Hello. Welcome to another episode of Unlocked. I'm Skot. Today we're going to talk about unlocking the potential of people, and we're doing that with Laura Gallaher. She has a new book she just released, and we're going to talk a little bit about that book on the call today. Of course, because that's what we do with new authors that are writing books because they have something passionate to talk about. I love it. Laura has an awesome demeanor to her. She was just a really easy person to interview, lot of fun, really, really smart, great insights. She is an organizational psychologist, USA Today best-seller, speaker, executive coach, and she's a founder of Gallaher Edge. That's her company.
Laura was brought on to the team. In 2003, there was a space shuttle accident, and she was brought on to help assess the cultural issues within the organization at NASA to understand what led to that accident. And yes, there's a technical side, and she talks about. And she talks about that at the beginning of her book, and we talk about that at the beginning of this interview. The technical issue that happened with that, but then it gets into well, what's the organizational, the cultural issue that led to that problem and that accident happening. We hit on that, which is really insightful because I know a lot of us, we think, "Well, why did that happen? Why did that space shuttle explode or that accident happen?" And we try to process, "Oh, that's the thing. That thing hit this thing. Oh, that's what caused it." But what about the people that were responsible for certain decisions that were made leading up to that accident?
That is culture. That is organizational health. That is what we talk about on this show. So I'm really excited for you to learn something from Laura today. So let's get on with it.
Laura, it is so good to have you on the show. You've got a new book that just launched and really, I've never interviewed anybody that's worked at NASA or for NASA. So congratulations for being the first.
Laura Gallaher:
Well, thank you. Thank you, Skot for having me.
Skot Waldron:
Yeah, no worries. I am interested to hear about the whole space shuttle thing and how you got brought into this job and your whole book kind of starts with this story, and please, share that with us about the space shuttle, Columbia, and the accident and how that all got wrapped into what you do.
LAURA GALLAHER:
So 2003 is when this happened. This was February of 2003. So some of you may remember. Challenger is much more common in people's memories from the 80s because it was during the launch, a lot of people were watching. But Columbia was a shuttle accident that happened actually upon re-entry. And unfortunately, we lost all seven astronauts on board. So what happened following the accident, they set up an investigation board, Columbia Accident Investigation Board, CAIB Report. And the report was outlining what happened. How did this accident occur?
So from a technical perspective, during the launch, there was a piece of foam that fell off of the external tank. That's that big orange structure. I didn't know. Before I worked for NASA, I didn't understand the pieces and parts, but the external tank. So foam fell off of that, and it struck the orbiter. So then as a result of that, when Columbia was coming back to Earth, there was a hole in the wing. So all the hot gases that normally the heat shield protects were able to penetrate the vehicle, and it broke apart. So technically, that's what happened.
But the investigation board didn't leave it there. They didn't just talk about the technical causes. They said that NASA's culture was as much to blame for the accident as the foam itself. So I don't know about you, but when I hear that, I picture all kinds of horrible things going on in the culture. I picture that it's really toxic, you've got people who are disengaged, maybe overbearing managers who are yelling at people all the time. I just picture it being something awful. But just a couple months before the accident occurred, NASA had been rated the number one place to work in the federal government.
So it really raises this question of well, gosh, what is culture? Because I think any leaders listening now, if they just found out that they were the number one place to work in fill in your industry, they'd probably think, "Yeah, we've got a great culture." They would probably use that as a means to attract new talent and retain who they've got. They'd be proud of it. But this, at the same time, the investigation said that culture was a cause of the death of seven people. So how does that happen?
So Dr. Philip [Need 00:06:07], who is currently my business partner, was asked to lead the culture change initiative at Kennedy Space Center. And as he started to learn more about organizational culture, he learned there's this whole field called organizational psychology. So he hired a team of us to come in and work with him on the culture there at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. So that's how I got started, and that's actually the, like you said, that's the start of the book. So we talk about what was happening there and what is culture. What is the actual complexity of culture that you can simultaneously be number one and also make decisions that result in the death of seven people? And then we walk through, okay, how do you take this really complex idea of culture and make it something real and tangible that leaders can actually do something about?
SKOT WALDRON:
So the book is called The Missing Links. So why is it called that? What's it have to do with what you're talking about here?
LAURA GALLAHER:
So our company, Gallaher Edge, our purpose is we exist to evolve humanity, that highest level, lofty...
