Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Dr. Cynthia McCauley - An Achievement of the Collective

March 15, 2022 Scott J. Allen Season 1 Episode 114
Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen
Dr. Cynthia McCauley - An Achievement of the Collective
Show Notes Transcript

Cynthia McCauley is an honorary senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership. With more than 35 years of experience, Cindy has been involved in many aspects of CCL’s work: research, publications, program and product development, evaluation, coaching, and management. Capitalizing on this broad experience, she has developed expertise in leader development methods, including developmental assignments and relationships, 360-degree feedback, and action learning. She has also played a central role in CCL’s efforts to understand leadership as a collective phenomenon shared among people and to expand its leadership development practice to include the development of teams and leadership cultures. 

Cindy has published numerous articles and book chapters for scholars, HR professionals, and practicing managers. She is the co-editor of three editions of The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development (1998, 2004, 2010), as well as two books on experience-based development (Using Experience to Develop Leadership Talent, Experience-Based Leader Development: Models, Tools, Best Practices, and Advice). Cindy has a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Georgia and is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the American Educational Research Association.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

  • "What we say is leadership is an 'achievement of the collective,' which might be the most concise way to express a relational view of leadership."
  • “Assessment, challenge, and support…are the elements that combine to make developmental experiences more powerful. That is, whatever the experience, it has more impact if it contains these three elements.” 
  • “Individuals broaden and deepen their leadership capabilities as they do leadership work. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that learning from experience is the number one way that leader development happens…. How can organizations better harness the power of experiences for leadership development?”  
  • “A leadership development strategy is a plan for the thoughtful, intentional deployment of organizational resources to ensure the ongoing availability of leadership for achieving the organization’s strategic agenda…." (with Karen Grabow)
  • “Relational views of leadership may be the disruptive idea that helps reconstruct leadership development in ways that meets these concerns” (with Chuck Palus )


Resources Mentioned In This Episode


About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

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Connect with Your Host, Scott Allen



Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate

Scott Allen  0:00 
Okay, everyone, welcome to the furnaces podcast. Thank you for checking in wherever you are in the world. Today, I have one of my academic heroes on the program and I would like to introduce you to Dr. Cynthia McCauley. She is an honorary senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). And with more than 35 years of experience, Cindy has been involved in many aspects of CCL, his work research publications, program and product development, evaluation, coaching, and management. Capitalizing on this broad experience, she has developed expertise and leader development methods, including developmental assignments and relationships 360-degree feedback and action learning. She has also played a central role in CCL his efforts to understand leadership as a collective phenomenon shared among people and to expand its leadership development practice to include the development of teams and leadership cultures. Cindy has published numerous articles and book chapters for scholars, HR professionals, and practicing managers. She is the co-editor of three editions of at least this was my (leadership) Bible, when it came to leader development Cindy, the Center for Creative Leadership handbook for leadership development, published in 1998 2004, and 2010, as well as two books on experience-based development, one using experience to develop leadership talent and a second experience-based leader development models, tools, best practices, and advice. Cindy has a Ph.D. in IO psychology from the University of Georgia and is a fellow of the Society for industrial and organizational psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the American Educational Research Association. Cindy, thank you so much for being with us. I can't thank you enough for spending some time today.

Cindy McCauley  1:53 
Well, thank you for that lovely introduction. And thanks for inviting me to come and join you and talk about one of my favorite topics. And also thank you for this podcast and what you're doing for the field and bringing people together to talk about leadership and leadership development.

