Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please log on to Spotify and iTunes, leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on this podcast. My guest today is a fellow South African, so I'm really excited.
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but also with an IT background, he decided to be more authentic and switch to what naturally came to him, which is about people and communication skills. Help me welcome Ian Hatton to the show, the CEO and founder of Totally Morpheus. Hi Ian. Hey Roberta, so good to be with you today and visiting across the Atlantic Ocean.
00:57
Thank you so much for being here. I'm excited, like I said, to have a fellow South African with me. Welcome to the show. And please tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so I think I'm a fellow Durbanite as well. We were both born in the same city, which is wonderful. Yeah, I my career was IT for 19 years and I thought, you know, this was going to be it. It's a it's a fast moving world. It's it's interesting. There's always developments.
01:26
But what emerged was a realization that I found people more interesting than technology. And I'm still a bit of a gadget guy, you know, I've got all the latest gadgets to a large extent, but the people side is what really stimulated me and realizing that leadership, we often think of technology leaders like an Elon Musk, but leadership is always influencing people.
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because it's people who do the stuff. And so that was the side that really got to me. And I saw so many examples of inauthentic leadership when I was in the IT world, including my own. There was kind of a wake up call for me to kind of, well, I need to do something about this. I need to internalize this journey. And authentic leadership was the term at the time we're talking.
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23 years ago now actually, and that was what kind of motivated me doing a master's in organizational leadership and switching to leadership development type work. 23 years ago, that was the whole Y2K, everything is changing. You decided to step out of IT when everybody thought this is the way to go. That's an interesting perspective. Well, it took another two years before I actually got out. But yeah.
02:39
I was also running at Microsoft South Africa, the launch of a product called Windows 2000, which nobody will remember anymore. Actually the biggest launch that we ever did in South Africa, big nationwide thing, but mainly aimed at techies. And that was massive and very successful. And then the wheel started to come off when I started making mistakes in my own leadership and realizing there was this opportunity and deciding to start studying. So while I was still at Microsoft, I started the master's degree in organizational leadership.
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From there, it just became more and more of a passion. And I wondered if I could switch careers even within Microsoft, get into leadership development there, and eventually realized, no, I actually needed to get out and pioneer my own thing. Mistakes in leadership, would you like to tell us some of those, if that's okay with you? It's totally okay. I'm very open to all of these conversations, embarrassing as it may be.
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So one of the biggest mistakes I made was I was promoted into a leadership position in early 2001. I became the group product marketing manager, had a team of people reporting to me, initially a very small team, and I had a trust survey done and I scored 100% in the trust survey, sort of a 360, you know, do my people trust me, that kind of thing. A year later, I had another trust survey and I scored 50%.
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This was devastating to me because I consider myself a person of integrity. So, you know, how can I have lost trust? And what had happened is in that year, I had a boss who was really encouraging me to lead the way he led and the way he led was very command and control. He actually said somebody once said he should have been a sergeant major in the army, commanding people in the marching parade, you know. And what happened is that in that process.
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As I tried to lead this way, people saw my leadership as inauthentic. They saw what I was doing as it wasn't truly me. And simultaneously, I couldn't do what he did well, because I could only do it poorly because I was trying to imitate him. Right. And this is why this sort of thing started to emerge for me. That's inauthentic leadership. And that is actually what.
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really got me and I realized that I was failing and I did fail. We didn't make our targets that year. I had unhappy people. It was a low, one of the lowest points in my life from a leadership perspective especially and just an awakening to if I want to lead well, yes I need to gain knowledge and skills but I've got to be me in that leadership and that authenticity has served me so well ever since. I love the self-awareness and we'll delve deeper into that.
05:20
But my question is, if somebody is like that leader with you imitating, do they have the idea in their heads that the more I become command and control, people are gonna be more productive? What goes on in their minds is what we're trying to understand. Well, I think it was probably partially the personality, partially the pressures that we were under at that stage. And then additionally, I think...
