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Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training in your organization. This podcast is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I’m your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U. Today, I have Ryan Gottfredson joining me to discuss the webinar, Resolving the Biggest Issue Affecting Leaders: Self-Protective Fears. Thanks so much for joining me today, Ryan.

00:28

Yeah, thanks for having me on again. I love always having conversations with you, Sarah. Yes, likewise. And so it’s been a bit since you’ve been here on the podcast. Can you share a little bit about yourself and your professional background? For sure. So I’m a leadership professor at Cal State Fullerton. So I’m in Southern California. If you’re not familiar with Cal State Fullerton, we actually have the second-largest business school in the United States. So it’s a really big operation. And we serve a really uh

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meaningful demographic of students. Most of our students are uh minorities. They are first generation college students uh and uh love working with them. So it’s fun to do that teaching. I also do academic research and I try to leverage my academic research to fuel my consulting. So I work with organizations all over the world to help them to develop their leaders and we’ll be talking about that as we go along.

01:23

Great. Well, thanks for sharing that. I’ve known that you’ve worked at the university, but I didn’t know that little detail. So I always enjoy learning new tidbits when I get to have people over here on the podcast. So could you talk a little bit about what are some of the key experiences or milestones in your career that have shaped your approach in leadership training? Yeah. So I think one of the biggest things occurred towards the tail end of my doctoral program. So I did my doctoral program at Indiana University.

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and I was working on my dissertation on leadership and my dissertation allowed me to review the last effectively 70 years of leadership research. And that was incredibly informative. And I walked away from that feeling like really the leadership research over the last 70 years has been designed to answer one primary question. And that primary question is what do leaders need to do to be effective? Now that is a good question and it has led to some good answers.

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But to me, it felt short-sighted because to me, leadership is not just about doing certain things, it’s about being a certain type of person. And so ever since my doctoral program, that’s been the focus of my research and my teaching is how do we tap into the being side of leadership? How do we become a more positive influence in our spheres of influence so that we could create greater value for the world around us? And so that’s.

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been my focus over the last 10 years. Wow. That’s great. I love to hear kind of the value and the passion behind the projects and what you do. And that’ll lead me to my next question for you here. What projects are you currently working on? Are there any initiatives that you’re really excited about particularly? I am super excited about… uh

03:13

One project I’m working on, which is my next book. So it’s going to be, it’s tentatively titled Becoming Better. And it is all about this idea. So I’m kind of taking the last, the things that I’ve learned over the last 10 years about personal and leadership development. And I’m bringing it into this book. And the main idea with this book is that most of our development efforts focus on improving the things that we do. They focus on our doing side. And that can be incrementally helpful.

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but rarely is it transformationally helpful. And if we truly want to transform ourselves, elevate ourselves as people and as leaders, we’ve got to focus on actually a different side of ourselves, which I’m calling our being side, which is the degree to which our body is wired for value creation as opposed to self protection. And that’s something I assume we’ll be talking about as we go throughout. So I won’t define it for us now. And Ryan, how many books have you written thus far? This will be number three.

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Number three. Lucky number three. Yeah. We’ll see how it goes. Let’s hone in to the details of the webinar a bit here and talk a little bit more about self-protective fears. How do self-protective fears – Well, first, what are self-protective fears and how do they typically manifest in leaders? Yeah. If we are human, we have fears. uh

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Some people don’t like to admit that, but we all have fears about something. And generally these fears cause us and our bodies to want to self-protect. And while that can help us in the moment, it generally hurts us as a leader. Let me give you a quick example of this. So Sarah, how would you say that most people respond to constructive criticism? Not well, defensively, I would say. You kind of get defensive, right?

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Can you sense that there’s some fears that might be there, right? If I receive constructive criticism and my body makes meaning of that as though this is an attack, then of course I’m going to get defensive. And that defensiveness protects me in that moment. It helps me feel better in that moment, but it holds me back from taking advantage of that constructive criticism as an opportunity to learn and grow.