SKOT WALDRON:
Is that it? Is that all you're trying to do?
LAURA GALLAHER:
That's all. That's all we're trying to do, yeah. That really high... That why. That why that's really inspiring. I mean, think Simon Sinek level why. What is really compelling to us? And that's really compelling to us. We genuinely believe that the work that we're doing with human beings, mostly in the context of organizations, but we're genuinely helping them evolve how they think about themselves, how they think about the world, how they interact with the world. And as they change with it, they're interacting with other people. Parents out there, changing how they're interacting with their children. They can genuinely evolve the species.
I mean, a lot of the issues that we run into in terms of culture and some of what was happening with NASA is that there are these evolutionary autopilot responses that we have as human beings that are not working for us today. They're not working for us today. They're getting in the way. So that's how we look at it, is we exist to evolve humanity, and we really focus on helping leaders evolve their culture. So we talk about our culture model as a DNA strand. You've probably heard that culture is the DNA of an organization. So what we focus on then are the missing links to help you evolve your culture.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. And so the missing links within this whole NASA experience, what were some of those things? Can you give us an example?
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
What was something that you dug out of that that said, "Hold on, number one place to work, hooray, everybody come work here because we're awesome." But wait, wait, wait, hold on a second. They're saying your culture also contributed to the death of seven people. That's a pretty big deal. A lot of cultures don't have that kind of pressure. I interviewed a CIA agent on the show in the past, and he said, "When we as leaders in the military make bad decisions, it can lead to somebody's death." And some cultures, a lot of cultures don't have that pressure.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Right. Most don't.
SKOT WALDRON:
It's like, if I make a bad decision, you maybe get disgruntled, and maybe it causes emotional... I don't want to downplay it because a lot of emotional trauma and other things can come of that, but in this case, people lost their lives. So thinking about that connection, where was that disconnect between the greatest place to work and then also the death of seven people? What were some of those cultural things that led to that downfall?
LAURA GALLAHER:
So I'll give you a really high level overview of the model itself, and then I'll give you a couple examples of where we had some missing links that led to this. So one of the challenges with culture is it's this emergent property. So our favorite example of emergents is the taste of sugar. The taste of sugar is an emergent property. Now, you know what sugar tastes like, right? Most of us are familiar.
SKOT WALDRON:
I've never had sugar. I don't know what you're talking about.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Shoot, this is not going to work for you.
SKOT WALDRON:
Nope, not going to work.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Hopefully, your listeners have tasted sugar before. So sucrose, if you look at the structural formula of it, it's comprised of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, and there's certain interactions. And I am not a chemist, so I'm not going to try to get into the weeds of that. But we understand that's basically true, but I couldn't ask you, Skot, to lick carbon, lick hydrogen, lick oxygen, sum it up in your head and then tell me what sugar is going to taste like. That wouldn't work. In fact, you take those same elements, and you put them together differently, you get something that tastes very different like gasoline. So the problem is that a lot of leaders, really well-intentioned leaders, they want to look at culture in the same way that we've always been taught to solve problems, which is break it down into the smallest pieces and parts, look at them individually and then sum it back up.
But that doesn't work with culture. Culture is like a smoke stack. You can't grab it. You've got to pay attention to the forces that are affecting it. So it's emergent. That's the first challenge. The other challenge is that culture is all about the interactions of the human beings, their behaviors and their beliefs. So what that means is the source of culture is actually between the ears of the humans. It's in the heads and the hearts of the humans. Now, maybe one day, I hope this isn't true, maybe one day we will have organizations where we've got electrodes, and we're manually stimulating people's brains, and we're forcing things to happen, but that's not how things work.
Any leader who has tried to simply tell somebody what to do and cross their fingers that it works or any parent who's had a child, we don't just tell people what to do and they do it. That's not how humanity works. So this is why culture is so difficult. It's emergent. You can't work on it directly. We've got to be able to understand the interactions, and the source, it's in here. So when we talk about the missing link culture model, we're looking at it at the culture level where it's emergent and the individual level, which is what really drives us as human beings.
And for us, it all starts with self. Self is at the core of absolutely everything. From the inside out is one of those phrases that we use constantly because it's so true. So one of the findings that I found to be most compelling as a psychologist, acknowledge I'm biased, is that there were people that were genuinely concerned about foam strike. There were engineers who brought it to management, and they said, "Look at this video. Do you see this?" I mean, they were aware of it.
