Unlocking potential: strategies to perform at a higher level

An interview with organisational development expert Roger Kastner

Welcome, Roger. Given the breadth of your experience in the fields of organisational development and leadership, let’s start with you painting a picture of your expertise and current practice. In other words, who is Roger Kastner and what does he do?

I'm an org development practitioner. I've spent my career working with leaders and teams to not only figure out what they're trying to do to achieve their business goals, but then really, how to create workplaces that allow people to thrive and find meaning in the work that they're doing. Because the research is clear. When people have meaning and are able to lean into their strengths, they perform at higher levels. And when we have teams that bring people together and have clarity around what we're doing, why we're doing it, how we're doing it, what you're doing versus what I'm doing, when we have that level of clarity, we perform at a higher level.

So, the goal of creating workplaces where people can thrive is not only do we actually get work done and achieve our goals, but when people are more fulfilled at work, they leave the office and go into their communities, go home to their families, and they're better people. They're in better moods. The world is a better place when we have people who are working within their meaning and within their purpose and getting joy out of their work. There's this quality of higher performing teams that includes workplaces where people can thrive and they go out and make a better world.

I'm also a leadership coach, so I work with individuals to help them identify what's getting in their way of achieving the goals that they want to achieve. They have the strategy of whom they want to become or what they want to be able to achieve. And then there's those blocking issues. Well, we go in there and do deep tissue massage on what those things are.

In both as an OD practitioner and as well as a coach, I've learned the solutions that work for me are not going to work for anyone else. So, I'm really facilitating a process to help the client, the people I'm working with, discover their own solutions and implement them. I can be an accountability buddy, but I'd rather that they hold themselves accountable for that.

The third thing I do is I'm a host of the What Do You Know To Be True? podcast, which is about talking with everyday people about their extraordinary talent and the meaningful impact it has on others. The goal is to get inspired by their stories, by what they've done, why they do it, how they do it, what motivates them on a day to day level to go and do that thing that they love again. Because as coaches, mentors or OD practitioners, if we understand what motivates and what brings other people joy, we can help other people do that. The people whom we're coaching, the people whom we're mentoring, we can help them identify those things that are so important to them and eliminate the things that aren't. So that those people can achieve their purpose, their potential and go and make the world a better place.

You’ve mentioned to me on previous occasions a certain degree of cynicism towards what is said and done (and by whom) in your profession. Tell me why you are somewhat jaded, and what readers of the Strategy Toolkit newsletter should watch out for.

I'm a systems guy and I'm really interested at looking at the interplay and the balance between the individual, the team, the organisation, the market, and a world perspective and how those things not only need to be in balance at their own level, but also in the interplay between them.

It's really easy for us to identify then, at the systems level and the interplay between systems, that we've got problems. There are massive issues that are going on and maybe that's always been the case, but they seem to be more exacerbated right now. And maybe that's because we're in this, you know, some people refer to it as late stage capitalism, but you see strife, at the individual level. We have epidemic levels of unwell-being, of anxiety, depression, suicide, loneliness. Not just in the world in general, but in the workplace. It seems like it's harder and harder to get work done.

Organisations are behaving in ways that are not sustainable. If you look at systems, whether it's education, business, religion, or politics, things don't seem to be working in a sustainable way for everyone concerned. The big question for people that I have, for people who are in leadership roles and in Org Development, are we supporting a status quo that is creating harm at all levels, or are we challenging the status quo to bring these systems back more in a sustainable balance?

I think that's an important question for strategic thinkers, because ultimately, if you're trying to build products and services that need to successfully land in those systems, with those teams, with those individuals, you need to understand how those elements of those systems are working and where they're dysfunctional, because that could give you an opportunity to make it better, and therefore create more value. That also brings it back into balance. Human systems want to be in balance, so it's antithetical to individuals, teams, organisations and systems to be out of balance. On the whole, some individuals might benefit from those systems being out of balance, but again, if they're unsustainable, it's not in their best interest for a long time.

Would you agree with that premise?

Let me play back a couple of themes that I'm hearing because there's a lot that you just shared. Thank you.

