Leading with Every Perspective: Ann Herrmann-Nehdi on Whole Brain® Thinking | #21

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact, Unlock Others, a podcast about inspiring leadership. We hope to bring you grounded wisdom, stories from real leaders and leave you feeling inspired. Let's dive in.

Welcome to Unleash youh Impact Unlock Others, the podcast where we explore what it really takes to lead with purpose and presence, integrity and authenticity. I'm your host, Dave Morris, and today we're diving into the most powerful but often underutilized asset that every leader has at their disposal.

The human brain.

In a world of complexity, rapid change, and the increasing demands on leaders, the ability to think clearly, adapt swiftly, and connect deeply isn't just a nice to have. It's actually mission critical.

And yet, many leaders overlook the tool that drives every decision they make, every relationship, and every innovation. And that is the way they think.

That's why I'm thrilled to be joined by a true pioneer today in the field of cognitive diversity and leadership development. My guest is Anne Herman Neddy.

As former CEO of Herman International and now chair of the board and chief thought leader and the force behind whole brain thinking, Anne has spent her career helping leaders unlock their full mental potential.

Together, we'll explore how understanding and harnessing different thinking preferences can transform how you lead, how you solve problems, and how you build more effective and inclusive teams.

So whether you're leading a boardroom, a frontline team, or simply trying to lead yourself better, this episode will change the way you think about thinking. Let's dive in. So, hi Anne. Welcome to our podcast today. How's life ever in the in the United States today?

Delighted to be here. Just, you know, it's. It's terrific. I just got back from speaking at a conference in D.C. and so excited to talk about leadership today.

Yeah, so am I. Absolutely. And just for people who don't know where you are in the States, whereabouts are you situated?

I'm currently in the mountains of the Carolinas. So beautiful. Lovely location. It's a perfect sort of spring, almost summer day. So lovely. So lovely.

Yeah, it sounds idyllic.

It actually pretty is. It pretty much is today.

So we've got a number of themes I want to explore with you today. Some of those things, the future of work and how you see the future of work, and particularly the future of leadership.

We're also going to explore some of the work that you're doing over in the States with leaders and obviously explore a lot more about whole brain thinking and what that means.

But before we go into any of that, there may be people listening to this that don't know anything about Herman International, God forbid, or whole brain thinking.

So perhaps I thought the starting point would be, perhaps you could give us a little bit of a history of Herman International, how it started, how it's developed, and particularly how it shaped your leadership career and some of the leadership lessons that you've learned.

Great question.

So, yes, it was actually started, founded by my father, Ned Herman, who was head of management education at GE at the time and who was really trying to figure out and crack the code on how managers and leaders were thinking and solving problems. And he recognized that without understanding that, how could we really help develop them? So it became a whole journey of research.

He was a physicist by training.

So GE actually sponsored the research that led to an understanding of model that we have today and the assessment that we use today, the hbdi, the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument. And so I grew up in an environment where I would come home after school and get wired up to an EEG for testing.

Sometimes people say that explains how I turned out, I don't know. But it was an interesting. We had an interesting reputation in the neighborhood, right. Of, let's go over to the Herman's and get wired up. Right.

So you were your dad's guinea pig, basically, then we're one of his many guinea pigs.

Absolutely. And that did certainly have an impact on the way I grew up and the way I looked at thinking and leadership.

But honestly, I kind of needed to get away from it, if you know what I mean. I kind of went off and went to college and then lived overseas for many years.

And it wasn't until I really became a leader myself that I started to truly connect the dots between the implications of how we think and where our thinking strengths reside and where our biases reside, and then where we might have some mental gaps. Right. In terms of how we look at a given situation. It all started to come together and I was like, ah, I get it now. I understand. And it was, it was.

I had a hidden gift because I understood things as a young leader and had some tools that most people don't when they're just starting out in leadership. So for me, I think the greatest influence was my ability to actually come to leadership with some tools in hand that I'd.

I didn't actually even realize I had until I was confronted with situations where, you know, I was dealing with a very diverse team that I needed to lead, where I had, you know, client situations that required me to adapt dramatically to a given situation on the fly.

And I could use our model and our way of you know, of looking at how we think and maintain a growth mindset to really, really help me become a better leader. So it was ironically, many years after that initial exposure that it all kind of came together. Yes.

And then I became, ultimately became a leader of Herman. Sorry to join my father in his endeavor.

And Herman's been in business for over 40 years, and we've been helping individuals, teams and organizations really develop a better understanding of their thinking and then have a common language around which they can navigate many of the challenges that we're facing today. And it's a powerful way to not only understand yourself, but to sort of navigate the world.

And I think that that's one of the reasons why we've endured for the time that we have.

I think in some respects it's a simple model to get your head around. Some models could be quite complicated.

And it really resonated with me and I think that's when I sort of looked around and became a practitioner, obviously using your tool, and certainly we use it a lot now in our leadership development programs. So we will dive into the model a lot more later on. But I guess we ought to create some context. Dan first, for sure.

Why is a model like this important in the world that we live in now? Because you are right, diversity is really important. Cognitive diversity is a, I think, a superpower in a business, if you could harness it.

But many businesses don't, do they? That's the problem.

Absolutely.

And I think especially in today's environment, there's so much distraction and noise in today's world that I'm finding that many of the leaders and the teams that I work with forget to pause and have what I like to call a stop and think moment about what's actually really happening.

And so one of the sort of important things I recommend to leaders today is to actually find time on your calendar to have a step back moment, a stop and think moment, and just stop, get off the treadmill, so to speak, of your workday. Because it's. It's getting worse and worse and I don't think it's going to get better this year.

I think it's actually going to get worse before it gets better, hopefully at some point. But the sort of 24 second news cycle that we live in, I was getting ready to work with a Very senior leader in the team.

Just recently and that morning, about 15 minutes before we got together, there was an announcement in the news that completely changed the focus of this team. I mean, it was kind of like, oh, okay. And suddenly we needed to be able to say, okay, how do we spend our time? And everybody's.

