Metamorphic Leadership with Evan Smith

Evan Smith is the principal and CEO of Metamorphosis Management Group. He's a catalyst, trusted advisor and coach to senior leaders. In this show you can learn lots of practical change ideas and leadership hacks including:

• How the pace of change is unlikely to slow down
• Why comfort stifles curiosity and creativity
• The importance of shifting conventional thinking
• Why compassion is essential for future change leadership

Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services

Find out more about Evan below:

MMG Website https://metamg.com/

Evan on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/cesmith/

Evan on Twitter https://twitter.com/cesmith_

 

Full Transcript Below

 

Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.

Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.

Joining me on the show today is Evan Smith. He's the principal and CEO of Metamorphosis Management Group. He's a catalyst, sleeves rolled up trusted advisor and coach to senior leaders and executives. But before we get a chance to speak with Evan, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: For many of us, 2021 feels really hopeful. It's a new year, we have opportunity and presents itself with us to have a reset and a fresh start. And although it's really important to be positive and upbeat, we need to keep moving forward. Leaders however, still need to be managing teams, have different perspectives and different emotions through times of crisis. And therefore, we've got to foster that agility in team resilience to roll with the punches.

As the “Twitterverse” puts it. We're not just working from home. We're working at home and during a crisis trying to work, and over the past year, crisis mode has become business as usual for most of us, even the most fortunate among us, maybe struggling in some way and knowing this, good leaders everywhere still are under pressure to fix situations for their teams. Well, guess what? You can't fix this crisis and that's okay. Even if you don't have control over the conditions or the fallout from the ongoing public health emergencies, the apparent social justice around the world, the economic crisis, you do have control over building and supporting your own team and your own personal resilience.

In an article for entrepreneur, Shelley Osbourne calls a number of ways to be a good leader in an ongoing crisis, and I've called out five. One, acknowledge you can't solve everything. Many leaders are stressed out knowing that their teams feel isolated and anxious and may be grieving or stretched thin through work, childcare, homeschooling, looking after elderly friends and family. The fact that you know, what your team members are struggling with, means you know, you can be constantly checking in with them and that's a job well done. Although you can't fix how they are feeling, the very act of asking how they're feeling can create the space for one-to-one and meetings with them. It is supportive and effective and will help them figure out how to problem solve. So rather than trying to solve every problem, having ensuring emotional intelligence will go a really long way. Check out Daniel Goleman work by the way, on Emotional Intelligence, it's still mega.

Number two, support a psychologically safe working environment. A psychologically safe environment is one where employees and colleagues and coworkers feel safe, comfortable, included, and can share perspectives and challenges without the fear of repercussions in making mistakes. Amy Edmondson, Harvard Professor and author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Links psychological safety to innovation and business success. In addition, feeling secure to speak one's mind in particular is really important today for helping individuals cope with different ways of what's going on in the world. For example, a safe place makes it all right for someone to say, I need a break. I'm too upset. I need help. Team members will not perform, will not do-good work if they're feeling under pressure. And therefore, it's really important to clearly communicate to your team how wellbeing and mental and physical health is a top priority.

The last one I've called out, number three, create the space to learn through challenges. For me learning is a way to process challenges and is my path forward during uncertainty. Unfortunately, with everything going on with organizations around the world, many employees, either feeling like they don't have time to set aside for learning, or they need to look too busy, you felt they can't take a break to learn. Fear about furloughs or cut backs, permeates either through the healthiest of businesses. Learning shouldn't be thought of as a break, but as an essential part of a career. Signaling value can go a long way in creating time for space, for learning with teams. As a leader by you modeling that learning behavior as part of the job, you create a great learning environment.

Have a think every day, what have been your wins and what have been your learns? And if you ask each of your team the same question as a leader, you can gather great momentum and great learning cultures and foster a great learning culture. So, the leadership lesson here is to remember that you don't have to be the font of all knowledge and you don't have to have all of the solutions and therefore creating a culture of learning, inclusivity and communication, or really help people work through what it is they're dealing with in this ongoing period of change.

That's been The Leadership Hacker News. If you do have anything that you want our listeners to hear that you think could be fun, interesting or insightful, please get in touch.

 

Start of Podcast

 

Steve Rush: I'm joined on today's show by Evan Smith. He's the principal at Metamorphosis Management Group. He's a keynote speaker, a team member of the world-renowned Kotter Inc. The firm founded by John Kotter. He's also a program leader with Box of Crayons. Evan, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Evan Smith: Steve, thank you. It's a pleasure to join you today.