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And so whenever we see leaders misstepping in their leadership, it is almost always connected and rooted in a fear that they have. So another example of this, I would say a common misstep that managers or leaders will make is they’ll micromanage. Well, why does a leader micromanage? It’s because they’re afraid of something going wrong under their watch. And so they engage in micromanagement to help them to feel better

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in that moment. But that micromanagement, of course, leaves a wake of almost destruction behind it in the long term. And that’ll lead me here then to my next question. How do self-protective fears impact a leader’s ability to effectively manage and lead their team? Yeah, so I think that there’s I mean, one of the ways to think about this is what I’ve kind of discovered is that there’s two primary

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fears that leaders can have. One fear is they’re afraid of being unsafe, uncomfortable, or not belonging. And another set of fears is about afraid of not hitting results, not standing out. And out of those two sets, what I do find most common in leaders is most leaders are afraid of not hitting results. So let me give you an example of this. I was working with an organization.

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And there was, uh I met the COO and I asked her, how do you measure success in your business? And mind you, this is a healthcare company and her answer was 10 % growth year over year. um implied in that response is a fear, is I’m afraid of not hitting certain results. My CEO and even our investors,

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have expectations of me as a leader to hit 10 % growth year over year. And I’m afraid that if I don’t, I might lose my job. And so while that’s justifiable, when leaders lead with a focus on results, that will oftentimes help them in the short term, but hurt them in the long term. And here’s why, is because what I found is that the best leaders are usually incredibly invested in improving their organization’s culture.

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because they know that if we could create the right culture for our employees and leaders to grow and thrive, then our business will be successful in the long term. But leaders who measure success by 10 % growth year over year, they’re generally not very focused on culture, because culture is a long-term play. They’re focused on things like pushing their sales reps, advertising, marketing, the things that will draw the quick dollars into the money, or into the business. So at the end of the day,

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leaders, if they don’t awaken to the fears that they have, they might get stuck focusing on results or outcomes that are short-sighted and eventually hold them back in the long term. Where do you think that the fears stem from? Are they primarily rooted in personal experiences or do you think it’s more so related to professional pressures or both, a combination of the two?

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Yeah, I think you bring up a couple of main sources of where our fears come from. Now, of course, again, I think just being human, we’re gonna have fears. But the two main sources of these fears are our past life experiences or our current culture. So let me touch on both of those briefly. So to give you an example, I have a CEO that I’ve been working with and this CEO is fairly self-aware.

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And one of the things that the CEO has told me is my childhood was rather rough. My parents got divorced. ah I didn’t really see my dad much. My mom would struggle to make ends meet for us. And I just kind of felt like I wasn’t a priority to my mom. And he says, I’ve realized the way that this shows up for me as a leader is I have to win at everything that I do.

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because if I’m not winning, I don’t feel like I’m of much value. So this leader, while self-aware about this, is so intensely focused on winning that he has a tendency to micromanage his leadership team. And so that’s something that stems back from kind of his life experience. But at the same time, as I told you about this other COO, oh

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who she said, we measure success, double digit growth year over year. Where does that come from? Well, it’s pressure that she’s feeling placed upon her by essentially the organization’s investors. And so one of the things that I’ve found with leaders is leaders are in a position of a lot of pressure. And if they don’t enhance and develop their capacity to withstand pressure, then they have a tendency to move more towards self-protection.

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and away from value creation. But if we can enhance our capacity to withstand pressure, which is something that we can do, then we as leaders are in a better position to always bring the best version of ourselves. So then what would be early warning signs that a leader is operating from a place of self-protection rather than with confidence and clarity?

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Yeah, well, it’s easier said than done, but I think one of the best ways is to get at what are the motives that are driving me? What do I see as my calling as a leader? uh Right, as I’ve already articulated with this COO, her motives were around results. For the CEO that I mentioned, his motives were around winning. Now, where we ideally want to be is our motives and our values should be focused on

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creating value for others, for something bigger than ourselves. So the COO, as I’ve been working with the executive team at her organization, they went from being focused on double digit growth year over year to now they’ve shifted and they’ve become focused on creating value for their stakeholders. Again, this is a company that operates in the healthcare space.

