Kelley Reynard

Peter Docker, Leadership Consultant and Executive Coach, Co-Founder of the consultancy Why Not, and close associate of Simon Sinek and the ‘Start With Why’ team, discussed in detail how his belief, passion, and contributions to leadership creates great performance by connecting people to a higher, common purpose – a ‘Why. Peter exists to enable others to be extraordinary, and his work enables leaders to lead their organisations in a way that creates extraordinary cultures in which people are truly fulfilled.

Q1. Your career has been so diverse and expanded over multiple roles, from serving as a senior Royal Air Force officer and professional pilot, to flying the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher around the world, and teaching postgraduates at the UK’s defence college. What led you to where you are today, and how did ‘Start with Why’ evolve?

I started off my career in the Royal Air Force, I was a pilot by trade. You mentioned flying Margaret Thatcher which seems to capture people’s interest. I was actually only about 24 years old when I flew her which was interesting. The reason it was most interesting was because Margaret Thatcher knew what she believed; she knew what she stood for. I use the distinction of a stand versus a position. A position is against something, and as soon as you create a position, it automatically creates a counter position. A stand is for something; it’s what you believe, and it’s based on Why. A Why is a stand. Being clear on your stand allows other people to stand with you if they share your belief. With Margaret Thatcher, you knew where she stood. You knew her belief and what her stand was. Many politicians today seem often to just have positions – not a stand. Consequently, we don’t have a clear understanding of what they believe and therefore don’t have the opportunity to decide whether or not we believe the same things. Margaret Thatcher was a good example of someone with a stand.

I was a pilot in the British Royal Air Force for 25 years although I flew for only about 12 of those. I was fortunate enough to have different roles in the Air Force. I was a Force Commander during the 2003 Gulf War, taking 200 people to war and bringing them all back home safely. Somebody much cleverer than I said that leadership is a huge privilege, and it was only during that – in that period – that I realised what that really meant. Because to lead people who are willing to put their lives on the line for others is a very humbling experience, and it’s nothing to do with politics, it’s to do with a belief of looking after the person who stands to the right of you, and the person who stands to the left of you. That’s why the military do what they do; and that as I say is a very humbling experience. As part of my career, I also taught a postgraduate degree at the defence college in leadership.

After 25 years in the military I decided to leave and I joined a company called JMJ Associates who work with people in very high risk industries and high risk projects, such as oil and gas, mining, and construction. What JMJ do is bring a way of leading, a way of caring so that everybody looks after each other to ensure everybody goes home safe every day. It’s not about hard hats or high visibility jackets, it’s about a culture of caring. After 3 years, I thought there was actually more to this, and I decided to leave. I spent a few months analysing everything I had learnt over my career about people and leadership, and reflected on my time in the Air Force and the type of leadership I was involved in there. I looked at what I had done at JMJ Associates, and I decided to take all of this apart and reduce it down to this component and think about ‘What’s the big picture, what can I see here that is common?’ It was around about that time when I came across Simon Sinek’s original work of The Golden Circle and the ‘Why’ which encapsulates very simply what I believe. Simon and I then started to connect. We have a great relationship. Simon has the ideas – the big 30,000 feet view around such things as The Golden Circle, and I use that with all the other things I know to implement it in business organisations around the world. So that’s where I came to be from where I was to where I am right now. I have my own company called ‘Why Not’ (which was formed long before I met up with Simon) and my focus is on how to operationalise Simon’s ideas – The Golden Circle and the big 30,000 feet view. So that’s what I spend my time doing with organisations. And what that looks like is everything from keynote speaking at conferences to occasional workshops to full blown programs with companies teaching them how to lead based on Five Key Principles.

Q2. Can you please explain in detail the Five Key Principles?

Simon Sinek’s model, The Golden Circle or Start With Why stands on its own. What I have done is combine it with four other principles to create what I call the Five Key Principles. These are principles which individually are pretty useful, but together are very powerful in creating simplicity and clarity in organisations, giving people access to a way of leading differently. You see, I make a distinction between leadership and management. Management is about handling complexity, whereas leadership is about creating simplicity; and yet simplicity isn’t necessarily always easy. When we say something as a leader that’s clear and simple, it becomes repeatable. When it’s repeatable, it can take hold within the culture. For example, when a leader is clear about the organisation’s Why, it allows everybody within that organisation, regardless of their formal role, to start to work out for themselves what they can do in support of that overall cause. So simplicity is hugely important. Together, these Five Key Principles are a guide to how ‘Starting with Why’ can be brought to life within an organisation.

