drama

103: Nate Regier: I made two huge mistakes

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience, break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

Need a powerful and entertaining way to ignite your next conference, retreat or team-building session? My keynote don’t include magic but they do have the power to help your attendees take a leap forward by putting emotional intelligence into their employee engagement, customer engagement and customer centric leadership practices. So bring the infotainment creativity the Fast Leader show to your next event and I’ll help your attendees get over the hump now. Go to beyondmorale.com/speaking to learn more.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader Legion, today I’m excited because today’s show is going to be loaded with drama. Nate Regier is a down-to-earth guy with a global perspective on life. He grew up the son of missionary parents in Zaire in Botswana experiencing firsthand the struggles of poverty and injustice and the joys of making a positive difference with compassion. Nate is passionate about seeing multiple perspectives on situations exploring the nuances of how people communicate with one another and this is why he struggles with those who seek to push their beliefs, jump to conclusions, or put people in boxes. His home is Newton, Kansas where he lives with his wife and three teenage daughters. On the way to helping form Next Element Consulting in 2008, Nate pursued a PhD in Clinical Psychology and practice clinical psychology for 11 years.

His passions have always been around consulting, coaching, speaking and working with groups. He has developed deep expertise in social, emotional, intelligence, group dynamics, mind, body, spirit, help, communication skills, and the use of positive conflict to create. Nate is committed to the philosophy that the goal of the great communicator is not to see through people but to see people through. Nate love studying models of human behavior and communication. He believes that the purpose of a good model is to change your mind about someone or something not to make it up. Nate has published two books Beyond Drama: Transcending Energy Vampires and his just-released book Conflict without Casualties: A Field Guide for Leading with Compassionate Accountability. 

Nate Regier:    Beyond visioning ways to share the message of compassion, accountability to more people, Nate loves woodworking, barbecues, camping, and watching his daughters play volleyball. Nate Regier, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Jim Rembach:    I am. And I love to talk about drama it is a great honor to be here with your legion. 

Nate Regier:    Thanks Nate. Now I’ve given our Legion a little bit about you, but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Jim Rembach:    Well, yeah, I can. I think kind of start to find my stride in my life. I’m almost 50 years old and my new passion is to change the energy balance in the world. I think we spend too much energy and negative conflict and not enough trying to create amazing things. 

Now you bring up a really interesting point. In reading through your book you talk about the energy and conflict being on both sides, the negative and the positive side. 

Nate Regier:    Yeah, your conflict is not necessarily bad, it gets about gap. But really conflict is just a difference it’s like a gap between what we want and what we’re experiencing at any point in time. So, the question is not are we going to have conflict or not, the question is how are we going to use that energy?

Jim Rembach:    You talked about also how we as humans have certain things about us. And you talk about drama tendencies and compassion potential. What is that?

Nate Regier:    Well, we have natural tendencies. All of us, we have personalities, we have habits that we’ve been doing our whole lives and we have predictable ways in which we get in to distress and get sideways with each other. And there are three predictable roles that people play in drama maybe we play the victim role where we kind of do the one down position we think we’re not okay. Maybe we play the persecutor role where we going the attack and we assume that we’re fine the other people had a problem. Sometimes we play the rescuer role where we get involved and meddle in other people’s business thinking that we know best. 

Jim Rembach:    You know it’s funny, I just started saying that. I started thinking about me and that I’ve probably played all of those roles.

Nate Regier:    We do. And what we found is most people play at least two roles on any given day and inside our heads maybe all three roles are going at it, and it could be situation specific as well. 

Jim Rembach:    I think you bring a really interesting point when you start talking about all of those things going along in our head. When we start talking about our own drama tendencies and our own compassion potential and we talk about all those different perspectives and the dynamics our lenses and interpretations and all those different roles, how do we ever move forward?

Nate Regier:    Well, that’s where compassion potential comes in. And we all have amazing positive strengths as well. And we’ve identified three critical strengths that anyone can develop, openness. Resourcefulness, and persistence these are core leadership competencies, their core strengths that are necessary for us to practice healthy conflict. And not all of us are well-developed in all of them but we can work them out just like muscles. 

Jim Rembach:    That’s interesting. You talk also about the drama is quite predictable and habitual. What does that mean? 