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When certain people do it, they can kind of pull it off to some extent, because in other ways I had a really good relationship with him. We could discuss things. He was a smoker anyway. He used to say to me, come and smoke with me. And we'd go out onto the balcony. I didn't smoke. But we would have these really good conversations. So it wasn't that was his only style, but it was what he was trying to, I think, he saw maybe in me, I needed to be more authoritative in the way I was leading. But it's not my style. So it became very inauthentic.
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I think he got away with it and he actually ended up going to very senior roles. But for me, it could not serve me because it wasn't who I am. But I also agree with you that command and control is so old school. It kind of went out of fashion in the 80s already. And to be still using it in the noughties was probably not that relevant. So the self-awareness, you keep talking about how it felt inauthentic for you. How many leaders?
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just in general, do you think, actually do take the time to self-reflect? Or do they think, this is my work personality, and when I go home, I'm a different person? Well, you know, people do try and divide things up like that. I don't think that's human. I don't think that is authentically human. I think the number of leaders who are following the exact pattern you've just said,
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and who even say to their people, you know, you leave your personal things at home, when you walk in that door, you're here to work, this kind of thing. But those are not the leaders who get the most out of their people. The leaders who get the most out of their people treat their people as human beings and understand that you can't leave everything at home. Now, you may still have standards, you may have boundaries, you may not allow people to just do whatever they want to, but there is something about when we can connect with the humanity of our people, we can get their hearts.
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And real motivation comes from inside, not outside. You know, the command and control is a sort of carrot and stick type leadership. We know where you rewarding externally or punishing from the outside. Real motivation is when you can connect with people on the inside and then they want to do things. And that is intrinsic motivation and optimal motivation. Whereas the sort of external drivers, command and control, that kind of thing.
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have a limit on how much they motivate. And there's a ton of research on this, that there are things that then go missing. For example, one of the key motivators is autonomy. People need a level of autonomy. And so an over-controlling leader limits that autonomy. But the autonomy needs a competence because it doesn't help to be autonomous, but you're incompetent. So you need leaders who develop competence, who grow their people. But there's a third part of that triangle, and maybe it's a bit of a triquetra, I'm not sure, but it's a triangle.
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There's a third part of it and that is the relatedness or purposefulness. And so when people are connected with each other in teams and have a common purpose, but they have autonomy on what and how they contribute to that purpose, but they have competence so that they know what they're doing. That is the sort of triangle of inner motivation and great leaders know how to tap into that, know how to create environments where those three things are satisfied and people's inner motivation comes out.
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That requires treating them as human beings, not as machines. And when you realize that this is not authentically who you are, we sometimes say to people, just because you get promoted based on how brilliant you are technically, if you feel that people are not your thing, can you turn the promotion down? Well, you know, I think of the promotion I accepted and I wasn't ready for it. I think it's that simple.
09:29
I think I would have been ready for it a year or two later, but I wasn't ready for it then. Let me tell you specifically what happened because it's exactly what you're talking about. So I was really good at doing product launches. I was really good at dealing with the press. I did a lot of interviews with the technical journalists, radio, print, everything. I was really good at dealing with the channel and training them up. There were a whole bunch of things where I was at my genius, my brilliance.
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The moment I was promoted, I wasn't doing any of those things anymore. My people were. And so it took me completely away from what I did best and threw me into something that I wasn't prepared for and able to do my best at all. And I think this happens all the time. You take your best salesperson, you promote them to be the sales leader or the sales manager, and you've lost your best salesperson and gained a bad leader. And really we need to be preparing people.
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So I think today I would probably have done that job brilliantly because I've learned, I know what I was doing wrong and I'd actually find it fun and challenging, but at the time I wasn't ready. And as a result, I did damage. I will tell you one humorous story though. One of the people that I bashed heads with the most of my team is somebody I brought into the team after I had been promoted, we had a vacancy and I brought this guy in from another part of the business.
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And we bumped heads incredibly. It really disappointed me because I really liked him. And he contacted me about a year after I'd left. And he'd also left. And he said, you know, could we do lunch or coffee, whatever, so we did lunch together. And he said to me, look, there's multiple reasons he wanted to do the lunch, but one of them was this. He wanted to apologize. So I said, what do you want to apologize for? And he wanted to apologize for his behavior because he's now become a manager and he realizes how difficult it is.