Key Principle 1. Start with Why: The first principle is about being clear on your cause, your belief, your purpose; why do you get out of bed each day? It’s about being very clear on this purpose. It’s not about increasing stakeholder value or increasing shareholder value which is something I quite often hear. One company in Canada said to me profit is like oxygen: we need it to breathe, but it’s not the reason we exist. As an organisation, when we’re really clear on our Why it can act as a source of inspiration for others. To give you an example, I worked at a hospital in the States and this chap John who was a porter, wheeled people around on trolleys. That’s What he did – that was his job. He was in his late 60’s and had worked there for years. I asked him “John you could have retired years ago, but yet here you are working long hours each day, well why do you do this?” He straightened up with pride and said ‘I save people’s lives. If I didn’t push these patients from the Emergency room to the operating theatre, the doctors couldn’t do their job, and then these people would die. I save people’s lives’. What he did was to push a trolley around, but why he did it was to save people’s lives – that was his contribution to the impact the hospital had on the community. Notice that Why wasn’t complicated. This is the key: in industries and organisations, we tend to get attracted to the complicated side of management because it’s an intellectual challenge. But it’s the clarity and the simplicity of leadership that inspires people. It inspires people to work out how they can contribute to bring that cause into reality. This is the reason Starting with Why is so important; it’s the catalyst, the spark, that can create the inspiration for people.

Key Principle 2. Right to Left Thinking: This principle takes the Why and helps us to start to answer the question ‘What’s next?’. Usually, when faced with a new challenge or project we employ what I would call ‘left to right thinking’. We stand in the present, look at what we’re faced with and consider our past experience – what we’ve done before. We would draw on that experience, apply it in the present and get what we call a predictable outcome. This is how human minds have evolved. We take what we’ve done before, apply it in the present, and come out with a predictable outcome –hopefully getting a little better each time. This is how we improve over time and is a perfectly valid model. However, it does have a couple of limitations. The first is that we can only get incremental change using this approach because we are inextricably linked to what we’ve done before. So the best we can do is to have a slight improvement – which won’t help if we’re trying to achieve a breakthrough. The other problem with it is, what if we don’t have any relevant past experience to draw on?’ Then what do we do? That’s when this alternative approach – Right-to-Left Thinking comes in.

Right-to-Left Thinking is where mentally, we stand in the future and viscerally connect to what it is we want to accomplish. It’s vital that we connect emotionally with what it feels like, what it looks like, what it tastes like. We then use that energy to inform what we do in the present. The past is less relevant. This is a transformational approach. It might sound a little weird, but this is how America put a man on the moon. When President Kennedy stood up and said by the end of the decade America would put a man on the moon, they had no past experience of doing that. But when Kennedy stated this he made a commitment and declared it to the world. It was the power of that honest declaration that inspired. It inspired the folks at NASA to work out how they were going to achieve this when they had no past experience of doing this before. The key to Right-to-Left Thinking is the emotional, unshakable commitment and declaration to others that whatever it is will be achieved. This is referred to as a Declared Outcome or Future.

When I had the privilege of leading people in a combat war situation, we didn’t go into battle thinking we’ll give it our best shot; we went into battle with absolute total commitment and a declaration that we were going to achieve what we had set out to do. Flying an aeroplane when you have an emergency, of which I had many, and you’ve got 120 people on board, it’s not a case of we’ll give it our best shot – you are totally committed to bringing that aircraft down safely. That’s where you’re sourcing your actions from. I go mountain running in the hills and, when I stand at the bottom and look up at the summit, I don’t think it looks tricky I’ll give it my best shot. Instead, I mentally visualise what it’s like standing on the top of the summit and seeing the view from up there. I can taste the air, what it smells like, and I feel so connected with that. There is no way I’m not going to get to the top of that mountain. My perspective from that summit is to look down at the path I came up and accept that while there may have been some difficult moments, I overcame them. I might not be able to tell you how I did it, but I know that I did. It’s that total commitment. When you stand in that future, you declare what it is you are going to achieve. By declaring it, and showing that genuine belief and commitment, you create a possibility, and you hold that and bring it into existence; and that allows others to also believe what you believe to step into that space and work out with you how to accomplish it. It’s our Why that acts as the source of inspiration for us to achieve that declared outcome.