Everybody's brain was sort of spinning at trying to process what was going on. And so I think that's. That's really become a reality.

And now, you know, you have to be careful about change, fatigue, and the level of distraction that we have, and that inability to sort of feel like I can focus when I need to focus in a very uncertain world. And I do believe that the good news is some things are coming forward, like AI and some other things that can help us if we use them thoughtfully.

But it is very different world of work than the work.

The world that many people kind of started with or observed their families having as they now step into the work world, and it's not at all what they thought it was going to be.

Yeah, and I think you make a brilliant point about distraction. We see the same thing over in the UK that you were seeing over in the United States around a lot of people very distracted.

They're not building enough time to reflect into their day. And, of course, the human model of learning is dependent on us taking a step away and doing that reflection, isn't it?

But you didn't have the sheer amount of information chucked at you that you get chucked at you these days, do you? So how on earth we find time to absorb all of that, let alone make sense of it, let alone decide what we're going to use and what we're not.

I mean, it's. It is or can be very overwhelming if you're not careful.

I think overwhelm is, you know, the conference I just spoke at, I talked about how teams have fewer resources and higher expectations, and everyone's feeling overloaded and overwhelmed. And so I think the real. You know, there's several.

Several aspects to this, which is kind of, again, very indicative of the world of work that we live in, and that is that we're adding to our lists and to our workload every single day. We rarely stop to say, is there anything that I can let go of? So I'm a big advocate of the not to do list as well as the to do list.

Because if you don't have a not to do list, then you just keep adding. Right. And we can subtract, you know, we're capable of subtracting things. We don't have to. Just adding. And you know, I.

Someone mentioned to me the other day, well, I've been producing this report for I don't know how many months. I don't know that anybody's actually even reading it, but I'm still producing it.

And I think that one of the, you know, and because things have changed so much that it's no longer relevant.

So really, again, one of the ways that you can take those stop and think moments and I think it's nice to have structure around them to not just sort of. Because again, when we're this overwhelmed, it's hard to even say what do I reflect about?

But to take a moment and just say, you know, maybe once a month, is there something on my to do list list that I need to remove? What's my not to do list?

And how does that help me take my mental resources, my thinking and focus it on what's really important and what really matters right now? So big recommendation A not to do list for any leader out there. I think you'd be surprised.

The first time you do it, you're like, wow, there are quite a few things here. So it's a very practical way to address the issue of overwhelm because most of us are feeling that way and it just keeps piling on.

Yeah, no, absolutely, yeah. And it is getting harder. And I think that's where want to go sort of, kind of next with the conversation is this is the world of work.

This is the reality that we're now living in.

But I know when we first spoke you had some views on the future of work and, and what's really changed in recent years and maybe the direction we're going. Perhaps we could unpack a little bit of that.

Because you were talking about things like people working in their constantly almost like pressure version of themselves under pressure version of themselves. You were talking about managing outcomes rather than managing tasks. I'd like to explore a bit of that from your perspective. Really?

Sure.

I think much of this started with the pandemic and sort of a radical shift in how we just structured work and so suddenly people were working remotely.

Now we've got a hybrid world which is even more complex, but in some ways at least gives you a little bit of each of the remote versus co located situation.

I think that it's indicative of the way work will continue to evolve and that is that situations and what's happening in the world at large do have an impact on, we do in our day to day.

What's currently happening in the world today is having an impact like the team I just described that, you know, walked into the, into the room with a completely different perspective based on what an announcement that had been made, you know, that morning. And so as we look at that for leaders, there are several implications.

One is if you are working with a team and in many instances it's remote by design because maybe it's a global team.

So even if some are co located with you in your office, you are not sitting there being able to sort of manage what somebody's doing on the day to day. You have to think about the outcomes and manage to outcome rather than activity.

And many MBA programs and many managers kind of grew up on this idea that I'm managing to activity and if I do that I get the outcomes I want.

Now with the combination of not always being present with the individual and the speed at which things are happening, the only way to do this is to manage to outcome.

But that's a mindset shift and it requires a very clear and compelling set of goals for the team that you're leading so that they understand what that outcome needs to be. And then in addition, in this new world of work, those change.

So not only do we maybe need to set those goals, but we need to check in on them on a regular basis because perhaps things have changed since they were set.

Used to be able to say this is our yearly goal, blah blah blah, and that's just no longer going to be sufficient in today's environment because the world around us is rapidly changing. So my sense is that this notion of uncertainty that we're living with today is here to stay.

And that's not something that people may want to hear, but I believe that it means that the way we think about our work lives, how we look at the time that we spend at work, how we go to work, so to speak, how we connect with others at work, all of that is really changing pretty rapidly.

And I was working with the team recently, they were talking about the number of channels of information that they have to manage in today's environment.

So they have got, you know, they've got slack, they've got teams, they've got regular email, they've got, you know, text, they've got just Zoom and etc. And that was in itself just overwhelming.

And so one of the things I really recommend to the leaders that I work with is that they take a look at the channels that they're using and that they audit and get very clear on which channel they're going to use for what type of information. So there's a source of truth that I need, I know that I need to go to whatever it might be. I'm going to go to teams to find out what's going on.

And that helps with this feeling of overwhelm that so many people are experiencing.

And you know, and also just be thoughtful about what, what information you share and be as succinct as you can be if there's, you know, so that people can understand. Well, all right, this is what I really need to know and I can dig deeper if I need to.

So this notion of thinking about how you are interacting and being a little bit more thoughtful and planful around it is really important because there's just so much. And then on top of it, in our personal lives, there's a lot.

So we're kind of leaving our work life and going to our personal life and feeling like it's a whole lot of information and uncertainty. So we're getting it really from both directions, which is a little different than I think it was before.

No, you're right.

And I think one of the things we realized, going back to your point about managing the outcomes, managing the priorities, stop managing all the tasks, activities, I think we realized that a few years ago.