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And he realizes what he'd done to me. And I've actually heard that story multiple times since then from other people of the same story of somebody who once they got promoted had to go back and apologize for their behavior before they were promoted. Wow. Yes, because like I said, the awareness that, you know what, people are not my thing, but I really love my job. Can I just be left alone? You know, move me horizontally and give me the perks that come with it.
11:48
Let me remain an expert in what I do. I believe in businesses should design it that way. So let me tell you another story. One of the companies I worked for much earlier in my career, we had an incredibly brilliant technical guy, an absolute genius. This guy could think in hexadecimal. You know, it was just absolute genius. And we once had him solve a problem which we thought was unsolvable without a complete restore of backup systems, which would take hours and hours. And he actually went in
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and edited the computer's memory live to solve this particular problem. Now, we, in those days had clients who would buy computers from us, mainframe computer systems of 50 million rands, 100 million rands, you know, let's say over a million dollar type deals in those days. They would buy them from us because Ted was on staff. Now Ted's career, did you want to grow Ted's career by making him a manager? You don't do that. So what they did.
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is they gave him the status of a manager. He had his own office, he had the same sort of car allowance, all of this kind of thing, but he had no direct reports. And it was a brilliant scenario because he was rewarded for his value without having to become something that would have taken him away from his genius. That is the ultimate model, especially for brilliant people like him for sure. And then back to trust.
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When you said you had that 50% score the following year, what do you think creates trust in a team environment? Actually, I have a whole model for this. There's three main components to trust. A lot of people think trust is just integrity. And in those days, I did too. Either I've got integrity or I haven't. Either you trust me or I don't. It's a switch. But it's not true. Trust is actually multifaceted and even situational. So to give you a simple example of what I mean by situational.
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There's a difference between, you know, I walk into a meeting room and I've got a new team member and we start building a trust relationship and I'm landing at an airport somewhere and I've got people offering to help me that I don't know if they really want to help me or if they want to rob me. You know, it's a different situation. And so trust is situational. We need to be really aware of that. But there's these three main areas. The first one is the whole thing of...
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the relationship that we have with people, the connection, the approachability, the way that we connect. We trust people that we have a relationship with. And so building a strong relationship increases trust. And so these environments where it's kind of very distant and people are treated individually, in fact, I worked with one leader about 12 years ago, and he used to assign the same task to two different people, play them off against each other.
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and see who came up with the best. But he wouldn't tell them he was doing it. And so they put all this work in. He's actually playing a bit of a game. And the result was these people didn't trust each other. Everyone was looking over their shoulder all the time. You need a strong sense of connection to have trust. And that includes some vulnerability. It includes the good communication skills, listening skills, all of that is a massive part of trust. The connection through relationship and communication.
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and vulnerability is absolutely critical. The second area is the integrity piece. We do need integrity, we do need values, we do need fairness in the way we treat people. Unfairness breaks trust. In fact, we've all heard the story, people don't leave companies, they leave managers. The research behind it is actually they leave people who've broken trust. That's actually what it comes down to is something in the relationship broke the trust.
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And it's often an unfairness, a perceived unfairness or something like that. The third area that drives trust is reliability. I call it the air model AIR. And the reliability is this thing of, can we depend on you? Do you have the skills? Do you have the competence? I have two daughters, both in their thirties. The eldest one has been driving since before she was 18. The youngest one has never got a driver's license.
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So I can trust the eldest one, I can give him my car keys and say, won't you go and run an errand for me? I can't trust the younger one. It doesn't mean she doesn't have integrity, she just doesn't have that competence. And so we need to be aware, can we trust them? Are they reliable? Do they have the competence? Do we even know where their zone of genius is? Because if we can rely on people for their genius, interesting things can emerge from that as well. So this AIR model is an interesting thing for me to have a look and to kind of perceive, you know, exactly what
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What are the ways that we actually can practice trust, the ways that we can build the multifaceted nature into our teaming, into our behaviors as leaders, that people will trust us more, that we can even empower our people so that they will be more trustworthy with each other. There's a whole lot of things we can do there. And so trust is one of the factors that is underestimated in terms of productivity, engagement, these kinds of things.