Key Principle 3. Adaptive Leadership: Adaptive Leadership is essentially leading when you don’t know what to do. When we are faced with problems we might think that they are all just ‘problems’ and will attack them in the same way. However, as Ronald Heifetz identified, problems can be broken down into two types. There’s the Technical Problem and the Adaptive Challenge. The Technical Problem is when we know clearly what the problem is, we draw from our past experience to solve it and handle it by doing it ourselves or, if in a management role, delegating it. For example, if we have a flat tyre on our car, we know what the problem is and we can ask a mechanic to repair it.

An Adaptive Challenge is very different. With an Adaptive Challenge, sometimes you don’t even know what the problem is, let alone the solution, so we can’t tell people what to do. It demands a different approach. An Adaptive Leader knows that solving Adaptive Challenges is done, not through delegation, but by empowerment and being open to learning. For example, if somebody has chronic heart disease, they will go and see their doctor and the doctor might say we will fix that for you by giving you a heart bypass. That’s the technical fix. Unfortunately, just doing that technical fix isn’t going to solve that problem. The Adaptive Challenge is getting that person to choose to lose 70kg, choose to give up smoking, choose to eat healthily, choose to give up drinking, and choose to change their lifestyle, because that’s just as much of a problem as solving the technical side. If the patient doesn’t choose to take on these other challenges, then that person isn’t going to get well in the long term. This person has to choose to change their lifestyle, not have someone standing over them telling them what to do, because as soon as that ‘police officer’ goes, people will revert to their normal habits. People’s perception needs to shift. If they are inspired by why they need to change their lifestyle in this case, then that will have them choose to do things differently.

Adaptive Leadership gives us the tools and the skills to help us achieve what we set out to achieve when we haven’t achieved it before – and it starts with the Leader acknowledging that they don’t know what to do. This for leaders of organisations can be quite a challenge because they have usually reached the top of their company by dint of their technical knowledge – in other words, knowing what to do. The Adaptive Leader’s role is to create the environment where the team feel empowered to learn their way through the problem.

Key Principle 4. Being and Doing: As an Adaptive Leader, who you are being is as important than what you are doing. For example, if we recall our favourite high school teacher, it’s likely we’ll remember them for who they were being when they taught the class, not so much what they were teaching or doing. These are the teachers who can really inspire. As Maya Angelou once said, “…people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

If we see or hear somebody speaking who is very charismatic, we leave the room thinking about them. If we see somebody speak who is inspirational, we leave the room thinking about ourselves, and the possibilities that opens up for us. That’s the difference. Anybody can be inspiring when they’re connected to and are talking about their passion. If you hear anyone who is talking passionately about what they believe, regardless of whether you believe the same thing, it’s difficult not to be inspired.

Paying attention to who we are being is always so important. For example, in football, who the team captain or manager is being will have an effect on the performance and outcome of the game – regardless of the level of technical expertise. If the manager tells his team they can go out and win and yet he doesn’t believe it himself, the players will hear the words but will sense that lack of belief.
This is down to biology. Our brain is split into two main components. The neocortex – responsible for handling facts, figures, analytical thought and language; and the limbic brain – responsible for feelings, such as trust and loyalty; all human decision making and all human behaviour – and yet has no capacity for language. The neocortex can assimilate, analyse, and take in 40 bits of information per second, whereas the limbic brain can take in 11 million bits of information in that same second. This is why when we meet people, we might hear what they say and what they show to us, but sometimes you get that feeling that something doesn’t feel quite right with that person, or that you don’t trust them. That’s our limbic brains kicking in. Our limbic brain is connected to who we are being and can detect when someone is being authentic, being genuine, and when they believe in what they’re doing. When they’re committed, when they’re dedicated, we can sense it. This is the importance of being a leader rather than just doing management; being true to who you are. This is why as a leader, who you are being is so important.