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So now more than ever before, they are primarily focused on the impact that they’re having on their customers, on patients, as opposed to the dollar signs. And so then in your experience, what are the most effective strategies for leaders to overcome their self-protective fears? Well, the first step is always awareness. We’ve got to help them to become more aware of what these fears are, because it’s only when we surface these fears that

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we could then do something about it. And for me, the most approachable way that I’ve found to do this is to actually focus on mindsets. Our mindsets are the mental lenses that we wear that shape how we view the world around us. And we all have mindsets. Some of our mindsets are more wired for self-protection. Others are more wired for value creation. And so if we are able to uh understand what mindsets are out there,

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awaken to the quality of our current mindsets, what that actually allows us to do is it allows us to surface what our fears are. So for example, one of the things that I find when I work with organizations is over 60 % of leaders have a fixed mindset. What that means is that they effectively have a self-protective fear about looking bad and failing. And so their bodies are wired to want to self-protect by not failing.

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And so what do they end up doing? Well, they end up holding on to what’s worked in the past and they have a hard time letting go of that and embracing what might work better in the future. And that ultimately that need for self protection and stability and not failing helps them feel more secure in the moment, but again, holds them back from creating value in the longterm. So when I work with organizations, I have a mindset assessment. In fact, if you’re listening to this and want to take the mindset assessment,

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you could go to my website at ryangotforson.com and it’ll assess the quality of your mindsets across four different sets of mindsets. So when I work with organizations, I have leaders do this that helps bring some objective information to the quality of their mindsets. And then based upon the results that we see, we could develop a strategy for helping them to rise above their self protective fears and elevate their mindsets. And I think you said, it during the webinar, was it over 300 organizations that you worked with on?

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on mindsets? Yeah, well, probably more than that. But there’s been over 300 groups where I’ve when I’m working with a group of leaders, what I’ll oftentimes do is I’ll have them take my mindset assessment and then I’ll aggregate their results and I’ll put together a collective mindset report that shows the collective mindsets of the group. And this is really powerful because it helps the group awaken to the fears that are most predominant in the group.

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If they have a fixed mindset, they’re afraid of failure and looking bad. If they have a closed mindset, they’re afraid of being wrong. If they have a prevention mindset, they’re afraid of having problems and they care more about that than fulfilling a purpose. So those are some examples of some of the self-protective fears that you’re able to identify through a focus of mindsets.

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So then with these groups that you’ve worked with, could you share a success story where a leader was then able to recognize and address their fears that um then led to better outcomes within their organization? Yeah, and I think just because we’ve talked about it already, I’ll stick with this health care company where their first focus was on double digit growth year over year. And as they started to sit with this fear, they did surface. They said, this is a fear that’s coming.

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from pressure that we’re feeling from our investors. And they effectively had to psychologically get to the point where they say, yes, we need to produce that, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that needs to be our focus. In fact, maybe what would be better for us to focus on is a purpose that is about creating value. So one of the things that I did with this organization over the course of about eight months is we worked on

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coming up with a clear uh inspirational and stakeholder-centric purpose statement. And now that’s something that they are grounded with. So kind of the rule of thumb that I gave them, and I’ve seen them operate in this way, which has been really cool, is I gave them the rule of thumb is any time you talk about results, which you should be talking about in organizations, but any time you talk about results, you need to be talking about your purpose.

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And you need to be talking about your purpose when you’re not talking about results. So purpose needs to be the dominant part of your conversation, not results. And I’ve seen them make that flip. And it has been incredibly powerful in the organization. I think the way that they would talk about it is they would say, before we became moored in our purpose, we were lacking life in our organization.