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Low trust environments slow everything down. People spend time working on the things to cover themselves. I'm gonna say CYA, I'm sure you know what that means. Cover themselves rather than on the actual task that produces the thing for the client. And so everybody's playing these sort of games and it slows everything down. High trust environments, things are quicker, they're more open, they're more energized, they're more collaborative. And I think that in itself is...
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to me, absolutely fascinating. It actually is. I don't know whose bad idea was for that leader to play his support against each other. But also the vulnerability aspect. Some leaders have this idea that if I'm vulnerable and they see the human side of me, they're not gonna respect me as their leader. What do you think of that? My experience is the absolute opposite is true. What fascinates me in so much of what I do
17:57
There are so many assumptions. Now, yes, you don't want to go and hang your dirty laundry. You know, that's not going to build trust. That's not going to build. But let me give you a specific kind of example that I think is completely underestimated. And it's this, we have leaders who say, no, no, look, I'm quite a private person. I don't want to talk about my family or my struggles, you know, or something like this. And I say to don't worry about that, but you're helping your people develop and you're seeing them.
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For example, struggling to learn a new task. If you can simply say, well, you also struggled when you learned that task. It's as simple as something like that. It doesn't have to be bearing your soul. Not everybody's an extrovert like me. Some people are much more introverted and that's okay, but bring yourself into the picture and talk about maybe one of your work failures. Talk about somewhere where you struggled. Bring that kind of vulnerability in and it makes you more accessible.
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and as a result more trustworthy. And I think that is for me incredibly exciting. It certainly is. And like you said, yes, we're not asking them to tell about the home stuff or do the laundry, but that part of, you know what? I was once in this position and you can do it too. Exactly. And what is the difference between training? Cause we used to train and transformation. Wow, what a beautiful question. So,
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In fact, I think there's a progression before I got to transformation, but the progression actually leads that way. So I used to sit in so many courses in my IT career. And so often I would be like in a presentation skills course or a time management course or a leadership course or something. And I would sit there thinking, I want this person's job. This trainer thing. I like that. I never really wanted to be like a schoolteacher, but there was something about that kind of work. And I...
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often talked about training and then I realized, no, but the term everybody's using is facilitation. And I was like, okay, that's quite interesting. And I had a turning point experience. I was delivering for a big South African financial institution, a leadership development course, a two-day course, and somebody wrote on their review, Ian's need to be right is getting in the way of being a good facilitator. I mean, it was devastating for me at the time. I mean, this is probably more than 15 years ago.
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And it was devastating. But what happened was I was under the mindset impression that as a trainer, my job was to be the expert. Actually, as a trainer, my job is to facilitate people learning and people learn better when they almost discover it themselves than have it told to them. And so there was a progression from, I'm not a trainer anymore. I'm a facilitator of learning.
20:50
And I don't have to have all the answers. In fact, what I really need skill in is people and communication. That's where my skill needs to be. Not in the technical aspects of the, the tool or the technique that I'm teaching. I always say to people, the answers you seek are inside of you. My job as a facilitator and a mentor and a coach is to help you discover those answers that are inside of you. And yes, there are beautiful tools and techniques and models that we can use. And I will still use them.
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but they secondary actually to the self-discovery and the self-learning. Because a lot of our problems actually mindsets, not knowledge. We need shifts in mindset and that nobody can impose on you a mindset change. No. But it can be facilitated and you come to it yourself. See that I'm telling stories, let me tell you a story. I was facilitating a training with a bunch of leaders, but one of the guys quite senior in a company in Cape Town.
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It sounds like I do all my work in South Africa, which I don't, by the way. In fact, I've only done about 15% of my training work in South Africa. It's normally elsewhere in the world. But we still love South Africa. Yes. We still love South Africa. Anyway, this guy, I kept talking about leadership as a real job and this kind of thing, and eventually somewhere late in the morning of day one, he sort of says, no, no, hang on, he wants to just, he doesn't have time. He doesn't have time to do all the I'm talking about all these things. See, there's no time in the day to do these things. It's impossible. I said, OK, can we do a quick calculation?