SKOT WALDRON:
And how far ahead in time did that happen, the foam strike?
LAURA GALLAHER:
Oh, within a couple days of the launch.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yeah, so a good 10 or 12 days before Columbia was returning, something like that. So they had time, notionally, they had time. But there were so many factors and problems with that. So one is foam had been falling off of the orbiter for years. For years, and it had never once posed a threat. So one of the things that happens is normalization of deviation. Something's just a little bit different, but it's okay. It's all okay. And then it happens again, but oh, it's okay. It's okay. And that happens. So even though there's this deviation, it starts to become normal, and people stop raising any eyebrows at it.
Now, some people were genuinely concerned. They were raising eyebrows. They said, "We think this is different." But there was a committee that had previously decided when foam hits the orbiter, it's not an in-flight issue. We're going to worry about it later. So it's important to understand some of those forces, some of those higher level decisions that were made to say, "We have previously said we do not worry about this during flight." So picture the amount of vulnerability that's required for an engineer to come not just once because at first they were like, "What's the big deal?" But a second time, a third time to repeatedly say, "Hey, listen. I don't have enough data to say with any degree of certainty that this is a problem, and I know you've previously said it's not a problem, but I really think it's a problem."
One of the mantras of NASA was "In God we trust, all else bring data." NASA's super data-driven. So you got to keep in mind the level of vulnerability that's required for an engineer to step up repeatedly and continue to advocate. It got to a point where they genuinely started to quiet themselves because they were told it could have a bad effect on their career if they kept pushing it because they made decisions before. So the other angle of this, from the management level, the design of the organization has a really big impact on how decisions are made. At the time, the same person who was supposed to make decisions related to things like schedule and budget was also responsible for decisions related to technical and safety.
That's a lot of hats for one single human to wear. And you layer onto that all these external pressures that were happening. I mean, the idea of the shuttle program being canceled was something that would constantly come up as a maybe. So save the program was a mantra. There was a countdown clock people had as screensavers on their computers to core complete, which was completing the international space station. So there was tremendous schedule pressure. So the idea of pausing, holding more space and time for us to say, "Well, foam's falling off the external tank a whole bunch of times. It's never once created an issue, but we're going to go ahead and decided that it is an in-flight issue. We're going to talk about..."
There were just so many pressures that were effecting the decisions that ultimately meant that maybe they could've done something about it. They're not really sure, but they failed to even explore if the damage was going to be catastrophic or not. They just decided we'll worry about this once it comes back. We'll just fix the damage, and then we'll send it up for the next flight.
SKOT WALDRON:
Imagine the amount of self-preservation in that place. And when I coach clients on self-preservation, what do I have to fear? What am I afraid of losing? What am I trying to hide? What am I trying to prove? Those three questions, and when you sit there and say... Because I do a lot of coaching with the CDC as well, and there's data up to wazoo at CDC, a lot of scientists and a lot of information that goes out that has to be very precise, or there's a big PR issue, and there's a lot of backlash and other things. The amount of vulnerability, like you said, for somebody at a maybe lower level, to speak up, first of all, who maybe doesn't have all the information when that is strongly valued. All of a sudden, they're afraid of being wrong. They're afraid of looking incompetent. They're afraid of being too vulnerable. They're afraid of pushing. Maybe they're newer in their position.
There's all these things that are happening, and when you have that kind of, I guess, wall up for yourself, then you got the leaders' self-preservation wall. They're thinking, "Who is this person stepping up and challenging me? Who is this person that keeps talking and challenging my thought process? Maybe now I'm afraid of maybe them being right or afraid of..." There's all this fear.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Absolutely.
SKOT WALDRON:
That was surrounding this culture.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yep.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's scary.
LAURA GALLAHER:
And a lot of it's subconscious.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, yes. Yes.
LAURA GALLAHER:
It's subconscious fear.