Steve Rush: Really looking forward to getting into the world of change and what that really means for us from a leadership perspective, but also internally as an individual. But before we get into that, perhaps you can give our listeners a little bit of a backstory as to how you've ended up doing what you're doing?

Evan Smith: Sure, and it's a story that really starts at the beginning of my professional career. I was good with math and science. Ended up completing university degree in engineering and ended up inside of renowned fortune 500 company doing information technology and I.T. work. In that early experience, and I don't know if you or your listeners might remember that moment where you step out into the world for the first time.

Steve Rush: Sure.

Evan Smith: New in your career as a professional person.

Steve Rush: I remember it well.

Evan Smith: Hopes and aspirations for the future, uncertainty, et cetera. I was carrying all of that with me and stepped inside this organization with great hopes. And within three weeks was in the pit of despair, convinced I've made a terrible choice. Our organization didn't work very well. Lots of conflict internally, conflict externally. We weren't doing a very good job delivering for customers and long story short. It was a moment of discovery for me. I was entirely, both sort of grappling with what I should personally do next, but also grappling with, why wasn't this working? in this well-resourced professional clearly top tier organization. Why wasn't it working better? It sorts of sent me off in a direction that I did not expect.

Steve Rush: And was it that observation that you had at that time that gave you that spark or that curiosity to pursue what you do now?

Evan Smith: Absolutely, it led me into looking at what is it that helped some organizations in some circumstances to perform really well, really capably, where individuals and teams and organizations at a whole. Where they rose to the occasion, and it just did unbelievable things. And then on the other side, why in certain instances with all of the right assets, other people, teams and organizations, really didn't perform at all. Really missed the mark, it became a point of exploration really that has set the course for the rest of my career from that point.

Steve Rush: And often entrepreneurs have that little epiphany that goes on that sends them in a different direction.

Evan Smith: Yes.

Steve Rush: You are now the principal of The Metamorphosis Management group or MMG. Tell us a little bit about what the focus is of the key work that you do now and the work that you do with some of the partners you work with?

Evan Smith: Yes, thanks. So, we are involved in helping support, change and transformation in organizations. And I would say leaders who are involved in that. So, I spent about the first half of my career after that sort of pivotal moment with that leading from working inside organizations in a variety of roles, working my way up to some leadership positions. So, I spent about the first half of my career there. Second half has been in consulting, coaching and change work. And our focus now at MMG is really around helping leaders who are facing a big change with their organization, helping them to get in the game, to both design and carry out an effective change effort, but also to really experience and model the same sort of change and learning that they're asking others to undertake as the work unfolds, we help people see patterns, help people respond to those patterns and ultimately make changes in your individual behavior as a leader that help you get this sort of outcomes in the organization that you need to get.

Steve Rush: I don't know if you find this, but certainly in my work, it never surprises me that change has been constant forever. I think it was Heraclitus the famous Greek philosopher 500 BC that said nothing is more constant than change. That was two and a half thousand years ago. And yet still, we seem to get surprised at the pace of change or when things like the pandemic happen. We're almost in shock rather than anticipation that this is something that's always going to be present. What is it that causes that?

Evan Smith: Well, I totally agree with the observation that this has always been with us. I am of the mind that the rate at which we're experiencing, not just sort of structured change, but disruptive change is accelerating and has been accelerating for a few decades now. I recently was reading the book, Exponential Organizations and I believe the author there was making the observation that there's a series of technologies now that are coming to the fore in our corporate and professional life, in our organizational life, including things like bioinformatics and solar technology and drone technology and things like that. When you look at any one of those by itself, it has the potential to be a Gutenberg printing press level of impact. But what we have are a dozen or more of these types of massive changes and they're happening in a coincident period of time, lot of integration, overlap complementarity. People are facing change on more fronts than I think we, as a species have ever experienced it.

Steve Rush: I think it's a really fair observation and one that I absolutely concur with, it's also probably fair to suggest that it's going to continue to ramp up. That pace of change is going to continue to grow.

Evan Smith: I totally agree with you. Yes, I don't see that slowing at all.

Steve Rush: So, I'd love to get into some of the things that can help our listeners deal with some of that as we go through that. But before we do that, I'm keen to learn from you having, being able to learn from some of the very best scholars and academics that you've worked with. John Kotter and others who are leading in their field of change. If you had to maybe just narrow that down to one of the biggest learnings for you personally, what would you say that would be?