Nate Regier:    Yeah, great question. What it means is that when we hit sideways with each other and when we go in to distress the way in which we do it is unbelievably consistent it’s predicted by our personality and it’s predicted by the models that we had growing up, the environments that we grew up in. So, when people have conflict, they handle it the same way over and over and over. 

You know, you really bring up an interesting point when you start talking about the different generations in the workforce and even now when I see it with my own kids we have to be very careful that they become so self-absorbed in doing their video things, their social media type things that we have to cut them off. A lot of the folks who are entering in the workforce haven’t had the ability to flex those muscles or maybe even build good habits in regards to how they treat one another because their examples are so bad and society and the ones that get  sensationalized, but does this mean for us as a community?

You’re right we are at a crisis in our world right now with the role models and the way in which conflict is handled around us. My children, what they see when they turn on the TV or go on Facebook or a lot of the social media sites, they see conflict that destroys. They see adversarial conflict, they see polarization they see people dealing with differences and disagreements. By giving adversarial and going on the attack for each other and throwing each other under the bus or just avoiding the issue altogether and none of those are solutions and none of those take advantage of that amazing energy so it’s been very important to me to teach my kids how to be open, how to be resourceful, how to be persistent and how to see conflict as an opportunity to learning growth. 

Jim Rembach:    You bring up a really interesting point. For me I also pulled out of the book when I read—you know, you talk about conflict being unavoidable however I see people trying to avoid all the time, was that mean?

Nate Regier:    Well, we avoid conflict in a couple ways. Usually we play the victim role and we just take it, we accommodate, we give the in, we put our own needs on the back burner just to keep the peace and just to avoid the conflict, but you know, that’s drama too. If we’re not asserting what we want, if we’re not being confident in who we are and what we need then we’re just as much a part of the problem.

Jim Rembach:    It’s interesting too. I also know—talking about that personality differences and things like that that there some folks that they just avoid conflict and what I find is that it often creates even more energy in a conflict because they try to squash, don’t you see that your evitable pattern is going to create negative conflict because you’re trying to avoid it at the beginning point and then prolong it? 

Nate Regier:    Yeah, absolutely. And in my book, Comfort without Casualties, I tell a fable about a variety of people in a workplace called drama core. And the one, the person that plays the victim role, it may look like she’s not engaging in conflict but she’s preoccupied with what happened in the meeting, she’s texting her friends looking for drama allies, she’s gossiping in the break room, she’s thinking about it all the time when she’s at work and so she’s not focused on her work and so it consumes immense amount of energy. 

Jim Rembach:    Now, you talk about also a compassion cycle. We talk about our compassion potential, but what is the compassion cycle?

Nate Regier:    Well, what we discovered is that these three skills openness, resourcefulness and persistence, actually operate in a relationship to one another and they actually operate not as independent skills but as this unified, balanced, synergistic set of competencies. And what we discovered is that if we look at them as if they’re in a cycle we can see that one comes and then the next one, and then the next one and we end up back where we started and it can be a really amazing tool. So the cycle is the way in which openness leads to resourcefulness which leads to persistence which leads back to openness and so on. And we discovered that these three skills have an order, they have a direction and have very specific rules and formulas on how to use these skills for maximum impact.

Jim Rembach:    You start talking about this whole energy thing and being your negative and positive—energy’s as a whole and how we use it best is that on the show we try to use quotes as a means to give us energy. Is there a quote or two that does that for you that you can share? 

Nate Regier:    Yeah. I have lot of leadership gurus and people that I admire. One of the quotes that we’ve developed in our company which I like to share with people is “Compassion without accountability gets you nowhere. But accountability without compassion gets you alienated.” So, blending the two really is the essence of leadership. And why does that matter? It matters to leaders because you can’t just nice-y nice your way to great performance sometimes conflict and difficult conversations are necessary. Alternatively if you’re always bringing a hammer down on people they’re not going to give you their full discretionary energy nobody does their best work when they’re afraid. So, great leaders balance accountability for behavior with full respect for human dignity and relationships. 

Jim Rembach:    My interpretation of what you just said and what I always find myself trying to make sure that the balance is correct is tough love, right?

Nate Regier:    It really is. It is tough love and it’s amazing when we use the right tools how we can stay connected to people through a very difficult conversations, difficult relationships where we’re trying to close that gap between what we want and what we’re experiencing. 

