Speaking and Communicating Podcast

And then one year later, you just find out that things are not what they seem, because people show up at meetings, and they smile, and they say yes, and then they walk out, and they do something else.

Or they try to sabotage somebody.

But it's evenly and if not more detrimental than red zones, because in red zones, at least you know what the problem is, you can see it.

There's a battlefield, people are beating up each other.

In pink zones, it's much more subtle, and much more difficult to detect and to solve, but it's evenly problematic.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with Dirk De Smaele, who held all the way from Belgium.

We haven't had many guests from that part of the world yet.

He is a trainer, coach, and consultant with almost three decades in the healthcare industry in various leadership positions.

He is now on a transformational journey to help others reach their potential and use his work in order to transform their lives professionally and personally as well.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Dirk.

Good morning.

Welcome from Belgium.

Yeah.

Well, welcome to the show.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

All right.

Thank you, Roberto.

Thank you for having me.

Sure.

So as you mentioned during your intro, I'm an engineer by training, and after my PhD in chemistry, I was able to join one of the biggest health care companies on the globe, Johnson & Johnson.

And for 28 years, I've had the privilege of leading multiple R&D teams.

And I look back at that period and that part of my career with a lot of joy and happiness and satisfaction.

While I was working with global teams, I was able not only to travel, but also to live on different continents.

Maybe most importantly, I was able to contribute to the discovery of and development of life-saving therapeutics.

That's what we do in pharma.

But in one moment in time, as you said, and that's not that long time ago, I decided to change careers and become, as you say, a leadership coach, a trainer and a consultant for a company named Transformational Journey, with the objective of using all the learnings and sharing all the learnings that I've had throughout my leadership experience with as many people as possible to help them grow, help them develop, and to some extent, also to help them avoid making the mistakes and the learnings that I had to go through myself and cut them on a fast and accelerated path of growth and development.

So let's start from the beginning.

What got you interested in the engineering sector?

That's a good question.

Well, actually, that takes me back to my 6-year-old, 5-year-old boy who was interested in how things worked.

Biology, electricity, mechanics, anything that seemed complex to me.

I wanted to kind of disassemble it, understand how it worked.

Some cases, I was able to kind of assemble it again.

Other cases, my grandmother was mad at me because the coffee grinder was left open and she had to buy a new one.

But that's kind of how I got into engineering.

When I was 18, apparently this interest was still there, and that kind of allowed me to join university in a city called Ghent, here in Belgium, continue my path with curiosity and surprise.

A big buzzword right now, curiosity.

You know, when we talk about all the soft skills you should have in order to thrive, in addition to your technical skills, one of them is curiosity because, like you said, you were curious about how things worked.

All these technological changes and benefits we derived from them is because somebody was curious on how things could even work better than what we currently have because the inventor was curious about something.

That's where we are today.

Yeah.

I guess if I just kind of continue on that path, Roberta, in one moment in time in my career, I was curious about how science worked.

That's got me into the engineering, into the pharma, into R&D because that's what R&D departments do.

We're curious to learn, we experiment, we try things.

Sometimes we're successful, sometimes we fail.

Now, the curiosity is still there, but the curiosity is more around the psychological part, how people think, how people behave, and how that translates into leadership.

So, the curiosity is still there.

It kind of just got another flavor, apparently, as I got more senior or older.

Yes, so we're going to talk about that, obviously, in this conversation.

So, if you look back when you started your career, how has the workplace changed, especially now that you're doing your leadership coaching, how have things changed when it comes to dealing with people?

On one hand, I'm tempted to say that people remain people.

The essence of our biology, the essence of our psyche has not changed.

We are still the same human beings, we are mammals, and a lot of what we do, we have in common with the dog and the cat, so to speak.

But of course, it would be not fair to recognize that the pace of change and the pace of evolution and the role that technology plays in today's world is of a totally different dimension than what I had when I started my career.