And another model that we use, which is another one that's come from our American colleagues, is Gino Whitman's entrepreneurial Operating system model.

So we, we run our, our business on that framework and of course that, that puts in place the, the habits and the disciplines to set priorities for each quarter of the, of the year. And then you manage to those priorities. We have a weekly meeting that we manage towards those priorities. So we're constantly flexing and adapting.

And I think, I think that's your point, isn't it? Modern leadership, we have to manage flexibly, adaptively. We have to constantly be thinking and rethinking.

Absolutely. You know, I heard recently a leader at NASA say, well, you know, you need to make a plan, but know that you will deviate from it. Right.

And so that, that idea that, okay, it doesn't mean that you're not going to go out there and think about what you're going to do, but you also need to have the flex inherent flexibility to know that that may not be etched in stone. In fact, it's probably going to Change. And that's a very different way of thinking than just a few years ago.

And the other piece, I think that really could be helpful in terms of looking at leading in this new world of work is there's very. There's. There's quite a few things that we cannot control in our environment.

And so it's important to think about what you can control and hold onto that, like, really focus in on the things that you can control.

And also, you mentioned having rituals and having, you know, processes in place that gives you a sense, those habits actually give you a sense of control. They help your brain sort of feel like, okay, I know what's coming, right? And it can be very helpful.

It sort of reduces the cognitive load that we're feeling today. So having some of those rituals with your teams, I highly recommend that leaders set in place some rituals so that people kind of.

There is something that I know is going to happen, and then I can count on that, and it's one less thing for me to think is going to change. So it sounds like you're doing that, and it's an effective way to deal with the degree of change that's happening today.

Well, I have to say, I think and because we started using it just before COVID hit, so about six months before the first wave of COVID hit. And I think it's one of the most important things we've done in recent years because we've embedded it in the business now.

But I think it helped us get past not just that difficult period, but I know a number of other things that have happened since.

So, yeah, I think it definitely has given us that sense of control, that sense of we are adapting and being flexible, and we are reprioritizing where we need to, because there's a lot of things coming out of the woodwork we didn't expect to come out of the woodwork. And that's going to carry on as you said.

The other point I'd like me to pick up on when we first spoke was your observation that the work you're doing with leaders, people are now under pressure almost permanently because Rich and I have launched a podcast that's going out today called the the Inner Game of Stress that's going out. We're here, we're on Friday, the 23rd of May, today. That's the podcast that's going out today.

And we were talking in that podcast about actually the difference between good stress, bad stress, and healthy stress. And I think a lot of people are under a lot of pressure constantly and not really sure how to deal with that pressure.

So your observations around that would be really useful actually.

Yes.

Well, one of the things that we noted, we did a study on resilience during the pandemic and the HPDI profile actually has a day to day profile and that has an under pressure profile. And it shows where your thinking may shift under pressure. Not everybody's thinking shifts under pressure, but for most of us there is a shift.

And that could be incredibly useful to first of all understand because you may or may not be 100% aware of that and your team probably is, but you, you may not be. And what we realized in that study is that during the pandemic people said, you know, I'm living in my under pressure profile.

I no longer have the day to day. And because there's just so much pressure on me that I'm living in that mode.

And what we've, our research has shown is that that under pressure mode is often a little bit less multi dominant in the thinking and a less flexible, we tend to kind of lean in to certain modes of thinking.

I might be kind of, I'm extra analytical under pressure or I might really want like lean into wanting a lot of control or I might feel like pretty strong sense of emotional engagement or I may really, really want to be kind of looking at all different kinds of ways that I might solve a problem that are different from them today.

So what that does is it means that in our teams we find that if everybody is under pressure and everybody's kind of, you know, looking at things from a stronger perspective as we look at their, at their preferences, that requires the leader to able to lead differently and to understand that people are, you know, are not showing up in a state that's kind of that more day to day state that that might have been very relevant not that long ago and that they need to lean into being a different kind of leader to be able to adapt to that.

And I find that most leaders, I, I believe the adage that, you know, it's like they say on the airplane, you know, you put on your oxygen mask first before your children.

I think you've got to take care of yourself as a leader first so that you can then help help your team and so really understand you go under pressure, what are the implications of pressure for you and stress and then having some very specific strategies that work for you because there aren't universal strategies that work for everybody but you. You know, there are many different ways that you can shift your thinking and you know, Take a moment.

Some people, it's just a physical thing where they. You need to take several deep breaths. You need to kind of get regrounded. You know, some people use meditation, et cetera.

That's something that you can do at your daily desk. For other people, it's actually getting up and moving around and ideally going outside, taking a break.

You know, we used to think about taking a break as being, again, something that we're taking away from our productivity. No, it's actually adding to our productivity to take a break.

Absolutely.

This is true for leaders and teams. So it's not just for you leaders, it's for your teams as well. You've got to let them take breaks.

And there's a lot of data that shows that getting out in nature will make a big difference. So.

Or even just looking out the window at something in nature can help your brain really kind of of reset a little bit and finding ways to, you know, to mentally engage in ways. For some people, it's play and it's just getting out and doing something that's completely different and fun.

And you can find that with family or you can maybe find a way to do that with colleagues.

But it's just taking that moment to recognize where are you in terms of your thinking at that moment, and then how can you shift it in such a way that again, reduces the cognitive load that we're all carrying right now. But it really starts with awareness.

And I think you have to acknowledge that people are coming into work already with change fatigue, they're already feeling stressed from their personal lives. And so you start by acknowledging it and then look for ways that you can then release that, both as an individual leader and as a team.

Yeah. Can we explore where this, some of the stress and pressure is coming from? Because when we last spoke, you talked about a model I'd never heard of.

So we, I think most of us have heard about the, the Vuca model, where things are volatile, they're uncertain, they're complex, they're ambiguous. And a lot of people now have got used to that sort of terminology.

