Unlocking Momentum: Moving from Control to High-Performance Teams with Norman Wolfe

If your team says they’re aligned but execution keeps slipping, the problem might not be effort or talent. It might be the way we’ve been taught to see organizations. We sit down with Norman Wolfe, founder and CEO of Quantum Leaders and creator of the Living Organization framework, to make the case for a true paradigm shift: stop running companies like machines and start leading them like living systems.

We dig into the hard realities behind quiet quitting and chronic disengagement, and why command-and-control leadership can quietly create the very dependence leaders complain about. Norman breaks down a practical alternative to forced alignment: moving toward contribution agreements that give people real choice, which is where empowerment and engagement actually come from. Along the way we explore what it means to build organizational capacity through both capabilities and maturity, so teams can adapt, self-correct, and take ownership without constant oversight.

We also unpack the three fields that drive performance in any living organization: activity, relationship, and context. You’ll hear why relationship energy and culture can’t be “managed” by logic alone, how leaders can sense early warning signs by connecting head and heart, and what heart-centered communication looks like when the pressure is high. Norman shares stories from executive life, including what happens when change triggers grief, and why trust and psychological safety depend less on the perfect words and more on who we are being in the conversation.

If you want better leadership communication, stronger culture, and strategy execution that actually sticks, hit play. Then subscribe, share this with a leader who’s tired of pushing harder, and leave a review telling us: what would change at work if trust replaced control?

Transcript

Organizations Are Living Systems

Dr. Leah OH 0:00

Welcome to another episode of The Communicative Leader. I'm your host, Dr. Leah O, and today we're exploring a paradigm shift in how we view our organizations. We're moving away from seeing them as machines to be managed and towards seeing them as living systems that need to be led. In a world where 70% of employees feel disengaged and quiet quitting has become a boardroom buzzword, the old ways of command and control aren't just outdated. They're actively damaging our cultures. Norman, our guest today, argues that the secret to high performance isn't more oversight. It's a fundamental shift in how we communicate and the why behind the work. We are joined by Norman Wolf, the founder and CEO of Quantum Leaders and the creator of the Living Organization. With over 40 years of senior leadership experience, including steering a 1.2 billion unit at Hewlett-Packard, Norman helps executives move past mechanical management. He's a veteran of over 30 leadership podcasts and is a trusted advisor to CEOs looking to unlock real growth by designing conditions for trust rather than exerting control. In today's episode, we'll discuss why traditional alignment often fails, how to design for trust, and how you can translate systems thinking into day one action. If you're ready to stop managing parts and start leading a living system, this conversation is for you. Let's dive in and have some fun. Hello and welcome to the communicative leader, hosted by me, Dr. Leah O'Millian Hodges. My friends call me Dr. O. I'm a professor of communication and a leadership communication expert. On The Communicative Leader, we're working to make your work life what you want it to be. Norman, thank you so much for joining us on The Communicative Leader. Welcome. I'm really excited for our chat today. And, you know, you have this incredible, incredible experiences, this past, you know, all of these successes. So you've led massive units at HP. Now you advise CEOs through quantum leaders. So if we look back at the 1.2 billion, billion with a B, my friends, unit, what was that aha moment when you realized that, you know, that traditional mechanical management approach was no longer enough to sustain organizations?

Norman Wolfe 2:37

Well, that's a great question. I it actually happened after my work at HP. And is it my work at HP that set the foundation for what I discovered later? I was refocusing my consulting business. Prior to the turn of the century, my consulting did a lot of different things. I didn't really have a focus. I was helping CEOs that I met in whatever way I could help them. But after the after the turn of the century, I was talking with one of my clients, and I was really thinking about what should my next direction be, or what where should I go? Things we do periodically throughout our life.

Dr. Leah OH 3:13

Exactly.

Norman Wolfe 3:14

And I was talking to a client of mine that I've been working with for over a decade, and I just asked him, Bill, why do you keep hiring me as a consultant? And his words is what gave me focus. Without hesitating, he said, That's easy, you help me execute faster. So that put me on the path of executing strategy as as my focus. Which, you know, is a fancy word for simply saying, how does an organization go from where they are to where they want to be? About two years later, I was talking with a friend at a conference, somebody I just met, and she asked what I did, and I told her, and she said, Well, what makes you different? Here's where my experience from HP and all the other years. My response was, I think it's because I look at organizations different. I think of them as something alive, something like that has a soul and a purpose. And that was really my a-ho moment. Because what I realized was the statistics said 70% of companies fail to execute the strategy. And only 30% of employees are engaged. And and that was though those two statistics have not changed for well now four or five decades. Back at the 2004, 2005, it it started to make ask make me ask the question with all the knowledge and information we have, with all the wisdom from Tom Peters to Jim Collins to uh Daniel Pink to Amy Edmondson, all the all the great information we've been provided. Why aren't we changing? And it was that moment when I said organizations to me are like living entities, that the idea came to mind that we're stuck in what I call a paradigm trap, the paradigm of how we think about what an organization is and how to lead it. And that's that's when I started on this path.