Scott Allen  2:12 
Well, thank you so much, Cindy, I really appreciate it. I mean, I meant what I said CCL's Handbook of Leadership Development, really, I mean, at the time that I was writing my dissertation, it was a core piece of literature that really, really helped me understand the landscape. And so I can't thank you enough for that. What I want to do today is really just highlight some quotes from your writing over the years. And if I could, I'd like to share the quote, and then maybe have you comment on that? Does that sound okay? That sounds great. Okay, so, and I feel I feel a little nerdy. It's like I'm about to say to you, okay, on page 44, of the handbook Cindy. Like, I'm a nerdy Star Trek fan or something. In the handbook of leadership development, the 2004 edition, this assessment, challenge, and support. And what you wrote was assessment, challenge, and support are the elements that combine to make developmental experiences more powerful. That is, whatever the experience, it has more impact if it contains these three elements. Okay, talk about that, if you would assessment, challenge, and support.

Cindy McCauley  3:27 
So CCL had been designing, assessment, challenge, and support into its leadership development programs since the 1970s. But we had not really articulated those three key ingredients for development, until the editors had to write an introductory chapter for that first edition of the CCL, Handbook of leadership development, the one that was published in 98. And most of the chapters in that first edition focused on a specific type of leadership development experience, like formal programs or 360, feedback coaching on the job experiences. And as editors, we ask ourselves, what is it that is common across these chapters? And our answer was a development process that contains assessment, challenge, and support. Assessment, of course, just to review is data and feedback about how you're doing your strengths, weaknesses as a leader, how others experience you. Challenge is about being stretched beyond your current capabilities as a leader, and the support is really about having the help you need to bear the weight of development because that's not usually easy. And having support also helps a person maintain this kind of positive view of themselves in the midst of the struggle of growth and change. As I thought about this, there are three quick things to say about the assessment/challenge/support framework. First, it was it stood the test of time. Okay, it continues to guide people's thinking about designing leadership development interventions. But CCL didn't invent this. And designing, we were drawing on multiple streams of research, in theory, adult learning theory, developmental theories, research on behavior change. And that's why it's remained useful. It's grounded in this rich and diverse knowledge base. The second thing about it is its particularly useful framework when you're designing an intervention that by nature is heavy in one of the elements. For example, if you give somebody a stretch assignment challenge is already built-in. But to maximize that opportunity for learning, you have to ask yourself, How am I going to design it assessment and support to, it's useful to think about assessment challenge and support as both resources for development and motivators of development assessment can not only help you gain clarity about gaps in your capabilities as a leader, it can also motivate you to close those gaps. So they play that dual role. So you can see this framework has been really useful for us, at CCL and beyond. Thanks, that it's been helpful for you too.

Scott Allen  6:38 
Well, it's a wonderful framing, and as you said, I mean, I think if you have a developmental assignment, yes, I mean, the challenge is baked into that, but what the designer of that experience has to consider is, how are we going to support this individual, as they're navigating these challenging situations? Otherwise, A) it might be too much B) we're going to struggle to capture the learning, right? And you know, you missed an opportunity. All you did was really just stretched someone, but did they necessarily grow in the process and make those connections that they needed to make? Right,

Cindy McCauley  7:15 
So you know, in that challenging assignment, are they going to have a boss that's particularly developmental? Or if not, maybe they need to, you may need to make sure there's a mentor or a peer that can serve that role. And they need assessment they need feedback about am I learning what you expected me to learn from this assignment? So yeah, it's, you know, sometimes people think about the assessment challenge and support model is Oh, assessments, the 360 feedback and challenges, the assignments, and support is mentoring, but it's really thinking about each one of those and how to build assessment challenge and support into any type of intervention.

Scott Allen  7:56 
So let's kind of stay on this stream of experiential learning. In your book, experience-based leader development models, tools, best practices, and advice, you right? Individuals broaden and deepen their leadership capabilities as they do leadership work. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that learning from experience is the number one way that leader development happens. How can organizations better harness the power of experiences for leader development,