But you introduced me to a slightly different, maybe more updated version of that, which we. You called Banny. So I'd.

I quite like to sort of explore that because I think that that's potentially where a lot of this stress and pressure is coming from, isn't it?

It is. And you know, interestingly enough, since we spoke, I am discovered yet another. So there's actually, there's three ways to describe today's world.

So Vuca Vuca feels Vuca. At the time when it came out, everybody was like, oh, wow, that explains today's world. And now it feels.

Feels kind of tame compared to what we're living with, right? So in the interim, there's another term that's. That's rupt, like disrupt. Rupt, R U P T.

And that stands for rapid, unpredictable, paradoxical, and tangled. And so, you know, this notion of speed, right?

So that is something that is really increased the unpredictability, which connects to the uncertainty of Vuca. But it's a, you know, it's kind of an outcome of it, the paradoxical nature of what happens.

So we used to think there was a certain logic that we could. We could. We could, you know, count on no longer true. And I thought tangled was really interesting.

Interesting because so much of what we kind of are experiencing today feels like it's kind of in a big knot, right? And it's kind of like we use the term unpack all the time.

Well, the reason we have to unpack is because it's just all smushed together, right, in a tangled mess, and you need to lean into that tangle. So rupt is kind of an interim step from. From Vuca. But bani itself is. Is, I think, what many people can relate to right now and that is. Is brittle.

The B stands for brittle. And that notion of feeling like things can break so easily, so even things that we didn't think could break can break very easily, you know, and.

And that sort of notion that, like systems that we thought would never change, well, wait a minute, it just kind of fell apart, right? So that's. That's happening kind of even as we speak. The A stands for anxious.

And the degree of anxiety that we're feeling, and many people can kind of relate to this, but that, because of this notion of things breaking more easily in an unpredictable way, as the previous acronym described, it can make a lot of people feel anxiety that they hadn't felt before. Nonlinear is the N. So we've got brittle, anxious, and nonlinear.

And that kind of connects to that notion of what we used to kind of just think is ambiguity or complexity. And now it's complex. It's what we. What it means is that our ability to even get our heads around what it is that may happen is, is.

Is much more difficult because it's not going to happen in a predictable way or in a way that we might think is, you know, something that we can conceive of off the bat. And then the last one, the I, is Incomprehensible, which again takes, takes ambiguity to a completely new level.

And what this really means is that, that we're, you know, especially for leaders.

And I would, I would like to just also tip my hat to this notion of teams as well, that we, you know, our ability to kind of show up and know what we're supposed to do on the job is just not there anymore. We have to really position ourselves in a way that is much more agile than we ever thought we needed to be.

And I believe that teams, and one of the reasons we focused on teams in the last few years, as we've done our research, teams are really the engine of how work gets done. Leaders on their own don't really get, you know, and used to kind of have the hero leader that could go in and save the day.

The world's so complex today that it has to, you need lots of brains at the table to be able to get work done.

So leaders, their real role today is to be able to help those teams, you know, bring their brains together in a way that is meaningful and can address the issue at hand.

But recognizing that we're coming into the, into the workplace in this sort of bonnie environment means that we probably need to do it differently than maybe we did in the past and recognize that everybody at the table is going to need some strategies in order to do that in a way that doesn't feel as disruptive as it might based on what's going on in the world today.

So that to me suggests that because I agree with everything you've just said there, that to me suggests that there are skills that we don't necessarily always see with leaders that we need to develop for the leadership that we need in the future.

So I'm thinking about we need to be more empathetic and more compassionate because it's about, as you said, the power of the team is going to be absolutely vital. Let's get all the brains that are there at the table functioning and working in harnessing, you know, their best.

We need to be much more human centric as leaders here.

It's not just about some of this traditional stuff that we've done before where we set goals, we, we count lots of numbers and all that kind of stuff, which is that stuff's still. But it's more than that now, isn't it? I think that's what you were saying.

We have to really focus on the power of the team and the power of the thinking diversity that those teams bring. That's like our superpower.

Almost, absolutely.

And, you know, one of the things that has come out of nowhere and it's created this environment that we're in today is AI and what teams could and should be doing.

And leaders is looking at how they can augment their capacity using AI, which means that there's certain tasks that are going to get done that, you know, are great. You know, that can be sort of automated tasks that can get automated. That's fabulous.

What that really means, though, for the leader is that they do need to lean in to that human side of things. They need to be more effective at really understanding.

They need to care enough to really get to know people, to be able to understand, to build trust with the team, to help the team better interact with each other and feel like they can create that psychological safety that Amy Edmondson spoke of at Harvard so many years ago, which has always been true, but it's never been more true than it is today. And so for a leader to create that psychological safety, they have to make it a safe space. And that doesn't mean nice.

It means creating a space where people can be brave enough to say what they really think. So they're bringing their best thinking to work every day.

And that is a different kind of a team atmosphere than I think we were, you know, that we really needed to do before.

And, and if we're looking for true collaboration, a true collaboration is when the best kinds of thinking, often very different, come together so that it's more than the sum of the parts. That's what true collaboration is. To lead, that is a different thing.

And leaders need to build that muscle so that they can help their teams get there, because they need their team to be able to do that in order to accomplish what it is that they've been mandated with.

And as you said, so we need to move away from that kind of more recent years, we've looked at that, as you said, that mythical, heroic type of leader who leads from the front. And actually, it's not like that anymore, is. It's moving away from that. That isn't what we need anymore.

We need somebody who can harness a team and they can get the best out of that team and they can create a safety where that team can really operate at their best. That isn't how things have tended to work in the last 20, 30 years, in my experience, and probably not in yours either, either.

No.

And I think one of the, one of the things that I find that leaders often now need to do is really tap into their whole brain, irrespective of what their preferences might be. And it means balancing the data with their instincts. It means understanding, you know, and kind of sort of sorting that out.

It means kind of honoring the need to get things done, but also innovate and, you know, and innovate in ways that might require some risk.