SKOT WALDRON:
It wasn't like blatant fear because they're a number one place to work. It's not like everybody's walking around tip-toeing on eggshells all the time. It was there, and it was mostly internal.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yeah. Completely. And again, as a psychologist, that's where my attention always goes because I genuinely believe it's where we can have the biggest impact in genuinely unlocking people's potential is to help them focus on self first, self-acceptance, self-awareness, self-accountability. And we talk about the interaction of those three things from the lens of the shuttle program manager because at one point, when this was raised as an issue, as, "Oh, by the way, the foam strike. They're looking into it," she was actually quoted as saying, and this is in the CAIB Report, she was quoted... And I'm going to paraphrase it, but it was like, "Well, I don't think there is much we can do, so it's not really a factor in-flight because there's not much we can do about it."
So if you think about what she's saying, part of it is, from a self-accountability standpoint, "I don't have the solution. I don't know what to do." And that's true. I mean, had they actually discovered the hole that was in the wing, had they actually gone to the DOD and followed through on request to reposition satellites, which I think is in the cost of millions of dollars to do. I think it's not a small ask because it did actually get that far, and DOD came back and said, "Did you actually want us to do this? Did you want imagery of the shuttle?" And there wasn't a good understanding of it. So the mission manager shut it down. She's like, "No, I'm not aware of a formal request for that. Foam is not an in-flight issue."
So she didn't know what to do. They didn't have an actual solution in mind. They might have been able to pull out a miracle, like during Apollo 13, but we don't even know because they didn't explore it. So if you don't think that you have a solution to a problem, you might actually reduce your own self-awareness, convince yourself that it isn't really a problem to worry about because you don't have a high enough level of self-acceptance to be vulnerable enough to say, "Shoot, this might actually be a real problem and I don't know what the heck to do if we discover that it's a problem." But this is all operating at a subconscious level, this interaction of self-acceptance, self-awareness, self-accountability.
And so being able to create that kind of psychological safety in organizations, that's a huge part of what we focus on because you're right. Most organizations, thankfully, are not dealing with genuine life and death situations. They're dealing with things like very expensive mistakes. They're dealing with, like you said, maybe emotional abuse of trauma. They're dealing with the cost of turnover. It's not always life and death. But when you don't have psychological safety in your organization, you're never going to make the same quality of decisions that you could make if you did have it. You want to have that diversity of thought. That's part of our model as well. Do we welcome in different opinions? Do we understand as leaders how we need to show up in these meetings so that people realize that it's safe to disagree, to push back, to bring a different perspective? Or do we send implicit and explicit messages of "Sh. Stop it. Shut it down."
I mean, we're very sensitive. Humans are tribal creatures, and we're very, very sensitive to even the slightest change in somebody's tone, a facial expression. We do not like feeling like an outcast. We don't want anything to make us feel like we don't belong. And so really paying attention to all the very subtle things that happen in human behavior and thinking, does this help create psychological safety, or does it detract from psychological safety?
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah. And Google's Project Aristotle, familiar with that?
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yes.
SKOT WALDRON:
That study, right?
LAURA GALLAHER:
Oh, yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
That revealed that to create a high-performing team, that was the top finding out of that whole study was psychological safety, the feeling of safety that I'm not going to be shut down, that I'm not going to be criticized, that I'm not going to be reprimanded for speaking up or challenging an idea. And I was speaking at a conference this last weekend, and I brought up that point. And I always bring this up, too, to the audience I'm speaking with because everybody's like, "Totally. I totally think that's great, and I totally want to create psychological safety," but when you define it and say, "How many of you out there can truly say that anybody in your organization feels, that everybody in your organization feels safe speaking up and they won't be reprimanded, they won't be criticized, they don't be shut down, they won't be ignored?"
If there are multiple people in your organization that feel that way, then you do not have a culture of psychological safety. And I said, Google did the study, but we also, at Giant, work with Google and their data centers. They don't have a perfectly psychological safety environment either. It's a continual process.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Absolutely.
SKOT WALDRON:
I would love to find an organization that does have an organization full of psychological safety because I don't know if there is one.
LAURA GALLAHER:
I know. I think it's a spectrum, absolutely. And one of our core values is progress over perfection. So I would say, which direction are you moving in? Are you moving in a direction of more or less? And a lot of it, to your point, Skot, is people don't realize the small things that they do that shut people down. I'll share with you one of my more vulnerable stories around a lot of this work. I mean, I was brought into NASA to help leaders create the psychological safety. And I developed really strong relationships with my internal customers, the leaders of the different directorates within the space center and was building a really solid reputation for myself. And then I did one of these 360s.