I mean, when I started my career, there was one fax machine in the department, somewhere, and you had a privilege if you were allowed to fax something.

Just imagine how that sounds.

No, I would say I started in the mid-90s too.

So I lived in that world as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the amount of information that is being generated, the amount of decisions that need to be made on a short period of time, obviously has grown exponentially.

And I think my curiosity still remains, how do we as a human being still remain central and balanced in that exponential growth of data, of information, of not being able to focus because there's so much things to do, there's so much alarms and things and apps calling for our attention.

The other thing that is a little bit of a concern to me is, with that complexity, it has become more difficult to really differentiate noise from relevant stuff.

And if I look at younger people, I am genuinely concerned that they need to maintain that ability to differentiate what is true or what they have picked up because they happen to live in a community that kind of continuously sends out the same information, but they need to step out of it in order to say, hey, there's another perspective here.

So training people, and that goes back to your point of curiosity, training people to remain curious, to explore other alternatives, other perspectives of maybe that single truth that they see is a very important job.

More now than it was 20 years ago.

Absolutely.

What would you say were the criteria for you to obtain a leadership position back when we started working versus now?

And is it different when you get promoted to a leadership position?

Do they still use the same criteria?

I am using or was using the same criteria.

Yeah.

And that's where I see and I stay strong with that statement.

Humans have not changed.

We are still wired in the same way.

And there are a couple of things that I would be sharing as a message with anybody who would step from a team membership role into a leadership role.

For one, your leadership role is a privilege.

Now you're in a privileged position that not only will impact the future of your team, the organization, but also you're impacting people's lives and careers, also personal lives.

So handle that with care.

You have now the privilege to leave a legacy, to change the organization, leave it in a better shape than what you received, to develop people, to have an impact on a company and on society.

I think that notion for anybody to step into a leadership role is extremely important.

And the second thing that would come to mind, if you step into a leadership role, people look at you differently.

They look at you through a magnifying glass.

And it's true for all of us.

Whatever we say, what we don't say, what we do, we don't do, it sends a message.

But as a leader, all of the above carries more weight.

So be aware of it.

The last advice I would give is to lead with authenticity, no matter what, to be true to yourself.

The reason why I say that is, well, first of all, for yourself, it's extremely difficult and ridiculously energy consuming to be somebody else than who you are.

Even if you're in leadership position, that is still true for you.

The first law of thermodynamics, the energy that you put in trying to be somebody else is not going to be put into leadership topics that you're being paid for.

A company doesn't pay you to be somebody else.

A company pays you to be a leader, to impact an organization.

It's not only for yourself that that authentic leadership component is so important.

It's also for others because we are programmed to notice when people are not authentic.

People feel it.

And if people feel it, they don't feel safe.

I mean, our body and our mind is trained to pick up signals that are not safe.

That's how we survive.

In a professional context, it remains the same.

And if people don't feel safe because they don't feel authenticity, it will impact the relationship that you have.

It will impact their well-being.

It will impact their creativity and so on.

So I don't think you can underestimate the relevance and criticality of authenticity here.

In your illustrious career, what did you do to develop people?

Obviously, a leader is promoted because they're really good at their job.

And it's human for all of us, even sometimes we struggle with.

When you delegate something, you always wonder, are they going to do it as well as I would have?

And I know delegated it.

So that's one thing.

So when you developed people in your career, did you have those fears?

And what did you do practically in order for people to be transformed?

Yeah.

Well, I'm no exception to the rule that initially, I was really concerned about if I ask somebody to do something, will he or she do it with the same level of quality, depth, outcome as I would expect it to do?

But even if you try to hang on to this methodology, pretty soon you find out it's not scalable.

So there's limitations.

There's only that many people that you can control in that way before you run out of time, and it prevents you from doing other things that you should be doing as a leader.

The other thing is you need to look at individual by individual.

And as I said, this is something that you learn along the way.

It doesn't come as of day one on the job.

