporting to me. So my way out was to lead relationally, to be very clear with my team that, you know, I have to learn this, I have to learn that, but build collaborative relationships with with my team and with people up and down across the peacekeeping force. So that's step. The leading relationally on a team individual level. And then the third piece is what you referred to earlier. It's building a fearless culture, a psychological safe culture. And then and undergirding all of this is the growth mindset, which, you know, we sort of touched on earlier when we talked about the failure. So self awareness, lead relationally, individually, and then lead relationally in terms of the culture. Those are the three legs. And when that or is that like, those those are three legs that I think are are just foundational for to build culture in general. And, like, the interesting thing for me, like, when you came back in after twenty years and the world has changed, the the economics the global economy has shifted completely. And you came back in in a peacekeeping mission in the military. And so when when you jumped in when you jumped back in in a leadership role, how did you get people to buy in to that to that framework? Well, I lifted. I mean, literally, I I I lifted. I did it by example. I mean, it's just you know, and it's all this stuff, it's so simple, but it's not easy. Like, I would literally I had my deputy commander. We deployed. I have never met him. He's in the mission already. He's a key person for me. Same with the warrant officer. The first thing I did, I took him for lunch. Something very human, non hierarchical, get to know them, their family, their background, their plans after the mission, their expectations of me as their commander. So, so that's I lifted like that. And so, and I was very, you know, and by by the way, you know, I wrote the book on humility. I made plenty of mistakes. I made plenty of mistakes in in my leadership. There's no question about it. But I was very transparent about my, you know, my gaps and that I needed to fill them and that I needed their help to get me there. So, and at the same time, let me be crystal clear. Humility is no replacement for competence or skill. It is not. I was working my behind off to get up to speed, and everybody knew that and saw that. And so so that was, that's that's important, thing to mention as well. You know, we I don't advocate for humility because we want to be nice or liked. I advocate for it because the world today demands it. You know, Jeffrey, you were mentioning those surveys. You know, it's crystal clear that all the engagement surveys show that our people, especially the younger generation, wants meaningful and purposeful relationships. People leave they don't leave jobs. They leave bad bosses and dysfunctional teams. So and and and my whole thesis is that a humble leadership approach can be a way out of this. It's, you know, it's so interesting you say that. I wanna kinda hone in a bit on that because, obviously, in the work that you do, you're also committed to this idea of providing, you know, a blueprint to develop a new type of leader for a new type of world. And yet to your point, right, we're seeing so many people leave jobs because of bad leaders or bad managers, and we all know there's a difference between a manager and a leader. I'm curious, in all the work that you've done, you know, being on four different continents, you know, being in a peacekeeping role at probably some of the most stressful environments that anyone could ever experience, doing peacekeeping mission work. What were some of what would you say were some of the highlights of some of the kind of best leadership examples that you saw that that you feel would would would help someone understand where they could change who they are today in the same way to take care of their people, the people they're leading. So I write in the book about the best commander I've ever had. So I was sitting in his office, and he opened the meeting with these words. He literally said, Urs, I love you, and this is not even close to being good enough. It may drink in my chair. And from that day forward, I turned myself inside out because I know he was right, by the way. I delivered some hard work. But here's the deal. This is what I call tough end results tendrum people. If he would have yelled at me, if he would have belittled me, I would have tuned him out. I would have, you know, whatever, just, you know, he's just a jerk. Right? But because I knew that he cared for me, and obviously it wasn't just him saying that in the moment, we've built a strong relationship for the last six months. He understood me. He knew what I wanted. He, he we did career planning together. The whole Shazam. So he saw me as a whole human being. And because of that, I really was able to hear his feedback and act on it. And that's, you know, in terms of, advice for folks, being tender on people, building deep relationships gives us license to be tough on results. Okay? Our feedback is much more likely to be heard or acted upon if our people know that we actually care for them. And by the way, sometimes the most loving thing is we can let we need to let somebody go. You know, there's again, it's tough on results, tender on people. It's what I call the ultimate yin yang of humble leadership or leadership in general, actually. So this is a, this is certainly one great example. You know, one of the things I did in terms of systematically building relationships, I was in my mission