I'm not really a fan of the anonymous 360 process, which is a bit of a tangent, but I did several of them actually. And there was one where I got feedback from my peers that I would sometimes get into intellectual bullying. And I was beyond stunned, horrified, embarrassed. I mean, I'm a psychologist who was brought in to help leaders avoid the very behaviors that my peer group was now saying that experienced from me, and it was really eye-opening because on the surface, self-awareness, if you had asked me, "Do you intellectually bully people, or do you shut people down?" I definitely wouldn't have thought that was the case. I was in my mid-20s. So I was pretty young and not as mature at that point.
So I thought it was just great for me to confident with my opinions, and I would debate very heavily. I thought it was super fun, and not everybody thinks that's fun. Not everybody likes it when I...
SKOT WALDRON:
My wife has told me that. It's like, "Why do I have to debate you all the time?" I'm like, "because it's fun." And she's like, "No it's not!"
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yeah. But I mean, that was one of the things that stunned me that was a really powerful learning, is I might think it's fun, and I enjoy the process. And afterwards, I have no hard feelings or hurt feelings. But the other person, they feel beat up. So that was my self-awareness gap, and like I said, it was particularly embarrassing for me at the time because I was like, "Shoot, this is what I'm supposed to be helping leaders with." And I didn't have that kind of relationship with my customers. So there was something about how I was showing up with my peer group that was partly different from me and partly different in terms of how they experienced me because of our relationship that was different here.
So I really took a look at myself and began this whole big journey of introspection to better understand all of the different ways that other people aren't like me, and I can't use the golden rule and think that that's going to work. That doesn't work. I can't treat people the way I want to be treated and expect to get all the results I want to get. I have to get to know each person. I have to build trust with each person. I have to pay attention to the smallest little changes in my own intuition, in my own gut if it feels like the conversation's going sideways or it feels like they're holding something back. I have to keep my own defensiveness in check so that I'm not triggering defensiveness back in them which spirals the conversation or shuts it down.
So it's something that, like you said, it's something that's constant. And it can take a lot of courage, actually, for leaders to really look at themselves. I mean, I think I felt kind of shattered for over a year. I think I felt sort of shattered around, my confidence was shot, and I felt like I was re-learning how to be. But it's okay. That's part of the journey. So going through something like that where it took my self-concept and shook it all up, and it enabled me to build something stronger. I have those experiences over and over and over again. But not I approach that whole journey differently. Now I don't look at that as I'm broken and there's something just fundamentally wrong with me as a person. This is learning. This is the journey, and it's okay. And I'm always going to find things about myself that I can do differently to improve, and that's no reason to not accept myself exactly as I am. I can be self-accepting and focus on self-improvement at the same time. They coexist.
The opposite of self-acceptance is self-judgment, not self-improvement. So a lot of those things have been really huge for me. I'm a firm believer that I can't take other people further on the journey than I've gone myself. So I'm always focused on these things for me as I'm working with the leaders that can focus on the same thing for themselves.
SKOT WALDRON:
Well, let me know if you need some help because I don't really have anything else to work on. I've nailed it.
LAURA GALLAHER:
You've nailed it? Oh, sweet.
SKOT WALDRON:
I'm pretty much awesome at life.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Pretty much perfect?
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, pretty much. Yes. Ask my wife and my... Well, my kids do think I'm pretty much perfect.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yeah. Have they hit teenager-hood yet?
SKOT WALDRON:
My daughter, she kind of thinks she's a teenager, but she's 11.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yep, I was like that.
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh, yeah. No, I appreciate you sharing that story. I think that's incredibly relevant. Just your ability to display that vulnerability and humility and your own journey brings you to meet people where they are, and I think that's probably what makes you effective in your job. I don't know how effective you are in your job. I assume you're effective in your job. I mean, you wrote a book.
LAURA GALLAHER:
I am. Yeah, thank you.
SKOT WALDRON:
So you must be effective. But I think that that's amazing. So I really appreciate you sharing that. So what's your approach then? When you are working with organizations around culture, what's your approach? How do you do that?