But some people, you can give more complex tasks, and you can delegate, and you can emphasize the accountability, because they have proven experience that they were able to do this complex task.

Other people haven't gotten that proven experience, and may need some more handholding.

And then it's up to you to decide when you let go a little bit more of the handholding, because they have proven experience and they feel comfortable themselves.

So that's the situational leadership component, where every member of your team is on a different journey.

I had people in my teams that I spoke maybe once a month, where they had some questions, and then they went off and they did their job.

I had people on my team that I spoke every week, because the assignment was so complex and critical, then they had no experience and they were in need of support.

So it changes very much from person to person.

Like you said, as a leader, encouraging that curiosity constantly, especially now, I mean, we have a situation where we didn't start working with Google and the Internet.

But now you have a situation where you could have been in your job for 30 years, and someone who's 20 can come up with a new idea because they searched it on the Internet, Chetra Pithee and whatnot.

So also, even as a leader, I think you still remain curious and open to learning new things and new ways of doing things.

Yeah.

And as an R&D leader, I had people in my organization who were way smarter, way smarter than I ever was and will ever be.

The thing is, I had a different role.

I had a leadership role, and some of these people were content experts, and both of us had a different role in this organization.

And that's another principle that I think I would keep in mind and advice to people going into role is to build on your strengths.

Don't try to compete or to with others who are much better at this than you are.

It's a waste of time.

Find your strengths and find your space in an organization that builds on your strengths.

You will feel much more comfortable, be much more successful.

And that's how it goes.

The thing, of course, is to find out what your strengths are.

And for that, sometimes you need to take on assignments and roles where you find, and I went through it myself.

This is not my thing.

But okay, by doing it, I learned it.

And a good organization that invests in people, allow you to recover from this path that is not your thing.

And you allow you to move on to a different path.

If you're lucky, if you work with people and leaders who invest in you, you're allowed to do that.

You try stuff, it works, you try other stuff, it doesn't work, well, you recover from it and you move on and that's how you grow.

And I'm so glad you said that because we're not saying that everybody should aim to be a leader.

Some people don't even want to lead people and that's okay.

You can be the wizard, you can be the content expert and be known by the organization that if we have a client that requires a certain level of zoned in expertise, we go to Dirk.

We don't just hand it over to an entire team.

Sometimes those projects are there.

So you need to be known for that and that's okay.

It doesn't mean that everybody should aim to lead people because like you said, if you look at a company hierarchy, there's only so many leadership positions.

So if everybody steps on each other to get to a leadership position, the work is going to take a backseat and therefore, that's just not going to be productive because the focus is the leadership position and not making sure that we produce the best product and service for the client and therefore grow the organization.

Absolutely.

And I had people actually stepping into leadership roles later on, coming to the conclusion that this was not something for them and they wanted to go back to subject matter expert, which is perfectly fine.

But again, it relates to what philosophy do you have as a company and as a leader when it comes to people development?

Do you allow them to explore it or not?

And obviously, allowing them to explore it is the best option, because otherwise, if you don't allow it, people will step out of your organization and try it somewhere else.

And then maybe you've lost some good talent never to come back again.

Yes.

And some organizations have lost brilliant talent.

And the cost of having to train new people every time, high staff turnover, it costs them a lot of money.

Absolutely.

One of the things you mentioned when we first spoke was that you are also starting to work with the young people.

Obviously, this generation is different from when we started working.

What are some of the main things that you focus on or highlighting to young people when they graduate college and they say, Okay, Dirk, I'm about to start my career.

What should I do or what should I work on in addition to what I study?

Yeah, if I reflect back on my career, sooner rather than later, I would have invested in self-awareness.

Who am I as a person?

What are my beliefs?

What are my motivations?

What triggers me from an emotional perspective in a positive and in a negative way and where does this come from?

So if anything, next to, for example, a scientific engineering degree, I would sooner rather than later start to invest into some psychology.

Two main reasons.

