Neil E. Grunberg, Ph.D., is Professor of Military & Emergency Medicine and Neuroscience in the Uniformed Services University (USU) School of Medicine; Professor in the USU Graduate School of Nursing; and Director of Research and Development in the USU Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) program, Bethesda, Maryland. He is a medical psychologist, social psychologist, and behavioral neuroscientist. Dr. Grunberg earned baccalaureate degrees in Medical Microbiology and Psychology from Stanford University (1975); M.A. (1977), M.Phil. (1979), and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in Physiological Psychology and Social Psychology from Columbia University; and completed doctoral training in Pharmacology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons (1976-79). He has been educating physicians, psychologists, and nurses for the Armed Forces and Public Health Service and scientists for research and academic positions since 1979. He has published > 220 papers addressing behavioral medicine, drug use, stress, traumatic brain injury, and leadership. He has been recognized for his professional contributions by awards from the American Psychological Association, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Food & Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute, Society for Behavioral Medicine, US Surgeon General, and Uniformed Services University. In 2015, Dr. Grunberg was selected to be a Presidential Leadership Scholar. He co-founded the Healthcare Leadership Community of the International Leadership Association. He also is a member of Teaching Followers Courage.
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Neil E. Grunberg, Ph.D., is Professor of Military & Emergency Medicine and Neuroscience in the Uniformed Services University (USU) School of Medicine; Professor in the USU Graduate School of Nursing; and Director of Research and Development in the USU Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) program, Bethesda, Maryland. He is a medical psychologist, social psychologist, and behavioral neuroscientist. Dr. Grunberg earned baccalaureate degrees in Medical Microbiology and Psychology from Stanford University (1975); M.A. (1977), M.Phil. (1979), and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in Physiological Psychology and Social Psychology from Columbia University; and completed doctoral training in Pharmacology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons (1976-79). He has been educating physicians, psychologists, and nurses for the Armed Forces and Public Health Service and scientists for research and academic positions since 1979. He has published > 220 papers addressing behavioral medicine, drug use, stress, traumatic brain injury, and leadership. He has been recognized for his professional contributions by awards from the American Psychological Association, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Food & Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute, Society for Behavioral Medicine, US Surgeon General, and Uniformed Services University. In 2015, Dr. Grunberg was selected to be a Presidential Leadership Scholar. He co-founded the Healthcare Leadership Community of the International Leadership Association. He also is a member of Teaching Followers Courage.
A Quote From This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
The Prometheus Project
My Approach to Hosting
Connect with Scott Allen
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody, welcome to another edition of Phronesis. Thank you for checking in wherever you are in the world. And today, my guest is Dr. Neil Greenberg. Neil E. Grunberg, Ph.D., is a Professor of Military & Emergency Medicine and Neuroscience in the Uniformed Services University (USU) School of Medicine; a Professor in the USU Graduate School of Nursing; and Director of Research and Development in the USU Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) program, Bethesda, Maryland. He is a medical psychologist, social psychologist, and behavioral neuroscientist. Dr. Grunberg earned baccalaureate degrees in Medical Microbiology and Psychology from Stanford University (1975); M.A. (1977), M.Phil. (1979), and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in Physiological Psychology and Social Psychology from Columbia University; and completed doctoral training in Pharmacology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons (1976-79). He has been educating physicians, psychologists, and nurses for the Armed Forces and Public Health Service and scientists for research and academic positions since 1979. He has published > 220 papers addressing behavioral medicine, drug use, stress, traumatic brain injury, and leadership. He has been recognized for his professional contributions by awards from the American Psychological Association, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Food & Drug Administration, National Cancer Institute, Society for Behavioral Medicine, US Surgeon General, and Uniformed Services University. In 2015, Dr. Grunberg was selected to be a Presidential Leadership Scholar. He is a co-founder of the Healthcare Leadership Community of the International Leadership Association. He also is a member of Teaching Followers Courage...sir, that is incredible. Thank you for being here. What else do listeners need to know about you?
Neil Grunberg 2:07
Well, you are much too kind, Scott. We all do our part. And it's really my privilege to be on this podcast with you today.
Scott Allen 2:16
Thank you. Well, what more do people need to know? I know you're a family man....