LAURA GALLAHER:
Self is at the core always. So that's where we began. Pretty much no matter what a CEO brings to me in terms of here's what we're experiencing, here's the challenging, I might listen to them and see, "Yeah, it looks like they're not fully aligned on strategy. They don't have their organization designed to support the execution of that strategy. So they could use some org work." Doesn't matter if that's the main thing they're talking about. We always start with self first. So we take the leadership team through experiential learning that really, it's focused on nothing besides growing self-awareness around a lot of these things we've been talking about, better understanding defensiveness, understanding what psychological safety is and how you can contribute to it and how you can detract from it, but really helping people understand their own self-concept and how they can think of themselves differently to align themselves with their goals, to align themselves with the kind of leader they really want to be.
So we start with self, and then usually we assess the organization. We do a survey. We talk to key people in the company to understand what's going on. And we just take them through our culture roadmap. So it's everything from really helping the team build trust within themselves, between each other and then making sure the team is genuinely aligned. And we like to look at alignment as binary. Your aligned or your not. Slightest misalignment, especially in a big company or a growing company, creates chasms underneath.
SKOT WALDRON:
So right on. I talk about a fly wheel a lot and the way a fly wheel works and different things that we measure within the fly wheel. One side of that fly wheel is off, it just wobbles, and then that fly wheel's attached to another fly wheel, and there's little micro-fly wheels, and they're all off and things are going crazy. So I think that's really, really relevant. And just talking about a brand as we perceive brand to be an external marketing thing, brand is reputation and brand is what people say about you when you're not around. The key elements to defining a brand are alignment, consistency and differentiation or uniqueness or the value that you're going to bring and communicating that in an effective way.
So when you talk about alignment, it's so true. And I love how you brought in that either you're aligned, or you're not. There's no... When we talk about psychological safety a scale, there's no scale on alignment, necessarily, because if you're not aligned, it's going to cause some issues and real problems. I love that thought. And starting on the inside, going to the out.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Absolutely. Yeah. Avoiding that...
SKOT WALDRON:
You got to learn to love yourself before you love other people, right?
LAURA GALLAHER:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Oh, that's so true.
SKOT WALDRON:
So I think that that's really cool, too, the way you bring that out. So let's talk about this... So the structure of the book, how is it built out? What was the thought behind how you were going to structure the book and write? I mean, is the whole thing about the space shuttle or do you reference it throughout the book? I mean, explain that to us.
LAURA GALLAHER:
So there's three parts. So the first part, chapter one really does a deeper dive into what was happening with NASA in the Columbia accident and what did we uncover about what culture actually means then. If you're the number one place to work, and that's not it, then what is it? So we talk about what makes organizations complex. People can understand those concepts. The rest of part one gets into the guts of the model like I was describing. These are the things that every effective culture has in terms of traits that emerge. These are the drivers, the individual drivers that, as human beings, we're all hardwired to want so we can really tap into the humanness.
And then part two walks through, we call them the strands. So there's maturity, diversity, community and unity. And so in that section, we begin with a story of what was happening at NASA with Columbia so we can reference back to it as we talk about the missing links in each strand. Each one has three missing links. And then we go through, and we go deeper into those missing links. We talk about self-acceptance. What does that mean? What is it? Where does it come from? Self-awareness, same thing. Self-accountability.
And so then part three, once we've gone through all the strands, and we've gone a deeper dive into the model, which, by the way, we include stuff from science because I definitely identify myself as a scientist, and we also included a lot of stories to make it really relatable. We've worked with so many clients over the years, so we've got stories for every link. Part three is then application. It's like, okay, so what do you do? So we talk about how leaders are really responsible for shaping the culture and how they do that. We talk about how you can really assess your organization or your organization's culture more specifically. We actually get into what is safety culture and what isn't it because a lot of people misunderstand components of what a safety culture is. And we talk about the ability to evolve, that capacity to adapt. That's not an accident.
If your organization has the capacity to adapt, that's an attribute of the company. So it's something that leaders can actually work into their organization. So part one is understanding the foundation of the model. Part two is the deep dive, and then part three is all application.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay, cool. Cool. Tell me, do you have a favorite link, missing link?
LAURA GALLAHER:
My favorite? Oh, yeah. Self-acceptance.
SKOT WALDRON:
Is it?
LAURA GALLAHER:
It's my favorite.
SKOT WALDRON:
Surprise, surprise.
LAURA GALLAHER:
It's so misunderstood. That's why.
SKOT WALDRON:
Why?