First of all, if you know who you are and why you're doing things, for example, it comes back to also building on strengths, you can also relate to how you land with others.

And the second thing is, while you're doing that kind of exploration for yourself, automatically you develop a curiosity towards others.

There's a 99.999% probability that your belief system, Roberta, is different from my belief system.

And that's not an issue.

On the contrary, it's a good thing.

Where things go wrong, when I assume that my belief system is the same as yours, and you start to assume that I have the same belief system as you, that's where things go wrong, because then we start to make assumptions about one another, which I said are very likely to be wrong.

And we start to collaborate, we start to lead at a level that is superficial and only creates misunderstandings and conflicts from which we will have a hard time to recover.

So I think that investing in to self-awareness and how people think, behave, and curiosity towards others is extremely important.

And the other thing that I would encourage people to work on and be very much aware of is this integrity.

Some things that I learned even myself the hard way in, an integrity is to what extent do your words and your intention, the meaning that those words have, and your actions align.

And you should never ever as a leader be tempted to deviate from that.

You can experiment with it, but you will see that it's not the good thing to do, not for yourself, but also for others.

Because again, I come back to the basics of our biology.

If it's aligned, people feel great.

If it's not aligned, they pick it up immediately, and you have a credibility and a trust issue as a leader.

And as we know, trust issues are very difficult to recover from, especially as a leader.

So that's why it would be my advice to focus on that, and make sure that they don't step into this pitfall of trying to say something, to do something else with a totally different motivation.

And the good thing is, we're all born with integrity.

It's just as we grow older, we lose some of those integrity components as we're being shaped and massaged by our external environment.

So again, it comes back to understanding why that happened, where it happened, and what you can do to kind of course correct for it.

And then you work with global companies.

The world is more global now than it was before.

So, what are some of the communication and soft skills aspects that you feel that you still need to highlight with them?

Especially, I mean, cultures are very different.

You know, how you guys communicate in Belgium with one another is very different from how, I'm not talking just about the language, but how we relate to each other in South Africa.

And so, if you and I are working for this global organization and our leaders in America, what are some of the things they need to be cognizant of for these different cultures, for everybody to feel included and feel that they are still part of the organization, no matter where the headquarters are located?

Well, I would not only have the notion or communication, I would actually add collaboration to it.

Because I think as a leader, and we have a transformational journey, the effectiveness of your leadership style, of your leadership is very much determined by the quality of relations that you're building and the ability to maintain those relations.

Obviously, communication is an important element of that.

But you see, once you start to talk about collaboration, once you start to talk about a mindset that you have to invest into a relationship, and to say, well, I'm not going to jeopardize our relationship for some short-term gains, whether you're in South Africa, India, China, or Belgium, that resonates.

That resonates with everybody across the globe.

That's one.

And the second thing is, create an environment, and here we go again, of psychological safety, where people feel comfortable speaking up, to tell their truth, not the truth, because the truth is something may be very theoretical.

Everybody has a known perspective and you should be able to share that.

And that's the openness.

Again, universal language.

Wherever you are on the globe, if you create that atmosphere and people have the ability to speak up without a fear for humiliation, rejection, and so on, they will take it.

The other element we focus on is accountability.

And accountability is an interesting topic because typically, people in organizations say, well, whatever we do is being dictated by hierarchy, I execute, and the number of choices that I have are limited, which is a little bit of a myth, because once you start to work with people and teams, you pretty soon find out that they have more options than they were originally aware of.

And having ownership around options to choose from and accountability is an engaging perspective.

Once again, universal language.

And then of course, what we talked about earlier is the self-awareness.

If I may, a specific element, Roberto, about self-awareness is defensiveness.

Defensiveness is a very interesting topic near and dear to our heart.

And what I mean with that is not to defend yourself against somebody who is trying to do harm.

You do that out of the conscious way of thinking and acting.

What I'm talking about is more of an emotional unconscious response that triggers defensiveness.

