On Silence & Broken Leadership with Carmen Medina

Carmen Medina spent 32 years at the CIA, but when you meet her you will hardly notice. She is recognized as a national and international expert on intelligence analysis, strategic thinking, diversity of thought, and innovation and intrapreneurs in the public sector. She is the co-author of the book Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within. Her story as a heretic and change agent at CIA is featured in Wharton School professor Adam Grant's bestseller Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. Carmen is Puerto Rican by birth and Texan by nationality.

Pronouns: she/her

• Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within by Lois Kelly & Carmen Medina
• Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant
• It's Time to Fix Our Toxic Notion of What Makes a Good Leader by Nora Bateson

Liz Wiltsie: Welcome to What's Leadership? I'm Liz Wiltsie. The more I learn about leadership, the more I'm convinced there's not a one size fits all solution. So I am on my own learning journey and I invite you to join me. EbonyJanice reminds me that being open about my journey is important. Each episode features someone I admire with actionable insight to share. So please join me as I ask what's leadership?

I am thrilled to welcome Carmen Medina as this week's guest. Carmen spent 32 years at the CIA you meet her, you will hardly notice. She is recognized as a national and international expert on intelligence analysis, strategic thinking, diversity of thought and innovation. And intrapreneurs in the public sector.

She is the co-author of Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within. Her story as a heretic and change agent at the CIA is featured in Wharton School, professor Adam Grant's bestseller, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. Carmen is Puerto Rican by birth and Texan by nationality. We're so excited that she's here. Thank you.

Carmen Medina: Thank you, Liz, for having me.

Liz Wiltsie: Yeah, so let's get to it. What is the number one channel challenge that you see leaders face at work?

Carmen Medina: You know what I want to start macro and the macro challenge is that almost everything that they're being taught or they have been taught about leadership is wrong.

In my opinion, It's almost like a sham industry, the leadership development industry, and it differs from domain to  domain, but there's just a lot about leadership skills that overemphasizes the importance of leadership. Which, I think, given the nature of work today, that it's so much more fluid. You can't stop work to have these leadership moments anymore.

It just doesn't make any sense. And so I think, you know, that's the biggest challenge, the concept of leadership. The way it's taught, most everything about it is ill suited if it was ever well-suited, but it's ill suited to our world today. I know that's a way vague answer. So I'm going to bring it down to a specific point.

Which is that, if you think about organizations and corporations, they tend to value smoothness. They want things to go smoothly. Organizations are created to deliver outcomes at scale and with consistency. And so leaders get judged. Even if the corporation never says it, leaders get judged on how smooth their team their group is.

And this runs  exactly opposite to what you need when you want to do something new or you want to innovate because newness and innovation is almost never smooth. It's very crunchy, right? It has ups and downs. It's uneven. So that's a specific example of how everything that leaders are being told to do.

Almost everything I think is wrong.

Liz Wiltsie: Yeah. So what is your number one sort of tip for dealing with that in the workplace?

Carmen Medina: Well, you know, I actually have three number one tips, cause I, I thought about it and  it's hard for me to choose among these three. So the first thing I would say is kind of the secret, not well understood leadership, hack is silence, be silent.  Listen more to other people. There's a great acronym. I didn't come up with it, but I just it's like that meme how old were you when you learned. Well I was 65, when I learned this acronym. Which is, wait, why am I talking? Wait, and what a great thing to say to yourself as a leader. because back to that first point, what everybody tells you about leadership is that you're supposed to set the vision, you know, provide clear guidance and all this stuff.

And, you know, it's like you have to impose your will on your employees. Well, it's a lot more interesting if you listen to what they have to say. So I think silence is a spectacular leadership hack.  Kind of related to silence, the second one I would say is that when people, when I was working actively in an organization and people would ask me what my leadership philosophy was, I said, conversation.

Conversation is my leadership philosophy. And if you think about it, silence should be 50% of every conversation. Right. And then the, and then the final thing I want to say, it's very specific is that when you're a leader, particularly if you want to do things differently, if you want to lead innovation, You have to realize that the status quo will control your calendar.

You become a leader and you inherit all these meetings and events that you have to go to. And they all represent what the status quo is interested in. So one of my favorite things to say to leaders is that your calendar reflects your priorities and you have to make it so.

Liz Wiltsie: Yeah, those are great three tips. I'm excited that there were three and not just one. So what is something that has impacted the way that you think?

Carmen Medina: You know, something recent that I read and there's so much, you know, that I've read about leadership, you know, not just books about leadership, which don't always tend to be that great. But, just other stuff that you read fiction or nonfiction about being a great leader. But one that is was very recent that I would have to recommend to people. It came out in Quartz and it is by  an author named Nora Bateson, B A T E S O N. She's actually the daughter of, I think his name is Gregory Bateson. Who is a famous, very famous systems thinker. And it came out in Quartz December 5th, 2018, and the title is It's Time to Fix Our Toxic Notion of What Makes a Good Leader.