Dr. Leah OH 5:04

Yeah. That's so exciting. As a as a communication, a leader communication scholar, you know, that's music to my ears because we recognize that it's constantly in flux, that we all experience this thing differently. So when we pretend that this is a static entity, it's not helping anyone.

Norman Wolfe 5:22

It's not. It's not. You know, if you continue this, I was curious about, you know, I got all these statistics about employee engagement. We've got statistics about company success. And I recently checked out to see if there were any statistics about leaders, how people feel about being in a leadership role. And I found a couple, and and they both said the same thing that leaders today, like 68% of them, feel extremely stressed out trying to lead their organizations and go home emotionally exhausted. And, you know, so what we have is a system that doesn't work for employees, doesn't work for leaders, and doesn't work for organizations.

Dr. Leah OH 6:06

Yeah. Who's left, right?

Norman Wolfe 6:08

I mean, something's gotta change.

Dr. Leah OH 6:10

Yes, exactly.

Norman Wolfe 6:13

So that that's that's what brought me to the kind of work I do. In changing the paradigm, and and I want to emphasize this is not just a new set of tools or another methodology or another strategy planning model. This is a change in paradigm. And that's not easy. You know, that's in my own ever since I wrote the book, which was now 2011 when it was published, that's well over almost a decade and a half. And numerous times through those years, I myself caught myself thinking in terms of the old paradigm. I'd be working with a client, looking at a challenge, and come home feeling something's off. You know, it's like I got this way of thinking, this new paradigm, but I'm not getting the results. And what I realized is I wasn't operating from that perspective. I was operating from the old paradigm. And I shared that only to highlight how how difficult it is to change the paradigm. Actually, I was working with one of my CEO clients just the other day, yesterday, as a matter of fact, and he was reflecting, and I've been working with him now about three years, and he says, you know, Norman, the work you're doing is is producing a phenomenal results. I love what's happening.

Speaker 1 7:28

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 7:28

It's not easy. I get the idea, but but putting it into practice, we both laughed and I said, Yeah, I know. I've been wrestling with that issue for for well over a decade now. So, yeah, changing the paradigm is not an easy thing. But it's so so important for us to be successful in today's world.

How Mechanical Leadership Creates Dependence

Dr. Leah OH 7:46

Yeah, and and to continue with that idea that traditional kind of what I see as more antiquated now, because we're moving into these more holistic, people-focused perspectives, you know, thinking about the organization as a machine. So, Norman, what have you seen, you know, from a communication standpoint, how does that mechanical mindset stall progress? And what is the damage that a leader's doing, you know, likely inadvertently to their team when they're treating them as kind of parts to be fixed rather than an ecosystem to be nurtured?

Norman Wolfe 8:19

Yeah, those are great words in the language I often use. It is an ecosystem and it is to be nurtured and developed. That's the biggest issue. You know, some of the, let's take a few of the challenges CEOs face. Typical issues is why do they always come to me? They're the experts, why can't they solve the problem? Or why aren't they taking ownership? Or, you know, we've got this great strategy, and it's been everybody agrees, we're all aligned, but we're not executing. Execution is stalling. What's going on? Why aren't they taking ownership? These are the typical comments I hear from CEOs. And the answer is because the way you are managing them or leading them is in itself causing the problems. Let me give you a specific example. I have a group of CEOs I meet with monthly, and the topic was how do you get your people to perform? And we we talked about it. And the typical response is, well, you know, I set the goals and you know, I help them overcome the obstacles they're facing. That's my job as a leader, is to help them be successful. Well, just think about that. If I step in and I help them overcome the obstacles they're facing, or if I make decisions for them, when do they ever learn to make decisions for themselves? It's like raising a child.

Speaker 1 9:35

Exactly.

Norman Wolfe 9:36

If you're always giving the child the answer, they become dependent upon you.

Speaker 1 9:41

Uh-huh.

Norman Wolfe 9:41

Now, I I don't want to I want to put this in context that being a leader of an organization is very challenging. What I'm presenting is a very risky thing to do because business, unlike raising children, is a time-based game, if you will. Things have to happen by a certain time. So it's natural to say, he's struggling. I gotta get this done. I'm gonna step in. So I don't want to undermine the the other side of the equation we're talking about.