in the Middle East, I was promoted to Swiss senior representative, even though I was a relatively low ranking officer as a captain. And so I needed to build relationships with people in the mission fast and so you know, to to get anywhere. And so I made a point. I literally pulled out the org chart of the mission and identified about thirty people, including everybody at the senior senior leadership level who I knew I needed to build relationships with. And then I got them Zooms and Teams meetings just to get to know them. No business agenda upfront. Introduce myself, learn about them, their expectations of me as a senior. And because I've built those relationships upfront with no business agenda, you know, I write about that in a book. I was actually able to be read tough on results and get some results from our offices in Syria, which they needed, even though I was a low ranking officer. So, you know, again, we don't build relationships or be humble because we want to be nice or liked because we it drives trust, it drives engagement, communication, all that stuff. So, these are two examples I can think of. Yeah. And and that's I mean, building relationships quickly and genuinely is difficult in the best and best of times, and you had to do that in a austere environment to say the least. And, like, a lot of tea a lot of so so from my experience, what I've seen is, like, okay. When when you start to build teams, you start to build relationships. It's maintaining those relationships and maintaining that pace that becomes difficult over time. So when you talk to leaders and when you you you you build teams, what are some of your tips for being able to to sustain that? Because relationships are great, but a lot of lot of leaders come out of the gate like, yep. I'm gonna be I'm gonna follow what Uris is is talking about. I'm gonna be this humble, leader. This rad this radical community is great. And then six months from now, how do you keep up that pace? A lot of people, they get out of the gate really quickly. So how do you do that? Right. So that's so this is a great question and I probably don't have the simple answer because it is very hard. Okay. So there's no so, but a couple of things. This is basic stuff. With your immediate team, the famous one on one meetings, which everybody talks about, Very few people actually do it. The research shows every ten days, thirty minutes, one on one. You know, because we have seven day weeks, we should probably do it every week. So I actually did this, you know, and one of the only officers in the mission actually who had regular one on ones with their team members. So that's one. Another thing, you know, you can do fun. One of things, which I also do, I get the team together and everybody shares something they're passionate about for thirty minutes. Okay? So and so what happens? We learn, you know, it doesn't matter what it is as long as you're passionate about it. What happens? We get to know each other on a deeper level. So injecting from time to time. So little things like that can really, really build a team. But then you're absolutely right. I need to, from time to time, actually pull back your chart again. And, you know, that's based on Ed Schein's work, who wrote, you know, humble leadership many years ago, actually. You you, you probably have it on your bookshelf, right? So you, you, you draw a relationship map and you assess the relationships you have with your peers, your directs, your bosses. What is it? What out of five? What should it be? And then, you know, have some gaps, and then you make another effort and and reach out. So it's a it's an ongoing thing. There's no question about it. And everybody's always too busy. Always too busy. Your time as a leader is your most important currency with your people, your most important currency. So you need to spend it well. You need to spend with those that matter, your team. I you know, when leaders hear this, I hope they really take it to heart. Right? Because to your point, there's so many people hurting in the workplace, and I always say that leaders have a make it or break it moment. And, today, there's such a need for truly more more make it moments than than, unfortunately, there's just too many break it moments. And so I think, you know, you just reach such a deep, level for so many people. You know, obviously, in a lot of your work, and you alluded to it before, you have this, passionate desire to really create a psychologically healthy and safe culture. You know, this is something that's been around for a long time, but it really hasn't been talked about as much in the workplace. And it's also not as easy, obviously, to to do it. Right? I mean, it it takes a lot of work. Doctor Vivek Murthy, our surgeon general, has said that this is probably the greatest challenge in the workplace in a manner than we've ever experienced before. And he's gone on to explain that from a mental health perspective, the crisis that we're facing at home and the crisis we're facing in the workplace have actually now reached the same levels, and there's research that backs this. To your exact point earlier, there's some surveys that have been done by by, several, HR related organizations, and one of them actually says sixty nine percent of individuals in the workplace say their manager has has a greater impact on them, than everything else except for their spouse or their partner, and so they're tied, which says a lot. Right? I'm curious. You know, you talked about this idea of tough on results and tender