And if you're okay, I'm willing to do a little bit of an experiment here.

Please do, yeah.

So I'm joining you as a guest on your podcast, and I'm a little bit nervous.

Why am I nervous?

Well, I'm afraid that I won't be able to answer your questions, and I won't be able to express myself.

But deep inside, there is a fear that I will look incompetent.

And all of us, to some degree, have a fear that we will look incompetent, that we will not be liked, that we will not be insignificant.

But that fear of not feeling or not being competent is something I don't want to feel.

So what do I do?

I suppress the fear and start to project it to you.

I'm going to say, well, too bad, but Roberta, as a podcast host, not the best host that I've ever seen.

By the way, if you feel some emotions coming up, that's your defense mechanism.

So I apologize for that.

I apologize for that.

By the way, it was a last-minute scramble.

Not a surprise that it doesn't go well.

And the audience of the podcast, I don't know if they will get my message.

So what I'm doing is building an internal narrative to protect myself from feeling that fear of being incompetent.

And I just project it to the outside world.

Now, this is an unconscious process.

This is not something I do in deliberately.

What will happen, however, in our dialogue, and this is happening in leadership teams across the globe and nobody's aware of it, unless they start to dive into the details.

You will pick up signals that something is not right here on this side of the line through my choice of words, the tone of my voice, my body language, my facial expression, you're going to pick it up.

And what are you going to do?

Well, why is this turk guy reacting the way?

I am a competent podcast host.

I am significant.

I want turk to like me, whatever it is, and that's different for you than for me.

Again, you will suppress it, and you will start to react unconsciously with words, body language and so on to the things I've triggered in you.

And then we're off.

You get defensive, unconsciously, I get defensive.

And I think like, what's wrong with Traversa?

And you think like, what's wrong with this guy?

And we end up in a different level of conversation, which prevents us from having a good dialogue.

And if you were a company, in a team, in a company, it would prevent us from solving problems because we're so much involved in this internal narrative that the other one is trying to do us harm, is not competent, is an amateur and so on.

So that's defense mechanisms.

And what we're trying to make people see that this biological, unconscious, automatic process is doing way more harm than they are aware of.

And then if we can reduce that defensiveness, as soon as you become aware of it, it disappears and you can have so much better conversations, so much in-depth communications, collaborations, that before and after is like day and night.

And that's, I think, a very important element that we try to educate leaders and teams about this human condition that we all have and how much it gets in the way of developing and building good collaborations and high quality relationships.

That is so powerful.

Is that the ego?

Because here's what happens.

Like you said, when you're afraid, the way of you protecting yourself.

Because if you're in a team, unfortunately, everybody feels like they're competing for the promotion.

So I don't feel as competent.

Instead of raising my game, I must make Dirk look like he's not the competent one so that the boss thinks I'm better.

Like you said, leadership teams across the globe, that's why they're bad heads.

That's why sometimes you think, but we're working towards the same thing.

Why are we in so much conflict?

Yeah.

And there, as a leader, you have a choice to allow it to happen.

I mean, as a leader, you can see it.

People don't even realize it.

But if two team members are competing against each other, for air time, for credibility and success, what they don't realize is as a leader that you see that either you encourage it, you allow it, or you tell them like, hey, this is not how we work as a team here.

This is not how we function.

And if that is the behavior that you think will get you up the ladder, it's not going to be that way.

And that's what I chose to do.

I mean that from the bottom of my heart, I chose every time I saw that to not allow that happen because I understood how detrimental it would be.

Because today it's this person, tomorrow it's another person.

And we call it in our terminology, we call it red zone organizations.

Red zone organizations are very competitive.

Your objective is to kind of beat up the other one, to show to the leader how important and great you are.

And data has shown that red zone organizations, when you look at their financial performance, red zone organizations are outperformed big time from organizations that are collaborative.

You can look at the financials.

There is a Harvard study that has shown that.

The other thing that exists, and we call it pink organizations.