Evan Smith: Yeah, the single greatest observation for me has been that it is really not possible to disconnect your personal experience and journey presence as a leader from whatever the larger context is. We try to do that often or we do it inadvertently, I guess. The biggest observation for me, has been both be privileged to watch and work with leaders who are in the midst of their own transformation while working with their teams and others. Watching that work is really a moment of magic.

Steve Rush: Yeah, sure is. And we often forget, don't we? As leaders and as change agents are taking individuals and organizations through change that they're dealing with themselves, and sometimes it could be quite healthy to just remember that we're all processing this different spaces, different times.

Evan Smith: Yeah, very much agree with that too. And there's a great sort of irony that comes up for all of us, right? Whether you're leading a team or an organization, or whether you are a front-line worker. Over time we learn what it takes to perform. And as we learn what it takes to perform, we get better and better at delivering in a certain structured setting and we get more and more comfortable. And the more comfortable we get, the less actual learning we're doing, we are effectively creating a set of patterns and habits that are leading us to be more oblivious, less curious, more patterned, more rote. And the sort of opportunity I think is for everyone, is to be persistently looking to be in that place where there is a sense of discomfort. Because in that place, learning is going on, we all need to be sort of leaning forward to find that rather than sort of looking for, in pursuit of comfort.

Steve Rush: Yeah, a hundred percent agree with that. I'd love to get into this a little bit deeper with you. So, this whole principle of learning is in itself is a habit, isn't it? But then there's also this almost an oxymoron that suggests the more habit forming and the more processes and the more consistency you have, you stifle innovation and creativity. So how do you square that off?

Evan Smith: Well, I agree with you. The great set of questions, and here again, I guess you ask about the work of some of my partners and I love to give a shout out to Michael Bungay Stanier and some of the work he's done. Focused on coaching and curiosity. I think the remedy, the approach for any given person on any given day is to be stepping into a stance of curiosity, to ask are the outcomes that I'm experiencing and that I'm creating. Are they the ones that I want to be creating? And what is it ultimately that I want, you know, want to be doing? And is this work that I'm doing, is this my greatest work? Am I fulfilling my greatest work, my purpose? And depending on how you answer those questions, you might decide, I need to make some shifts in the pattern of my day, the things I say yes to, the conversations I have and the way I have those conversations. What I'm doing with others, versus what I'm asking others to do, et cetera. Being in the place where you're sort of perpetually querying what it is you want and what outcomes you're creating and making intentional structured adjustments in your patterns to move towards that, I think is the opportunity that we all face in a world that's moving faster and faster like we've discussed.

Steve Rush: And I remember from the last time we spoke; you were really quite passionate about the whole principle of, in order to change. You have to shift those conversational patterns. So, if I was a leader listening to this, how would I recognize what those patterns are?

Evan Smith: That's a great question. To invite people to do often in the work we do together is I invite them to do the, asking each other more questions and different questions, even in those situations where he or she believes they know the answer. And the benefit of asking those questions and listening to others is that you get to hear whether the set of assumptions, the mental model of the world that I'm carrying as a leader does, how does that line up with the mental models and the assumptions that the people I'm working with are carrying? Where are they similar and resonant and consistent, and where are their observations or assumptions that are different? It's recognizing those places where we might have less than ideal alignment that that are an opportunity then to dig in a little deeper.

Steve Rush: We all have assumptions. And we all come to work with different experiences because it's based on our belief system, which is also based on our upbringing and lots of other things that play out to that, how challenging is it to then face into you being really candid and really honest and aware of your own assumptions versus other people's biases?

Evan Smith: It can be really challenging to do that, especially if some of those assumptions are core to my identity to go back to some ground, we covered earlier about the way that we all sort of learn to perform in the roles that we inhabit. Part of what comes with learning to perform is a lot of positive reinforcement, right?

Steve Rush: Right, yeah.

Evan Smith: You get promoted or you get recruited for the next big job, and everybody's telling you how great this is going, questioning some assumptions. Again, you know, when you're in a situation where you're questioning some of those assumptions and might cause you to question whether some of the patterns and habits you've engaged in over the first decade or so of your career are the same ones that should drive the second and third decades of your career. That's, that's really core work. And it might be difficult. It might be uncomfortable and there might be some dark times as you sort of figure out how you're going to reinvent yourself. But that process of reinvention is absolutely personal reinvention on its perpetual basis, I think is what's required.