on people. And I know you've worked with some of the very largest organizations on this work from, you know, Amazon to Starbucks to Microsoft to even SHRM. When you talk with these audiences, some of them may not even be living that out, you know, based on, you know, some of the survey results. How do you help people understand that it can't just be the concept of psychologically health and safe, but the implementation and the continual reinforcement of it and measurement of it to really make sure people feel it. How do you how do you do that? So this is a big topic as you, you know, as you correctly said, and probably the hardest thing to implement and yet so important, you know, especially in the medical field. Right? Evidence over evidence. Right? So people don't speak up. Right? They don't feel safe. So there's some, you know I have a simple framework in my book, which is based on Amy Edmondson's work, on how we can shift our teams towards a psychologically safe culture. So the first step is to actually reframe failure. And so reframing failure means this, you know, I talked earlier about personal reframe. Reframing failure for our team members. So I think Amy writes about a United Airlines pilot who opens every crew meeting like that. He says, I've never done a perfect flight before, and I'm going to prove it to you again today. So I need you. I need you to speak up when you see me do something wrong because it will happen, and I'll do the same for you. You know, for all of us freaking flyers, I know Travis just flew back yesterday, there's never a perfect flight. There just isn't. Okay? So what does the captain do? The captain reframes failure. He praises the messenger versus punishing the messenger. Okay? So he pocks the messenger versus shoots the messenger. So that's reframe. There's a lot more we can talk about that. In a nutshell, that's reframing failure. And by the way, reframing failure for our team members does not mean we have low standards. We can shoot for the stars and still say, we will mess up. It will happen, but we all need to speak up about it. So that's the first one. The the second is, you know, encouraging speaking up, which it was basically I just covered. There's the famous story, by Mullally who turned the Ford company around, and many people know that. But when he, first got to Ford, they were losing billions of dollars every month. Well, yeah, probably probably millions every every month, and all the dashboard signs were on green in the senior management team. Everything was going great. Seriously? We're losing lots of money. And so nobody felt safe to speak up until, you know, his then successor, Mark Fields, actually spoke up and said, oh, this is not going well. We're gonna hold the release of this one car. And everybody in the room was looking around and going, oh my god. Dead man walking. And Malawi started to clap. He clapped. He said, Well done, Mark, for speaking up. Who can help Mark with this? So people who are observing, was Mark getting fired? No. He wasn't. He wasn't speaking up. And over time, then, you know, they could actually get to work. And that the greens went to yellow and red, which was actually representative of what's really what's going on with the company. So that's the encouraging speaking of. The third piece is some you know, in a way, the easiest and the hardest, which is acknowledging and thanking. No matter if I agree with the input or what this person is saying, my first reaction always needs to be thank you for bringing this up. And by the way, leadership, as we all know, it's not the popularity content. It doesn't mean I agree, but I always ask. I always listen. I always think. If we do belittling, if we do eye rolling, you know, you can be sure next time nobody will speak up. So that's, these are the so the reframe failure, encourage speaking up, acknowledging and thanking, and then I have a section around the value of experientially learning together. So actually taking your team out of the regular environment and have them learn together and show up with vulnerability, have people feel up be uncomfortable. And so that really is a way and, you know, Travis, of course, knows this from the military as well. That's the most powerful way you can mold a team. Urs, I wanna, ask you. Where can individuals connect with you to learn more about the work that you do? And, obviously, for leaders and organizations, they they need this, and so where can they find you? Absolutely. Well, so the book is, you know, on Amazon. Everywhere is sold. Everywhere books are sold. You can find me on the web at Urs koenig, u r s k o e n I g, dot com. And, for my keynote speaking, my workshops, and, mainly on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn actually as well. Awesome. Obviously, Travis and I wanna thank you for joining us here today, but also wanna thank you for all the incredible work that you're doing and and, you know, really spreading these important messages, around reframing, around really maintaining and working towards a psychologically, health and safe environments in the workplace, and and then all aspects of leadership. And, obviously, thank you for your service as well. For all of our followers and and and everyone else, be sure to check out, this episode, as well as all the additional episodes and continue to learn, why we need more holistic leadership in every organization and as well as in our communities and, frankly, in our homes. And so, Urs, thank you so much, and, Travis, so good to have you back.