Speaker 1 10:10

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 10:10

Unlike other frameworks, the living organization is really performance-based. In other words, we recognize you have to get results by a certain time frame, otherwise, you won't be successful. The competition will come in and be and you know, take your market away. But at the same time, we have to balance the focus on getting results with the reality that if we don't develop the people's capacity to execute, yeah, we're always gonna be stuck with getting people, or we're gonna have to terminate them and replace them with more capable people, which is very expensive and nobody likes that. So, what we've done is we've tied the performance goals as the way of here's what we do. You have the goals of the organization. The goals of the organization are gonna establish a challenge for the people to accomplish. Why do I say that? If they already knew how to accomplish those goals, they'd already be doing it.

Speaker 1 11:06

Yep.

Norman Wolfe 11:08

And and so by definition, every time we s establish a strategy, we are setting goals that the organization can't do, which is a good thing.

Dr. Leah OH 11:16

Yep. Yep, we're moving forward, right?

Norman Wolfe 11:19

But what yeah, exactly. But what that means, what that means, what that translates to is setting the goals isn't the end of the journey, right? It's not like we do a strategy, we do an analysis, we do a SWAT, but hey guys, correct. You've got to recognize that the minute you do that, you're establishing a something people can't do. So that's really in the living organization framework, the beginning of the journey, not the not the end.

Speaker 1 11:45

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 11:46

And it's saying, I'm setting goals for my organization. I know they cannot accomplish. So therefore, I want to use those goals as the catalyst to stimulate the development. And so I, as a leader, have to learn how to develop people, not just set goals. The way we work today in the traditional paradigm, and again, going back to your original question, yeah. We set positions in place like a component for a machine. We develop a job description, we talk about roles and responsibilities, and we think about what we need to have the job done. And we hire somebody that fits that role, and they have those skills and they can do that job. But now we come along and we establish a new strategy. So, what do I do? Do I replace this component with something else? Or do I develop this component?

Dr. Leah OH 12:34

Yeah.

unknown 12:36

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 12:37

To do that. The other thing that that the old paradigm creates problems is we focus on the ability to perform a skill. The world today doesn't just focus on the skills we have, it focuses on other capabilities, what we call maturity aspects.

Speaker 1 12:55

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 12:56

Things like knowing my role in the bigger picture, knowing how I can work with my teammates together to get the success of the company. Not just how do I be successful doing what they hired me to do? How do I relate to other people? How do I relate to change? How do I relate to uncertainty? How do I take ownership for my mistakes and learn from them? Right? How do I self-reflect? Why do I depend on the leader to tell me what to do? I'm a grown-up. I should be able to say, whoops, I blew that one. Here's what I learned. Let's move on.

Speaker 1 13:30

Yep.

Norman Wolfe 13:32

We don't hire for maturity. We hire for skills because in the machine paradigm, that's all you need. You need a component that's going to plug in here and do these things, and then we change what we expect of them, but we don't focus on developing them. That's where the machine paradigm really breaks down a lot. And these and that's what we're experiencing and why leaders are experiencing the frustrations they're experiencing. And again, I I don't fault them. I you know, they've never been changed. They've never thought in this new way, and they don't know how to have the skills necessary in this new way. So that's the challenge.

Dr. Leah OH 14:13

Yeah, and I love that that you raise that up, and that's something I've been spending time, you know, in my my day job as a professor and educating, talking to students, like you want to build your capacity. It's not just can you do A, B, and C, but what is your latitude for being flexible, for asking thoughtful questions, you know, as you said, maturity, right? For looking at your place within a system and knowing how it impacts others.

Norman Wolfe 14:38

So exactly what good to hear. I love that you use the word capacity because we say the capacity for an organization to execute is equal to the capabilities and the maturity.

Alignment Versus Real Ownership

Dr. Leah OH 14:51

Yes. Yes. Oh, I love that together. Yeah. So insightful. So, my next question, Norman, this is about alignment. And this is, you know, I was preparing for our conversation and looking at the work you do, and I really love this because I think so many of our listeners have been taught that alignment is the goal of good communication, of thoughtful management. But a lot of times what you've noticed is that when we have alignment in place, things feel right, but execution is failing. So I'm wondering, you know, what is the language of forced alignment in the old model that we might hear? And what could leaders do who want to take a different task, who want to communicate with their teams in ways that are generating resonance and engagement instead?