First is systems thinking, and I am partial to that with my engineering background. I particularly appreciated the framing that you provided from your perspective because not everyone has that breadth. Different people have different ways of looking at things. That first theme of if you're going to interact with someone in this space, in whatever context, it could be a colleague, it could be someone external, it could be something you're reading. One filter or one test you should apply to this is, are they bringing a systems mindset to this engagement? Because that would be a marker or an indicator that they are going to bring a more likely productive contribution to this engagement because we don't know what their actual relationship is.

Second is this idea of sustainability, which I tend to think of as having a temporal or a time aspect to it. Are we only focused on the short term? Let's solve a problem, or let's make a little bit of money for the next quarter, or whatever it is, or is it something that is meant to last over a period of time with some type of benefit to it. So it's almost like, what timeframe are they using? And are they actually addressing the need of something to be beneficial over a longer period of time? Because that's important in these challenges.

Then the third was the idea of innovation or that something has to get better. There is something wrong with some aspect, if not more than one aspect, of the status quo. Whether or not we think of a decline, whether or not we think of some kind of shock to the system, whatever it is that people are using for ‘we have a problem’. There has to be a way of recognising that maybe something different, something new, has happened, or it could be something that used to be but is gone. Whatever it is, we need to change something.

So I'm hearing we need to think systemically, we need to think sustainably, and we need to be bringing an openness, if not a creative new idea, to the table and not just accept or be, what do you call it? Complicit in the status quo. Is that a fair playback?

Yeah, I love that. And there's something about, isn't strategy dependent on change? Isn't it dependent on solving a problem?

Yes. Strategy needs to be part of this on a very basic level.

There's this idea of all individuals belonging to humanity. Much more deeper thinkers than me have said similar things and can explain it better than I can. But there's this idea of how we're all connected. We all come from the same stardust that hit this rock a long time ago. And while we are all deeply connected, we experience life through differences. And we want to do the best thing for ourselves, for our family, for our tribe, our clan. And that puts us at odds with other individuals, other families, other groupings.

Thinking about some examples, such as how do I get ahead in my career? Or how do I help my kid get better at sports or in school… I think when we start making decisions about how do we get ahead over someone else, we start that process of denying the connection, the belonging to that humanity.

And I mean, I get it, our economic system is set up for competition, but there are ways of looking at competition, of how do I get better, but not at the cost of someone else. And when we start making decisions that create imbalance, not meet everyone's needs, but actually extract from others to benefit ourselves, now we're creating an unsustainable system that, over time, creates bigger challenges for us as individuals. It's not in our best interests.

Getting back to the work that I do with teams, if I'm working with leaders and teams that are not recognising a level of interdependence and are not spending the time to understand the clarity of why we're doing this together, why we are a team, what's our identity, and how we do the work, what you do versus what I do, if we're not spending that time to look at our team and how our team fits in the organisation, how the organisation fits into the system, if we're just doing things for ourselves, or just doing things for our teams at the expense of other teams, or things at our company at the expense of other companies, I think we're shooting ourselves in the foot, sometimes with BBs, other times with Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

My readers love case studies. Let’s dive deep into your past work (whether while working at a company or as an advisor): where did your approach to unlocking potential contribute to “cracking the nut” on a strategic challenge?

When unlocking potential, especially as leaders, I believe you're actually, if you're doing your job, you're unlocking the potential of others, which in many ways means you need to stop blocking the potential of others.

Years ago, I was brought in to work with a team that was chewing up project managers. This team would bring in a project manager from a general pool, and some of the best project managers in this company would come into this team, and within six weeks, eight weeks, they're asking to be pulled out. The person who was running the PMO was wondering, “What's going on in this team?”

I go in there, and on day one, 4 hours into the job, the leader of that team pulls me aside and asks me, “What's wrong with my team?”

I'm like, whoa, “I've only been here for 4 hours, I can tell you what two people told me, but I don't know yet.” The leader looks me dead in the eye and says, “The problem is project managers can't identify scope creep. They allow it to happen, and all of a sudden, we've over promised and we can't deliver. It's a problem. That's what's holding us back.”

I reply, “Oh, interesting. Give me some time, I'm here for a couple months. Let me figure out if that's true or not, right?”