Steve Rush: And an assumption is that it's likely to be challenging because it's coded into the way you behave. And it's formed in some part of the unconscious mind that we have maybe learned to behave that way for many, many years, but that in itself is an assumption, right?

Evan Smith: It is for sure. Some of the work that the B.F. Skinner did. And in terms of contemporary researchers, I love the work that BJ Fogg is doing now, related to tiny habits. But if you look at a pattern reinforcing cycle, which is how we get to the place where we build repetitive ways of operating, there's always a reward. And part of what we need to be identifying is what triggers me to step into behaving a certain way with a certain person in this moment. And then what do I get out of engaging in my pattern behavior? And if I was to do something different, if I was to consider responding in a different way, what's the reward that comes to me from that, what would be in it for me? And ideally in it, for them in it, for my team in it, for the organization, if I can shift the way that I show up, I think that's sort of the opportunity at a really micro behavior level.

Steve Rush: Yeah, sure. If we think about habits, it's fair to say that in the last 10 months, we've all maybe had to unlearn and relearn some really new habits in this crazy and more remote world that we're now living and working in. So, if we want to think about the way that we need to start engaging our audience differently, what are some of the habits that you've experienced or observed in others that are helping them maybe holding people back?

Evan Smith: One that it's really, really tops of mind and it might seem small. But I think it's really significant in terms of our ability to connect with each other. You know, we're all spending so much time these days on Zoom and Microsoft Teams and other web conferences. And part of what I observe is, there are ways to be intentionally in those web conferences. And there are default ways that many of us show up in those. And you can look at some of the things that happen and ask yourself whether they promote connection, engagement, empathy, or whether they stand in the way of it. And one of the things that I see people doing, you know, when it works, it works really well for people to show up with their cameras on and with their eyes looking at the camera. And for many of us, our physical structure of your machine, your laptop, your webcam, the picture on the screen might not be in the same place as where the camera lens is. That might be one of those things, that sort of a simple adjustment, but where we can sort of look each other in the eye, even though we're on Zoom. That is something that affirms our connection and it's going to go a long way to improving our ability to understand and work together. It's a really small example, but I think it's an important one.

Steve Rush: It is, isn't it? And it's one of the earliest forms of communication that whole facial expressions. And before we could speak, we would use our eyes and our facial expressions to communicate. And that still holds true today, doesn't it?

Evan Smith: It sure does, yes.

Steve Rush: How do you see the pandemic impacting on the future of work?

Evan Smith: Yeah, I love that question. I think there are so many dramatically different experiences that leaders are having in exploring for themselves and their organizations at this time. So, I think it was Dan Cable from the London business school. I heard him on a podcast recently and he said, there's never been a moment since the beginning of the industrial revolution where so many assumptions about how people work, how work is organized, what performance management means, how we do it, and what our work as leaders is. There's never been a time since the beginning of the industrial revolution where so many of those assumptions were challenged. In fact, thrown out of the window on such a large scale.

Steve Rush: Very true, yeah.

Evan Smith: It's a massive, it has been a massive experiment and it's been intriguing about how much we've learned about what it really takes. I'm amazed and I know many leaders have been amazed as well about what has really worked. A lot of the new organization around remote work. There's a lot that people have found to like about it. There are clearly massive challenges still around it. There's clearly, remaining needs to improve connection and group cohesion that even if people are able to address the line of sight, eye to eye sort of issues, that opportunities that we were talking about earlier.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Evan Smith: There are challenges for supporting group cohesion. But I do think the world, I mean, part of what is here in front of us right now is, there are some businesses and business models that are going to face really dire challenges and face amazing dramatic needs for reinvention. And that is going to take people in those organizations, bringing their absolute best, their best ideas, new thinking, et cetera. And the question for some, for many of us, if you're a leader in a situation like that, is how do you bring that? How do you stimulate, invite, engage people to bring their best in service of our collective future?

Steve Rush: It's interesting that what you've almost just described is what we talked about earlier. We'd form these habits over 10, 20, 30 years of working with technology, but we'd form habits and using it that way. Now we've had to unlearn those habits and relearn some new habits to really embrace the opportunity this now presents.

Evan Smith: Exactly, that's exactly right. Yes, yeah. We have been confronted in many ways, organizationally and personally.