Norman Wolfe 15:38

Yeah. I love the fact that you brought in the notion of engagement. That that's really what you're looking for. And engagement is really focused on the principle of empowering people. Now, we've heard those two phrases a lot. And we know that engaged employees get creative and innovative because they they're really so engaged they want to help the organization be successful. So let me tie the two pieces you brought up. One is this notion of alignment. Alignment feels like we've got everything, right? But alignment is only agreement or compliance. Right? Here's the goals. I agree with the goals. But now I'm stuck with, yeah, those are the goals, but I've this is what I'm used to doing. This is how I always did it. This is those goals, you know, yeah, maybe we can achieve them, maybe we can't. You know, that's the sales h organization has to really set the stage and and then when they do that thing, their thing, I'll do my thing. You know, you don't really have engagement. You don't have ownership. That's the way we like to talk about it. You know, when people own collectively own the success and the goals, there's a different energy, and that energy is called engagement. Here's the problem engagement is equivalent to empowerment. When people feel empowered, they become engaged. But to feel empowered, I have to be the one choosing. To have power over my life means I can choose what I do. And in the old paradigm, we take choice away from them. We tell them what to do, we tell them how we're going to evaluate them, we tell them, you know, this is this is the carrot, this is the stick. They're not choosing anything. So, how do you go about so you ask what can leaders do? The way we approach it, we say we call it contribution agreement. And what that means is it's not really the same thing as goal setting. I mean, it is, but it's it's an it's inviting the employees to step into and say, This is how I want to contribute to the success of the organization.

Speaker 1 17:42

Okay.

Norman Wolfe 17:47

You know, I heard the other day that Dwight Eisenhower made a statement, something to the effect of, and it's very similar to what I believe. In an organization, what we really want to create is an organization where the employees want to do what the organization needs. When they're in that place of choice where they want to, that's the critical work. They want to. They don't have to, you don't have one, you don't have to manipulate them, you don't have to set incentives and bonuses to get they want to do it. That's where you get the engagement, that's where you get the ownership, that's where you get the energy, that's where you get creativity, innovation, and success. If you don't have that, now again, going back to it, it's very scary. I'm gonna go to my employees and say, Hey, do you want to play this game with me? And and and you know, for from a leader's point of view, that feels very risky. It's not once they learn some new skills, but it feels very risky. From an employee's point of view, it's also risky because we have trained people in our society, literally from elementary school on, follow the lead of the leader. The education system was designed for the modern corporation of the Knights to create workers who come into the factory who are guided by leaders, and they're told what to do and how to do it.

Dr. Leah OH 19:10

Yeah. And we've tried to reprimand it if they don't.

Norman Wolfe 19:13

Reprimanded if they go.

Dr. Leah OH 19:17

Exactly. Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 19:19

So so we're dealing with a societal systemic problem of people and leaders both being raised in the old paradigm, facing a world where that old paradigm no longer works, where we need more maturity, where we can be more flexible, as you said, be more resilient, be more adaptive. You know, I was talking to one of my coaches the other day about a problem here, and I said, wouldn't it be nice if the incentive systems rewarded people who didn't meet their goals, but didn't meet it because they sacrificed themselves for the good of the organization and of the organization. Where in our current system does that get taken into account, right? If I meet my goals, if I'm focused on my performance because I'm a good component and I do really good, I get rewarded. But if I do really good at the expense of the organization, hey, that's not my problem. Exactly.

Speaker 1 20:20

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 20:21

They didn't set my goals right, they didn't take into account. But if I'm taking ownership for the success of the whole, if I want to do what the organization needs, I'll come up to a point where I say, you know what? I'm going to help you be successful. I'm not going to make my numbers, but the organization will win. Now, as a leader, that's the kind of employees I want.

Dr. Leah OH 20:40

Exactly. And I like too, and you're talking about this, instead of it being me and them, it becomes an us or a we.

Norman Wolfe 20:47

That's the way we look at it. Is it's exactly. And when you think of the organization as a living being, as a person, and the employees are the living cells of that, yeah. This us and we becomes a natural way of thinking. Because I, as a cell of the body, rely on the body being healthy. And the body being healthy relies of me as a cell doing what I need to do.

Dr. Leah OH 21:11

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 21:12

So there's this you call it ecosystem. And I like that term because there's an ecosystem interdependence between the collective and the individual that we bring out consciously in the way we approach it in the living organization framework.

Dr. Leah OH 21:28

Yeah. So let's continue talking about your framework, the living organization. And part of that involves looking at an organization through different fields activity, relationship, and context. So, Norman, I'm wondering how can a leader identify early warning signs in a team's dialogue? You know, that relationship or context fields, maybe these are breaking down, even if activity, right? Those performance, those numbers look okay on paper.

Norman Wolfe 21:55

Sure. First of all, let me define for the audience what you just talked about.