So, I go and I talk to all the project managers and find out what's working and what's not. I talk to the leadership team and ask what's working and what's not. I talk to some customers, internal customers within the company about what they're seeing.

And at the end, I've been able to identify what are the top ten areas of bad friction that hurt performance. I have worked with some of the teams to identify what are the root causes. We do the five why’s to get to root causes. We then start talking about what would some of those solutions could be. And then I pivoted on the solutions and discover that if we implemented on only five solutions, we’d address eight of those top ten problems.

Well, the thing is, those four of those solutions had to do with the leader and his actions and behaviour. It had to do with the different ways he was making decisions or different ways of getting involved in situations and overriding what people thought was the right thing to do, or just telling people what to go do.

So, I go to the leader and say, “Hey, remember that first day when you pulled me aside and you told me what the problem is? Let’s go for a beer.”

So we go down to a pub and after two Guinnesses, I walk them through the process. Here are the top ten issues that everyone in this ecosystem says is causing friction and bad performance. Do you agree with those? He says, “Yep. Seen all of them.” Cool. I walk him through the Five Whys analysis to identify what are the root causes for each of those problems. Again I ask, “Does that sound about right?” and he responds “Yep.”

We identified potential solutions for each, and again ask, “Do these sound about right?” He goes, “Yep, those seem like those would address those root causes.” Then I show him the pivot to focus on the most frequent solutions and ask, “Do you recognise four of those five? Do you recognise your contribution to those problems?”

What happened next were the most awkward two minutes of silence I've experienced in my professional life. And I think, am I about to get thrown out of this establishment? Is my firm about to get sued? What's going to happen?

And the client says, “Okay, I want you to stay on for the next three months and help us with this. Put together a proposal on what we're going to do.”

They were smart enough to know that just team or leadership development, training workshops, or coaching wasn't going to be enough. It had to be in the context of working with the team.

So, we identified a program of how we were going to address those four issues directly with them and help them show up differently. And there were some bumps and bruises along the way. But ultimately they were able to own their contribution to that problem and see how they were actually blocking potential from their leadership team and the project managers from actually getting the work done that needed to get done.

That's a great story. That reminds me: I have to insert a contemporary topic from this week. Have you seen the buzz around Silicon Valley on this idea of founder mode versus manager mode? That the way in which AirBnB’s Brian Chesky operates, which is incredibly hands on, is correlated with successful decision making. And they are calling it founder mode. This idea of the leader who micromanages versus the leader who actually empowers everybody else to autonomously do good work is, of course, one of the big arguments in management science, I guess the best way to describe it.

Yeah, and I would say, like the story of AirBnB or Twitter or Tesla or a lot of these companies, these companies aren't old enough to actually say if something works or not. And, yeah, there's this point in time, whether it's market cap or how much of the market do they own, or all these different ways of evaluating value today. But is that model, is that example statistically significant? Because for every AirBnB, there's probably a few hundred that we'd never heard of for really good reasons. Is there a combination of luck and opportunity? A lot of VC funding can overshadow a lot of bad leader management behaviour. And we see plenty of examples of that as well.

And so I would say, since we're sticking to the Valley, let's go back to an Adobe, let's go back to an Apple, go back to Hewlett Packard, who've been there for a test of time and look at all strong, founder-led ones. How did they lead? Was it a micro management style that made them successful or was it something else, was it more of a delegative form of leadership?

Maybe that's a better way of looking at the data to tell us what is more sustainable than asking the guys who are trying to justify their current situation and behaviour, because there is a form of not only PR but also of acting in a self serving way to it. Their statistical samples are really, really small.

The Strategy Toolkit newsletter shares insights from research across many fields of endeavour, including science and technology. You have an interest in neuroscience: what have you read recently in neuroscience that you find fascinating?

My focus is on human systems and what motivates people to show up and do the work that they do. It's not the things I'm reading lately, but it's calling back to some of the things that have been around for a while that go back to maybe more of the formative years in my career. It's kind of like your favourite music, that music you listened to when you're 18 to 20, right? Because you were going through so much growth and so much development that that music was imprinted. For instance, I will argue with anyone that The Joshua Tree is the best album ever made. And not because it's critically acclaimed or artistically perfect, it’s just that it's really important to me.