So I think that the burden on leaders in today's environment to lead teams that are diverse is that they need to situationally lean in to all of their different thinking approaches so that they can, they can be most effective and they can connect with the people on their team most effectively. And that can feel like a stretch. It can feel uncomfortable for some leaders.

Yeah.

So I'd like to tap into your experience of how you're using your model to do this work with leaders, because there is a separate podcast if people want to understand the model in a bit more depth. Rich and I recorded a podcast a couple of weeks back so they can dive into that.

And so I don't necessarily go over explaining the model again, but it might be very useful now for you to explain to us how you use that model with leaders from your perspective to really get them to do the stuff that you're talking about.

So first and foremost, it's really starting by understanding kind of what is my thinking baseline, where do I go just in my day to day. And that can almost be like, like a bias in that our brains are actually very lazy.

We, you know, our brains kind of just go with patterns that they're used, it's used to. So one of the things that we do over the course of our lives is we develop these thinking preferences, which tend to be patterns.

And so we look at a given situation, our brains go boom, boom, boom. I've seen that before. That's what I'm going to do.

And you know, without really paying any attention to it, the next thing you know, you've made a decision. Is it the right decision based on information that your brain had in the past? It may or may not be. Right.

So really understanding where it is your thinking goes both in your day to day as well as under pressure, is the first step.

And in having that conversation with leaders, one of the things I like to ask them is, how is this serving you today if you are a highly analytical leader?

And in speaking with the leader very recently, one of his comments is, well, you know, I can, I can go to that more empathic kind of place in working with people, but my gosh, it takes so much energy to do that. Oh, I mean, you know, I'm Just exhausted when I have to do that.

So then we get into a conversation about, okay, well if that's the case and that clearly that, that relational piece of your preferences is not at all where you like to go, but you need to do it, how do we, how do you, how do you take a look at your week and structure your week around understanding how you manage your energy?

If you know that you have some high impact relationship meetings that need to take place, find ways to kind of replenish the tank, the energy tank, so that you, you know, and structure it in such a way that you're understanding where you need to be able to pull on that aspect of who you are. And if it takes a lot more energy, then get planful around it. Do what it takes, you know, to be able to kind of replenish the tank.

You know, I, almost every lease I work with talks about Fridays and how like by the time they get to Friday, irrespective of what they've done that week, they're, they're, they're literally fried, right? They feel like their brain's dead. They get home, their spouse or their partner might say, hey, let's go do something.

And they're like, no, I just need, I just need like, you know, 12 hours of, of just quiet because I've been in back to back meetings. I don't know how many leaders who are listening can relate to that.

And so I think one of the, one of the biggest challenges today for leaders is looking at energy management. And that means that you do think about, do. Where does my thinking energy need to go and then how do I best manage that?

Using the model as a, as a guide to understand that if I need to, you know, if I need to stretch into being highly innovative, then that might mean that I'm going to feel very uncomfortable doing that. How do I set myself up for success in a way that allows me to do that?

And so it might be that if you're a morning person that you do that in the morning, it might be that if you've got colleagues that really help kind of spur that kind of thinking for you, that you make sure that they're part of the party.

If you feel like you're going to get lost in an endless brainstorming session that you time box it so you know that there's a beginning and a middle and an end.

So there are lots of different strategies that you can adopt, but it starts with understanding how your thinking is either working for you or getting in your way. And then really owning it, you know, owning it. Own your schedule.

I mean, I mean, gosh, if you're a leader, you've gotten there because you've accomplished some things. Well, don't let your schedule manage you. You need to be managing your schedule. Right?

I mean that's really, we need to, I think, own what it is that, that we bring to the table and get more, you know, more intentional about it and be much more flexible.

It's interesting. I totally agree that you know, if you're going to develop leadership in any business, you start with the individual leader.

You know, it always starts, starts with me as the leader before I look at my team. And self awareness is the starting point there, isn't it? Self awareness and self management.

So a brilliant tool, the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument, or HBDI for short, is a profile of your thinking preferences. In other words, how you prefer to process information, take it in, do something with it and then push it back out again.

So when the leaders do their HBDI profile and they see the results, how many of them actually recognize that that's them and how, and that's how they operate? Do they understand what their preferences are? Do they see that? But more importantly, do they understand the impact of that?

And then obviously, because I know you also do the under pressure profile as part of it as well, then you look at the under pressure profile which could be quite different to the normal. How many actually, is that a wake up call? Is that something they don't recognize about themselves? And be interested to hear from your perspective.

Yeah. So I think I would differentiate your description somewhat. I think people, when they see their data, they go, oh yeah, that's me.

But I hadn't thought about it that way before. And the reason is because they hadn't seen it in a way that allows, that allowed them to get clear on what that meant.

And so when you get data and you have a model around which you can organize your thinking, it allows you to then say, okay, take that self awareness, which can be very vague. Yeah, I kind of know I'm this kind of person. Which doesn't really get you anywhere to. Oh, I see that.

I tend to start my thinking as someone who always needs to help have a plan. And if I don't have that plan, then I get stuck. Right. Ah, that might mean that there are challenges associated with that.

And so that notion of being able to describe it in a very clear and tangible way by using the profile and the model gives leaders a way to then navigate the now what, so what Right. Which I think is the most important part of really this, this discovery process.

And, and so in many instances it might be, it might be how I deal with certain situations.

In other instances, many leaders have big AHAs around a colleague that they find quite challenging to lead and where they just are very frustrated and they say, oh my gosh, I just don't, I just don't get it.

I don't get what it's going to take for me to help connect with this person in a way that's going to allow them to truly bring what they need to bring to the table. And so most, for most people it's spot on. You know, the face validity is very strong.

But the aha or what I like to kind of call that like popsicle moment. Right.

Where it's like the light bulbs go off is when you, is when they begin to, to make connections between the data itself and what's happening in their day to day work life. That explains what happened at that last meeting. Now I understand why that one on one just didn't go that well.