Jim Rembach:    Not a doubt. So, I know for me when you start thinking about this whole growth and development and being a better not just leader but just person as a whole and emulating the folks that I want to emulate not often doesn’t work out and we make mistakes and there’s humps to get over. Is there a time for you when you had to get over a hump and it really made a change for you that you can share?

Nate Regier:    Oh, there was, reflecting on this it’s not fun to reflect on where we’ve messed up. One of the things I want to share with your readers, this is what I’m going to share today, this is the first time I shared it publicly because it’s something I’ve been reflecting on and trying to work on. I think it was kind of serendipitous that I had this opportunity because it forced me to put this down and articulate it. So, it’s been good for me as well as hopefully a source of some help from your listeners. Part of the stories in my new book but the real leadership lesson for me, the hump, isn’t in the book because it happened after the story was printed in our first soft published edition. A couple of years ago we were doing an extensive leadership training program with state service agency and we were also consulting with their executive team about the challenges along the way. And you know, with any leadership program not everyone’s on board and there’s going to be efforts, undermine, and sabotage is going to happen. Sometimes those efforts are easy to see and sometimes the creep up on you this one crept up on us. One of the people in the program attempted to engage us in side conversation that seemed innocent enough at first but pretty soon it morphed into full on drama triangulation and trying to undercut the executive team and stop this change happening. And we didn’t set good enough boundaries with this person and we ended up putting the reputation of the CEO and the company at risk before we realize what was happening and stopped the communication. 

And it took a lot of work and time and grace for us to rebuild trust with our client and I thought this was one of my most significant leadership blunders in learning moments until I made a bigger one. In my book, Comfort without Casualties, I shared the story and I shared the process of how we rebuilt trust to illustrate how we use the formula for compassionate conflict, difficult situations. But in the process of writing, I include the story in my book, I made two huge mistakes. First of all I didn’t get permission from the CEO to print the story.  I figured out made a generic and nobody would recognize the characters and yet I gain permission from other people whose stories I shared, so why didn’t I talk to this person. 

I don’t know, maybe it probably related laziness, lack of diligence on my part or maybe I was afraid that he wouldn’t want me to print it. You know what they say ask for forgiveness instead of permission. The second big mistake I made was the way in which I wrote the story really made me out to be the hero, the good guy that use all these amazing drama strategies to deal with disgruntled client and turn them around and everything. And you know, that might be one side of the story but it  wasn’t completely accurate and the story came across this pretty arrogant self-serving and the book went to print and our client bought copies frizzle with executive team because they our company and they like the work that we did. And everyone on this team recognize exactly who the story was about, you want to talk about an angry client and justifiably so. 

So, without going into the details of how I’m working through this with the client, what I can tell you is that I may have eroded trust to the point of no recovery. I may have lost a friend as well, and you know, you only get so many chances in situations like this. I did it, it was my fault and I let my team down and I let our client down. And in a long-term I think it’s going to hurt our company in some ways that we might not be able to recover with them and am learning some things I guess any leader can benefit from and I want to share those, is it all right if I share them? 

Jim Rembach:    Oh, absolutely. 

Nate Regier:    One of things I’m learning, we hear it all the time but it doesn’t get real until it’s personal and that is the trust is a precious thing. It takes years and years to build in a second of laziness or prejudgment you destroy it. Another thing I’m learning is that our gift can be a curse. We all have gifts and on the other side of the coin of that gift can be negative tendencies that will take us down for not vigilant. The part of who we are and we can work to manage them but we can’t ever get rid of them completely. One of my gift is I love to get up in front of groups. I love to tell stories I have a lot of charisma but the dark side of that is I like the limelight and sometimes I get the limelight in another person’s expense. And for the most part I keep it under control but once in a while I don’t and they never turns out well.

I think the third lesson is that as leaders our behaviors and choices have far-reaching consequences sometimes way bigger than we know and sometimes in ways that can’t be fixed and can’t be recovered, so, the only thing we can do is learn from our mistakes and make an effort to do better next time. So, in our paperback version of my book that’s coming out next spring with (16:14 inaudible) color publishers, I’ve re—written story and I re-wrote it in partnership with the client to offer more accurate balanced feel of what happened, it’s one small thing I can do to make things right but I’ll never get to redo and there’s 3,000 books out there with the story that I’m not proud of. So, it’s been a really painful learning experience for me and I want it to help make me a better leader going forward.