Steve Rush: Yeah, so if you had to cast your crystal ball, look to the future, what do you think will be the, maybe the one or two things from a change perspective that you will see that will continue to be present?

Evan Smith: I think what's going to continue to be present in the larger environment are new demands. And part of what I think we are going to have to discover are ways to build resilience, play the long game in terms of inventing new business models that will work in the world that we have today and tomorrow. And it's going to mean real personal work around personal change and adaption and learning and growth like we talked about earlier. And I think alongside of all of that, a heap of compassion.

Steve Rush: Yeah, sure.

Evan Smith: Because one of the things that happening when you're in that learning space is you are going to make mistakes. I make mistakes. I make them every day. And the interesting question is, what am I learning from the mistake I just made? How do I want to use that in service of, you know, my work with the team or our collective work together, what am I going to do differently next time? Personally, I don't know about you. I hate making mistakes. I've always, you know, I was a good student in school and being in the place where, sort of, you can turn and look fully at something that's gone sideways and see all of what's in it for you and be in a place where you can be in conversation with others about what was in it for you and what was in it for them. That's really the opportunity we face really day to day.

 

Steve Rush: You mentioned compassion and compassion, we need to really dial up on the basis that we aren't going to be pushing more people into facing into their assumptions and perhaps ever before, if we want to really be adaptive for the future. And I think that's going to take a lot of crafted conversations from leaders of all levels and all shapes and sizes, right?

 

Evan Smith: I couldn't agree with you more. And just to tie back to the last little bit, we're going to find ourselves as leaders’ sort of stepping forward into those conversations with feeling a lot of uncertainty and not sure what the right way to do it is. And recognizing in some cases belatedly about, you know, not doing it right or in fact making mistakes, making significant mistakes. And the question for all of us is, you know, like we said, how do you examine that for corrective guidance that's going to help you? How do you let go of whatever the emotional baggage is that doesn't serve you? And how do you do it again? How do you step forward again? Repetition is the mother of skill. How do you step forward into trying it again? Inviting that conversation again, or pushing to the next level so that you can get to where you need to get to around it.

Steve Rush: I love that phrase, by the way, repetition is the mother of skill. Not heard it before. Just love it. It really resonates that if you want to ever be good at anything, however, skillful and knowledgeable you are today, it's that hitting the repeat button that makes you become more successful, right?

Evan Smith: Yes, yeah. I think that's really right. It's not original, I can't claim authorship of that. And I don't know where I heard it originally. One of the things that stuck with me from early in my career was some guidance from a man named Robert Fritz who wrote a book called Creating. Something he said that has stuck with me is he says, you know, we often hear that anything worth doing is worth doing right. His observation was anything worth doing is worth doing wrong until you get it, right. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again.

Steve Rush: Awesome, love it. Now we get to turn the leadership lens on you. And this is the partnership I love the most, where I get into hack into your leadership mind. If you could distill all your years of leadership and experience and helping others down to your top three leadership hacks, what would they be?

Evan Smith: I would say it's three specific behaviors. The first is cultivating for yourself, a stance of curiosity, and that is sort of actively questioning assumptions, reading outside of your professional domain, taking team leadership on a team that you know, not very much about. But stepping into a place where you're in that learning zone, a zone of curiosity, and you're putting yourself in learning mode. That's one, the second would be, especially if you're somebody who's leading a team, leading an organization, leading a change initiative, I would find a handful of people. You are close to who will give you absolutely unvarnished feedback and want to do that. Not just one person, not someone who's a direct report. Someone who's going to give you honest, unvarnished, clear feedback about your work and how you're showing up and what their experience of you is. All of us need that. And a lot of us, especially in leadership roles, don't get enough of it. Frequently enough, real time.

Steve Rush: Very true.

Evan Smith: The third thing is, I would recommend building a practice around explication, this process of describing your thinking out loud and what I would say around that is, it's really useful if you can do that with a discussion partner with your team, like we talked about earlier, testing assumptions out loud so that you can see what you're learning from that and what makes sense. I would say it's useful, even if you're doing it while you're driving in your car or standing in front of the bathroom mirror in the morning, hearing yourself speak out loud, it elaborates your thinking in a way that just writing something down or thinking about it mentally does not do. There's actually some research on that, that was done by a good friend of mine. But I think this process of hearing ourselves. Describe our thinking out loud is incredibly useful for getting unpacking assumptions and thinking about what's driving our behavior. There’re three things for you.

