Rewrite your Leadership Code with Shlomo Ben Hur

Aidan McCullen: It’s an absolute pleasure and I was telling you before we came on air your book absolutely fascinated me , it brought me back to early childhood traumas that I’m absolutely sure have rewritten my own leadership code. To be the way i am today whether that’s good or bad but i thought we’d open up with why this book and in a way this is i mentioned the fourth in the trilogy and how all those other books led to this one and this one is the piece de la resistance in many ways

Shlomo Ben-Hur: Yeah, well, why this book is because I’ve been honoured and had the privilege of actually accompanying top executives for the last 15 years of my life as they go through some soul searching that we do when IMD Business School programs. And I take them to the mountains, we have the Alps, which are very close to our campus. And I spend sometimes it’s a weekend. Sometimes it’s, it’s more days with them against the backdrop of the mountains. And, and one of the things that we do is that we take time to reflect on their leadership to reflect on their successes. And most of these people are extremely successful, right? They’ve scored and ticked all the boxes.

But at the invitation to think about their leadership, to think about their performance, to think about what’s going on, we go back to talk about like meaningful junctures in their lives. And what we discovered interestingly is that a lot of those critical moments that they bring to their leadership have to do with their childhood. Whether they’re very early experiences.

Now, we’ve known this, as psychologists, and so I could behave as a developmental psychologist all along, but it was fascinating for me to start hearing that from people who have been busy building companies, building organizations, showing up in the world, failing miserably in some cases and resurrecting themselves. Who start talking in a reflective kind of way about what it is that they took from their childhood. And what we know when we think about that leadership code that we named our book after is that these underlying sensitivities and preferences and tendencies within us is something that we develop very, very early in life.

It’s the simple association, rather than complex knowledge. It’s like what makes me think that this is good and that is bad. That if I do this, this will happen. And those are the products of our experiences. These are the lessons that are learned that we’ve written into our brain, like a pre programmed instructions at a very, very early age. You can, you can call it our computer source code in many ways. And then when it comes to people, this usually lives in the dark. It’s something we don’t talk about, except that I actually started hearing executives start talking about it in our walks in the mountain that can’t stop. And that, that made Nick Kinley, my co author and myself think that, we really ought to go more systematically to try to surface some of the origination of that code.

Aidan McCullen:  I was telling you off air I had a couple of instances as a child that I am absolutely certain have, impacted me and they’re the way I am whether that’s good or bad in my later life. I’ll give you one instance which was when my very first day in primary school so this is when I would’ve been four or five and i’m a big guy and I always was a big kid as well. I walked into the class and you know happy, excited, scared, all those emotions that goes through a kid’s mind. Hanging up my jacket in a small country school in Ireland. Sit down at my desk. The teacher doesn’t say anything. She’s quite an elderly woman I remember her. She doesn’t say anything to the class she walks up and she absolutely takes the head off me with a slap. And I was a good kid as I was saying to you before, I always learned well, didn’t make noise, respected the teacher. And the only thing I can think is that she was doing it to get respect from the class, or she picked on the tallest kid or the biggest kid in the class. Somebody told her perhaps that that’s what you need to do to get respect of the class, to get the discipline in the class.

And I’m sure that has been, it’s somewhere written into my source code that has manifested later in life in some ways and I want to really use that as a talking point to bring us to points that you talk about in the book like can being a good kid make you a bad boss and, whether your teachers taught you to hate criticism. I think those two things are so interesting to see how they manifest later not only as leaders but as normal workers in the workplace.

Shlomo Ben-Hur: What an incredible experience, Aidan. I could relate to it because I was always the shortest kid in the class, but I could imagine. That you are carrying it and it has been impacting your code because here you are a successful person after so many years actually remembering that very defining moment.

And this is stuff that’s there that defines us. We are not consciously aware of it and we don’t have control over it, but it leads us in certain directions. As we lead, as we lead our own lives, as we lead other people. And I wonder if that teacher did not act that way coming from her own code and issues that she may have had with people who may have projected authority, which may have been something that she saw in you as a threat to her authority or whatever was going on in that situation. So we can know that we are anxious in general. But we can know that we’re anxious in general about something, but we don’t know it in the moment in which we’re reacting in an anxious kind of a way. We can tell ourselves that we won’t feel anxious or worry about something, but it doesn’t really help our nervous system that reacts in this very specific way. And that’s what we’re trying to decipher with this book. We’re trying to go back to the origins of where anxiety or any other element has been instilled in us as part of our code and try to recognise it while it’s happening and maybe even before in order to really make sure that we’re learning from the experience in order to create different scripts for us to react in a different kind of a way. It could contribute to our success as leaders and as people showing up in this world.