That project, it didn't go well because we just totally overlooked that kind of thinking. And the team data has shown me that we have a big deficit in this kind of thinking.

And that actually can really create a problem for us in terms of how we go forward. How do we compensate for that and make mitigate for that in the future.

And so it becomes a planning tool really once you've had that first sort of aha moment.

Yeah. And often do they also recognize when you talk to them about this is how your thinking changes under pressure.

Do they recognize that that's happening?

You know, it's interesting for some people it's the aha is well, you know, I sort of inside of me knew that that shifted, but I hadn't thought about the implications for other others. And that again, that ability to describe it can be so powerful.

And so what many leaders and teams do once they have that data is then they have an opportunity to say, okay, this is where my thinking tends to go. Under pressure. What are the implications of that?

Years ago I had an assistant who worked with me and my under pressure my thinking becomes much more analytical and much less relational. And so we had a conversation about that.

And so knowing me, the way she got to know me and knowing my under pressure profile in the first minute of our one on one, she would do a quick assessment of whether I was under pressure or not. And she would, if she knew, notice that I was.

We eliminated the chit chat and the sort of warm and friendly la di da and we would go straight to the data and what was there that we needed to handle it. And so it was a much more effective.

And I also recognized that sometimes I could come on a little strong and that maybe, you know, 10 seconds of chit chat might go a long way to make her feel good about her day. So we found a way to actually navigate that by understanding. Because actually under pressure we went in opposite directions.

She became more relational, less analytic. I became more analytic, less relational. So I think that's the piece where you can, once you have that in hand, understand that.

And then in some instances you really need to take that into account and override it because the situation at hand doesn't really benefit from that kind of thinking.

And so if you are somebody who needs a lot of control and you're in a situation where there is very little control to be had had, you need to figure out how do you adapt.

And I guess one of the metaphors I like to use is, you know, when you're, if we have any tennis players out there, when you're waiting for the serve, you don't just stand there rigid, holding your racket, you know, kind of like wondering, okay, let me pray that the ball comes to me. You're actually, you know, actually quite flexible. You're moving around, you're kind of light on your feet.

And that is, that's really a metaphor for the way most leaders need to lead today because you really don't know where that serve is going to come, come from. And you have to be prepared to move pretty swiftly. And so the same is true for your thinking.

You've got to be able to say, ah, okay, well, this isn't going to serve me well on this either. How do I engage this kind of thinking? How do I bring one of my team members in to help me engage that kind of thinking?

How do I use AI to help me bring in that kind of thinking?

There are lots of different strategies you can use, but it's, it's, the first piece is recognizing what is needed and then, you know, filling in the, the gap, right? And so it's really like a gap analysis tool.

And so when you've got these teams of execs that you work with together and they've all seen their own profiles, they've all had that conversation with you about how that shows up and the implications of how it manifests in their behavior, then you start to talk them about what it means for them as a team. How do they sort of use that model to be more effective as a team?

You know, I think, as I said, much of what we're working on today is team effectiveness because. Because it is a make or break for most organizations, right?

If teams cannot deliver and they don't have ways of working that allow them to deliver, then it affects the organization's success. So what most teams do is start by beginning to understand the implications at an individual level in terms of what they need to be most effective.

So they let their teammates know, this is what I need to be most effective on this team. Most teams have not had that conversation.

Most people don't recognize that their teammate over there, okay, so for them to be most effective means that I need to actually start the conversation with some data so that they understand exactly what is what.

And then we can then move into maybe talking a little bit about, you know, what's going on, you know, emotionally with the team or whatever it might be. And so having that, you know, we take an opportunity for everybody to tell the backstory of their profile.

You know, kind of, how did I end up with this kind of thinking? And that gives people tremendous context. And the value of having tremendous.

That kind of context is that what it does is it gives people empathy for when somebody shows up the way they do. Too often in a team setting, somebody shows up the way they do. We have no context for why they're doing it. We make up why we think they're doing it.

Oh, it's because of this, it's because of that. It's because of me. No, most of the time, it's because of some context that they bring to the table that we're clueless about.

And so once I have that context, then it's like, okay, now I understand why that person is showing up. Now I know how to best interact with them. And I can have empathy for the fact that they're engaging with me in that way.

I worked with a leader some years ago who, in one of these sessions, talked about how he grew up in an environment where. Where he kind of knew if his dad came home early, that, there we go again, we're changing jobs once more.

And he said almost every year, every year he was moving, his father was changing roles. And so that developed for him a very high preference for experimental thinking, because he grew up in an environment that was like an experiment.

And that led to some behaviors that the rest of his team members. Members did not understand. And so when they heard that, they said, oh, my gosh, all right. Okay, now we get why you're doing it.

Now we can have a conversation with you about how that impacts us and we can figure out the best way for us to come together as a team to leverage that kind of thinking, but not let it get in our way or become something that drives us crazy.

I love that story. Because what that really gets to the heart of it is because you talked about there having empathy for your team members. Members. So it reframes it.

It's not that that person is being difficult, it's just that they think differently.

But that diversity can be really useful that there are some, you know, that style of thinking that that person that you're talking about has in some context is going to be really, really useful in other contexts. It might get in the way, but at least we know where it's coming from.

At least we know why that that person articulates themselves and behaves the way they do. And we can manage around it, can't we know that's true for every member in the.

Well, and I think what emerges for teams is a sort of operating system for the team. You know, you talked about, you know, eos earlier. I believe that teams need to have a thinking operating system.

And so whole brain thinking can serve as a thinking operating system for them. And they can say, what does the situation require?

The way we define thinking, agility is that ability to consciously and intentionally shift your thinking as the situation requires it. So that means that individually and collectively, you do that as a team.

And so if you have the model as a way to kind of develop this operating system, not only for you, for your team, but for the business, do you need to be focused on goals, objectives, the payoff? Is it something where you need to be looking at plans and risk management and really dealing with process?