Cindy McCauley  8:28 
I have to go back aways. So I came to CCL back in 1984. And Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo, and Morrison had been leading a project to better understand how executives learn, grow and change over the course of their careers. They did this primarily by asking successful executives to think back over their careers, identify key developmental experiences, and then describe what happened in those experiences and what they learned from it. It eventually led to this book called Lessons of experience. And first, let me say that I was very energized by this research. Oh, it was a great guy. Yeah, well, I and I had never been involved in qualitative research and I was hooked. You know that I was trained as an IO psychologist. And at that time, you are unlikely to be exposed to qualitative research in an I-O program. So I saw how this type of research provided on the ground granular data that's great for inductive theory building, but it was also energizing because it highlighted how much of what successful managers were learning came from challenging leadership work. And this really opened up new opportunities to impact leader development. You know, we were very program-focused, but thinking about how can we be, again back to this notion of better harnessing on-the-job experiences for development? How can we better use those experiences many practitioners started inventing, experimenting with new on the job development strategies, things like matching leaders with the right challenging assignment to stimulate their development, creating more opportunities for stretch assignments in the workplace, focusing on how to support reflection on those experiences, not that organizations weren't using jobs for development before they just were not typically being very intentional or systematic about it. Yep, that book experienced-based leader development was really one of our efforts to capture all this great work that was being accomplished in organizations to better use this experience for development make it available more widely available to other practitioners and students. Other ideas flowing out of that research was the concept of learning agility as a key leadership competency, if learning from experience is so important then a key competency needs to be your ability to learn from that experience. Yes. And then more recently, Josh Burson coined the phrase learning and the flow of work. Yeah, which I really love learning in the flow of work, he should really talk about tools and practices, particularly technology-enabled tools and practices for that ongoing day-to-day learning in the midst of work. So it's come a long way from the interviews that Morgan and Mike and Ann did to now all of these gadgets and tools that we can use to focus on our learning on a day-to-day basis. So it's, it's been very successful. Even since I came in the door CCL on the job development has been a big part of my focus,

Scott Allen  12:09 
It reminds me of Robert Keegan's, you know, the curriculum of life, the curriculums there. If you pay attention, and I think the same thing is true,

Cindy McCauley  12:21 
It really gives you that visual image of kind of learning and work is very intertwined and not separate things,

Scott Allen  12:30 
I think of, if you're going to put something like that into motion, there needs to be some level of intentionality. And you also write about a leader development strategy. And the forthcoming chapter that you have coming up, you shared this article with me and you say, a leadership development strategy is a plan for the thoughtful, intentional deployment of organizational resources to ensure the ongoing availability of leadership for achieving the organization's strategic agenda. The best leadership development strategies are comprehensive, with interventions embedded in a broader organizational context of support and continuous ensuring new leaders are developed and experienced leaders stretched on an ongoing basis. I love that.

Cindy McCauley  13:15 
Actually, my co-worker, Karen Grabow, wrote that. So I shouldn't take too much credit for it, because she has had several top-level HR and talent management roles and organizations. And it has really, she really brought this she's lived the life of making leadership development strategic. So she was a great partner in capturing leadership development through this more strategic lens. But that's really it's really key for leadership development to have moved into this more strategic realm. The first half of my career CCL, I was focused on leader development methods, you know how to best design, implement and evaluate interventions for leader development. But there was a shift that was going on, and leadership development in organizations and I think it maybe was best captured by Jay Conger and Beth Benjamin and their book building leaders in that book they talked about in addition, they talk about developing individual leaders, that's still in remains still a focus of the course, and leadership development. But they noted that leadership development in organizations was increasingly focused on what they call fostering shared values and common visions, particularly among those in leadership roles, and on accelerating major strategic change in organizations. Let me give an example. So 15 years ago, IBM was focused On moving from being a US-based multinational organization to being what they call a globally integrated enterprise, wow. And numerous development initiatives were launched to support that goal, including their highly successful Corporate Service Core. And if you've ever heard of that I haven't it's joint is still going on. It was joint leadership development. It is a joint leadership development and Corporate Social Responsibility initiative. And it brought together globally diverse teams of IBM employees to provide pro bono work to communities in need around the world. And so it again, it was focusing on supporting organizational development and strategic change. And that shift to more strategic, more organization development-oriented, I think had impacted the shape of leadership development in a number of ways. One was at CCL and other leadership development providers, we pretty much notice that the growth of customized development programs grew at a much faster rate than they had open enrollment programs. That's what we called programs where individuals from different organizations come together at one of our facilities for leadership development. So in those customized programs, your 360-degree feedback needs to be tailored to fit the organization's competency models, executives in the organization were much more likely to be involved in the design and even the delivery, oh, wow, of programs. And that's also an action learning teams working and learning together as they worked on strategic projects became popular. But we also noticed that leadership development moved beyond those methods for developing individuals, and now includes the development of leadership networks and organization development of shared leadership and team's development leadership cultures. So if you think back to IBM Corporate Service Core developments that happen at all those levels in that program, certainly they were developing individual cells, you know, that that's also part of this becoming more strategic is it broadens what's included in leadership development?