And that reflection, that space, that more stepping back and looking at what’s happening and the way I react and I show up in the world is something that leaders say they have very, very limited space for in their lives. In fact, when we asked leaders where, how they spend their days, the average number that we got to is around 72 percent that they said that their day is being spent running on automatic. And what they’re describing is a life in which they’re moving from one meeting to the other when there’s no time for reflection. And when you run on automatic, usually you fall into that code that was instilled in you at a very young age.

Aidan McCullen: I think that is such a valuable point and it stands to not only working on yourself. So Aristotle first know thyself is where we need to begin because so many people are in leadership roles in a turbulent business world, trying to change the organization while leading people. And it’s very difficult to lead others when you don’t actually start with yourself.

And I think that whole idea is leaders eat last. There’s some value in that, but you need to actually work on yourself. And I love the work that you do, for example, with IMD and your leadership coaching, because it’s so valuable where people actually uncover who they are. And it’s almost like an excavation project to go back to the source code and go, oh this is why this manifests later on in life and one of the things I’d love you to share is the criticism aspect. So feedback is a gift if people give us feedback and that feedback is coming from a very good place, it’s the best way to get better whatever we’re doing it somebody holding up a friendly mirror to you, but when you talked about whether teachers teach us to hate criticism later on in life I’d love you to unpack that a little bit because so many of our guests, our listeners will have experienced this themselves. Nobody really likes being told your cooking sucks or you get a 360 feedback review and people in your organisation that you think that you’re doing a good job and it’s damning. And people can go through a little bit of trauma when they experience that. But if they can intercept it early and reading your book and understanding this early and going back to the origins of that, they can actually intercept it later on in life.

Shlomo Ben-Hur: Right. So it’s really about that interception, right? This is what we’re looking to create. And you talked about friendly feedback, but depending on our early experiences, we will have a tendency to either see it as unfriendly feedback or unsolicited feedback or whatever else. And, and many of us would immediately put the defense up there.

What we’re seeing is that our early experiences are actually determining a whole range of things, and we focus in this book on three key areas, which I think matter when it comes to feedback. It first focuses on what it is that we actually focus on what is how is our childhood experience impacting our ability to see and to hear information and events in an objective kind of way. So when a person is giving us feedback, some of us based on our upbringing will tend to see only the critical aspect of it, while other people would see the supportive aspects of that. That has to do a lot with those early experiences.

So it’s what we focus on. What is it that we hear and not hear? We have all these tests of like the famous gorilla test or some other video testing in which we ask people to describe what it is that they see on the screen. And many people miss out on like some, critical information that’s projected on the screen because they’re looking for other parts of the display that’s being on the screen.

And, and I think we do that in life all the time. We see what we want to see, or we see what we look for to see, and we miss out all of the other information. So we don’t see events and information objectively. And that is one part that we focus on. The other part is, what is it that is triggering us emotionally and how able are we to regulate that?

How, how, how good is our self regulation, which is a critical component in leadership and the way we show up in the world. And then last but not least is like, how do we interact? In terms of our ability to engage people, to resolve tension, to manage relationships.

So when, when it comes to the feedback that you’re talking about, I would say that we’re touching on all of those. We’re touching on what it is from the feedback that we actually tend to focus on. Then how does that make us feel because of all of those early experiences and how does that lead to either improved or actually a more tense or critical relationship with the people who are the feedback providers?

Aidan McCullen: Shlomo, I’d love you to share a little bit about this stress response and how that also stems from our childhoods. That may make sense on a high level to people but you dig deeply into that I’d love you to share that but that and then also how, key moments from our early years can impact your self esteem and people have had this where things that were said to them in the classroom or maybe conflict on the playground has had a dramatic effect later on and maybe made them as I said in the intro reluctant or even rebellious as leaders, I love you to share the high level some of those things you pick up at your preference which ones you wanna talk about

Shlomo Ben-Hur: Of course if you’re just thinking about the first relationships that we have, if we have been fortunate, enough to grow up with a mother and father or two fathers or two mothers whatever the parental construction, in your household is we know that when there’s strict parenting or inpatient parenting or critical parenting that this, immediately impacts the way we tend to listen to people.