Neil Grunberg 2:20
My wife, Nancy, and I have four grown children, all of themselves healthy and successful. But perhaps for your listeners. There is one aspect of my life that is relevant to how I approach leadership. And that is, I'm a jazz musician. I started playing the drums when I was five years old, and started playing professionally when I was 14. I am now 69. So I guess I wasn't good enough to really make it in music. But all kidding aside, much of the way I approach leadership, especially with the relationship within the team, the leaders, the followers, or teammates, people have various preferences on how to call the members of a team; I use my experience as a musician, especially in jazz ensembles. So when dealing with small groups, similar to a jazz ensemble, I think of the importance that everyone needs to be literally on the same page on the same sheet of music. But the group can either play or be extraordinary when playing ensemble. But also, each individual can take the lead. That is, there's a shared or moving adaptive leadership, depending on the song. And for myself, as a drummer, that's particularly cogent to think about. As a drummer, I can play loud and try to impress; I can drive the beat, I can set the tempo, I can play in the, if you will, middle of the group, and I can play very softly. But I also need to know when not to play it all. To me, the way I teach and encourage leadership is by understanding leaders, flowers, and teammates; how do we create that Gestalt? That ensemble with a whole was greater than the sum of the parts? And how do we know and respect and learn from each other?
Scott Allen 4:11
Oh, I just love that as a metaphor because I think, you know, as you know, Sharna, Fabiano uses a dancing metaphor, which I think is beautiful. I love even in the description of what you just said; There's intentionality. There's intentionality on how I should show up at this moment or my best guess as to how to show up at this moment based on what we might be doing and where we might be headed. But there's intentionality, and I think, far too often. We don't necessarily have intentionality when people are teaming up. I mean, before we started today, I said to you, I feel like sometimes our language fails us. And really, what we're talking about is, are we teaming? Well, are we engaging with one another to help the work of the group move forward and to your point? Sometimes you're in the lead. Sometimes you're in a supporting role. Sometimes we're a little more forceful. Sometimes we are less forceful. Sometimes we use this technique. Sometimes it's another technique. But are we making beautiful music together? Or is it a bunch of noise, right?
Neil Grunberg 5:18
I want to build upon what you just said; I really liked the way I've never heard anyone respond to this point that is raised about intentionality. But you're spot on. I agree with that. I think the other point that I hope your listeners will find interesting, and we hope we can gauge with each of us going forward, is that we need to also understand the importance of developing all members of a group or a team over an organization. So the concept that my colleagues and I have developed, we originally called our conceptual framework of leadership, before C, Peto model, or C elements, add for psycho-social levels, but a personal, interpersonal team and organizational, but it evolved as we studied it more in the last few years. And we refer to it now, just consistent with what you pointed out as a leader-follower framework. We need to have self-awareness of ourselves in both types of roles. And we need to develop across all of these domains, across all these contextual situations psycho socially,
Scott Allen 6:23
say more about the motto. Would you please go into that a little bit more? Because I think that's really, really interesting. And to your point, again, I said this to you before we jumped on today I said, in Western society, we tend to lionize the leader, and Ron regio on the podcast, I think it might have been my fifth episode, and we're almost done on 145 Now, said, Look, you know, leaders don't do leadership. It's co-created between leaders and followers. And, again, even when we talk about leader development, it's leadership development, leader development, but we do so little to help people better understand the role of being a great follower. And again, I imagine that's, you know, you do receive that training and music. You do understand the role at times, in a very real way, when it comes to music, but we tend to completely ignore that dimension of the work in Leadership Studies.