Dr. Leah OH 21:59

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 22:00

Activity relationship and context. When I shifted to thinking of an organization as a person, the next logical question was to ask, how does a person create results? Because remember, I'm interested in the organization creating the results and needs. So if it's a person, then the question is, how does a person create results? Well, there's three things that happen to a person. One, just like a machine, we do stuff, right? We call that activity, right? We have to do stuff. There's activity, there's goals, none of that goes away. But people are highly affected by the quality of the relationships we're in. What does that translate to in very simple terms? If I having a conflict with my wife, say in the morning, and I'm leaving home and I'm heading to work and I've got this issue weighing on me about my relationship. I come into work, that is going to affect my activity. I'm troubled. I don't feel fully present. I don't feel like my half of me is thinking about what's going on at home. You know, when I was a young engineer just out of university, working at Pratton Whitney aircraft, about three months in, my supervisor was talking to another engineer and giving him advice. And his comment was when you come to work, you leave your personal life at home. That's old paradigm thinking because when you come to work, you pass through those doors, you become a component to perform. But we can't. We're humans. Relationships mean things to us, and it affects our activity. In business, we talk about high-performing teams and synergy. Well, synergy is when people's relationship energy are in sync, they feel supported, they feel understood, they feel acknowledged, and they are energized by that. You go into a group of people who are in conflict, their performance isn't. So we know this about teams and relationships. So that's the second component. Here's the third component. I call it context. And it's a little difficult to understand because it wraps a number of different things together. But but there's an old saying, if if you think you can, you're right. If you think you can't, you're right. What that really is saying is I have some belief system about what's possible and what's not. That belief system is what we call context. Here's another way to look at context. I have learned over the course of my life how to respond to life's events. How to respond to when I go to the grocery store and how do I respond to the cashier? Or if I bump into somebody, how do I what do I do? I learn to say I'm sorry, right? I mean, I don't think about it. I don't go into oh, I bumped into you, what should I do in that kind of situation? Responses come naturally, right? Well, that's true of every aspect of our life. It's true in our working life. We have learned how to respond to events in the workplace, how to respond to a call from a customer, how to respond to requests from the CEO, how to I mean every aspect of our life, we know how to respond to it, right? That that you can call it that, we call it the psychic DNA because it's like psychological responses to life, like our physical DNA responds to environmental things in life. So our behaviors are driven by this psychic DNA, this collection of experiences or responses associated with previous experiences that guide us through life. Very simple. Very simple, but very important. Here's the way context comes into the equation. We as an organization, a living entity, have developed a collective context, a collective set of rules of how we believe behave in this organization. Common language is culture, how we do what we do around here, right? I come along as a leader and I set a new strategy. That strategy is different, a different set of outcomes that we're creating today. Our behaviors are already fine-tuned to respond almost autonomously to events to create the results we're creating. We've we fine-tuned our organization to get where we are now. But now I'm setting up a new set of goals which requires new behaviors. You know, the old thing, keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. So we got to do new behaviors. But behaviors are driven by our context.

Dr. Leah OH 26:31

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Reading The Room With Head And Heart

Norman Wolfe 26:32

If I don't change the underlying context, how are we going to get new behaviors? So putting those three pieces together, you've got the activity of the organization. You want to make that as efficient, as smooth, clear goals, all of the things we do for the machine paradigm. But once you recognize the organization as a person, operates like a person, then you've got to take into account the activity, the relationship, and the context. So that's the definition of those three things. Now back to your question. How does a leader understand that? And sense and pick it up. One of the problems in the old paradigm is we have trained leaders to be highly dependent on logic, on the mind. Right? Big data, rely on data, database decisions. You know what does the data tell us? There's a term, and I can't think of it, but it's also dependent on data. And so everything is driven towards logic. You can't understand relationship energy or context through logic. They are not observable data, but they are felt and sense data. Let me give you an example. Walk into a room of B people without saying anything, without people saying anything, most people could feel the sense of the room. Not uncommon. Like, whoa, what's going on here?

Speaker 1 27:52

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 27:54

What's happening in this room? You know, you can feel it. It's an energy that you sense. People are talking to each other, they're being polite. Things are saying something, right? You're listening and you go, oh, something's really off there. You don't know what that is logically. You feel it, you sense it. We have trained leaders, we've trained people to ignore their instincts, their sensing mechanism for logic, reason, and data. But we have that skill. Everybody has it. We use it all the time in our lives. So what leaders need to do is learn how to recall it connecting the head with the heart.

unknown 28:34

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 28:35

That's our language. We call it heart-centering, heart-centered communication, sensing the field, being aware. And again, this isn't really rocket science in any way. When I was at HP, we learned something called MBWA, management by walking around.

Dr. Leah OH 28:52

Walking around. Yep.