So 20 years ago, I was reading Marcus Buckingham’s book First Break All The Rules, talking about first time managers and how to approach them, how they manage and lead people. And in there, he described how about 80% of people aren't able to use their strengths, the things they're good at and passionate about. 80% are not able to use their strength on any given day. And that broke my heart. It just broke my heart thinking that's a lot of people that are just showing up for either a paycheck or showing up because they've been asked. They've been recognised as humans. They want to be recognised for the value they can create. But it's not enough, it’s not driving them to do something even more, deliver more value in service of more people. And the thing that they are doing isn't their strength. Someone else could step into that space so we can play musical chairs and find our purpose.

Then I think about David Rock's neuroleadership work around threat and response, or threat and reward response. Looking at neurobiology, when we encounter a new stimulus, the brain makes a couple of calculations real quickly and determines if it triggers a threat response or does it trigger a reward response? The chemicals with a threat response are three times stronger than that of a reward response. So constantly scanning for fear, we come into something new and the brain asks, okay, will it kill us? Or is it something that actually benefits us?

I think about this in the context of the work that I do when we're introducing change, when we're trying to get people to agree to a vision, agree to, say, what are the capabilities we need? How do we sequence those capabilities to have clarity around the workflow? Where are the decisions? What do you do versus what do I do? How do we create structure to best support that work? And then what are the agreements around the team and the leadership about how to drive the right behaviours? Where does this introduce threat to the system, and where does this introduce rewards? The answers to those questions helps us understand where and how we need to plan for and respond to those reactions when implementing new systems.

David Rock put together the SCARF model acronym. The S is for status. Does this change, increase, or decrease my status amongst the group? The C is certainty. Do I understand or am I unclear how I'm going to perform the work that's going to be asked of me? The A is for autonomy. Do I still get to have decision rights that I had before, or do I have less? Will I get to decide what I do, or do I get told what to do? The R is relatedness. Right now, you and I are peers in this new model. You're going to be my boss. How do I feel about that? And the last one is F for fairness. Does it seem fair?

And I've heard plenty of people talk about nowhere is it written that fairness is a guarantee. And yet, if you think about just early evolution, the part of our brain that stems from, that's common amongst all animals, for instance when there's a lion in the bush and we're that gazelle, we want to run into the group, and we get safety in those numbers. But once we're in the group, fear is not necessarily what brings us together and helps us create and have a more joyful experience. It's that reward response. It is that joy, and it is that understanding of am I part of, whether I belong to this group. Not only am I getting the safety, but do I actually belong to this group, to this species. Then once we're in there, okay, well, what is our role? Fairness is a way of determining where we are in that pecking order. Yes, it's physically safe to be in this herd, but is it psychologically safe? Can I show up in my best way? Can I begin to move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs around that level of psychological safety? So that's where I tend to go back to the work that David Rock has done around threat and response and thinking about SCARF.

I have taught many managers to use SCARF with those same questions I just ran through, trying to anticipate people's reactions. Build the relationship with your employees where you can go ask them things like, hey, we're implementing this new structure. We're implementing this new way of doing something. Do you feel that that enhances or hurts your status amongst the group? Do you have the certainty or the clarity of what you're going to be asked to do? Do you think that hurts your ability to make decisions or enhances your ability to make decisions? What does this do for your reputation? And, you might not have been in the room to help design this, but your colleagues were, people who have similar roles to you, they were actually in the room to help make that decision. Does it seem fair that we're going in this direction? You can use the words or not use the words, but you can still have those conversations.

Which gets me back to something that happened years ago, working with a team, and we were going to be making a big change. I was talking about the SCARF model with the leader. And they’re like, hey, we have one person on our leadership team whom for some reason we don't understand. Their leadership scores from their direct reports are an order of magnitude higher than for everyone else on the team. They’re doing something different than anyone else. Their people love them. Can you go find out why?

So, I schedule coffee with the person. I tell them all this, and they respond, “That's funny. My boss has never told me that I am the role model for managers in the team.” I'm like, okay, noted. That's the next conversation I'll have with the leader. I continue, “What do you do differently?” and this people manager says, “I make sure my people…”, and this is a direct quote, “I make sure my people know I give a s*#! about them.”