Scott Allen  17:30 
Well, you're headed exactly where I was gonna go next in this 2021 article with Chuck Paulus, where basically the two of you say, look, organizations are demanding leadership development that is more sensitive to the context and support of organizational transformation. Critics of current leader development practices claim they are too narrowly construed to yield meaningful results, relational views of leadership, maybe the disruptive idea that that helps reconstruct leadership development in ways that meet these concerns. So talk a little bit about that, because now we're going into more holistic as Keegan and Les, he would say Penn developmental, it's not just one individual at a program. But there's a lot happening in that statement, once you unpack that a little bit. Yeah. Okay.

Cindy McCauley  18:22 
So, we have focused so far in this conversation, mostly on leadership development, yeah. Which is traditionally been understood as the development of individuals. And its practice has been offered primarily to individuals in positions of authority or responsibility. Yes. And a big reason for this, we pause it because what we have is what we understand leadership to be. So in most discussions of leadership, it is understood as something that is created by people we label as leaders who are generally people that we identify as having influenced others to work towards shared goals because we're talking about organizations beginning to see that achieving their strategic goals often relied not only on influential individuals, they're not going away, they're still important, but on shared leadership on teams, the distributed efforts have networks of leaders, the concept of leadership was starting to get stretched and wet in ways that really made it hard to discern who was leading and who was following. Think about it, if there is shared leadership on a team, is there also shared followership, or does the leader-follower distinction start to simply break down?

Scott Allen  19:57 
Oh, yeah, yeah, it blurs I would imagine. Right,

Cindy McCauley  20:00 
So to make a long story short, there's a network of colleagues at CCL that began to embrace and explore relational views of leadership. For the reasons we've been talking about clients wanted leadership development, that would better advance their strategic goals. Critics were really pointing to the inadequacies of leadership development, that focus solely on individuals and individuals in leadership roles. Yeah. And relational ideas were beginning to pop up in many academic fields. So let me try to explain relational ideas without getting too deep into it. So much of our theories and models of leadership focus on the individual, identified as the leaders are actions, behaviors, mindsets. And the assumption is that leaders produce leadership and that we can improve leadership in organizations by developing these individuals. It is what in philosophy circles would be called an entity view of leadership. Okay. If one takes a relational view of leadership, it's the interactions of people who are pursuing a shared goal that produces leadership. So let me illustrate that a little bit. Yeah. So we have developed a framework called the direction alignment, commitment framework. There are two central features of the framework. But one thing it does is it specifies three, what we call leadership outcomes that help groups of people achieve collective results. So groups are more likely to achieve collective results. If they have agreement on overall goals, that's direction, if they have coordinated work in the group that's alignment. And if they have mutual responsibility for the success and well being the group, that's commitment. So do you see how these three outcomes are relational agreements are between people, coordination exists among people. mutual responsibility is something that grows between people, no single individual causes those things. It's the relationships that create. So that's why we think of that's why it's thought of as relational leadership. And again, back to philosophy. It says that the relations are primary, not entities and that so this view starts with those and highlights and centers those relationships. Another central feature of the framework is that it posits that these three outcomes' direction alignment commitment, is produced by the shared beliefs and practices of group members. In other words, it says everyone is involved in producing these leadership outcomes, for example, the offering of it, we think a lot about vision and leadership. So the offering of a vision and the embracing and elaboration of that vision by others are both important for achieving direction, the creation of a project plan, and efforts to adhere to that project plan are both needed to produce alignment. What we say is leadership is an achievement of the collective, which might be the most concise way to express a relational view of leadership. It's like saying it takes a village takes a village to make leadership happen to make direction alignment commitment happen. That's what organizations are ultimately interested in developing the capacity in their organization to make direction alignment, commitment happen, not simply to make some people more effective as influencers. Yeah. In this article, we really examined CCL's, relational, this relational framework of leadership and how it helped us expand our own practice of leadership development. It was a fun case study of ourselves to look at how expanding our views to more relational ones helped our leadership development efforts.