Norman Wolfe 28:54

Very common old style leadership. What did that mean? It meant you got out of your office, you put your reports down, and you walked the shop floor and you observed and you listened. And you picked up this feeling of what's going on. And as an HP leader, as I as I evolved in my leadership skills, I was able to sense what was going to happen, how we were going to do performance-wise, even before the reports came in, because I can feel the sense of the organization. And once I have that data, that subjective data, that intuitive data, I now can make better decisions and head off. I can feel those early warning signs. I can know what's going to happen.

Speaker 1 29:42

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 29:43

So that's how that's the answer. You have to connect the head with the heart, rely on not objective, but subjective data and combine the two to make effective decisions. And that's what we teach leaders how to do.

Dr. Leah OH 29:56

Yeah, and that's so important because, like you were saying, you overheard someone previously saying, like, leave your personal life at the door. You're, you know, you're at work to work. And you know, that's where we're leaving our heart. We're not bringing it in. We weren't rewarded for tuning into those natural, empathetic, communicative instincts.

Norman Wolfe 30:16

And and you know, there's a there's a wonderful book, I think it's by Kim Scott called Radical Conversations. Not rather, yeah, radical. Yeah, I think that's the name of it. Anyway, the book talks about compassionate communication. That's the whole lesson.

Speaker 1 30:28

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 30:28

But it doesn't get into how do you do that. It just tells you you should do that. And there's lots of communications now about being empathic listeners, empathic communications. Leaders needly have to know how to do that. But we never tell them, teach them how to do that.

Speaker 1 30:44

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 30:45

We teach them the very core skill of shifting the body from the thinking brain to feeling intuitive thing. The beauty of that is the what we call the heart center opens us up to being connecting with intuition. You know, those in-the-shower moments, aha moments that we get. What if you have the ability to move into a place where you can tune into that when you need to? Not when you're in the shower. Because what happens in the shower in the early morning time, you shut off the brain, yeah, and you're just taking a shower. And all of a sudden you're not thinking about it, you're not ruminating about it, you're not churning on it, you're just allowing it to be. And aha, that's the solution. What if you can do that anytime you want? So, teaching people how to heart center, we say heart center is the gateway into intuition, insight, inspiration, and wisdom. And that's what leaders need to bring to the equation.

Trust Psychological Safety And Compassion

Dr. Leah OH 31:42

Yeah, so powerful. I think continuing with that, the heart center and the head-heart connection, let's think about trust. We know that, you know, you're your organization, you work to advocate for designing conditions of trust rather than control, which is so important. And I'm wondering, Ramun, what have you found? What are the behaviors and communication messaging that leaders can use to integrate this, even in high-pressure corporate environments?

Norman Wolfe 32:13

You know, trust and psychological safety, that's another term that's used today. You've got to create environments for psychological safety.

Dr. Leah OH 32:21

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 32:21

Look, think about you as a human being. When do you feel psychologically safe? And let's talk about what that means. That has to do with what you say, trust. When are you willing to trust somebody? When are you willing to open yourself up to a degree of vulnerability where you can honestly say, I don't know? Where you can honestly say, I'm confused, where you can honestly say, I made a mistake here, I am sorry. My position, and I think a lot of psychologists will agree with me, is you will only do that when you feel the other person is going to be caring, compassionate, loving. So when you talk about what can leaders do, how can they communicate, it's it's not what they say, it's who they are being. Are they in a state themselves where they are compassionate, where they feel open to hearing you without judgment, where they can be empathic, where they can listen from a place of caring, concern, compassion, love. Is an interesting concept. We use it a lot because when I talk about the heart center, I'll give you a very simple exercise of how to move into the heart center almost instantaneously. All you have to do is to is imagine a time when you felt truly loved or loving towards somebody. Simple things like seeing a baby smile. It just moves us into a different state of being. We feel open, we feel connected, we feel loving. That state of love is what opens us to that. That's why we call it the heart center. That's what opens us up to the feeling and sensing the humanness of our interaction. And so it's it's really easy.