That's palpable. That's visceral. When you have a leader who cares about you, who comes in and asks you, “Do you have everything you need? Last time you told me you're having problems with your family, your kid was having problems in school or your mom's health.” Does your manager remember that? And then come back and ask you about that? Do they care about you? Because once we create that relationship of caring about people, that's going to reduce the threat response when we're introducing something new, and it's going to make people want to be a part of something so that the reward response is already triggered and is already in play when we're bringing people together.

I would recommend listening to the podcast episode that I released recently, in which my guest, Rick Beaton, talks about leadership in neurobiology. He even says, “I don't understand how you could be a manager today and not understand, not know anything about neurobiology.” I would extend this idea to understanding how to work with your leadership team, how to work with the board, how to understand what's going to land with your customers, and your suppliers and the whole ecosystem. You need to understand how people are motivated by what they fear and the interplay of that in groups. I think a lot of people have good intuition around this topic, but they're leaving something on the table when they're not curious about learning more about the underlying psychology and neurobiology.

The workplace is changing in many ways. How are you adjusting what you do to achieve your goals (including the goals given to you by your current place of employment, Starbucks)?

One way is actually how I evaluate my value in the work that I do. I was talking with a colleague a couple years ago who said, “I want my work to stand the test of time. I want to be able to look back in ten years and see the work I was doing today and see that it's still in place.” I think about that and I think about the work I've done over the last ten years, and I don't think anything I've done is still in place. Whether it's an organisational structure or a team that I helped with designing and implementing, the change management projects I led, the OD toolkits I development and rolled out.

Things change too quickly. I mean, it's just sandcastles that get washed away with the tide. None of them last, and that’s not about me or my capabilities. Things just change.

So I’ve started looking at something else. Rather than being focused on the outputs or the deliverables, I am looking at how successful was I in changing people's perceptions and changing people's understandings of their roles and how to not only create greater clarity in how teams should work together, but ultimately their ability to co-create solutions with their teams rather than tell people what they're going to do. Then lastly, how they create connections.

For example, at the end of the engagement that I have with them, are they more capable and see value in creating deeper connections with the people that they work with, with their teams, with their leadership? And are there long lasting capabilities and values that they're taking from this engagement that we've had?

Those things amplify over time to create deeper connections and a deeper ability to lead teams than where they were when we were first working together. So I think the first thing is how I approach the work and where do I want to emphasise, and I'll even tell my clients or leaders that I'm working with that I'm the design guy, I'm the model guy. I will say that structure is irrelevant. Ultimately, we need clarity on where we're going, how we're going to get there, how we're going to work together, who makes decisions, what are our roles, how we're going to measure success, how we know when we're on track and how we're not. The structure itself, well, we could screw up the structure, but if we have clarity on everything else in agreement there, we're probably going to do really well.

I’ve seen circumstances in which we nail structure, but we don't have clarity on anything else, such as I know whom I report to, or completely fail in what we're trying to do. So, yes, structure is important, but it's not as important as having clarity of vision and of capabilities, of workflows and decision rights, and of roles and responsibilities.

Lastly, subscribers to the Strategy Toolkit want to get smarter about strategy. If anyone wants to follow up on what they’ve learned here and want to become more proficient leaders, what can they do, practically? Do you offer training? YouTube videos? Etc.

Thank you for the question. I'm on LinkedIn, and that's probably the quickest, easiest way. I love being engaged in conversations and posting about the value of clarity, co-creation and connections in the workplace.

I also highly recommend subscribing to my podcast What Do You Know To Be True? because I'm talking to people who are enabling leaders and teams to be more successful in what they're trying to do. So not only having clarity of strategy, of vision, but then what are the things that enable the achievement of strategy, of vision, of those big goals. The podcast is available on all platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, etc. You can also check out the website directly. I am infinitely curious about why people do what they do and then identifying the what, the how, the when, and the who, to be successful in achieving those things together.

Lastly, readers can follow up via email: Roger@ThreeBluePens.com. Happy to have people contact me there too.