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So he said, yeah, yeah, this sounds good. So I pull up the flip chart and I say, okay, so by research, what is a really good one-on-one? How much time does it take? And the research, by the way, says somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes. So I said, okay, we'll take the extreme. We'll take the 30 minutes. And I said, well, how many staff do you have direct reports? And he said, well, he only has four. So I said, okay, well, let's use a bit different example. Anybody else here? Yeah, eight, eight is kind of a norm. Okay, so I said, let's go eight. So that's 30 minutes times eight, that's four hours.
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And you need to do that twice a month. That's eight hours a month. And how many hours are there in a month that you work? You know, normally 160, but they all said they work over 200. So I said, okay, well, let's use the 200. So I said, that's eight hours out of 200, which is 4%. And I said, what message does it send your people if you can't give them 4% of your time? And their eyes all went like this and...
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The next morning, as we were getting going and we were doing a bit of a debrief, he said, can he just speak to the whole class? And I said, sure. And he said, he wants to publicly acknowledge that he will never again use time as an excuse. The fact is that he was not prioritizing his people sufficiently. He did not view them as important enough. And he was making the commitment in front of everybody that he will never use that excuse again, and that he will lead his people.
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Now, at this point, I don't care which of the techniques he's learned, because the mindset change is going to change everything. The outcome. Yeah. And that intrinsic motivation you spoke of earlier. And then when it comes to like you were saying, you went from trainer to facilitator. What happens because now you left the technical and you became more drawn to product launches and.
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What are the skills that you felt you needed to develop in order to now be in front of people? Like I said, you used to say, I want to be that guy in front of people. Well, I'm going to answer that, but I'm also going to come back to the tail end of your previous question because I realize I hadn't answered that yet. So I'm going to I'm going to bring that in. Let me start with this. I think communication skills and for me, one of my biggest and even toughest realizations is somebody once said to me, and this is still in the 1990s.
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that eloquence is in the audience. And I was like, no, eloquence is in me. I'm an eloquent man. Well, he was right. He was right. Because what I discovered is that I speak at my best when I connect with my audience. And the more connected I am to my audience, they draw out of me my eloquence. It's the more I'm connected. So I am no longer one of these people who
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who arrives and I've got my script in my head and my speech in my head, I am now organically allowing it to be drawn out. So I know, I'm clear, I know what my strategy is, I know what I'm gonna start, I know what my three main points are, I know how I'm gonna close. But the way it actually unfolds, my audience draws it out. So my favorite way of speaking is to a live audience on a stage, because as I make eye contact, I can see what's lighting up, I can see what's landing, I can see what's not landing.
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And so for me, the connection, even to some extent, you could even say the emotional and social intelligence had to grow. And that made me a much better communicator. And I don't arrive anymore with a pre-planned speech that I now shove down their throats. I don't do that. I allow them to draw out what is resonating with them and what they need. And I can see it on the faces and I can follow that.
25:59
And that was probably one of the most significant mindset changes for me. Eloquence is in the audience. I like that. And when you look at the eyes, you recently had a seminar on digital body language. Now, how different is it to look for eye contact on the Zoom screen versus being live? Well, of course, one of the big problems is that when I'm looking at your face,
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I'm looking at your eyes, I'm looking at your facial expression, it's all in one nice area, except the problem is that it doesn't look to you like I'm looking at you because my camera is actually there. And what I do, I do a lot of online leadership development work, a lot of online facilitation, and what I try to do is to switch between looking at the camera where I know it looks to them like I'm looking in their eyes, and then looking at their faces.