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Now that we’ve infused purpose, we now have life in our organization. We are more excited than ever. And so that’s been a really cool transition to see. And we had a really engaged group of folks that joined us at the recent webinar that you presented on this topic. If you haven’t had the chance to watch the webinar, I highly recommend you do so. But could you share what the next step is for those leaders?

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you know, who recognize that they have these fears in themselves after attending our webinar event. Yeah. So if they’ve listened in, of course, I’ve got a variety of resources on my website. But most maybe more importantly, particularly for this audience, is we’ve got a workshop coming up next month. So we’re going to spend three hours actually diving into these ideas and concepts. I think my approach in the webinar was I’m not going to tell you necessarily what you need to do in the webinar. We don’t have time for that. But I am I do want you to

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gets you to rethink your strategy for how you develop your leaders and even how you develop yourself. So this is gonna be this workshop. I think we’re capping it at about 20 people. So it’s a small rather intimate group and we’re gonna have a lot of interaction. And it is going to be designed with two purposes in mind. One purpose is to help you as an individual better and more effectively develop the people that you work with. But the second purpose is really for yourself.

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to help you become more aware of your fears and to get some guidance on how you can elevate above your fears so that you can have more of the impact, more of the positive impact that you wanna have within your spheres of influence. And yes, so we have this webinar coming up, leadership, or workshop, excuse me, not webinar, workshop coming up, Leadership Effectiveness, what sets apart the very best leaders from the most leaders? And as you mentioned, it’s a three hour. uh

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three hour event there. And so what, could you give like a high level overview of what our participants can expect to learn and how it’ll continue to build on those concepts from the webinar? know you just touched on that a little bit. Yeah, no, yeah, let me go into a little bit more depth. So we’re gonna leverage a framework that comes from the field of developmental psychology. And it focuses on that the idea is that adults,

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can develop in adulthood. In fact, developmental psychologists have found that adults, there are three stages of adult development, but they’ve also found that most adults never develop in adulthood. So we’re gonna leverage this framework of these three adult development stages to help us give a sense of the degree to which one has self-protective fears or one who is operating in this mode of value creation. And what research on leadership has found is if we’ve got these three different stages,

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7 % of leaders operate at the base level. So there’s not many there. 85 % operate at the second level. So that’s most of our leaders and only 8 % operate at that top level. So the primary focus of this workshop is going to be, what is the key differences between these top level leaders, this top 8 % and the rest of the leaders? And we’re gonna primarily focus on that big 85 % section.

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What are the key differences between these leaders? Why do these differences exist? And how do we help a greater percentage of these 85 % of leaders level up and operate at a higher level? And so Ryan, is there a specific aspect of the workshop that you’re particularly excited to explore with our attendees? Oh man, I, everything, can I say that? But I think honestly, the thing that I’m most excited about is

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the impact that this can have for the people who join. I have worked with hundreds of groups, thousands of leaders on this type of content. And what I’ve seen is I’ve seen their lives change. And so that’s the possibility. And I think understanding these principles not only empowers them to upgrade themselves, but as I’ve talked about, it empowers them.

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to more effectively help others upgrade their selves. So I think that’s the thing that I’m the most excited about is the impact that this can have. And Ryan, before I let you go today, can you share with those that would like to connect with you where they can get in touch with you? Yeah, probably two of the best places is my website. I mentioned that before, RyanGotferton.com. Again, I’ve got uh some free assessments, additional resources there.

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And then secondarily is LinkedIn and would love to connect with anybody there. Well, that’s great. Well, thanks so much for your time today, Ryan. Thanks for having me on. And again, if you have not checked out the webinar, make sure you do so. That will be linked below as well as all the information that you will need to register for the workshop.

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So we hope to see you over there and we hope you enjoy listening to the HRDQ-U In Review podcast available on all major streaming platforms. If you did enjoy today’s episode, make sure to give us a follow and leave us a five-star review. That allows us to continue to produce this weekly content for you. And thank you all for tuning in today’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast brought to you by HRDQ-U.