Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen

Cathy Carroll - How to Lead a Family Business With Both Love and Logic

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 254

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Cathy Carroll learned about family business leadership the best way you can – by leading her family business. After a twenty-year corporate career, she left United Airlines to lead her father’s business and instantly recognized a difference between leadership in a family business vs leadership in a large corporation.  

Founder and President of Legacy Onward, Inc., Cathy Carroll is a family business leadership coach and author of Hug of War: How to Lead a Family Business With both Love and Logic. She also trains advisors serving in family enterprises as well as coaches who maintain their credential with the International Coaching Federation.

Cathy earned certificates in both Leadership Coaching and Executive Facilitation at Georgetown University, an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a BA at Boston College.  She is also a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) in the ICF.

An active member of the community, Cathy currently serves as Vice-Chair the Board of the Purposeful Planning Instituteand co-founder & Treasurer of A Leg To Stand On which provides prosthetic limbs to children in developing countries. 

Quote From This Episode

  • "There are these polarities that live within us that lead to huge blind spots, and our reactive tendency is to double down on our strength, which puts us into 'overuse.'"


Resources Mentioned in This Episode

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

  • The ILA was created in 1999 to bring together professionals interested in studying, practicing, and teaching leadership. Plan for Prague - October 15-18, 2025!


About  Scott J. Allen


My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace your reflection, research, and exploration of the topic.

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 the Phronesis Podcast. Thank you so much for checking in. Today, I have Cathy Carroll, and she learned about family business leadership the best way you can by leading her family business. After a 20-year corporate career, she left United Airlines to lead her father's business and instantly recognized the difference between leadership in a family business, versus leadership in a large corporation. Founder and president of Legacy Onward, Inc., Cathy Carroll is a family business leadership coach and author of ‘Hug of War: How to Lead a Family Business with both Love and Logic.’ She also trains advisors serving in family enterprises, as well as coaches who maintain their credentials with the International Coaching Federation. Cathy earned certificates in both Leadership Coaching and Executive Facilitation at Georgetown University, an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and a BA at Boston College. She is also a professional certified coach in the International Coach Federation. An active member of the community, Cathy currently serves as vice chair, the board of Purposeful Planning Institute, and co-founder and treasurer of A Leg to Stand On which provides prosthetic limbs to children in developing countries. Cathy, thank you so much for being here. What's not on the bio? What can we share with listeners, maybe a fun fact about you? 

 

Cathy Carroll  1:21  

Oh, gosh. Well, I grew up in Chicago. I live in San Antonio, Texas. I'm the oldest of five kids. My stepson just started at LSU, and he's doing all the learning that you do as a freshman at a university. I spend my non-work time trying to spoil my husband, my Poochie, my friends, my family. And maybe a weird, fun fact, I started my career as an actuary, so I was very in the logic part of my brain. Over time, I moved from finance to marketing to sales, leading my father's business, and then to leadership coach. And I had gone the complete other direction, and now I live very much in my heart.

 

Scott Allen  2:02 

Oh, that's awesome. And so, yes, we're just kind of starting on the cusp of looking at schools. My son's 16, and even though I spent a career in academia, that's been an adventure. Oof.

 

Cathy Carroll   2:15  

Yeah. It's a learning journey, no doubt. 

 

Scott Allen  2:17 

But there is a trip on the books to get to the University of Chicago. It's a great loss of Cleveland. Not many people know this, but Rockefeller was headquartered in Cleveland. He's actually buried in Cleveland, Standard Oil. And got mad at Cleveland and left, and provided the seed money to found the University of Chicago. (Laughs)

 

Cathy Carroll  2:39  

They do not know that. Yeah, it's a beautiful campus. It's a fantastic school. I can't speak highly of it enough.

 

Scott Allen  2:45 

Absolutely incredible. Well, I have done a little bit of work with the family office exchange. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with Fox, but really interesting organization. And have had some folks on the podcast who kind of work in that space, which has been really interesting. In my own practice, I also work with some family-owned businesses. So I'm really, really excited for this conversation because you bring this really wonderful perspective of, “I've worked in large corporate America; I've worked in the family-owned business.” And I love the phrasing, ‘love and logic.’ We need both ends there, right? 

 

Cathy Carroll  3:22  

Totally. Yeah.

 

Scott Allen  3:24 

Well, take listeners through a couple of things that you'd like to highlight from the book. I have not read it yet, but I just want to tease us a little bit with just kind of where you take the reader and some insights that you've had so that listeners have a sense of kind of where you're headed. 

 

Cathy Carroll  3:41  

Sure. I think my opening story in the book probably sets it up better than anything else. So, I walked into a prospective new client's office, and I was seated outside of the door of his office. I started hearing this bellowing from inside, and it was clearly frustration, maybe some anger. And I thought, “Good grief, is this my potential new client?” So, eventually, the door opened, and John came out, and he was a terrific person, very kind and very welcoming. I sat inside the office, and he started to explain to me that, in all of his professional life, he had started and successfully exited eight businesses. He was a serial entrepreneur. This was his ninth, and it was very different. Things felt very awful, and he could not figure out what was so different. So, his wife said, “You know, this is the first time you've worked with your family,” because he was working with his daughter. So, meet Mila. Mila actually had a history of substance abuse, and John had been putting her through rehab for quite a bit of time, so she was in a good place. She was in recovery. And she was struggling, though, at work, she wasn't really a high performer, and he was kind of tense about the fact that she wasn't performing well. And then, introduce her partner, Malachi who wasn't a great influence on her from a substance abuse perspective. He was an even worse performer, and he was in the sales role, so you could easily measure his performance. And so, his business mindset was very clear, “I need to fire these poor performers.” And the business mindset is driven by logic. It values profits, competition, and meritocracy, and it was a very clear answer. And then, his family mindset turned on, and it's driven by love, and it values fairness and sharing and unconditional belonging. And when he put on his family mindset, he thought, “Well, these people are caring for…” Meet the grandchild, Michaela, the love of his life, and they are providing for my grandchild. I can't fire them, I need to give them a raise, in fact… Because they were overpaid for what they were doing. He was terrified that if he terminated them, they would leave town and then he would have marriage problems. Meet his wife, Mary, who said, “Hell no, if you're going to take my grandchild away from me.” So, he was just beside himself. He had this cognitive dissonance that he could not reconcile, and he didn't have the distance from it to really make sense of it. But he had these two opposing truths, two opposing right answers that were in constant conflict, and it was twisting him up in his head and in his heart. And that's what's totally unique about leadership in a family business: you have these two opposing truths. So then, the rest of the book, I basically go through a series of power dynamics that are unique to family businesses, and these power dynamics manifest only because of this duality of mindsets. Then, I will talk about some of the internal cognitive dissonance that happens and some of the system conflicts that happen. Those of your listeners who are familiar with polarities know that we often only see half of the polarity. We see the business mindset, and we don't see the family mindset, or we see the value of centralization, but we don't see the value of decentralization. And so, you end up with this intense family conflict within the system, or even business conflict, because only a portion of the polarity is seen. And then I talk about how polarities manifest in succession, which is incredibly unique in a family business and looks nothing like corporate succession. Then comes governance, which is, again, unique in a family business. And then, finally, in chapters 9 and 10, I go through, step by step, the polarity principles that, eventually, you can use to find your way through the complex dynamics that are in play. But I didn't lead with polarity thinking because, to be honest, polarities can be kind of dry. So, I really made the book very story-driven so you can see and feel the anguish of being a leader in a family business, and then you finally get the relief of, “Okay, here's how I move forward.”

 

Scott Allen  7:46 

Okay. So, take us a little bit deeper into a couple of those areas and share some thoughts and perspectives. I'm very intrigued here because I love how you framed it up. You have these competing commitments, you have these polarities, and take us a little deeper on a couple of areas that you find intriguing.

 

Cathy Carroll  8:03  

Yeah. The first power dynamic I talk about is domain crossover, and it's when you leverage power in one domain to get what you want in the other. So, for example, I knew one client who said to his father, “If you don't give me full control of this business, you will not see your grandchild.” 

 

Scott Allen  8:21

Oh, wow. Wow.

 

Cathy Carroll  8:22

And then another client who got demoted at work because she wasn't playing friendly with her dad's new wife. And the dad said, “You are not going to advance in this company until you make friends with my wife.” So, it's leveraging power, like in the second example, leveraging power in the business domain to get what he wanted in the family domain. In the first example, he leveraged power in the family to get what he wanted in the business. So, that doesn't happen outside of… In form of hard power. And I talk about when it's actually appropriate to use hard power, but it's pretty rare when it's appropriate. And then, I introduce some alternative power sources like soft power, which actually leads to the second power chapter. I call it ‘Shadow Influencers.’ And Shadow Influencers are people in a family business who have no ownership, they have no role in the business, and they wield extraordinary power in the family business. One of my favorite examples is a chief operating officer who got blindsided by losing his job because he had no idea of what was going on in the family. And here's what was going on, the CEO is a woman who had a substance abuse problem herself, and she hired a new head of sales. And the new head of sales kind of had a party reputation, and so the CEO's husband said, “Oh no, we're not going to have a direct reporting relationship between my wife and this new salesperson.” Yeah. And so, what they did was elevate their son to be the president of the business so that there could be a reporting layer between the CEO and the new head of sales. So, Max, the young man who was promoted to the president, he's super smart, really capable. It was still a little early for him to take on a president role, but that's okay. He did it. But here's what happened to the COO, he had no idea that this was happening. And he was informed about it, even though he served on the board, he was informed when all of the employees were informed, and his first reaction was, “Wait a second. Why didn't I know about this? And then, second, why wasn't I considered a candidate for the president role? Why did this Max, who's 15 years younger than I am and 15 years less experienced get promoted into the role?” And he really struggled. This COO really struggled, and for six months he just couldn't get over it. And his performance at the office was starting to decline, and he ended up getting terminated. And he got completely blindsided because he had no idea what was really going on. He was a really strong performer to that point.

 

Scott Allen  10:53 

Hmm. This whole notion of power and how power is leveraged and power is used, and to your first point of, “I'm going to use the business, the corporation, the organization, and it's going to impact family and decisions in that domain.” Fascinating. And then, yeah, the contextual awareness that an individual, especially if you're not in the family, has to have is mind-boggling.

 

Cathy Carroll  11:18  

Well, and it's one of those dynamics where, if you think about a business, you've got inherent complexity in a business. You think about a family, there's inherent complexity in a family, and then put them together. And, although I was a math major, I'm not sure if that's exponentially more complex or not, but it is really, really complex. If you're a student of complexity theory, then you're in the domain of testing and trying to feel your way forward because it's not clear what's happening. And you don't necessarily know, you certainly don't have control. You don't have all the information. And so, it's a challenging dynamic because you're really kind of just sort of putting little mini-tests out there and trying to see how the system was responding, not knowing what's actually really underneath the full dynamic in play.

 

Scott Allen  12:03 

Well, okay. So, I want to put the pause button on and you left United to run your father's business. How did either of these two dynamics play out in that role? I'm wondering if you have a personal example that you can share where it may not be a one-to-one, but how power was being leveraged in the organization that just kind of caught your attention, caught your eye, that was interesting.

 

Cathy Carroll  12:30  

Yeah. I actually grew up in my grandfather's business, so I'm a third-generation family member. And I thought it was a crazy town when I was a kid, so I spent 20 years in corporate and then got recruited back into my father's business 20 years later, and that's when I started to really feel this weird tension. In terms of hard power, my father was a very command and control leader, but I'm trying to think of how there was a power leverage between domains. I guess maybe there's one that's an example that's probably relevant. My brother, at one point, was looking for work, and we were looking for someone who had his skill set, and so I thought, “Let's bring my brother into the family business.” And my father was dead set against it for unknown reasons. I think, ultimately, I ended up using some soft power to find a way to get my father on board with bringing my brother into the business because I knew I had no hard power, I only had influence. And it was really influencing him in the business domain to get what I thought was right for both the business and for my family in the family domain, which was to bring my brother into the business. So, I think that's probably the first example that comes to mind. 

 

Scott Allen  13:53 

Yeah. Well, you mentioned something really important here, which is power versus influence, and having to work through influence when in the family business. How do you think about that dynamic and the role of influence versus formal authority or power? How do you think about that?

 

Cathy Carroll  14:12  

It's one of the most important skills in leadership in a family business because families don't have the same hierarchical rules that businesses do. And I'll give you an example, actually, this is a perfect plug, Scott, for chapter four, and I talk about circular power. So, there was a woman that I worked with, she was the youngest of three, and her father wanted one of the three daughters to succeed him in the business. It was a multi-billion dollar business. So, they hired a crackerjack consultant, and they ended up choosing the youngest. So, here's the youngest of three who suddenly became the boss of her two sisters and upends a few different family norms. In a sibling group, you have peers, and in a sibling group, there's also a hierarchy. So, she kind of blew through both of those, and really struggled with the two sisters who reported to her, but then she reported to the Board, which was made up of herself, her sisters, and her father. So, you're talking about a very circular power dynamic, again, that doesn't exist outside of family business, and that's where influence is essential in leadership because you don't have the sort of formal authority that you tend to have in the business domain. You have these other sets of rules in the family domain that don't adhere to the hierarchical structures of business. And so, it's, I think, one of the superpower skills of leadership and one of the hardest ones to learn because you've got all your family dynamics in the way from childhood.

 

Scott Allen  15:43 

Yeah. And for listeners, there's just a really fascinating literature base on influence tactics. If we are going to make an influence attempt, just look up influence tactics. It's a lot of fun because I imagine if the individual is not skilled in that work, and who's ever trained on, “Hey, here's influence tactics”? That's not a thing. But if we aren't skilled in that, or even just how to use some of the forms of power and when to use them, and the second-order effects of using some of these. Sometimes, and I imagine, in your world, the lifelong effects of using some of these sources of power or leveraging power in different ways. But, yeah, the influence tactics literature is so fascinating because if you're not designing it well, especially in that context, it's going to be a very, very long road. It's going to be very difficult. And, to your point, that circular. Oh my gosh, I can’t.

 

Cathy Carroll  16:43  

It’s so strange. Yeah. Where would you point listeners to develop their skills in influence?

 

Scott Allen  16:49 

Well, it's a great question. So, Robert Cialdini is probably the global expert on influence. And so he, for years, has been writing books on the topic. So that's one space. And then the Center for Creative Leadership has some really interesting resources on, again, some of these influence tactics that if you bundle in, let's say, for instance, I'm going to use logic. So, logic is great and good. And in a lot of the organizations, logic wins the day. But add family, add humans, and logic doesn't always win the day. In fact, economists have learned pretty well that we aren't necessarily always rational beings. So, logic combined with maybe I have a coalition, there's two or three of us that feel the same way, combined with an ability to kind of empathize the needs of the other person and really put yourself in their shoes, so as I'm designing the influence attempt, I can take their considerations in mind. So, now, all of a sudden, I have three elements of my design, and there's probably a few others that I could add in there that strengthen the influence attempt. But if I'm not designing it -- and oftentimes, in organizations, people aren't, they aren't timing the influence attempts well, they aren't designing it well. And they'll say things like, “Well, I told them in the meeting it needed to be this,” and that's kind of it. And so, it's a fascinating conversation when I'm working with organizations, and especially if it's a mid-level manager who's trying to influence up, influence across, influence down. That is their world. They don't necessarily have a lot of formal authority, they're getting a lot of their work done through influence. And then you get into fun conversations, the difference between manipulation and influence. It's an adventure.

 

Cathy Carroll  18:40  

Yeah, it is really interesting. I think a little bit about the relationship between influence and negotiations. And I remember when I was a student, a graduate student, I learned about negotiations from the famous book ‘Getting to Yes.’ And then, many, many years later, I read the fabulously fascinating delicious book by Chris Voss, ‘Never Split the Difference.’ Chris Voss is a former FBI hostage negotiator, imagine the kind of negotiations he was involved in. And he said, “Yes, all that ‘getting to yes’ stuff is great, and that assumes that humans are rational operators and that our emotions are not driving.” And he says, “In my experience, the emotions are in the front seat. They're driving the bus here.” So, let's take into consideration what it's like when emotions are in the lead, and then how to actually negotiate these complex dynamics. So, I love both books, but they're very, very different, and I think they're both necessary. One is all about the logic and one's all about the love.

 

Scott Allen  19:44 

Oh, that's such a cool phrasing. I have not read the latter. It's Chris Voss, V-O-S-S, correct? 

 

Cathy Carroll  19:50

Mm-hmm.

 

Scott Allen  19:51

Okay. No, I've not read that one, so I need to add that to the list. And I think, to your point, going back to the family business conversation, yes, emotions are… Thanksgiving gets really interesting because it's hard to leave the business and all of that at the door when you walk through to eat turkey.

 

Cathy Carroll  20:13  

Well, I certainly had a hard time letting go of all of my childhood injuries when I was leading my father's business. All of the stuff that I had unresolved, sitting there unresolved in my childhood was showing up every single day, and it inhibited my ability to be a true leader and a true partner to the owner of the business, and I was not my best self. And, Scott, I thought I was so great. I have such an innocent lamb, “I'm doing all this great work on his behalf,” and my mindset was to keep him off to the side so that what I felt like was chao, his tendency for disruption wouldn't spill out over the rest of the organization. And he does have a leaning. In terms of polarity thinking, he loves disruption. And, of course, I grew up craving stability because his leadership style at work was his parenting style at home. So, I didn't like growing up in a disruptive environment, and so I kind of developed an identity around not being him. My father is very bold, I built an identity around being humble. My father loves to spend, I have saved every penny I've ever earned. I alluded to my father as a command and control leader. Of course, I developed a servant leadership style, but I actually, upon reflection over a decade later, I look back and I ran the risk of falling into the overuse of all those poll preferences, and I couldn't see it. All I could see was I was right, he was wrong, and I was on a mission to prove that that was the case. I wanted vindication. So, it really inhibited my ability to be an effective leader because so much of my motivation was proving my worth and proving that my way was the better way.

 

Scott Allen  21:58 

Just that right there is just an incredible piece of self-awareness. That's incredible. It really is. There's the Bob Hogan quote, “Who you are is how you lead,” and it's hard to leave your lived history at the door when you walk through the door. I had a guest, Amy Elizabeth Fox, and it was a fascinating conversation with Amy. She used the phrasing ‘performance-ready. Are our leaders performance-ready? And I think part of that performance readiness is not only the physical and taking care of self, but if you're a leader and you're not, in some ways, doing that work, that self-reflection, that personal growth, whatever it is with a therapist or a coach in an ongoing fashion, all of that spills out onto the team in whatever way it's going to show up, the good, the bad and the ugly. And I love your phrasing also of… The image I kind of have in my mind right now, and I don't really have words for it, Cathy, other than this, I'm reading right now Jocko Willink’s book, ‘Dichotomy of Leadership,’ and throughout the book, he uses the phrasing that you need to balance confidence and humility. You need to balance it. And I don't think that's the right phrasing. The metaphor for me is it's a dial of 0 to 10. And what's appropriate for this situation that I'm in right now? Where do I need to consciously turn the dial? Do I need to move into a follower role and really just kind of take a seat and let others come up with a path because it's their expertise, or do I feel like I have to be the person with the answers and really ramp up my assertiveness and lead quote-unquote? And so, I loved your phrasing there because, yeah, a servant leader overplayed, that's not good either.

 

Cathy Carroll  23:46  

Well, and I will even take it up one notch further, which is how can I be both assertive and humble at the same time? It's not when is it appropriate to be assertive and when is it appropriate to be humble. That's a fair question, and I think that's legit, but are there ways that I can actually integrate both that harmonize these opposites so that I am actually in a broader leadership space and not in one pool or the other?

 

Scott Allen  24:10 

Yeah. That's wonderful phrasing too. What does that look like? Paint a picture for me. I'm just literally interested. How do we hold those behaviorally? What does that look like? What do you think? 

 

Cathy Carroll  24:24  

Well, I'll give you an example just in the present moment. Here I am, to a certain extent, humbly sharing all of my challenges as a leader working for my father in a very bold way by speaking on a podcast and promoting a book, that's a way to integrate bold and humble at the same time. 

 

Scott Allen  24:43 

I love it. And sometimes again it's… So, let me know if this sounds accurate as well, or push back, please. At times, leaders have to model confidence and vulnerability. So, I think some leaders that I work with struggle to say to the team, “I don't know the answer,” but could a version of this be, “I don't have a clear sense of a path forward yet. We're going to get there, and together, we're going to create that. Here's the question I think we need to work. Let me know if you agree, and then we're going to come to a path forward.” So, is that, in a way, kind of holding both ‘I'm confident that we can move forward and identify a path, but I'm also vulnerable, and we are going to co-create that path’? Does that get in the realm of what you just said? 

 

Cathy Carroll  25:31  

Yeah. I think that's a beautiful description of how to harmonize bold and humble at the same time. Beautifully said.

 

Scott Allen  25:36 

Well, a couple of other things from the book that you want to highlight or just entice listeners with? Are there any other things on your mind that you want to make sure that we talk about as we begin to think about winding down? 

 

Cathy Carroll  25:47  

Sure. I talked about in one chapter, I mentioned the cognitive dissonance that happens in the leader, and I titled that chapter ‘Privileges and Responsibilities,’ and I hold them now as a polarity. And it was a polarity that I really didn't see for a very long time, and writing the book actually helped me see it because I saw the value of responsibility. My identity was formed of being not my dad. I see my dad as irresponsible, so I gravitate strongly, too strong to responsibility. And so, as I started to frame out the polarities, and anyone unfamiliar with polarity thinking is every pull in a polarity has upsides and overuses, so I described very quickly the upsides of responsibility. And I was very easy to describe the overuses of privilege and that label entitlement, that is the big TV shows and all of the media portrays family businesses is very entitled. The entitled air is a whole phrase, so that was easy for me to see. It was hard for me to see the upsides of privileges in the overuses of responsibility. And so, it took me a long time to realize that I was like, “Well, what's so bad with being responsible?” Responsibility is good. Everyone's supposed to be responsible.” And I finally looked in the mirror and I said, “Oh, now I know the overuse of responsibility.” It looks like burnout and over-functioning for all of my siblings and not letting them take the lead on anything. “I got this. I can do it. I'll take responsibility.” It really can be debilitating, not only to the individual who's in the overuse, but to the system who is enabling and being allowed to under-function because someone's taking on too much responsibility. And then I started to realize, okay, there are some okay things about stepping into privilege. And so, now I'm taking my spa days, and doing self-care, and I'm doing things that are important to me. And, to a certain extent, the coaching profession suddenly opened my eyes to the value and the importance of all this self-care, which now I see as the upside of privilege. So, I think of privileges and responsibilities much like I think of support and challenge in a leadership role. So, if I have a team member and I'm going to challenge the heck out of her, then I'm also going to give her a ton of support. And I think privileges and responsibilities pair very well similarly. 

 

Scott Allen  28:10 

Yeah. I loved your phrasing in there, Cathy, ‘hard for me to see.’ I think that's maybe the title of the episode, one option, because I think it just gets to the core of it's hard for all of us to see that there's things that are hard to see. And just admitting that on the front end of, Okay, I'm missing a lot. I'm not seeing a lot, I'm blind to a lot.” And when I'm being confronted with whether it's dissonance, whether it's results that aren't what I was hoping for, whether it's responses that I wasn't hoping for, do we kind of lash out and blame them and blame it and externalize that, or do we at least put it through the process or through the filter of, “Okay, this is a mirror, and what is this telling me about me? What is the learning in this for me?” And so, I used to be involved in an organization, and we always used the phrase ‘search for the learning.’ So, what's the learning in this? And there's so many, then that's part of the challenge of this conversation and leadership, in general, is there's so many things that are hard for us to see that it can be debilitating. But I think the indicator that there's something for us to see is when we're confronted with that. Does that make sense?

 

Cathy Carroll  29:27  

Yeah, it really does. I've been in the keynote space lately, and I've been inviting people towards the end of the keynote to think about their greatest leadership strength. Like, what's their leadership superpower? And then humbly ask themselves what feedback they hear when they overuse that superpower. And it invites an interesting reflection. And then, I invite them to think about what they need to sprinkle more of in order to get out of the overuse of their superpower, and what they are at risk of experiencing when they sprinkle some of that opposing energy. It helps people see that they can have blind spots about their strengths, and sometimes the strengths are the very hardest ones to see. So, there are these polarities that live within us that lead to huge blind spots. And then our reactive tendency is to double down on our strength, which puts us into the overuse. And we're terrified of sprinkling the opposite energy because all we can see is its overuse. So, it's like this infinity loop that keeps us in this perpetual cycle of discomfort. But if you're able to zoom out and fold both poles as equally valid and equally true and equally necessary, suddenly your brain can expand to hold both truths and you find the courage to step into that alternative energy that keeps you in that healthy harmony between two poles.

 

Scott Allen  30:53 

So well said. I love it. Where can listeners learn more about you?

 

Cathy Carroll  30:58  

My website is legacyonward.com. And more about the book, legacyonward.com/hug-of-war. Yeah, I got a vlog there and I talk about polarities quite a bit. 

 

Scott Allen  31:10 

Oh, it's awesome. And so, should I link to Barry Johnson, who are some of your favorite authors around polarities for listeners who want to learn more about that concept?

 

Cathy Carroll  31:18  

Barry Johnson is the founder father, the leader of polarity thinking. Polarities aren't new, Yin Yang is a polarity. It's a part of all ancient wisdom or most ancient wisdom, but Barry Johnson in the 1970s put polarity thinking on the earth. And so, that is the approach that leaders can take to find the path forward through the complexity of two truths. So, his book, and he's got a version one and a version two. I also like ‘Polarity Intelligence,’ which came out this year, and it's by Tracy Christopherson and Michelle Troseth. And it leverages Barry Johnson's work, and it's pretty accessible, so I like that. I like ‘Navigating Polarities,’ by Brian Emerson and Kelly Lewis. And they take a little bit of a twist on the traditional Barry Johnson version of polarity thinking, but really good work. I like their somatic and emotional components to it. And then. there's actually another book that's about polarities in family businesses, it's called ‘Family Business as Paradox,’ and that's written by Amy Schuman, John Ward, and another colleague of theirs, Stacy, I've forgotten her last name. And that's much more of a consulting lens with a focus on succession and governance.

 

Scott Allen  32:29 

Well, I think we have done a wonderful job of helping listeners understand a little bit of kind of where you're headed. I hope listeners will follow the links in the show notes, there's going to be all kinds of stuff there for you. So, click on those to learn more about Cathy's work. Cathy, I always conclude these conversations by saying, what's caught your attention recently? It could be something you're streaming, or something you're listening to, something that you're reading. It doesn't have to have anything to do with polarities or what we've discussed; family business. But what might listeners be interested in that's caught your attention recently? 

 

Cathy Carroll  33:05  

Well, I'm going to turn up the heat and actually touch on politics. So, we're talking before the 2024 general election in the United States. I don't know if this episode is going to come out before or after the election, but I'm going to start with a punchline, and then I'm going to meander a little bit, and I'm going to come back to the punchline a couple of times. So, bear with me. I was at a conference recently and I heard a phrase that stopped me in my tracks, and I can't stop thinking about it, and it's an African proverb that goes, “A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” And it really sung to me because one of the chapter power dynamics I talk about is blocking power, which is a form of power in a family business that gets exercised. And I don't need to get into blocking power, but now I'm going to segue to what I've been streaming. My husband and I have been watching House, which is a TV show that came out in 2004. It's about a brilliant diagnostician who's also a misanthrope and cranky and…

 

Scott Allen  34:08 

Drug addict, if I remember correctly. 

 

Cathy Carroll  34:10  

Yes, you're right. He's a drug addict, painkillers. Very irreverent. And what's been fascinating for me is watching that show. We're only in the second season, I don't remember how many seasons there are, which came out in 2004 and listening to it through a 2024 lens. That is post MeToo. That is post the racial reconciliation that was sparked by the George Floyd murder, and to hear Dr. House speak in such offensive language, at the time, I think if I had watched it, it would have been like a cringe, and now it's like, “Wow, that would so not fly. That would not fly today.” And it's fascinating to me to see how quickly culture changes, how quickly what we are subject to becomes object. And it's fascinating. So, now fast forward 2016, and I think about Hillary Clinton's statement about how half of Trump's supporters she puts into a basket of deplorables, and I think to myself, “Wow, what's it like to feel so shamed.” She didn't say people's behavior was deplorable, she said they are deplorable. That kind of shaming language... And I'm putting myself into the head and the heart of the person who feels like they've been accused of being deplorable. That doesn't feel good. And then, I think a child who's not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. Now, fast forward to 2024, and a lot of people hold liberal and conservatives as a polarity. In fact, Barry Johnson's original thinking about polarities came from a tension between liberal and conservative and a new awareness about that. But what's interesting about Trump supporters is they don't fit neatly into liberal and conservative, they sit somewhat outside of that. And, of course, there are a lot of different people who support Trump, but I'd say the ‘always Trumpers’ sit outside of that. And now, in 2024, they're not only maligned by the liberal community, but the ‘always Trumpers’ are maligned by a lot of conservatives now. There are a lot of conservatives who have come out against Trump. They've publicly stated that they're going to vote for Kamala Harris. Again, I'm tapping into what that must feel like to be shunned, and I go back to a child who's not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. So, I don't have any answers. These are just the random meanderings that I go through because you've teed me up with, “What have you been listening?” And I've been watching House, and that's what's… I take my dogs on these long walks on the weekend, and that's where my brain meanders. I don't have the right answers, but what I'm also noticing is that my definition of ‘we’ continues to expand. My we was just me, and then it became a little bit bigger, and then it became a little bit bigger. And now my ‘we’ includes liberals and conservatives. And now my ‘we’ includes people who vote for Trump. And my ‘we’ includes people who live overseas, Ukrainians and Russians. And so, I just keep noticing my we expanding, and I have a limit to my we. I know that there's, eventually, personal we. I haven't quite gotten there at an embodied level yet, but for those of you who do study adult development theory, I think about that in terms of adult development theory as well. So, that is the random meanderings. I don't have answers, I have a lot of questions and I sit in them for a long time. But that's what I've been thinking about.

 

Scott Allen  37:35 

Yeah. It's so interesting. There's a really, really interesting book called ‘How Civil Wars Start,’ and it's a political scientist, Barbara Walter. And if you get a chance to listen to that or read that, it's very, very interesting because one of her primary assertions, there's this concept in political science called downgrading. And when a population of people have been downgraded, she cites examples throughout world history, Protestants and Catholics, Sunnis and Shias, Serbs and Croats. There’s a couple of contemporary examples. But, oftentimes, one faction will protest, but then oftentimes it will move to violence. So, it's a very, very interesting thing when you look at the context of the United States where, in recent years, a lot of our rural communities, let's just say, the last five decades, they've been downgraded. Whole communities. And I'm in Ohio, so I can name a lot of them. Lordstown was one of the most recent where you have 15,000 people at the plant. The Chevy plant was the largest employer in town, or my grandfather and grandmother were in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and he worked at Hormel. Only at a high school education, but was an electrician and had a really good life. And now, the largest employers in that town are the prison, the Walmart, and the hospital. And so, you have these whole communities that have been downgraded primarily because of digitization, globalization, capitalism, the dollar. And these are communities that have lost purpose, lost hope, lost a lot; stability. So, it's a very, very interesting... And then, of course, to your point on George Floyd. You also have a faction of individuals who, for centuries in this country, have experienced horrible behavior over the years. And so, you have these two factions of people who are struggling, and one more recent than the other. And it is, it's very interesting to put aside Republican, Democrat, bring your mind to we, and how do we…? Because as soon as I choose to attack the Capitol, or as soon as I choose to burn down the police precinct, what brings a group of people to the thought process of ‘this is our next best option’? That tells me that we, the collective, we are sick, we're ill. There's some symptoms of a lack of health. And so I like how you're thinking in the sense that how do we move forward? And especially in a context where it's a multi-billion dollar industry to keep us agitated, afraid. My wife and I this morning were talking about polls. That's become a multi, probably billion-dollar industry itself just to keep us agitated, keep us clicking, keep us engaged, returning to… And it's big business. And so, it's so interesting. What type of leadership moves us forward? 

 

Cathy Carroll  40:44  

Yeah. And I'll just close out tying it back to family business. We're in an era where Rupert Murdoch is trying to reverse irrevocable trust in secret in Reno, Nevada, to give his son Lachlan more control because Lachlan's political ideology lines up with his father's because that's how they maximize their profit. So, the incentives aren't aligned in the system for harmony, the incentives are created. Profit incentive is driving division. Yeah. 

 

Scott Allen  41:19 

And division is big business. It's a multi-billion dollar business, even though... And back to the blind spots, I don't think we see that, but it's acting upon us. Well, Cathy, I am so thankful for this conversation, and I appreciate how you're thinking about the work because, as you said, leading in this context, it's just that much more complex. And it reminds me of that quote about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers where the individual said, “Sure, Fred Astaire is great, but you have to remember, Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards and in high heels.” It's a little bit of that feeling I have of leading in the family business, it's just you have to be a little bit better. And it's going to require a different level of skill to really do it well in a way that we aren't causing multi-generational factions. It's just… Oof.

 

Cathy Carroll  42:17  

Yeah, it's a tough space.

 

Scott Allen  42:20 

You're trying to help us make sense of it, and I appreciate that. Well, Cathy, thank you so much. Be well. Truly enjoyed that conversation with Cathy. Leaders, followers. Contexts. This is a unique context with unique dynamics. And leadership and followership can take on subtle, sometimes very obvious shifts. As always, thank you so much. Take care. Wonderful seeing so many of you at the International Leadership Association Global Conference. Put Prague on your agenda for next year, it's going to be a lot of fun. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.

 

 

[End Of Recording]