26:53
to pick up the facial expressions and things. So camera on for me is a big one. And so all our meetings are camera on, all my trainings we do camera on as much as possible. Occasionally there's people who just can't because of the environment they're in or something. But for me, yeah, digital body language is making those connections. And even what comes down to text, just simply adding an applicable, appropriate emoji can bring that in. But I think for me on the live call, the Zoom,
27:21
It's switching between looking at the camera and looking at the people and looking at the camera and looking at the people. Even the way I've done the layout right here, my picture is at the bottom, yours is at the top and my camera is just above you so that I don't have to move too far for you to get the feeling that I'm actually looking at you. It's actually switched the other way around as well for me. Your picture's at the top.
27:44
So I'm almost looking at you because you are just below the camera. Exactly. It's almost like that's how we maintain eye contact. Yes. Exactly. Yes. Mm-hmm. And therefore... So it does look like you're looking at me. Yeah. Yes. Same with you as well. And I know that you were concerned that when you look at your camera, it looks like you're looking up, but you actually are looking at me at eye level from the way I see it from my screen. When it comes to asking the right questions...
28:11
You know, Tony Robbins always says, it's all in the quality of the questions that you ask. Do you have a tip for us when it comes to asking the right questions? I get actually asked that question quite a lot. And I'm a strong believer that the questions are actually more important than the answers. A lot of people, we live in a world where everybody wants to jump to, oh, you must do this or you must do that. Everyone has to jump to the answer. But as a result, we're not listening. And the listening is actually
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the first step of asking a great question is properly listening. So for me, though, I mean, the questions that work best for me are what questions, you know, rather than saying to somebody, why did you not get that done? What got in the way? You know, it changes the tone of it and you get a better quality answer when you're asking questions like what or how, you know, those kinds of questions. I tend to find.
29:09
give a much better flow of people. Now, I'm not saying a why question should be avoided at all costs, but often a why question sounds like an accusation. It almost sounds like my parents and I was in trouble. Exactly. Why did you break the glass? Or how did it come to a position where the glass got broken? It sounds very different. Exactly. The why question we sometimes call the therapy question, you know, with well...
29:37
Well, you know, the way I was potty trained by my parents, you know, it's like, whereas the what question is kind of like, well, what are you going to do? Oh, it increases ownership. So to me, any time a question draws on people's thinking and their ownership of what they're going to do, it's a good quality question. So for me, as I'm leading, as I'm coaching, I want people to own, because when they own, they're more likely to take action.
30:06
You know, right down to the point of when you ask him, and I had a great session this evening with a guy in Kenya. And the last five minutes, I said to him, so what actions are you going to take? And when he voices it, you can see it. It goes deeper into him. But if I say to him, oh, so you're going to do this, this, this and this. It's almost like the ownership has shifted to me instead of to him. And so I love to try and do questions which increases sense of ownership and that help them to feel
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like they have a competence, they have something that they can bring out to that. And that, you know, kind of brings me to transformation, because that was what you were asking earlier on is training to versus transformation. And for me, the transformation is about the quality of the questions. The transformation is about people taking on board that it's an inner journey. And maybe I can tell another story. So, so I set out left.
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Microsoft 2002 and was set out, I was going to finish the master's degree and I was going to go and change the world. And you know, I had the master's degree, I had years of experience, I had a vision, I'm going to go and change the world. And of course, we all know how those stories go. They don't. I started a business, I had a lot of problems with my business partner who started with me and that was my relational issues and a whole bunch of things happened.
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And it took me all the way through to 2011 when I realized I've got to get out of this business and do something different and do it on my own because this partnership was not working. Almost simultaneously, my wife decided she wanted a divorce. And I then also moved location. So I kind of left my sort of community that I've been involved in, my kind of spiritual and social community I've been involved in.
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And this triple whammy was really about me going on the inner journey. And I think what was actually driving it was none of those three things. What was actually driving it was I was trying to change the world without first being changed myself. And the realization is that self-leadership is the foundation of leadership. And so my transformation is that I woke up every day and I had this mantra and I've got it on a picture above me over here.