Is this a time and place where you need to be addressing people, both stakeholders, as well as our employees and our teams and our values? Or is this really about, you know, looking at the possibilities as an organization and innovating and thinking of vision and so on and so forth.

You have a model that also applies to the business. So you can begin to say to yourself, what does the situation require? What does our business need?

And then how do we come together as a collective of very different kinds of thinkers to best serve that need? So it works not only for individuals, but also works for the business as a gap analysis tool. It's quite powerful.

What I've always loved about the model, apart from the fact it is quite easy to explain to other people and understand, which I think some models are not, but that yours clearly is, is that if you want to sort of make a decision to solve a problem or plan some communication, whatever the task is you're trying to do, if you can look at it from these four distinct thinking stuff, ultimately give you a much better outcome, won't it?

And I think being intentional about that, let's actually look at this problem from the four distinct thinking styles that we know are available to us. We've probably got some people in our team that have got preferences for each of these preferences that gives you surely a much better outcome.

And that's a great practical way to use this tool.

Absolutely. A team I worked with some years ago had a problem they couldn't solve and this was a quality control team and they just couldn't solve it.

And this was an expensive problem and it was in a manufacturing environment and they just couldn't, they couldn't sort it.

When they looked at their team data, they realized that they had very little relational thinking in their data and they hadn't looked at the people side of things at all. And when they be there, so they brought in somebody to actually help them do that. Sort of a team enrichment thinker.

You could also use AI today in this way to then be able to say, okay, okay, what are we missing here? And suddenly they realized that they actually had.

One of the, one of the members of the staff was having great difficulty with something that was creating a whole series of implications in terms of quality that nobody had picked up on because they just weren't paying attention to that aspect of it. And so, you know, I think what we suggest is that you literally walk around the model and anybody can do this.

You ask yourself, you know, what is an analytical perspective on this? What data do I need? What is the real problem at hand? And you start with that. Then you think about, well, why is this important? What is the context?

What is the strategic implication? What are the future implications of that? Who is going to be most impacted and why do I care and how do I best address that?

And then look at how do I then take action that hits each of the four quadrants of the whole brain model? And if you, if you build that muscle and that ritual as an individual and as a team, you know, the four critical questions, what, what's the problem?

Why is it important? Who is most impacted and do I need to bring on board and then how do I address it?

Those four critical questions, if you answer those for any problem decision situation that you're faced with you'll chances are you'll cover all your bases cases.

And of course the beauty of that is that because you talked earlier on about how do we recover our breadth of thinking under pressure. Use the model. Yeah, yeah. Because once you understand what your preferences are and, and your team preferences are, you can actually work around that.

Use the model. I guess in, at that point you made about making sense of incomprehensible and really ambiguous situations. Again, it's useful for that.

Maybe just speak about that a bit would be helpful. How do we, how do we use the model to get through those really hard to decide what to do, where to go situations?

Yeah. So there's, I could probably talk for an entire hour about that.

But because it's a, it's a challenge that many people are facing, I would say that first and foremost it's have that stop and think moment that I mentioned at the beginning of our call where you, you just ask yourself, where is my thinking going with this? Because we, that notion of overwhelm can flood our, our brains with chemistry that kind of makes it even harder to think. Right.

So just taking that pause can make a huge difference.

Then tapping into both multiple aspects of what's available to us, we may have some data that we can take into account that we can start to make sense of, but we also have intuition and instincts that we need to take into play. And sometimes we don't have all the data that we need.

And especially I think it's very uncomfortable for many people because, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the brain likes patterns it goes to when it looks at a situation, it looks for a pattern that it recognizes so it can know what to do. Well, much of what's happening today is not a pattern we've seen. So we don't, we don't, we don't have a pattern to go to.

So we get profoundly uncomfortable. However, our brains are probably, it's probably processing some things in the back of our mind. Our intuition may be telling us things.

There may be be, you know, signals out there that will help us better understand. So I strongly recommend that people use every aspect of what they're bringing to the table, look at things that they can understand.

What are the data points that I have? Are there elements that I've seen before? Who can I talk to that will help me make sense of this? And then, you know, what are the possibilities?

You know, a lot of where people get hung up in today's world is they're like, I don't know what to do well, what are the possible things I might now be able to do? Is a great question to ask. This may be opening doors that we never even had available to us before.

So rather than sort of feeling like I've got to go to what I did once before when that's never happened, it's more about what kinds of opportunities and possibilities does this open up based on what I can gather in terms of data, what I do actually know and kind of have as anchors the people that I have available to me and then the possibilities that are out there. So using the whole brain model as a way to process that is a, is a powerful way to deal with it. And, but just, you have to stop.

You have to stop, get off the treadmill, take a moment, stop and think, and then, you know, take a deep breath and then lean in to all the different parts of your brain that you can tap into to help you with that.

Yeah, brilliant advice. I love that. So before we sort of do any wrap up, is there any other sort of key insights you'd like to share or points you'd like to, to make?

And about, you know, I started this conversation with you about we have the most valuable tool we could ever want as a leader and it sits inside our head, but we don't always use it to our betterment. Anything else you'd like to put on the table today?

One thing we haven't talked a lot about is one of the key roles that our brain plays is that of learning.

Yeah.

And learning is, you know, we used to kind of think about like, well, you know, I did the learning bit right when I went to school or I went to university or whatever. And now I'm, you know, no. And in fact, today's environment is pushing many of us to learn in ways that we never even knew we needed to.

It's an opportunity for learning. Now learning can be supremely uncomfortable for many people because it feels like I don't know what I'm doing.

I'm, I didn't know I was going to have to do something. And so when you feel that discomfort, think of it as a learning moment.

When you feel that discomfort, think of it as your brain starting to sort of try to sort out what needs to happen and engage in a different way. And so whole brain thinking shows that we all have the opportunity to stretch our thinking in areas of lesser preference.