And pink is a flavor of red.

But what happens in pink organizations is that the competition is much more subtle.

If you join a pink organization, the first couple of weeks, you may think like, I ended up in heaven.

These people are so nice to each other.

They help, they smile.

And then one year later, you just find out that things are not what they seem.

Because people show up at meetings and they smile and they say yes.

And then they walk out and they do something else.

Or they try to sabotage somebody.

But it's evenly and if not more detrimental than red zones.

Because in red zones, at least you know what the problem is.

You can see it.

There's a battlefield.

People are beating up each other.

In pink zones, the battlefield is not there.

It's much more subtle and much more difficult to detect and to solve.

But it's evenly problematic.

Because there's so much to dig up if the problem is not very clear.

At least if everything is out in the open, it's going to start the conversation on how do we solve this.

It reminds me, I have a friend who's an executive leadership coach and she coaches teams as well.

She says one of her clients and it was a week-long training course because there had just been so much going on.

When they started to open up and some of them were crying, they had bond grudges on each other for almost 10 years.

They've worked together and some of them have hated their other team members for 10 years.

Yeah.

That's what happened because I think, like I said, they were on that pink zone organization element because the things were subtle, but underneath there was just so much going on, but nobody was addressing it because they were able to put on masks.

However, as time went on, the productivity was suffering, financials were suffering, and then they called in to find out what's going on.

Yeah.

And the other thing here, Roberta, to mention is, for example, if these organizations then address conflicts, if you and I have a conflict, and this becomes a battle between the two of us, and I am one way or another able to win that battle, and I go home like, yeah, I got what I wanted.

Guess what?

Next week, we will be meeting again.

How do you think you feel when we meet up again?

Do you think you forgot about last week?

No, you haven't forgotten about last week.

I'm going to avoid you at the corridor, isn't it?

But that's what happened.

People aren't even aware of the fact that they won a small battle, but long term, they lost a lot of goodwill and ability or willingness to collaborate.

And that's how organizations and teams kind of end up in totally different spots than they would like to be or where they thought they were.

And it's only by opening the box and by having the team look at it, they go like, wow, why haven't we talked about this earlier?

All those years passed by, waste of time.

And how much collateral damage was there?

Yep, the bottom line is that's exactly what there is.

So much collateral damage, there's so much that is lost, not just by the company, but by the individuals as well.

Any last words of wisdom for leaders who are facing these situations that you've just talked about?

What would you say to them?

Don't go into denial.

If you know or you feel that there is a problem, have the courage to address it.

If you don't feel comfortable doing it on your own, get help.

But the alternative of just standing, being on the side of the road, watching things further develop and going south, is not a sign of courage and it's not a sign of leadership.

This may sound like a very heavy task.

And if you're not comfortable, look for help inside of the company, outside of the company.

But the alternative of not doing anything is not an alternative.

Words of wisdom from Dirk De Smaele, from Belgium, who is a leadership coach, trainer and consultant with almost three decades in the healthcare industry, especially in research and development and various leadership positions.

This has been very eye-opening and thank you so much for bringing some of the new concepts that we've heard from you today.

We really appreciate you having been on the show here today.

Thank you, Dirk.

My pleasure.

Thank you very much.

Absolutely.

And before you go, please tell us where we can find you online and if you'd like to share any other social media handle.

I'm active on LinkedIn.

I don't have any other social media channels.

So from that perspective, I'm an old-fashioned person.

LinkedIn and then obviously there's the company website, A Transformational Journey, where you can also find some freebies for things for you to explore when it comes to defensiveness and so on.

So don't hesitate to have a look at the website and try some of our free stuff.

atransformationalljourney.com and Dirk De Smaele on LinkedIn.

I will put all of that on the show notes because at the end of the day, we're all human and we do become defensives.

So we all need that freebie.

Thank you very much for offering it to us.

We appreciate it.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

My absolute pleasure as well.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

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