LAURA GALLAHER:
People think that self-acceptance means complacency. People think if I accept myself, that means I'm not going to get better. They think that they need the inner critic beating up on them in order to get their butt in gear to change, to grow, to develop whatever it is about themselves, and it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole concept of self-acceptance. And people tell themselves these lies where they focus on an external milestone, and they think that that's going to be the thing that gets them to the point where finally they'll be enough. And they're always wrong. And we've all been there. It shows up in different forms like, "I can let myself relax when... Or I'll just be happy when... Or I'll feel good about myself when..." When I lose five pounds, when I buy a house, when I hit this revenue goal. And then we all know the feeling of hitting a goal, and it feels good, but it doesn't last.
You go right back into the same mode of feeling super critical of yourself and feeling not good enough, and you look for the next milestone, and you keep thinking that something outside of you is going to give you permission to accept yourself when it's a matter of doing it right now. And it's a choice to literally accept yourself right now exactly as you are, literally right now. Anybody listening, not like, "Oh, yeah, but I get impatient with people, and I want to fix that. Or I snapped at my wife this morning. I don't want to show up like that." Accepting yourself with all your flaws and imperfections makes it easier to see those flaws and imperfections, which makes it easier to be more self-accountable and feel more empowered in your life. So that's my favorite one to talk about, for sure.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's awesome. I love that. Yeah, it's the belief that I could either like myself now or I can like myself later. So it's like making that choice. I think that there is that wrestle and that conflict of, "Well, I don't want to be too complacent. I want to make sure that I'm pushing myself, but am I dominating myself also?" There's a fine line between dominate, beat myself up and push myself, make myself uncomfortable, call myself up versus calling myself out, "Hey, this is what I need to do to be better because that's what I'm committing to. Ah, I did that thing again." Not getting into the spiral of self-loathing and depression and all those things that could possibly be a result of that, but understanding what that event means for me and what does it mean for the future me and taking that with me. Any other thoughts on that?
LAURA GALLAHER:
Well, if you're not good enough now, you never will be. So whatever you're telling yourself like, "Well, I can't like myself now, or I can't fully love myself now because of this thing," I promise you, that's BS. So if you're not good enough now, you never will be. That's why the invitation is to do it right now, and it's a practice. It's not like flipping a light switch. And it's paradox theory. This is rooted in paradox theory. Two ideas that seem like they're in conflict, but when you look at them more closely, you realize that they're not in conflict, and they do coexist. Most people can understand it when they think about how they talk to other people. Now, some people are really hard on others, and I share this with them and they're like, "Yeah, I talk to people like that."
But most people can ask themselves, "Would I talk to somebody else? If I'm a leader, would I talk to somebody on my team or would I talk to my child the way that my inner voice talks to me when I make a mistake?" Most people are like, no because that's demoralizing. That's going to make them feel bad. That's going to actually make them not want to come to me anymore, and that's exactly what happens to us in our own brains. When your inner critic rages and you make a mistake, your lack of self-acceptance in that moment actually reduces your self awareness. You start to actually block yourself and deceive yourself from seeing your own mistakes, your own flaws, your own contributions. You trigger internal defensiveness, and you slow down your ability to grow and learn and improve. And this is backed up by research.
They've done studies where they actually induce self-acceptance, help people understand and learn about the importance of it, focus on a time when they have felt good about themselves, actually engage in some self-compassion activities. And then psychologists, we love to mess with people. So then we invite them to think about a situation where they felt powerless. And then the other condition, they didn't focus on self-acceptance. They wrote down a grocery list or something like that, some other control condition. And then they were offered a choice. What are you going to do? People who didn't focus on self-acceptance were more likely to want to spend money on some kind of compensation luxury item to artificially make themselves feel better about themselves when it has nothing to do with self-concept.
People who focused on self-acceptance and then were asked to think about a time where they felt powerless were more likely to invest in something that would help them grow, like Influence for Dummies. It was something like, right? And so people's orientation towards self-improvement actually increases with higher self-acceptance. So it's really a big mindset shift for people to make, and it's my favorite thing to talk about because I do encounter a lot of resistance and confusion around it, but it's such a fundamental way to completely transform how you see yourself and accelerate everything that you want to improve.
SKOT WALDRON:
That is awesome. So can we talk for another two hours about...
LAURA GALLAHER:
I would love to.