It really is a great example of how we all have what we consider a growth mindset.

So when you feel those moments, instead of shutting down and sort of like, oh my God, say reframe them and say, okay, I can be learning this as a result of this opportunity. This is going to invite me to think this way rather than the way I've done it before.

And if you reframe it as learning, it becomes more nutritive than maybe something that you just sort of feel is taking away from you. It's actually bringing value. Value.

And I think that's going to have to be a major strategy for most leaders going forward because learning is going to be the one thing that allows leaders to thrive in this new world. And our brains are at the heart of that.

It's a really brilliant observation.

I do remember because Rich and I talk a lot when we run leadership events about the importance of stepping back from the everyday, doing some reflective learning. Learning. And often people will say, well, I'm not in the habit of doing that. How do I even start? What do I use?

Of course, one of the answers to that as well. We've just been talking about whole brain thinking. Why don't we actually use that as the. If you like the organizing model to do our thinking.

That's an obvious use for it, isn't it? And I think that's what you're just saying. There is step back. You're at your comfort zone.

That's great because we learn and we develop and we grow and we're at our comfort zone. But use this tool to actually find your way through. Through.

Absolutely. And ask yourself the four critical questions and consider those learning opportunities and leaders. Engage your teams in the same way.

Our current research shows that the most effective teams are engaging in each of these four quadrants. They're actually doing that irrespective of who's on the team.

They will lean and stretch and that is how you get to team effectiveness in today's very rapidly changing environment. You really actually need that, that breadth of thinking. And so leverage your teams. It's not you alone.

Leverage your teams and invite their best thinking to the table by engaging their whole brains as well. And it's a powerful way to not only help yourself but to empower your team to actually think in ways that maybe they had never thought before.

And so it could becomes a learning experience for everyone.

Brilliant. So in summary, and where can people find out more about the work that Herman do?

Where would you point them to to find out more about whole brain thinking? Obviously of in the UK can come and speak to myself and Rich.

But you know, if they want to get more information about this lovely model, this Wonderful model you've created. Where do they go? And also, what's next for Herman? You know, what, what's down the pike from you?

So our website is thinkherman.com and it's h, E, double R, M, A, double N.

So we've got that little twist to the way herman is spelled thinkherman.com or, you know, conceivably, if you Google HPDI, that'll get you most likely to our website as well. The Herman Green Dominance Instrument.

I would say that what I'm most excited about today, we're working on very, very exciting projects, some of which were actually based in London, where we're looking at a completely different kind of coaching model using AI and whole brain thinking.

And it's really going to be, I think, something that's going to allow leaders to be much more effective in terms of augmenting their thinking better, managing meetings, better understanding who they're working with. And so really kind of bringing the human side to AI by bringing whole brain thinking and AI.

We have webinars happening, a series of webinars happening right now on LinkedIn Live that are talking about where our CEO is talking about how you bring AI and sort of the human aspect of work together. So that's a whole new domain for us.

I'm very, very excited about it, and I think it's going to allow us to really provide tools to people that will help them continue to grow and learn and leverage their thinking, but also stretch and grow themselves.

Brilliant. So, yeah, again, look at, look on LinkedIn for those webinars. The links are there.

Yes, absolutely. And, you know, connect with me. I'm happy to have them connect with me on LinkedIn @ann herman again, double R, double N. Brilliant.

And what's next for Ann? What's your plan for the next year, two years? Anne?

Well, I continue to. I thought the future of work was something that I would study and stop, but guess what? It keeps going. So I'm going to continue. It just keeps.

It keeps evolving.

Particularly interested in continuing some of this research that we're doing on collective intelligence in teams and what this new world of work is bringing us as ways of working and how you can come together both as an individual and honor that individuality, but also really engage with the collective intelligence of a team to create the best possible outcome. And I believe it's a skill that we need to continue to figure out.

And because we're doing it in very different ways than we used to, you know, we're remote, we're Working in, you know, across the globe in teams. Teams are changing. Many people are on like five different teams. I mean, how do you manage all of that? So I'm really keenly interested in that.

And then I'm also part of the AI team that's working on, on that, that new product that we're building, that. And we'll be adding AI also to the HBDI experience. So that'll be coming the just very.

Oh, wow.

So you will be able to experience ways to stretch your thinking once you've gotten your hpdi. So I'm very excited about that. So I'm working on some of those tools as well.

You've got me very, very intrigued now, Anne, which is just give us a little taster, leave us wanting more. So, yes. So definitely, if anybody wants to find out more, find the Herman website, find Ann on LinkedIn. Look for some of those webinars on LinkedIn.

If you're in the UK, please get in touch with Zentano as well, because Rich and I are practitioners of your, of your model and your tool. And we love it. We've used it for many, many years. It's a central part of the programs we do as well.

So if we could leave with just one thought for people to reflect on at the end of this discussion. Anne, anybody listening to this? What's that one thing you'd say to them to reflect on about how they lead, what would it be?

What I love to remind people is that if you're in a given situation, a leadership situation, and you're struggling with what to do, the first thing you need to do is say, what part of this problem am I? And start with an understanding of in what ways are you a piece of the challenge? And then begin to own that.

And a great way to do that is to think about how is my thinking and interacting with other others supporting the situation or detracting from the situation, and how can I be more agile and shift my thinking in such a way that I can not only resolve the situation, but model a different kind of behavior for my team so they can see what agile thinking really looks like.

So I think it's an opportunity every single time we face one of those challenges and we will every single day to continue to grow and learn and, and so take that stop and think moment, look in the mirror, and then look at what you can do with your thinking to actually stretch and grow, to really meet the needs of the situation.

Very, very wise words, Anne. Thank you so much for your time today. Really, really appreciate you being on the podcast.

As you said, we're big fans of your model, big fans of the work you do. And now you've got me tempted and intrigued about what's coming down the line. So that's great.

Well, we love the work that you do, so really appreciate that and was delighted to be able to have this conversation today.