Steve Rush: Awesome, love them. And of course, questions are the only way to really unpack those assumptions. Better to ask yourself those questions first, to get a real candid via, love it.

Evan Smith: Yeah.

Steve Rush: The next part of the show we call Hack to Attack. So, this is where a situation has occurred in the past. Maybe screwed up, hasn't gone well, maybe even been some adversity, but as a result of the experience, you now use that experience in a positive in your life or your work. What would be your Hack to Attack?

Evan Smith: Yes, well, I already described to you, my early in career sort of moments of despair, my very first job out of college. I was not very good at choosing companies, but there was another moment that was pivotal for me. At one point, I was the global head of quality for a chemical company. And the short story around it is, I was the first head of quality for this chemical company. As we were moving to a global organization from what had been a very, very sort of localized, you know, national organization, we had operations in more than 40 countries and I was effectively, I was not very popular in that role. A lot of my colleagues didn't understand why we were changing and what was going on around it. At the end of the day, while I did everything, I knew how to do, I was working terribly hard. I was traveling the globe. I was entirely physically, mentally, emotionally. I was entirely spent by the work that I was trying to support. And it didn't work out, at the end of the day, my colleagues’ sort of rejected the shift towards a more global federalized structure, and I was effectively fired. And in that moment where my boss told me he no longer cared what I thought and what I had to offer. There was a moment where I had some distinct realizations about opportunities I had missed. Things I had overlooked, assumptions I hadn't questioned. It was a difficult moment, and it was an incredibly rich moment in terms of considering what I might, you know, facing an opportunity like that, what would I do differently in different circumstances? And how would I respond differently to stimuli and provocations and people and relationships? So that was a moment that I think it was a very sort of dark moment of disruption, but it was also incredibly, incredibly rich and sort of landing on my feet. Taking away all the things that bubbled out of that learning experience for me have stayed with me for the last 20 years.

Steve Rush: A really rich learning experience in the face of adversity. And that's what managing and leading through change is all about, Isn't it? It's about, we're going to be facing into stuff. It isn't the stuff that we face into it. Is how do you learn from it and how you react and respond?

Evan Smith: Yes. Yes.

Steve Rush: Awesome.

Evan Smith: Totally.

Steve Rush: The very last thing that we'd like to do is to do a bit of time travel. You get the chance now to meet Evan at 21, and you now have the chance to give him some advice. What would your advice to him be?

Evan Smith: My advice to him would be to push boundaries sooner, to ask questions sooner, to not be quite as polite. To be more uncomfortable, more quickly in situations, right. Rather than sort of sitting back. As someone who was a good student in school and sort of knew how to do that. I was not a boat rocker early enough, and I think I would encourage Evan at 21 and almost everyone early in career to be pushing those learning boundaries as early and as soon as possible in service of your own learning and that of people around you.

Steve Rush: That's awesome advice. I often found that, you know, certainly in my earlier career, I wouldn't do that, but the more experienced I got, more mature I got, the more I realized my own limitations or capabilities. The more I was comfortable to do that because I had to reframe that from being provocative, to being a learner. And I think that's the difference, isn’t it?

Evan Smith: It is, it is. That's right.

Steve Rush: Awesome.

Evan Smith: It's in service of something bigger.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Evan Smith: And how do you do that? Yeah.

Steve Rush: Definitely, so. So, folks listening to you and I have a chat about lots of different things, all of which I'd love for them to continue the conversation with you on, beyond our talk today. Where's the best place beyond today that you would like us to send our listeners to meet up with you.

Evan Smith: Thank you. Yes, so I am at evan@metamg.com, that's email address. The website is metamg.com for Metamorphosis Management Group. I'm also on LinkedIn, that's a primary professional platform we're active I’m active.

Steve Rush: Great.

Evan Smith: And I would welcome the chance to hear about a particular challenges and reactions that some of the folks listening might have.

Steve Rush: And we'll make sure all of those links are in the show notes so that we can continue the conversation beyond today.

Evan Smith: Thanks, Steve.

Steve Rush: It's just left for me to say thank you, Evan, for taking time out of your day to come and join us on the show. It's been super listening to you and I'm delighted we've connected. We share a lot of similar passions and a lot of similar thinking. So, I'm hopeful that we'll continue the dialogue way beyond today. Thanks for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Evan Smith: Thank you. It's been a real pleasure to dig into this with you.

Steve Rush: Thanks, Evan.

 

 

Closing

 

Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.  Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler there @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.