Dr. Leah OH 34:15

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 34:16

But it takes practice because we're so trained to immediately go into the mind, solve the problem. You know, you hear about men versus women, and men always want to fix it. Just solve that problem. Instead of just, wow, I hear what you're saying. I can feel what you're feeling. And from that place, when the person or the group is ready, they can move into an into the next phase. They can solve the problem. Let me give you a very practical example of this. I had a very early in my consulting career, I was fortunate to work with a company. He was fairly famous. I don't want to mention the name. The owner of the company was very passionate. And he was he was uh you might define as as many owner founders can be a benevolent dictator, right? He he loved his people, he cared about his people, but he was so focused on performance. He drove his people and they became dependent on on. They would t he would tell them what to do and they would do it, right? Very typical organizations. He passed away at the age of 92 at his desk, so the broad the board had to bring in somebody else to run the company. And they brought in a young gentleman from uh it was in the beverages industry, let's just say. And they brought in another gentleman from uh big uh beverage company. And and this guy believed in management by objective. And he recognized his owner, founder, was dictated, told everybody what to do. He says, We're gonna throw all that out. And we're gonna start. Here's the problem. When he threw all that out, these people never really got a chance to mourn the owner family. So when he was setting new goals and they were stuck in the loss, what we did to help them through it is we when we worked with them on on doing the strategy and the planning, the first thing I did was take time to allow them to express what they were feeling and make it okay. And we talked about all the things that were good about the old way with the owner founder and everything they created. And then we talked about, well, you know, it where there's good, there's also not so good. So let's talk about what didn't work. And they got to express that. And all of a sudden the space was open for taking what didn't work, flipping it around, combining with what did work, and establishing a new path forward. Yeah, but if until they had that human experience of grieving for something that was so important to them, that's a big example. It happens every day when people when we ask people to change what they're doing, right? To give up something that was making them successful, to do something new. Guess what? They feel that thing just like a death.

Speaker 1 37:09

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 37:10

Because who they were, what made them successful, isn't going to be in the future.

Dr. Leah OH 37:15

Yep.

Norman Wolfe 37:16

So that's why these skills of compassion and empathy is being talked about psychological safety. We're recognizing the importance of it. It's embedded in the trainings and the work we do with the living organization so that leaders have the skills to be able to do that. Our second book, Leading the Living Organization, will be coming out later this year. And it's focused on the six skills leaders need to be successful in leading a living organization. And the foundational skill is heart-centering, going from the head to the heart, heart-centered communication, so that you can enter into conversation. When I'm talking about the strategy, I'm not just going to talk about the goals. I'm going to talk about everything associated with it. I talk about how it means to change it, what it's going to do to us and how we're going to feel about it. And then we also teach them how to reframe context because, as I mentioned earlier, if you don't reframe the context, if you don't create a new narrative about what's going on, the behaviors won't change. Yep. So I'm looking forward to it.

Quantum Leaders And Acting On Insight

Dr. Leah OH 38:18

Yeah, so powerful. Yeah. And so, Norman, to continue with your organization, you use this term quantum leaders. And for our managers who are listening, they hear quantum and they're thinking about physics rather than people. How do you define a quantum leader or quantum communicator in the context of today's workplace?

Norman Wolfe 38:39

Well, you know, I created, I as I mentioned at the beginning of our show, I was in the turn of the century, I was refocusing myself and I was looking at what the name of the organization would be. And I tried lots of different names that I wanted to use. And I was actually driving home from a client, and the the notion of quantum leaders came to my head. I don't know where it came from. It's one of those insights, those moments. But it just started a resonance with me. And so I decided to name my company Quantum Leaders. It was even before I wrote the book, but what I've learned since is the foundation of the book is what we're really talking about with activity, relationship, and context, these are like energy fields.

Speaker 1 39:19

Mm-hmm.

Norman Wolfe 39:19

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 39:20

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 39:22

Quantum physics talks about energy fields and the interconnectedness and the way subatomic particles interact with themselves. I say non-rational because they don't things like particle as a wave. Well, we view the we view the way organizations operate the same way. It's both a particle and a wave. It's a it's a doingness, it's a physicality, but it's a wave of energy and they work simultaneously with each other. So without even knowing it, when I first created the name Quantum Leaders, it was really a presage, if you will, of a prophetic naming of something that was yet to come. But in hindsight, and as the work has unfolded, I would say it's a perfect fit for the living organization because quantum leaders are leaders who can embrace the whole quantum effect, if you will, quantum field of energy that's causing their organizations to behave the way they are.

Dr. Leah OH 40:22

Yeah, so powerful. And I love too that the aha moment, and like you said, it kind of brew into this. Those are the moments you get goosebumps, and you're like, okay, I know I'm in the right place. I've just got to stay on this path.

unknown 40:35

Yeah.

Norman Wolfe 40:36

It it also speaks to the fact that, you know, over the last two, three decades, I really learned that the these voices, these aha moments, these insights that come are really to be paid attention to, even if they don't make sense.

Speaker 1 40:49

Yep.