The kind of views that we will be open to, so when we have strict or critical parenting being imposed on us, we tend to actually focus on people who provide clear views. Boys with strict parents or fathers, figures, very often would react very differently than those that had more permissive parents.

The dinner table etiquettes that were like typical in your household would impact the way that you will be open to debate things or to believe that there’s not just one way or another way, my way or the highway. It impacts the openness to new thinking and to ideas. Parents that are offering little outward affection, for instance are impacting my ability as an adult later on in life to actually open up to new ideas.

Parents who are encouraging curiosity would really end up with children who are really much more open to actually explore the world, to take risks. If we’re looking just at the risk or reward aspect of things how openly affectionate your parents were or how controlling they were really tends to have an impact on whether you end up playing to win in your life as psychologists love to divide the world to playing to win and playing not to lose.

And we see that parents who brought that very controlling aspect of their parenting prevented them from taking risks. Made them actually try to play not to lose versus parents who opened children up to a situation where they play to win.

Aidan McCullen: One of the things that so many leaders are guilty of is hiring in their own image or surrounding them with yes men or women and people that will be sycophants and tell them no bad news or agree with them and we end up creating this echo chamber where we get back the information we want.

We get that confirmation bias we get the hit of dopamine because we heard what we want to hear on our decisions are sound it leads to terrible decision making inside an organization, a lack of critical decisions, but more than that, it’s very damaging to us as leaders if we do that, I’d love you to unpack this.

Shlomo Ben-Hur: Right. So you’re describing a very true phenomenon that’s going on for a lot of leaders. And to be a successful leader, to some degree, you need to be a little bit deaf, right? A little bit actually hard of hearing, I would say. Because you need to separate from the noise that’s out there and to follow your convictions and to go to what you believe is the right strategy, the right direction for the organization.

But the problem happens when people move away from being hard of hearing to being deaf because of the echo chamber that they create for themselves in which they surround themselves with the with the people who support them, with people who believe, make them believe their own commercials and people who actually share their point of view or just kind of like, cater to their needs because of their own issues with authority figures.

And what happens is that that goes back to that leadership code that we talked about, whether you are a risk focused person or reward focused person, the standards by which you, you judge people. And that leads to the kind of information and solution that you prefer. Are you looking for hearing the challenging news, or are you looking for confirming evidence to what you think about the world?

And this in terms leads us to surround ourselves or not with people who are telling us what we want to hear or people that would actually provide us with a broader view of things or challenge our thinking. So for leaders, one of those critical things that we try to work with is who is in your inner circle?

Who do you tend to consult with? Who do you listen to and how much is that providing you with the useful information for your leadership or depriving you from that? And you would see that with top CEOs. In board members that we work with. Some who know how to actually tap into a broader set of considerations in a broader set of people provide them with important critical feedback and some that would actually deprive them of that to the degree that leads to surprises and to derailment.

Aidan McCullen: Shlomo where can people find you to find out more about the book i’m sure they’re fascinated to dig deeper and know themselves and understand why they act the way they are particularly under stress, where’s the best place to find you and more about the

Shlomo Ben-Hur: Well, if people would like to really not just learn about themselves, but actually think through what it is that they might want to do about that, to further increase their success and, and, and think about what it is they could do with their childhood code. They could read the book. The book is available in all book outlets.

It was published by Palgrave Macmillan and me personally, I’m a full time professor at the IMD Business School in Lausanne in Switzerland. My email is on the website of the business school and I will be delighted to follow up with any of our listeners via email or any other way and hope to see some of you face to face in our leadership development programs on the IMD campus in Switzerland.

Aidan McCullen: Professor at the IMD Business School in Switzerland and author of Rewriting your Leadership Code, Shlomo Ben Hur, thank you for joining us.

Shlomo Ben-Hur: Thank you very much, Aidan. It’s been a pleasure.