Key Principle 5. Relationship: When we build relationship, we accomplish so much more. A small increase in relationship has a disproportionate increase in what we accomplish. It is said that relationship is the foundation of accomplishment. As a leader, if you spend time building relationship with your people, you will accomplish so much more. During my military experience, I knew each of my people very well. I knew their partners, their families and worked with them for a long time which meant we understood each other and could accomplish so much more together. It’s much more than personal relationship – it’s also your relationship to your Why and the Why of your organisation. The more energy we put into building relationship, the more we will accomplish. The more people who are connected to Why the organisation does what it does, the more they will accomplish. One of the most powerful things a leader can do, is to go around their organisation and constantly talk about Why it is they’re doing what they’re doing – to keep the Why alive, to keep that relationship to the Why strong. When I used to fly aircraft, I would always aim to get into the cockpit 10 minutes before I needed to in order to allow my brain to reconnect with that aircraft and that environment. That way I would perform better than if I just jumped in at the last possible moment.

Having a connection to your own Why will help you to relate to others and the organisation or team of which you are a part. Before we can successfully lead others, we need to lead ourselves; to lead ourselves we need to know ourselves. And this starts with knowing our Why. Indeed, all of these Five Key Principles, while being hugely valuable to organisations can equally be applied to ourselves as individuals. It’s all a part of leading one’s life, rather than just reacting to circumstances around us.

Q3. What are your thoughts on why some people and organisations can’t clearly articulate Why they do what they do? Is it because they don’t have that connection to that higher purpose and don’t truly believe in what they’re doing?

Every organisation when it starts has a Why – even if it’s not clearly articulated. The Why and What the organisation does go hand in hand, but over time, the Why can be forgotten with the focus becoming increasingly just on the What – the results, the numbers, the figures. People forget Why it is they do what they do. This is what we call The Split.

Recently, in San Francisco, I gave a talk for a large healthcare company, explaining each of these Five Key Principles. Immediately after the talk, the Director said to me, “People from the floor have been coming to me during the breaks saying they want to reconnect with Why we do what we do”. It turns out that the focus for these people had been so much on the technical aspects of healthcare that they had started to lose connection to the Why. The passion had diminished. It’s the role of Leadership to clearly articulate the Why, to maintain the discipline of How they do what they do, and the consistency of What they do.
The Golden Circle of Why, How and What, when working together, create an organisation that is sustainably successful. Moreover, those who work within the company tend to make a greater contribution than they would otherwise – and feel fulfilled by what they do.

Q4. Do you often come across individuals who are clearly not connected to the organisation’s Why, even if it is clearly articulated and inspiring?

This is a very good point. First of all people need to know what the organisation’s Why is so as they have the opportunity to decide if they believe in the same things or not. Importantly, a Why is discovered, not created. So when I’m working with an organisation to uncover their Why it is a discovery process. If a Why has been created, it’s likely that instinctively we won’t trust it because we’ll sense it’s just a marketing message.
A Why is a stand – a stand for what you believe. A stand is like being on an island. You raise your flag on your island showing what you stand for. As ships sail past they can clearly see from your flag what you believe and can choose to join you on that island if they believe what you believe. If they don’t believe the same then that’s ok too – they can just sail on by.

Once the Why is clearly stated, sometimes there will be people who don’t feel a connection. That’s ok – not everyone believes the same things. If people don’t feel a connection to that organistion’s Why then chances are they’re not going to be enjoying their work as much as they could. They would feel better and achieve more in the long term if they choose to leave and join another organisation whose Why resonates with their own. Of course, it helps to know your own Why!

Q5. After the workshops you run with organisations in this space, if you go back and see them in 6 months time, do you notice sustained behaviour change, increases in productivity, and engagement?

It varies based on the belief and the commitment the senior leadership have. Those companies that really take off, in terms of seeing a real shift in performance, are those where the senior leadership is committed to articulating and keeping that Why alive. If they don’t do that, then the Why can die again. That is the fundamental difference between the companies that experience a sustainable difference and those that don’t. By being the guardians of the Why, Leaders create a space where they why can inspire innovation and where innovation can thrive. Often a long and extensive program to create these shifts isn’t needed. In the last few years I’ve been amazed by the innovation that’s emerged just from me introducing these ideas through a keynote talk for an hour.

The goal is not to hire everybody who needs a job; the goal is to hire those people who believe what you believe. In that environment you spend much less time Managing and can focus much more on Leading. Leading is a lot about being the guardian of the Why – creating and holding that space of possibility. It’s almost a case of standing back a little, allowing the innovation to emerge – and then coordinating the wonderful ideas that come alive within your organisation.

If you would like to learn more about Peter’s work to enable others to be extraordinary, please visit his web page http://www.speakers.ca/speakers/peter-docker/