SKOT WALDRON:
Oh my gosh. That is so cool. I love that piece of it. It is something that's, again, going to be a continual struggle. It's just this constant battle that sometimes you're going to win, and sometimes you're going to lose. But ultimately...
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yeah, I talk about it as a practice. It's a practice.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, yeah.
LAURA GALLAHER:
I'm practicing.
SKOT WALDRON:
And there's my daughter's first grade teacher said, "Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent." So trying to get to that level of permanence, of practicing this thing to the point of, okay, we come back to this because it's a safety mechanism. It's a tool I can use over and over and over again because I know that this is going to be a struggle. So we talk about, I talk about the idea of winning the battle, losing the battle but ultimately are we winning the war? We're going to lose some, we're going to win some, and that's great, but when we keep a high level strategic, eternal perspective, what Simon Sinek also talks about, you said earlier, in his new book, Infinite Game, which is really smart about that infinite mindset versus the finite mindset of, "Oh, I lost this one. There's no hope for me."
LAURA GALLAHER:
Right, it's over. Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
It's done. But keeping that eternal, infinite mindset is going to be the thing that says the game's not over. You don't win the game of life or business. We put an artificial metric on it, but it really doesn't translate to, "Oh, I won life."
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yeah. Exactly.
SKOT WALDRON:
You don't do that. So it's this constant struggle. So oh, thank you so much for enlightening us with all this conversation. So, so good. So The Missing Links; Launching A High-Performing Company, it's out now. People can get their hands on it I assume at a place called Amazon.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yeah, I think it's there at that little...
SKOT WALDRON:
That little book store down on the corner. Is there anywhere else that they can snag that?
LAURA GALLAHER:
Yeah, it's at Barnes and Noble as well.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. Okay.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Might want to get it there, yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay, cool. I love Barnes and Noble. I love just going to have cookies. Getting cookies, let my kids read books and...
LAURA GALLAHER:
It's a cool vibe in there. I like it.
SKOT WALDRON:
It is. I dig it. I dig it. So thank you, and if anybody wants to hire you to come inspire them at some speaking event or if they want to hire you to come help reshape their organization in some way, shape or form, how do they contact you?
LAURA GALLAHER:
I'd say the best way is to go to GallaherEdge.com. That's our website.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. That's good. Awesome, awesome. It is so cool having you on the show. Really fun talking to you, and good luck with the book.
LAURA GALLAHER:
Thank you, Skot.
SKOT WALDRON:
Wow, Laura! When she said "if you don't believe you're good enough now, then you never will be," I was like, "Whoa. Is she talking to me?" It was like, boom! Mic drop. I really loved the conversation we had about self-acceptance and about that journey that you are on, and she didn't do this during the interview, but when we were talking about that, you may have noticed, there's a tattoo on her wrist. The tattoo actually says, "Journey." She brought this up after the interview was done. She was like, "I was going to mention that when you were talking about the journey." Because she believes that this whole thing is a journey. The process is a journey, and if you didn't get that out of the interview, I'm going to re-emphasize that she believes it's a process, that we are not finished. We are always going to be working on things.
And it goes into that story that she told about her own self and her own self-discovery and what went into that. So I loved that thought. Really, really good. And then talking about psychological safety. I loved that normalization of deviation. That's a cool term, right? And the idea behind the little things, the little deviating and then we normalize that. We just make the little things, the little offs okay because there's always going to be something a little off, and we get used to, we make it normal that little things are off. But over time, those little things will lead to big things, and the pile of those little things leads to big things. And recognizing what those little things are is going to be really, really important.
So The Missing Links, her book coming out, or that's already out right now. The Missing Links, understand what those missing links are, dive into her book, understand the principles and how to execute on those things is going to be really, really valuable. Thank you, Laura. Thanks for sharing your insights on the show today. If you want to find out more about me, you can go to SkotWaldron.com. That's where I post a lot of stuff of these interviews. That's where I post a lot of helpful tools and resources. LinkedIn is also a place where I post a lot of things. So you can find me there, a lot of free resources for you there. You can also go to YouTube. YouTube is where I post a lot of these interviews. I post a lot of coaching tips on there for teams and organizations and would love for you to like, subscribe and share that information.
I can't wait to do this again next time. So thanks for being here on another episode of Unlocked. We'll see you.
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