Jim Rembach:    Wow, Nate, thanks for sharing that and being so vulnerable. I think you bring up something that’s really important for us all to take note of and that is we are constant works in progress. I think the keyword there is really progress and now we just have to keep getting up, brushing ourselves off knowing that we’re going to get knocked down again, so, I appreciate you sharing that.  

Nate Regier:    Yeah, and it’s painful and there’s just no quick way through it, I hate it. 

Jim Rembach:    So Nate….I mean gosh! When you talked about going through the process, writing the story, releasing and get 3,000 books out and all and having all of these things occur, when did you have that aha or epiphany to say, “oh-oh” 

Nate Regier:    Well, I’m reminded of one of my favorite leadership books called, Leadership and Self-Deception by D’Arbinger Institute and that whole book is a fable about how this young up-and-coming leader he just keeps thinking he hasn’t figured out and then his mentor helps him realize, no, dig deeper, dig deeper, feel another layer back from the onion and it’s so amazing how we try to deceive ourselves and delude ourselves in the thinking we haven’t figured out. I think for me to real epiphany happened when I met with the CEO after he confronted me about the story and I realized I have to meet with him we have to figure out what we’re going to do. And I really hope there’d be a way to patch it up. But about half way to the conversation I realized, something hit me and I realized, I can’t fix this. I can’t make it go away, there’s no way out and it really hurts and it really stinks. And I realized I was going to have to accept the pain and embarrassment, I was going to have to sit with it and let it work on m hopefully in positive ways. And it took me a few weeks before I was able to honestly say to myself, “Okay, what I can learn from this? And how’s it going to make me a better person and stop trying to defend it start trying to fix it, start trying to make it go away. So I think that was the big thing for me is it the pain needs to work on us and we need to give it time and it just not fun.

Jim Rembach:    You know, you really bring up a—that hit home for me because I keep chatting with my 11-year-old son, he’s 11 at that time, about owning his behavior and we all have to own our behavior even it’s a behavior we don’t want to own, and that’s tough.  

Nate Regier:    Well, you’re not kidding because the thing about drama is no matter which role we play in drama the ultimate goal is to not own our behavior. We don’t want to be responsible for the things we do so we play this drama roles to try to get someone else to take the responsibility. But there are things that I’m working on and there are some steps that I’m taking to turn things around and learn from this mistake and hopefully not do it again. 

Jim Rembach:    And the Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on, let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

Nate Regier:    The number one thing that contributes to customer loyalty is emotions, so move onward and upward faster by getting significantly deeper insight and understanding of your customer journey and personas with emotional intelligence. With your empathy mapping workshop you’ll learn how to evoke and influence the right customer emotions that generate improve customer loyalty and reduce your cost to operate. Get over your emotional hump now by going to empathymapping.com to learn more. 

Jim Rembach:    Alright, here we go Fast leader Legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay Nate, the Hump day Hoedown is  a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust, yet rapid responses that are going to help move onward and upward faster. Nate Regier, are you ready to hoedown? 

Nate Regier:    I’m ready to hoedown. Shoot. 

Jim Rembach:    Alright. So, what you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Nate Regier:    Transparency and honesty and willingness to feel the pain.

Jim Rembach:    What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Nate Regier:    It’s okay to ask for help.

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Nate Regier:    Ask for feedback, ask for feedback, ask for feedback.

Jim Rembach:    What you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Nate Regier:    Avoid rescuing and be curious.

Jim Rembach:    What would be one book that you’d recommend to our Legion, and it could be from any genre, and of course we’ll put the links on the show notes page to your two books. 

Nate Regier:    The book I’d recommend is the Arbinger Institute, The Anatomy of Peace, unbelievable.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader Legion, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today show by going to fastleader.net/Nate Regier. Okay Nate, this is my Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity go back to the age of 25. And you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with. But you can’t take everything back you can only choose one, so what skills or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Nate Regier:    Okay. Here’s what I would do, I would be a lot more vulnerable with the closest relationships in my life and I think it would’ve made a huge difference.

Jim Rembach:    Nate it was an honor to spend time with you today, can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Nate Regier:    Yes, you can look me up on LinkedIn, Nate Regier, I invite you to follow Next Element on Facebook and please, please visit our website at nextelement.com where you can get your copy of Conflict without Casualties.

Jim Rembach:    Nate Regier, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show, special offers, and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

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