Norman Wolfe 40:49

No way could I have logically explained why I chose quantum leaders back in 2001, 2002. It wasn't until life unfolded that it made sense to do it. I'll give you an example. A friend of mine was a was a consultant to I think it was Metropolitan Life. It was 1987, I think was the year. And the CEO of Metropolitan Life came into work one day and instructed his organization to get out of equities and move into other asset classes. Now, 1987, in January of 1987, the stock market was going crazy. And everybody could not understand his why he was doing that. But he had this sense that he needed to get out of equities, and so he trusted that in October of 1987, if I have my years correct, the stock market crashed. And he went from being the most crazy nuts the board was considering, you know, his team couldn't understand. They they were, but he was insistent and he stuck with it. And my friend asked him, Why do you how did you know? He said, You know, Paul, I don't know how I knew. It's just one of those things that I've learned when I feel something that strongly, I act on it. Yeah, well, you know, that's a very practical example of how it affects business when you learn to trust that insight and act on it, even in the face of everybody questioning your sanity. Quantum leaders came to me. I don't know why I chose it. It just came to me. Yeah, yeah, and you knew it revealed my future without me even knowing.

Practical Tips And A Bigger Impact

Dr. Leah OH 42:31

Exactly. Yeah, so powerful. Norman, I have two final questions for you. And these are interconnected. This is the way that we end all episodes of the communicative leader. And it's thinking about, you know, what is that pragmatic leadership or communication tip, advice challenge for titled leaders out there? And then the second part, what is the tip, advice, or challenge for employees across all ranks, all industries?

Norman Wolfe 42:57

Well, I think I I said it earlier, and I keep coming back to this, you know, that there's objective and subjective aspects of being a human. If there's one tip I will give to leaders, and I always give it to future leaders, employees. Your life will be greatly enhanced if you learn to combine the head with the heart. Begin to whatever techniques you use, enhance your ability to go into that state where you're in your what we call the heart center, that state of open, receptive, accepting, compassionate, loving state of being, so that you can really bring in the subjective elements with the objective elements.

Dr. Leah OH 43:38

Yeah. So powerful. You know, and you're saying that, and I was thinking of these moments, and I just like seeing my face reflected. I'm like, I can see a difference. Yes, you know, when I'm in that situation, when I'm in that heart center.

Norman Wolfe 43:51

Yes, yes, it really does make a difference. And and it's amazing. I mean, I've had clients, I actually had a VP of HR. Uh in a meeting recently he said, you know, we're talking about goals and and we were talking about the goals for a leadership development program. And she said the biggest thing we want to achieve is helping our leaders learn how to heart center because they will gain great wisdom and be great leaders.

Dr. Leah OH 44:18

Yeah. Yeah. You're like, I'm not gonna argue with you.

Norman Wolfe 44:21

A voice from the field, a voice from people who want to learn how to do this.

Dr. Leah OH 44:25

Exactly. Yeah, and so powerful. And I think too, as a leadership communication scholar, it just warms my heart so much to think about the future of organizations. When we have people like you doing this work and connecting with these clients who are then doing this work in their organizations, we know that it's contagious, right? Like when for doing that old way of thinking or this new mindset that that's gonna make for very tangible differences in the workplace.

Norman Wolfe 44:54

And and in society. Imagine if in the efforts to create the strategic objectives we said, we use that to develop the capability and maturity of our people. What we're doing as an organization is not only achieving our goals, but we're providing more mature people into our society.

Dr. Leah OH 45:14

Exactly.

Norman Wolfe 45:14

People who are more capable of dealing with different points of view, people who are capable of dealing with change and uncertainty, people who are capable of taking ownership for their own life and choosing to want to do what the organization needs, or finding an organization where they align with what the organization wants. So their lives are in hand. Imagine imagine how businesses can transform our whole society by by leading a living organization instead of a machine.

Dr. Leah OH 45:43

Yeah, and we think too about folks coming home and practicing that with their partners, with their families, you know, pickleball, whatever it is that they're doing. And it's it's really can be transformative.

Norman Wolfe 45:56

I had a CEO come to me. One of my clients said, Norman, I have to tell you. I was talking with my wife this weekend, and she said, You know, you've become a better husband since you've been working with Norman. So you're right.

Dr. Leah OH 46:09

Yeah, yeah.

Norman Wolfe 46:10

It's the reverse of what the manager said in my early days, right? Yeah. Who you are as a person at work will also be who you are as a person at home and in your society.

Dr. Leah OH 46:21

Exactly. Yeah. Well, Norman, I have learned so much in our conversation, and I really appreciate the great work you're doing. And I thank you for sharing your time with us so we can share your lessons and your tips with so many others.

Norman Wolfe 46:37

Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation. You've asked some wonderful questions and giving me a wonderful opportunity to get the word out to help change the paradigm so businesses are successful, employees are successful, leaders are successful, and hopefully our society gets improved as well.

Closing Message And Sendoff

Dr. Leah OH 46:53

All right, my friends. That wraps up our conversation today. Until next time, communicate with intention and lead with purpose. I'm looking forward to chatting with you again soon on the Communicative Leader.