And it's, you know, it's probably 2000 or 3000 words long, but, she talks about that, our current thing, she wants to call leadership. She wants to call bullshit on our current concept of leadership. And, and she actually says that the very, and I feel this way. The very, every time I hear the word leadership, I cringe, I just go, there's something about what it connotes now, which is just not right.

Not, not suitable. And I didn't feel this way 40 years ago, but there's something about our age, which is different. So if I were to point to something that everybody can get access to for free, I would look up that Quartz article by Nora Bateson.

Liz Wiltsie: Perfect. So what should I have asked you that I  didn't?

Carmen Medina: You mentioned that I, co-wrote the book Rebels at Work and, you know, my experience as a heretic at CIA. I know your audience are Generation Z and Millennial. And, I have to just quickly, I have to tell you a funny story. I about a month ago. I had my first real long conversation with Generation Z.

They were like just getting out of high school. I was at a friend's house for dinner and it was a really interesting conversation. I mean, I immediately felt. You know, anecdotally that they had a different outlook from the Millennials that I'm much more familiar with. And at some point they started coaching me on how economies work and I was sitting there, you know, they were like, Generation Z-splaining to me how,   how the economy actually works. And I was, you know, I didn't say anything, but I was thinking, okay, I've lived in this world for 65 years and I spent 32 of them at CIA thinking about lots of issues like this, but I'm just going to sit here and listen. But anyway, that, that was just amusing to me.  So I think a lot of how, how these younger people are entering the workforce now, although the Millennials are turning 40.

Like right now, or next year, this is the time when they turn 40. So they're really the, the mature part of the workforce. But you enter the workforce and you think people want to hear your new ideas. And then you very quickly get the disillusioned much of the time when you realize people don't want to hear your brilliant new ideas. And so that's sort of my experience of being a heretic and a rebel at work. So I wanted to just say very quickly, some really quick hints. Number one: if you're the smart person in the room. If you think you really know how to fix a situation, it's your responsibility to make sure you have a productive conversation.

So often times you hear someone walk away and they go, Oh, they didn't listen to me. They didn't pay attention. What's wrong with them? No, that's the wrong attitude. You need to think. I didn't do a very good job of delivering that message. What could I have done better. Two, when you're offering up your new ideas, think about whether or not that new idea you're offering up is theological in nature by which I mean, that's heretical to the very essence of that organization. Like the internet was a heretical idea to the CIA. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't advance that idea, but you have to realize that theological change is really hard and you have to understand, number one, that is actually theological in nature.

And then the third really quick hint for, you know, people with new ideas in the workforce is to always remember, it's not about you. And your, you know, you tend to think it's about you and about your brilliance and how people aren't listening to you. It's really about everybody else. And so the very first thing that you should try to do is make your idea, somebody else's idea. Make your idea community property.

So I wanted to throw those. I think pretty simple, but hard to do ideas out there.

Liz Wiltsie: It's super hard to do, but really, really valuable. And particularly the theological idea. I think about that a lot. And being able, just to know when that's, what you're doing right. When you're threatening someone's reality-ish.

Carmen Medina: That's  it. Great formulation, when you're threatening someone's reality. That's right.

Liz Wiltsie: Right. So you have a free resource for our audience?

Carmen Medina: Yes, my co-author and I, Lois Kelly. We have, we run a website rebelsatwork.com. It's completely free. There is nothing hidden in there. We blog with new content, probably two or three times a month. But we have an archive of content now that goes back years and years and years across all sorts of leadership and change agent topics.

And you can also follow us on Twitter and we have a Facebook group and they're all completely free. And, you know, we don't sell chotchkies or anything at Christmas time during the holidays, so totally free.

Liz Wiltsie: Fantastic. I know I've, I've looked at rebels at work obviously. And there are really great free resources in there, so, yeah. And obviously there will be links to that, in the show notes.

So the last question I have for you is what is something that you're grappling with?

Carmen Medina: Well, you know, learning all the time is something that's just, I guess my nature and I was asked to speak earlier this month at a software conference in Malmo, Sweden.

And I was like, I was the oldest person in that conference, I think for sure by 10 years. And I thought, well, what are these people? Why are they going to want to hear, listen to me? And, you know, and in fact, my talks went well, but that's not the important point. The important point is what I learned from them because this was software developers.

And I learned a lot about how software developers are grappling with the concept of leadership in the software field, because software must be continuously developed. You can't stop the process to have quality control that, that, that is problematic. And so they are working on new concepts of team management like Kanban and SCRUM. And I, you know, have always been grappling with this idea that how, how does leadership work when you have to have a continuous process? And it doesn't really the, the ancient concepts that we have don't really work when you're trying to do something in a continuous way. And so I grappled with that.

Liz Wiltsie: Yeah, well. Carmen, thank you so, so much for being here. This was  great.

Carmen Medina: Thank you, Liz.

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This episode was published as What's Leadership. The content remains the same. This podcast has just been renamed multiple times.