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and I actually do this with all the people that I take on my leadership journey. My number one job today is me. Not my only job, but my number one job is me because if I don't nurture it here, where do I give it to you from? What have I got to give you? If I don't nurture love here, how do I give it to you? If I don't nurture leadership here, how do I give it to you? And that was incredible because what I noticed almost immediately
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was without changing my techniques, I was having a deeper impact in my leadership and my facilitation. And what was happening is a deeper transformation. So the transformation that was happening inside of me started to become the transformation that was happening inside of my clients as well. And so for me, the shift from, oh, I'm gotta be the expert with all the techniques to actually it's my job to facilitate your genius and your learning to...
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I actually have to be growing inside myself all the time, otherwise I can't be taking you on that journey. And that was the real transformation. And that's really what we do as an organization is we work on that kind of transformation, real inside out change. Training, facilitation, and then transformation, the inside out change. Ian, last words of wisdom for an entrepreneur who is not sure about
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how to create this environment that focuses on conscious leadership? So maybe I can answer that by explaining conscious leadership, because it sounds a bit woo woo, maybe for some people. Let's make it a lot more real, a lot more practical. The consciousness is consciousness of self and consciousness of others. So we become conscious of our people, they're human beings. Our leadership and our influence is leading and influencing human beings as human beings ourselves.
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And that human to human, that is consciousness. That is just that awareness. That is emotional intelligence. That is bringing the humanity. So yes, we've got a task, we've got a purpose, we've got a project, we've got whatever it is that we're trying to achieve, but it's humans we're trying to do that with. So it's not either or, either people focus or task focus. The ability to bring those together is actually the optimal conscious leadership. And that consciousness can expand to consciousness of the environment.
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consciousness of our clients, consciousness of various things. And the trust that we spoke about earlier on, building that in ourselves, our relationships with our people, relationships with the clients, all of these things. It's all about the consciousness. And I want to be really clear. Consciousness is not perfection. No, it's not perfection. And that's one of the big mistakes people want to say, Oh, but you know, I did this unconsciously, I'm therefore not a conscious leader. The mark of a conscious leader.
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is how quickly they become aware when they're not being conscious and what they do about it. That is the mark of a conscious leader. It's not about being this kind of zen state all the time. It's how quickly we become aware when we're behaving in ways that are not conscious and what we then do about that. That is what a conscious leader is. Back to awareness again, that word keeps floating around this conversation. And then talk to a subject matter expert who
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is not looking to manage people. How can they then continue on their career journey and move it forward? Well, the crazy thing is that even if you're not looking to manage people, you're still going to move into leadership because leadership is influence. And even as a technical subject matter expert, whatever it might be, you're going to be influencing people. There's going to be a people element of what you do.
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You know, somebody who is a technically brilliant, but not managing people is still called into boardrooms to influence. It's still called in to help make decisions. And so learn leadership skills. You don't have to be a manager. In fact, maybe don't be a manager, but learn leadership skills, learn to influence, learn how to connect with people and make that one of your technical competencies. Don't try and.
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be a manager. A manager role could be very foreign, but an influence role. Actually, techies love that. Individual contributors love that. They love being part of the influence. They just don't want to be responsible for other people. And so still learn to lead. Leadership is influence indeed. Words of wisdom from Ian Hatton, the CEO and founder of Totally Morpheus, focusing especially on conscious leadership.
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This has been an amazing conversation, my fellow South African. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Roberta, absolute pleasure. And may your show just grow from strength to strength. I appreciate your kind words. Thank you so much. And before you go, we can find you on the web. So you can go to tightlymorphius.com. I think that is one of the easy places. But one of the best ways is LinkedIn. If you go LinkedIn forward slash Ian Hatton, one word I-A-N-H-A-T-T-O-N.
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you will find me. There are lots of Ian Hattons out there in the world, but on LinkedIn, I think I've got the prime spot. So that's a great way to find me. And we have a free assessment of conscious leadership for your team. So if you want to assess how your team's doing on conscious leadership, it's called the egg three. And it is a conscious leadership assessment that is for free. Excellent. Thank you so much for that. Is it on LinkedIn or is it on the website? Both.
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I will attach it on the show notes that every leader who wants to access that can find it. Thank you so much for that freebie and thank you for being on the show again. Thank you, Roberta. My pleasure. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating and a review on iTunes and Spotify and stay tuned for more episodes to come.