Scott Allen  24:32 
Well, Cindy, I don't know if I can, I don't know that I have the words for this thought yet. So it's not going to be a very pretty thing I'm about to say. But you know, when I had Ron Riggio on, he said, Look, "leaders don't do leadership. This phenomenon is co-created by leaders and followers." And that achieved some set of results. But that always just stuck with me leaders don't do leadership. And it seems like we're on this precipice of Seeing something it's almost like where I want to go next constructive developmental theory, where when we, let's say we're in, you know, stage four and a half, and we know there's something over the ridge. We know there's something there, it doesn't have a name even. But it almost feels like we're in this trap, where our language in some ways is limiting our ability to really, truly get it this phenomenon. And again, I may not have communicated that well. But does the sentiment of my words make sense or resonate?

Cindy McCauley  25:32 
Absolutely. And I do think language is part of the problem. And we are in such an individualistic society. We see a lot of things through that lens. And it's not that influential individuals go away. I mean, that's still happening. And it's still an important aspect of the ultimate what we're trying to ultimately achieve. And that is for people to work together willingly to achieve these collective results, results that they can't achieve alone. You know, I think what it is, in some ways is that were merging things that might have been thought of as separate. Yeah, now we had individual development and team development and organizational development, we have organizational learning, and part of it is seeing how these things are intertwined. And we can't necessarily do them separately, but we have to think about how they work together.

Scott Allen  26:35 
A lot of my conversations in the last two years, have kind of been swirling around some of this notion, right, that, gosh, we're so we lionize the leader, and I'm sure you've seen this progression since your time at CCL. I mean, it probably was wholly focused on the individual in the beginning, correct?

Cindy McCauley  26:55 
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And one of the things that helped push us is like our practice and our theorizing, you know, push each other simultaneously. Yeah. So one of the efforts at CCL was this notion of democratizing leader leadership development. How can we, as a nonprofit organization, take leadership development to people who don't necessarily have the resources, but sometimes just don't see themselves as leaders, high school students, physicians, villagers in Ethiopia, our colleagues who have been working, and more not with not more nontraditional leadership groups, one of the things they say about these relational views and about using the direction alignment commitment framework, is that these people say, Oh, now I see myself in leadership. Yeah, it's back to some of the ideas David de talks about with identity. If you understand leadership as these powerful people or influential people, and that it's, you know, I'm either a leader or a follower, then you're not gonna see yourselves yourself in leadership, and there's potential that wasn't losing. I think that that's one of the big drivers is to think about how we can use leadership potential in everyone. And this notion of democratizing leadership development. I thought it was more accepted in nonprofit organizations in the social sector. But I was recently with a group of corporate talent management people. And they were saying, we're being asked to democratize leadership development. How do we do that? What does that look like? And I was like, Oh, my goodness, this idea is getting around. So that I think that idea is also pushing us to think organizations are saying, we think of everyone as a leader. And part of that is because they need people to step up and be proactive. Part of that is because they need to attract talent to their organization, a part of it is because they really believe it. And so they're just trying to figure out how to how do we operationalize that?

Scott Allen  29:21 
Exactly? Well, you know, as we begin to kind of wind down our conversation our time together. There's one other theme I want to get to and I alluded to it a little bit ago, but constructive developmental theory, the work of Robert Kegan, Bill Torbert, some of the adult development theorists that really weaves throughout your work as well.

Cindy McCauley  29:43 
Being a CCL and being with people from all different backgrounds and educational experiences, I really resonated with CD theory, I say cd theory, so I don't have to say constructive development all the time. So math for it. And one of the early reasons for it being useful is that CCL had always had this perspective that leadership development did involve skill and knowledge development. But it also is personal development as more understanding yourself, how do you make sense of the world? What constructive developmental theory does is help us think through well, how is it that people develop more complex and less egocentric ways to make sense of themselves and the world, because that resonated a lot with a lot of the efforts that CCL had around personal development, seeing leadership development as personal development. But it also helped us think about this whole notion of how is the concept of leadership developing and thinking about it as you can think about leadership as somebody telling us what to do, and us following them. And then leadership could be thought of as more peer like negotiation influence, kind of the give and take that creates leadership, or you can think about it as this more advanced way of it is emerging from all these interactions and exchanges, rather than as being something a little bit more concrete. So again, it helps us think about how is the whole notion of leadership itself developing. And again, the constructive developmental theory just was a very useful tool in helping us think about these things. And I will also mention, there's a book that I would recommend by Charles Heckscher, professor at Rutgers called Trust in a Complex World: Enriching Community and that really caught my attention, because he uses CD theory, among others is not the only theory, theoretical frame he uses to help the reader understand how current societal level disruptions and challenges and then need for development at the societal level. And he uses that theory. And it really has been making me think about a what's my developmental edge in relation to these societal level challenges and how we all as a society need to move forward? So I would recommend that so you can see the theory at the individual level, the team level, at the organizational level, and even at the societal level to think about development. It's fascinating, it's this grow, but you don't leave completely leave behind. It's not like you completely change. Yeah, is that you? Expand and so you don't leave behind your ability to think and what might be thought might be called less complex ways, but it's this expand and include. So you're not, it's not saying the way you were thinking was wrong? It's how can you expand that and make it more complex?

Scott Allen  33:27  
And, you know, there's some, there are some nice distinctions for listeners, you know, you could think of this as transformational learning. Like the learning, we're talking about right now is literally kind of our mental complexity, how we make sense of the world, the world. And that can be considered transformational leader learning. And then there's informational learning, how do the cybersecurity processes work at my place of business, or the topic of marketing, more topics that are domain-specific content. So I thought that was always interesting and unique sometimes we hear it called vertical development or horizontal development. But I like the framing of transformational learning this, this constructive developmental theory, and really, really focusing on how we make meaning of the world, but then also just as important as this content and domain-specific information that we have to have an awareness of as well.

Cindy McCauley  34:29  
Absolutely. Both of them are important.

Scott Allen  34:31  
Yeah. You know, you say, and this is just a fragment from a sentence in the article with Graybow bow, but you say it's a never-ending process. Oh, yeah. Talk about that.

Cindy McCauley  34:42  
I mean, I think it's that notion of lifelong learning, right? And that organizations are constantly facing new challenges. Just think about the pandemic. And what did we hear well, learning how to work virtually learning how to be more empathetic. Learning to be more resilient. So as we encounter challenges, it's that all the way back to the experiential learning cycle. It's constant as we are current ways of working and being successful and making an impact, our new challenges are thrown in our path. So it's never-ending,

Scott Allen  35:26  
A very difficult concept to put into practice, year over year and decade after decade, because I think the research on humans suggests that most people get to a place of competence, and then they kind of stall. And if you look to Keegan's theory, most adults kind of you know, exist around that stage three, three and a half. And that's kind of where they end up, right. But if we can, as a way of being as a habit of mind, it's just, it's a mindset that I think will open a lot of opportunities for people.

Cindy McCauley  35:58  
Absolutely. Yeah, I think that it's not that people develop only when they really need to, because of the challenges and the complexity. So it's really being able and willing to engage in more complexity, that's going to push us in terms of learning and development.

Scott Allen  36:20  
And for listeners who just heard Cindy, say that or me, my little talk before what she said, I'm going to put a link to a book in the show notes, that if you're interested, if you're intrigued, it's a wonderful book, just to get a very kind of introductory look into what we're discussing. And there are some really cool opportunities and ways to think about how to stay in that place of continual growth, that transformational learning, we can do that work individually. So I'll put a link to a book in the show notes on that Sunday, as we close out for the day. What has caught your eye in recent times, it could have to do with leadership, it could have nothing to do with leadership. I've had guests talk about how they were in into period romance television shows on PBS, or I've had others say that they were interested in learning more about cooking or a podcast was a true-crime podcast. But what's something that's caught your eye maybe even listening to streaming reading?

Cindy McCauley  37:24  
Well, you've warned me that you're going to ask this. Well, one thing is, as I've always enjoyed reading biographies, but in the last year or so I've been reading some that focus on individuals who have had key roles, and what are clearly collective achievements. So one of those would be Tracy kiters book about Paul Farmer and his colleague's efforts to bring better health care to the underserved - Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World. And then Walter Isaacson's The Code Breaker focuses on Jennifer Doudna, but also pays equal attention to the cooperative, competitive genetics community that she was part of. And I've tried to see how they interweave that individual and collective perspective and make sense of their subject about these achievements, these extraordinary achievements, that we often again, with our western individualistic perspective, often attribute to these individuals. But in these biographies, they've really tried to balance that individual collective view. So that's been really interesting to me, if anybody has any other examples of those, be sure to send them to me. But also at that, for at this time of year, I'm watching a lot of basketball, mainly because I like basketball, but I live in North Carolina. And as for basketball, it's a really big deal here. So there's a lot of fun, teamwork, and interpersonal interaction going on and those to entertain me to, if I back when CCL had a blog, every March during the basketball term, the college basketball tournament, I would write a post on something that connected leadership in basketball, and I'm thinking about that I missed that. another outlet for my basketball leadership stories.

Scott Allen  39:23  
I had assigned a couple of episodes of The Last Dance. I don't know if you've watched that on Netflix. Yeah. But apparently, there's a new documentary out that has Pippins' perspective on the experience, which would be very, very interesting to explore. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Cindy, I can't thank you enough for being with me today and sharing some time, and sharing your wisdom. With listeners. It just means a lot. And again, thank you for the work that you do, helping us make better sense of this phenomenon that we're calling leadership for now. Who knows? I mean, it's amazing To the podcast, I don't know, I'd have to change the name of the podcast. So, but I'm okay.

Cindy McCauley  40:04  
That's funny that you say that, because that's what people would sometimes say to me when I would talk about these relational ideas and that leadership development is becoming more team and organizational development, too. They would say, Well, you know, why call it leadership? And I was like, well, because I work at the center. And

Scott Allen  40:29  
there's a whole system and infrastructure built on it now. billion dollar industry, right. That's why. But yeah, I mean, even like Mintzberg is starting to call it "communityship" and just trying to think of a bigger way of conceptualizing the work that's being done. But I really like CCLs framing that you were describing earlier in the conversation because it makes it bigger, I suppose. Sometimes it is about the individual. If it wasn't for Elon Musk with SpaceX exists, no, but he's not doing that work alone. He's co-creating whatever it is that they're going to become, you know, so there's that spectrum again, that whole spectrum of experiences. Cindy, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Be well!

Cindy McCauley  41:13  
You too, thanks.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai