The Inner Game as the Path to Leadership Excellence: An Interview with Geoff Davis

Turning Points in Leadership

Turning Points in Leadership 7 The Inner Game as the Path to Leadership Excellence: An Interview with Geoff Davis https://turning-points-in-leadership.captivate.fm

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, and welcome to Turning Points in Leadership. My name is Dr. Kris Albert and I'm the host of this Turning Points in Leadership Podcast. And I'm really thrilled that you've joined us today in this Turning Points Leadership podcast. My goal is for my listeners to get to hear from extraordinary leaders who are leading in their spheres of influence who don't necessarily need to have a title or a position of privilege to be able to lead. And so I look forward to you getting to know my guests today. My guests are leading in bold and inspiring ways, and I trust that as you listen, you, you too are going to be inspired by my guests and what they have to say.

I would like to introduce to you and welcome my guest, Geoff Davis. Hello, Geoff. How's your spirit today? It's great, Kris. Thanks for having me. I love your big smile . That's great. Podcast listeners who are listening, you don't see great. Geoff's big, big smile, but it's like ear to ear. It's so cool. So let me tell you all a little bit about Geoff.

Geoff is the president of his own coaching firm conversations, and Geoff uses his unique gifts and broad array of experiences to help others discover, uncover, and more fully realize the infinite possibilities, incredible fullness, and often overlooked richness in their own lives. As an executive and leadership development coach for over 25 years, Geoff serves regional, national and international businesses, nonprofits, academic leaders and coaches through coaching relationships.

He's committed to lifelong learning and believes that the coach is never done growing. In addition to his coaching practice, Geoff also realizes his purpose through an active ministry in his church, participation in leadership in local musical organizations. He's a lifelong tuba player, and we'll talk about that in just a moment.

And service to local nonprofits. Geoff and I have known each other for Geoff, can you believe it? 43 years. First as musicians playing together at his brass quintet and in these past years as my coach, my mentor, and my dear friend. And so I'm excited to be in this seat to ask questions of Geoff today. He is just exceedingly generous in his gifts with his gifts and his wisdom.

And I'm excited to learn how his life experiences informed who, who he is and how he leads. And as I said, I hope that, that you as my audience will be also be inspired so that you will become a catalyst for change in your spheres of influence. So Geoff, thanks again for being a guest on my podcast.

Well, thanks again for having me. It's it's a privilege. It's gonna be fun to do this today. It definitely will. Shall we tell them any more about our, our musical connections? You wanna tell 'em how we first got connected? Well I was a teacher at Hempfield High School and Kris was a student and I wanted to play quintet music again.

I hadn't played quintet music for quite some. And being a tuba player you think that you have the most unique instrument, but the horn, the french horn, is the instrument that is often the most difficult to find. So I had two trumpets. I had a trombone. I, I was looking for a horn player, and Kris was the one who I contacted and asked if she'd wanted to play.

And we, we, we formed the sounds of brass, which was quintet that ran for about 30. Before we we disbanded it. And my, my fondest memory is when we came in second place in the the Ragtime Festival we came in second place and won I think some Some savings bonds. Yes. $25 savings bonds, $25 savings bonds.

And we came in second place, but that was because there were only two groups in the, in the contest , we lost a piano player who played rag time. Yeah. Gosh. Too funny. And, and Geoff, you and I spent many hours commuting to Bainbridge Band rehearsals and just all kinds of stuff, but yeah. Your invitation to, to play in your quintet, I was 17 years old.

Right. And you were a teacher at At Hempfield. And. , I mean, to just be invited to play with your quintet was just such an honor. So that was neat. So a little as a little bit of insight into both of us that I don't think our listeners knew which is a lot of fun. Well, should we hop into some of the questions our interview today?

Excellent. Excellent. So I'm really curious to know what are some of. Early experiences of leadership, these could be times that you remember where you stepped into leadership, or it could be times where you are, you were observing someone else in leadership and maybe scratching your head or maybe looking wide-eyed and saying, that's what I wanna do.

I mean, it could be anything, but I'd like you to share with the, with the audience your experiences of, of leadership from an, your earliest experiences from an early age. Well, as a kid, I remember that the thing that I thought about when I thought about leaders was, first of all, they were old guys.

They were all guys. They were all men. And that they had all the answers. They knew everything. And they, I would be in awe of these guys whenever we traveled around the city. My dad was a, a, a director of purchasing for New Holland Machine Company, and he. , he was a leader, but I never really thought of him as a leader and I really didn't get too much involved in leadership until high school.

When when I was sent by McCaskey High School, they sent me to be the representative to the Rotary Leaders Camp. Wow. Which was a camp that was held at one of the local camps for a week where you went to learn about leadership. You were picked up by one of the Rotary Club members. For me, it was Mr. Andy Ro, who picked me up. He was the head of Rote Steel, picked me up in his Cadillac, I remember that, and drove me to the camp and picked me up at the end of the week and brought me home. And I don't remember much about the camp, but I do remember the, the Cadillac the the the leadership that I first exhibited and, and was involved in.

As the president of something called Hangout Council. The Y W C A used to have dances every, every Saturday night, and I was a DJ for the dances for two of the three years that I was in high school, and that meant every Saturday night I was down spinning records in the record booth and, and booking the groups that came in. But I was also president of the council of of teenagers from across the county who was. Task with putting on the dances, advertising them, and getting the chaperones that we needed. So that was my earliest memories of leadership. And and then, and then I, I evolved in leaders leadership positions.

I started my career as a teacher at Hempfield. And after about 10 years, The, the department chairman was going to retire, and several of the teachers approached me and said, well, you have to apply for this job. So I said, well, I don't really want the job. I just wanna teach. Well, but you have to. So, being a compiler that I was in part of my life, I decided that I would go and get my degree in supervision from Millersville and qualify myself for the position as department chairman and I got the job and I, I thought it was up to me to get everything done. Then I went to work at ISC, at which was a local company and an international company, and within six months I found myself leading a new company that we founded, an educational technology. . And what I think about when I look back on those days is how little I knew about leadership.

But yeah, that, that's a, a long answer to your question. I hope it's okay.

Absolutely. You know, I think it's so interesting just that, just the beginning of the, your story with Rotary and them selecting you for this leadership camp, I mean that somebody saw in you. This, these leadership potential or leadership qualities and inviting you into that space and and just that being kind of a starting point, a catalyst.

Did you think of yourself as a leader at that, at that time? No. No, no. I just thought of myself as a guy, you know? I was, yeah, I was, I was the guy who was just trying to get through school and navigate life, trying to figure out life at that point. , isn't that the truth? Yeah. Yeah. And then the point that you, you know, the point that you made about looking back and realizing how little you knew about leadership.

I'm sure we'll talk more about that as we go along. But that I, that is, I think one of the, the most profound things that I've learned from your influence and is that leadership is a very intentional and specific, specific and intentional process. And that it's not just looking back and saying, boy, I didn't know anything about leadership, but now that you know what, you know, , you realize you didn't. Well, the thing that I've seen most often is I think that people look at leadership through the lens of their technical expertise. So they think that by by honing their technical expertise, they'll become leaders automatically. Yes. When in fact, leadership is a, a whole different area of study. I tell many of the people I've coached over the years that your new profession is now leadership.

It's no longer engineering or accounting or, or even. It's, it's leadership and leadership is a, is a, is a, a field that needs to be studied and and understood from, from several different levels. I'm sure we'll talk about later too. Yeah. I love how you've articulated it that way, but your career is actually leadership.

That's really profound. Yeah, we will definitely dive into that. So, I'm curious you've alluded to some of this, but in what ways did your family, your cultural influences or your community shape, the way you view leadership? Well, I think, you know, I, I grew up in a, a row house in Lancaster and we were the kids that went to Wharton Elementary School.

That's, that's a fun thing I can tell people I have. I, I have a degree from Wharton. He graduated from Wharton--Wharton Elementary School, right. . But but we were the kids who were the have-nots as opposed to the kids that lived on the other side of f and m College who were the haves.

These were kids who every every week would get outta school in the afternoon to go to the Cotillion Club and learn how to dance and Wow. Use their manners and things like that, whereas we stayed back and did extra homework and many of our elementary teachers told us that we weren't gonna mount too much.

And my, my friend who was probably one of the most successful engineering companies in, in in the area that he founded years ago told me recently, he still thinks of himself not good. and I still have some of those feelings. I still find myself at different places. Like if I go to the country club for an event, I'll say to myself, I don't belong here.

Well, that influenced my whole view of leadership. That leaders were the people who were the in select chn. They were the ones who knew everything and, and I was just a follower who was supposed to do what I was supposed to. . That was a big influence on me till I, I realized that I had more to offer than that.

And as you talk about that, I think about one of the things that I believe is that from the time we step foot out of bed in the morning, every single one of us is leading in some way, positive or negatively. , we're leading ourselves, we're leading our families. We might step into leadership in the community at our work, no matter what that work is, every interaction with someone else has leadership embedded in it.

Ken Wilber wrote a book called Situational Leadership. Hmm. Made the distinction between positional leadership and and situational leadership. And he. , every situation, leadership emerges. And, and I've seen that throughout my life, that there are times where the positional leaders are not leading.

It's the people who know the most and who are, who are most qualified to to lead the situation. So, so I think that's, that's an important concept that you're talking about. It's, it's the fact that every. Has an area in which they lead, whether it's in their families or their churches or their communities or their neighborhoods, or their schools or their work.

Absolutely. And as a, and as a child, so, you know, as one of the kids on the other side of town that didn't go to the Cotillion Club, that stayed back and did homework and that saw yourself as the have not that was really

This was really a shift for you to, to see yourself as a leader when in those growing up years, you, you know, you didn't feel that way from, I, I think that that actually helped me because I believe it, it instilled in me the, the desire to want to prove people were wrong. Hmm. Yes. I've done my entire life.

Ah, interesting. From

from. . My, my dad left us when we were when I was a senior in high school. And I didn't go to the school I thought I would go to, so I went to Millersville and I worked full-time and went to school full-time and graduated in four years because I had a, a desire to become a teacher. I knew that's what I wanted to do.

Hmm. I knew that's what I was called to do and nothing was gonna stand in my way. . That was, that was good, but it was also bad cause it also nurtured in me the type a workaholic get things done, guy that I became Ah, very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So those, those characteristics that serve you can also become characteristics that your shadow.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, As you look around our society with people you work with, live with, interact with or who you know, your community, however you, you define the people around you, what do you want them to know or invite them to think about when it comes to. Leadership, what would you like to invite people to, you know, our listeners, what would you like to invite them to listen, to, explore or think about?

When it comes to leadership,

one of the things that I think is probably the most essential is to understand the inner game of leadership. So there, there are three levels of competence that are, are defining for leaders. There's leader. Process leadership competence and leadership consciousness. Leadership process includes things like budgeting, strategic planning project management.

Their processes that leaders need to be familiar with. Those processes can only be as effective as they are informed by the leadership competencies that. . There are people at the Ivy School of Business in Canada who have done some work on enterprise leadership, and they define these five different areas of competence.

You need to have people skills, you need to have business skills, organizational skills strategic skills, and general intelligence in order to be able to use those processes in ways that make. That's, that comprises what's called the outer game of leadership. The inner game is the, the, the leadership consciousness which drives the outer game.

The inner game is the, the the stage of development that you're, you're operating at. Which of course if we, if we had more time, we probably could go into that more in depth, but there are different stages of development. And one of the things that I've worked on the last several years, To study the work of Bob Anderson and Bill Adams, who have been influential in my, my thinking and my life.

And they, they both have have written a book called Mastering Leadership and in it they define these stages of development that there are five stages starting with the egocentric stage, which is the the stage of development that babies have when they're born. They, they. They are self-centered.

They make up the rules for their lives. Nobody tells them what to do. They do what they want, and 5% of all leaders are still stuck there, according to Bob Anderson Anderson and Bill Adams. Then there's the reactive stage of what Robert Kegan calls the socialized mind. This is the mind is defined by the the script that they run in their heads that.

It's up to me to do do things to get things done, but I have to get it done by doing and being what other people think I should be, even if they never tell me what that is. Bob Anderson's research shows there are 70% of all leaders who are stuck in that mode. So 75% of all leaders are either egocentric or reactive.

Then there's the creative stage of development. The creative stage is the stage that , begin to self-author, you begin to realize you don't have to follow all these scripts that you were taught as an adolescence to, to get through and be admitted into adulthood. And about 20% of all leisures are there.

And then the last two are called the integral and the unit of stages. The integral stage is where you recognize that you can't get it all done yourself. You need to work with other people. Unit of stage is where you understand your life. In service of a larger purpose. And Bob Anderson says that can only be achieved through longtime spiritual practices.

So to me, the most important thing to realize as a leader is, is that the inner game runs the outer game. And if 75% of the leaders are egocentric or, or reactive, they're unaware of their unaware. They're not even aware that they, they are they have an issue. Yes. And, and the, the big takeaway for me from all that research is that 95% of all leaders are unequipped to deal with Luca today.

Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. A, a term that's been replaced recently by some research that talks about B A N I. , they say that VUCA volatility has been replaced by brittleness uncertainty, replaced by anxiety. Mm-hmm. complexity replaced by non-linear thinking and ambiguity replaced by things that are incomprehensible.

Hmm. So, for me, the future and, and this describes the next generation of business and, and organizational leader. , which we see in schools, which we see in businesses, which we see everywhere. And to me it's one of the things that is, is most important as we, as we consider what's going on today. Mm-hmm.

and that invitation for people to, to take a look at what work have, have folks done on their inner game. Yeah. And the guess what's your. What percentage of people have actually who are out there in the working world and who are leading have that? I don't think, I don't think it's more than 20%. Cause cause I think of myself.

So up till I was 48 years old, I was a type A workaholic, get things done, guy. That was me. I was a controller, I was a perfectionist, I was ambitious, I was driven, I was auto. I was all the things that I look back on and say, what the heck was I doing? But I mean, that's the natural progression of development.

Sure. As I look back on myself, I say to myself, what was the single greatest thing that helped me change? And it was having a coach. My coach, my first coach,