Neil Grunberg 7:21
I focus my leadership followership team building in health care at the Uniformed Services University. We're training physicians, nurses, dentists, psychologists, and healthcare professionals, and if anything is a team sport, if you will, it's healthcare. And modern healthcare is quite different from decades, or certainly, a generation or more ago, where there was the authoritarian, almost great man theory of Thomas Carlyle was also a description of the way leaders and physicians once acted, but that's not true in the last in this century. With regard to the framework, we look to build and find which of the many leadership and leader development frameworks and approaches would be most apropos for growing not only healthcare leaders but, where I work, uniform leaders as well. Yes, extremely important and otherwise hierarchical structures. Well, we borrowed and studied from the extant literature, as well as looked at all the various military service academies. So if you think about it very briefly, those who are familiar with it from the Army, the Army has argued for a long time that the essence of leadership "be, know, do." The Navy, however, in contrast, points out how the leader's authority and responsibility change that land and sea air force argued about the individual pilot and the machine and the supporting staff. And then we have another key uniform service. And that's the Public Health Service, arguing the importance of message transmission to entire organizations or the public. Well, from it, we selected the key from each of those historical approaches, as well as studied the extensive literature from that our foresee elements or character, competence, context, and communication. Character is the who of leadership includes, however, not only our physical self but our psychological self, our personality, our values, and everything about who we are, but it also means that one needs to enhance the leader and we'll say as you've raised in the follower, a sense of what is your tendency, what's your preference, what are your values, etc. We have to engage and develop self-awareness, but many people focus only on internal self-awareness. The more challenging is external self-awareness. How do others perceive us? Okay, calm, But it says knowledge and skills and attitudes and abilities. But it breaks into roles specific to be, again, a physician, a nurse, an attorney, a teacher, a spiritual leader, or a parent, but it also has transcendent or generalized leadership skills, decision-making, problem-solving, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, particularly important, as well as the motivation of others. To context art context, we borrow actually from the great Kurt Lewin, the great psychologist who actually was the first scholar to actually study and publish on the three types of leadership originally, authoritarian, democratic, and laissez-faire. I am a student of one of his greatest students, Stanley Schachter, I make the intellectual grandson of Lewin, building off Lewin and his field of theory and social science. We think context is psychosocial as well as physical. Are we leading the day in the following day or night, inside or outside? But also physicals inside ourselves? Are we hungry? Are we tired, as well as this the context of the culture of situations of stress? And I imagine that you and your other guests have discussed VUCA environments as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, then that's the when and where so if the character is the WHO competence is the what context did the when and where, okay, communication is the how of leadership. Perhaps this is an area that we've been proud to expand the most. Because to my surprise, as I started focusing on this area over the last eight years or so, it shifted some of my own intellectual work in my academic work. And I would ask people, what's communication? They would provide a correct but limited answer; they would say communication is giving people information we say, that's about it. Communication is sending and receiving verbally and non-verbally to achieve understanding. And then we also argued to be an outstanding communicator, the more difficult is receiving, and how to receive the secret to how to receive is hidden in the word listen. Because if you take the words, "Listen," and rearrange them, they tell you how to listen.
They spell the words silently. And the word and enlist, silent to receive and enlist to engage in, include all others. So when we get on others, that gets back to the point, Scott, you made about grilling ourselves as followers but also understanding of followers. Here we've built the conceptual framework of our leader-follower Framework also operates at four psychosocial levels, developing the person, interpersonal, dyads, teams, and organizational, but then the next phase of this is what is followership. And who is the follower here? We borrowed from Barbara Kellerman's excellent work, where she talked about followership across a continuum of engagement, which has five types. Right. She has the isolette, bystander, participant, activist, and diehard. We've added two more dimensions to that orthogonal dimension of alignment. Wherever You are aligned or not aligned with the vision, the goals, the purpose as set up by the leader in the group, as well as the third dimension. Do you adapt or not adapt? I borrow from Ron Heifetz, his work on adaptive leadership, but we like to think we've gone beyond Heifetz as well, in the following way. Heifetz talks about being resilient and returning to that norm of being adaptive to the stress of a situation. I completely agree. But what hatred is doing and Heifetz himself as a physician psychiatrist is really applying cold homeostatic theory. Returning to where you were, we believe that leadership is more than that. And that's why we refer to a certain kind of adaptive leadership, which we call Allostatic leadership, not to return to baseline but to be stronger to what's called resilience to the point of thriving. And in fact, the analogy I like to use is adaptive leadership is like the cardiovascular system, blood pressure, heart rate, etc. Whereas Allostatic leadership is the immune system, getting stronger to be ready for new opportunities and new challenges going forward. So we take those four C's across four psychosocial levels, work on developing each one ourselves and others, as leaders and followers, and then work on the most challenging, and I would say most important part, having people work together to common missions and goals. I
Scott Allen 15:13
would love to explore a little bit more. The whole dimension of follower, what are you experiencing? What are you discovering as you do this work with individuals from that follower side of the equation, so to speak?
Neil Grunberg 15:28
Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. Actually, my team and I USU Uniformed Services University. years ago, we were focusing as many places solely on leader development until we realized we needed to understand how to deal with followers. And then we had to realize, as I use the analogy to the Jazz Ensemble when to follow ourselves. Yes. So within that, as I said, we started searching, and two scholars work particularly impressed me, the work of Barbara Kellerman and the work of Ira bailiff; Kellerman distinction of these four different types of followers, isolated bystander participant, activist, and diehard I thought was interesting. We built off that in a couple of ways. Just with that concept, we've found, based on our discussions with people beginning app surveys and discussions, that we believe that the likelihood of where one falls on that follower continuum of color means like a Gaussian distribution or a normal distribution, the bell-shaped curve where the majority of people are participants. We also found that people, including ourselves, have a great tendency to be stuck in one mode. I, for example, realized as I started thinking about followership a lot over the last five or six years, thinking, Oh, my gosh, I am almost always an activist, that is, an individual who always wants to participate. But just as I'm doing with you, I'm holding myself back until you give me an opportunity to jump in. But, I'd learned that we also, again, back to the Jazz Ensemble analogy; we each have to be prepared to change from our more preferred comfortable type to the other type. That's very important to be aware of making that shift.
Scott Allen 17:28
Exactly. I mean, I think sometimes it takes people aback and push back on this; I would love to get your thought on this. Sometimes, I use a similar model. I use some different phrasing when it comes to following or styles, but it's it the concepts are the same. You know, Kelly has his labeling, Ira has his labelings. Kellerman has hers. I just decided to add my own just kind of the pot a little more. But at times, so there's one, I think, you know, the sheep are the lazy and disengaged. Well, there are potential instances where that can be the role that I take on. In some instances, as long as I'm navigating with some level of intentionality, it might be completely appropriate for me to be a pair of hands or whatever you say, or I need to be activated because I'm not going to be fully engaged or I'm not going to be an activist in every situation. That's probably just not realistic.
Neil Grunberg 18:29
I love the way you're bringing intentionality because very few gurus of leadership make the point. With it, though, it must be coupled with self-awareness.
Scott Allen 18:39
Yes, yes. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Right. See more. What else have you learned about this dimension on the follower side of this whole conversation?
Neil Grunberg 18:49
The other thing we've learned is, again, we focus on military medical teams, as well as medical teams, as well as how this information transfers to optimize the performance of teams; I tend to talk mostly about teams because I like studying small to medium-sized groups. Yes, but when I'm saying it also is relevant to change leadership and organization. With regard to the point that you're raising now, though, what we find and encourage is the following. When the leader is first addressing a group, whatever what size, it is very important that the leader makes clear that she or he has a clear vision and a clear goal, but following the work of Richard Hackman, the late Richard Hackman, and various types of ways that when sharing responsibility is that when the leader develops and puts out that vision. First, they make must make sure that they're achieving understanding and buy-in from the followers. The next stage is that the leader when describing the goal and the mission. The problem is to encourage all followers to be activists. That is, I want all of your ideas to be psychologically safe space; we need you to be engaged in determining what to do. All ideas are welcome, be an activist. But here's where it gets a little nuanced. And I hope becomes more clear after the phase where the leader has set a vision, gotten by encouraging activism from the followers. Here, the leader has the responsibility and authority to make the decisions. Once the decision is made, where we're going in how we're approaching it. The leader needs to now do everything not only to emphasize the importance of working together and group identity rather than personal identity. But in addition, the leader must encourage some movement towards alignment, or alignment is mostly aligned as a participant, not arguing or discussing. But then we had this other idea - what he's sometimes called Intelligent Disobedience, which I think is a little too extreme. But the idea is that everyone needs to be aligned and moving and participating but they can say stop. If an error or a danger is to be made, your listeners will understand this is especially important in medicine; picture yourself working with a team in an operating room, the physician surgeon was in charge, and that was that. Yep. What ends up we now teach for the operating room. That's not the way you should approach it. Because in fact, when you first bring in the patient, who's in charge, the anesthesiologist, only when the anesthesiologist has determined and reports the safety and the patient's well-being as ready for the procedure, whether it's the esteemed anesthesiologist is a physician, or the nurse anesthesiologist would call to CRNA, or s RNAs, then turns over the shared leadership transfers to the surgeon. But at this point, we still expect the surgical team, surgical nurses as well as physicians to be monitoring. If something goes wrong with the patient's vitals, bang, we hope the anesthesiologist resumes rather than is ignored. And the leadership moves back to the anesthesiologist. So we have that movement, where we have participants that are aligned with the goal of well being of the patient or execution of a given mission or task. unless something's gonna go wrong. I don't think we have time today to get into it. But I've had the honor to discuss with Dr. Ai retail off the Uvalde horror. And why so many well-trained followers waited so long with the leader failing to make a decision that perhaps would have been life-saving. Yes, this is the other part of being aware of ourselves and aware of our tendencies. And really, again, I like picking up the point you've made, and if you don't mind, Scott, I will cite you. But use your point about intentionality when I talk and right going forward. I never emphasize that much. I really like that our self-awareness of how to be and our intentionality of how to be
Scott Allen 23:31
yes. But I think in your example of look, we're in a surgical suite right now, where there are clear lines of authority, and there are clear roles, and there are there is a mission, and it's very clear. Yeah, we need individuals who are actively engaged in paying attention, you know, so in that context, it goes back to Kellerman, his notion of context, or Lewin with context. I mean, yes, if it's my Hoa, not not a surgical suite. But I think you're exactly right. I mean, it's, it's so interesting. And what's really interesting is recent, I've been doing this exercise with people when I'm doing programs, and I've just called it the personal leadership profile. I don't know that it's going to be called anything different. But that's what I'm calling it right now. And it's just kind of been an experiment. But it's, it's been an attempt, Neal, to really work to situate the individual. This is a person often in a position of authority to situate them in what it's like to work for me. So it's trying to make them, the implicit explicit for the leader. But I'm asking questions like, or I'm having them answer questions like you have permission to. So you have permission to push back on me. If you feel like we're not going in the right direction and you have a concern, you have permission to always do that. And so there are all kinds of question shins that I've identified that the leader has to think through, that they if they communicate clearly, will hopefully make things run more smoothly. Hopefully, it helps set the stage a little more clearly for the people who are on the team. And yes, that courageous followership, that that notion of, okay, you have permission to say something if you feel like this is not moving in a good direction, because that blind authority, and listening to thought, I mean, as human beings, we are so limited, you would know better than anyone from these cognitive biases, that cloud, in some cases, especially under great stress, cloud our ability to be successful at times, right?
Neil Grunberg 25:44
Absolutely. And your comments have brought up a couple of related points. Because as you were describing different situations in the work you're doing now and approach, it's interesting that you started mentioning not positive leadership and followership but negative. So from that, it's another concept that we've looked to build. So we're quite a few authors have written on and called it toxic leadership. We tried to unravel that a bit. So we've published and talked about what we refer to as three different kinds of poor leadership, of which we all need to be cautious. And I'm raising it because it really fits with your point that intentionality will become clearer. We call it bit leadership, which is ineffective or toxic leadership, great different types; bad is doing and behaving in a way that's immoral, outrageous, or evil. But here, it can have intentionally done that or unintentionally, for one of two very different reasons. One is the person is not in their right mind, has a mental health disorder problem, a substance abuse problem, and the like. And so they're not even aware of what they're doing. Or it could be unintentional because they're not responsive to that particular culture or situation on what's considered, if you will, appropriate or not moral or immoral, ethical or not. The second type, we believe, is the most common type of poor leader, an ineffective leader. And here, we get to the point again about communication because the most common type of ineffective leader is the leader who is absent. They can be physically absent, they're never around, and they don't pay attention. Or they're psychologically absent. They're not engaged. They don't listen; they don't communicate, and they don't transmit information. The third type is really interesting. We use the word toxic leadership, again, because I have a medical background, and I teach in medical settings, based on the word toxic in a poison. So it's different from bad or ineffective, it is affecting others. So certainly, someone can be a toxic leader or toxic follower. Yes, they had malice, or Kutztown people treated them poorly. But there's another one to pick up on your point of intentionality; there is a really dangerous, unintentional way of being toxic. And that is the person who unintentionally plays favorites. So, for example, that very nice leader or boss or supervisor, who just happened to, based on their background, or their likes, or the history, became friends with a certain person. So let's say as you and I get to know each other, Scott, like you and I decide, we're gonna go out for lunch or have a beer or a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. And you start doing that to a point where the relationship of that leader with everyone else in the group becomes more and more distant because of unintentional toxicity. We also argue that, again, just as you and I have discussed, these are issues to be aware of not only for ourselves as leaders but ourselves as followers and the followers who we deal with. Well, Neil,
Scott Allen 29:13
okay, so I love the fact that, that you have the model, you're experimenting, you're making sense of the space. What have you learned as you transmit as communicate this model to people in the field? How are they responding? How are they experiencing your curriculum? I'm really interested in knowing this.
Neil Grunberg 29:35
Oh, well, I really appreciate that question. The jury's out a little bit, but when I first started delving deep because of my own background and social psychology, as well as physiological psychology, it goes back decades and decades since I read the work of Lewin and others over the years, but it's only in the last eight years, really, because following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a greater and greater concern within the Military Health System in the United States. What was working, and what was not working? There was an analysis done. And a report basically came out that the individual healthcare professionals, physicians, nurses, dentists, social workers, physical therapists, radiology technicians, and on and on, were excellent. But there was the failure of leadership or inadequacies. And it came down to what was it what to do that? The reason I mentioned that is it's with this attention. What can we transmit? So the greatest challenge that my team and I faced at first is that leadership was something that a lot of people knew it was and didn't need to be taught. And you started with a really basic difference of opinion. Are they born leaders? Are they learned to be leaders, you know, we have our own nature-nurture thing I can be, you know, a 19th-century debate here. So that's the first issue that we had to deal with and say, Listen, there are individual differences. Clearly, people are more charismatic, people are more confident, people more extroverted versus inter there are these differences that depending on the culture, and the situation, will set someone up biologically to be more predisposed to be more comfortable as a leader, follower, etc. But everyone, everyone can be developed and can learn to be more effective leaders and more effective followers. Yes, that's the first challenge that we had. The next intellectual challenge we face largely because I work largely mostly for my educational work within a uniformed service, armed forces, and public health service; we also had to confront the history of leadership in the military, which actually dates back in terms of written work, to the Iliad of Homer. Wow, when one actually goes back to the Iliad, in particular, whether when reading the Iliad, the Aeneid, or the Odyssey, we start learning about military history. With that, however, we go through the centuries, and the military, particularly for understandable reasons, emphasizes the leader, especially when we went through a period of history for centuries where a given army or group could name a champion, what's the most famous from the Bible, David, and Goliath naming a champion of each army, the two will battle it out so that 10s or hundreds or 1000s of soldiers are warriors don't die or get maimed. And it's all based on the leader in that sense. The work of Thomas Carlyle and others in great man theory, that great person theory was very popular through the 19th century. But we came to learn in the 20th century that was limited because we work largely with military and medicine, the importance of the well-educated, confident leader was something else to overcome. And who else can be a leader? Was it more than being politically correct to say that, I'm not going to give any specifics but fill in your mind? How do we eat? Picture the great leader. And who do we think physically, emotionally, height, gender, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity? Do we have biases or beliefs well founded or not? On what to be the leader not? So breaking through those biases and understanding in self as well as others? was a very important point. Yep. I, for example, am actually surprised a lot of people don't know me. Well, I'm really a pretty extreme introvert. Okay, that means I get my strength from being alone or being with a few people. But I can perform in front of 10s, hundreds, or even 1000s of people in a large auditorium. Again, I take it from my musician self. Yep. Where I've learned to play different roles. But understand I'm also small on five foot six, no, and, and so when well, except for some of the sportsmen in history have been the most dangerous leader isn't true for now.
Scott Allen 34:29
There's a whole complex named after that, I think.
Neil Grunberg 34:33
So, perhaps, you can do therapy with me after this. But in seriousness, to understand, especially in our culture, and another interesting I've had as I've had the great privilege to help educate leaders in military, military, medicine, and others, the number of truly outstanding women who I've helped become and develop as leaders encourage your mentoring them, who tell me these things Really powerful stories of what they face in Iraq and Afghanistan 510 15 years ago, command the man and then finding the village elder would even talk with them. They deal with that issue. So a lot of the things is the other is, I'm really impressed, I must say this it is that the leadership as a scholarly pursuit, is finding its way to connect with the meaningful application, where there used to be a big division between the ivory tower, leadership, consultants and others, there's much more of mutual respect. So we learn from each other. I'm always learning again, from applied settings, again, military and medicine. But I also love learning from people I talked to, like you and others in business settings, networking, and the leg; I think we have a long way to go. But the other new challenges we, of course, have, perhaps a discussion of another podcast is the challenge. And I mean the challenge of social media and how profound its effect on communication, leadership, and followership, and deeply miss in a misunderstanding of our own support, as we're each because of artificial intelligence, the way social media works, we each get that gigantic echo chamber of our own views, and it leads to gross misunderstanding. So I come back to my point of all the things leadership I've been studying for my career; the most important is I can help people with one thing, just one, improved communication,
Scott Allen 36:43
I literally was having this conversation with a couple of friends the other night, one of them is from the UK, and another one is from Columbia. One is a physician, a gentleman from Columbia, and the gentleman from the UK is, in an industry. And it's interesting because we were talking about media, and the discussion kind of centered around the BBC. In the UK, there's still somewhat with the exception of the rags; there's somewhat kind of one voice that's sharing the narrative. And that's, that's the BBC. Yes. And we were talking about that. And in the States, a contextual shift it's becoming more and more clear to me, and push back on this if you disagree. But if that leader is not almost over-communicating, really commanding the narrative, and highlighting the good and making people aware, through multi-channel means they're limited, the void will be filled by someone or something, that and the narrative will be filled. And I think that's a major contextual shift. How does an American president? How does a leader of a large organization rise above the noise and, again, communicate the narrative? Because if it's just one channel, if it's one mode, if it's, you know, the press conference? Well, okay, that's one. But how many people watch the press conference? You better get better be, you know, and repetition is another interesting component of all of this because I think at times, there's a quote, I'm not going to get it right now. But it was something to the effect of a failure of communication is the illusion that has occurred that the illusion that it has occurred. So the leader says I said it, but we all know in organizational life, if you aren't tired of saying it, you haven't said it enough.
Neil Grunberg 38:47
Right? That's great. You raised several points your listeners might relate to. When we talked about communication and effective communication, we talked about the principles of communication. It goes back to the work of Ebbinghaus, and then others, the Yale Hopkins School of Communication, primacy, recency, the first thing said, the last thing said, repetition, as you've already mentioned, simplicity, yes, point, point, counterpoint, clarity, perceived relevance to the listener. And so it is both communicating for understanding and reaching the goal. But the other thing that reminded me that I've always found really fascinating is that your comments just brought to mind, are many of the positions of Benjamin Franklin. And I bring up Franklin because I've always been astonished not only by his many contributions in various ways, but I've always personally found the most interesting what he said about essential communication and how essential it was for democracy unless the citizen rate is informed and gets correct and accurate information and can have public discourse and debate. You cannot have a true democracy. And so his argument about not only as a newspaperman and journalist, and then not only pull up Poor Richard's Almanac in other ways of getting out information but why he created the US Postal Service postal office to get information to others. And why his design is best exemplified in Philadelphia, is not only are there the different four different squares, and the way addresses are to find and transmit information but to have a central square and then little regional squares for people to come together, if you will, there are nodes or networks, physical interaction. When we think now about the electronic age and social media, there are all sorts of experts who have taken control of nodes and networks in that way. They basically come to own, if you will, Benjamin Franklin's Corner, his speaking area, Hyde Park, and you were talking about is the Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park is so famous in London that we all need to figure out how to get a fair exchange of information, where there also is accuracy, truth, integrity, a burden on all of us, especially as we work to be open and understand and truly understand and see the world through other people's eyes.
Scott Allen 41:36
Neil, I would love to have a conversation with you, at some point, just on this whole notion of communication. A good friend of mine, who's at a university in Canada, is taking a sabbatical and really exploring the literature around leadership and specifically communication because that's his background is communication. But when you start looking and delving deep into the leadership literature, actually very little, at least what he's telling me, has been written on that topic. And I think there's a gap there. And I think it's something rightfully that you are focusing on, as just critical that I don't know, even in some of our programming that we elevate to the degree it should be. There are some great scholars who have come out of communication, Hackman, Johnson, Northhouse, those individuals have kind of, that's their background, and they've moved into the space of leadership studies. But I think it's; it's a really interesting conversation that I would love to continue with you at some point because drilling down into that specific area, it's important, it's very, very important. And if there isn't intentionality and strategy around that, especially now in this context, you're, you're leaving it up to anyone else to, to command. Now that's at a larger global scale, right? But I think even in organizational life, when you think about the average manager's day or leader, the person in authority, it's kind of like the evening news. They're finding out the seven or eight things that went wrong, the fires, the things that are not going well, or that need to have been elevated to them. So their day can become that. And as a result, again, I could watch the nightly news tonight; millions and millions of good things happening today in my community, millions. But I have a funnel for the eight or nine that went wrong. And that is going to elevate those things in people's minds. And if I'm not commanding the narrative on my team, of all of the good and highlighting and elevating and creating space for those narratives to exist. I'm leaving it up to chance. And I'm leaving it up to other people's stories that they're making up in their heads, and there's a missed opportunity there, don't you think?
Neil Grunberg 43:54
I completely agree. And even more, you're leaving it open that vacuum to be filled by all sorts of misinformation. Yes,
Scott Allen 44:03
yes. And okay, so that's a date.
Neil Grunberg 44:08
I like I'd be, I'd love to do that. And whether Scott, I really appreciate thank you so much for inviting me to be on this. I'm really impressed with the podcasts you put together and the service you're providing. And if I can ever be of help in any way, as a guest tour commentator, or in any way, please, you know, 24/7 and, and to anyone who is bothering to listen to this, we hope that they've learned something, and we hope that they'll share their insights as we learn from each other.
Scott Allen 44:38
Exactly. Exactly. Well, I always close these conversations down, Neal by just asking, quickly, is there something that's caught your attention recently, maybe something that you've been streaming or reading or listening to? It could be a podcast; maybe it was a film, it could have to do with what we've just discussed, it might have nothing to do with what we've just discussed, but what's caught your attention recently. It could be an album that's caught your attention, maybe a jazz album,
Neil Grunberg 45:04
I believe that what is most relevant also to consider that one might miss one thing about leadership is how everything we've talked about today and other things on your podcast is also critical to relationships. And I mean family relationships, relationships with significant others, with children, with parents, etc. You know, I'm very fortunate I've been married to the same person for 48 years. And we still remind ourselves of the importance of communication. And I definitely believe that as I've pivoted my own research from drug abuse, stress, and other topics I've studied for the last eight years focusing now entirely on leadership. I feel so fortunate that I tried to apply every lesson I learned, to relationships with my wife, with my grown children, and with friends to understand them better. So it's not leadership is not about telling others what to do. It's about people relating to each other. And so that just to me cuts through everything.
Scott Allen 46:09
I love it. So they the whole of what you've been exploring and learning you're working to put into practice. I love it.
Neil Grunberg 46:17
My wife will have to tell you if I'm succeeding or not. We are
Scott Allen 46:21
all we are all works in progress. Okay, sir, thank you so much for being with me today. I appreciate it. I look forward to our next conversation. And thank you for the great work that you do. Thank you for exploring and help thank you for helping us better understand this space. I'm going to put it for those who are listening. I will put some links into the show notes so that you have access to some of his work and some of how they're thinking about leadership so you can explore it a little bit more. Take care, everybody. Thank you so much for checking in. Be well. Bye bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai