The show’s guests in this episode are Dr. Tracy, Christopher Christofferson and Michelle Troseth. They are co-founders of Missing Logic, and the core of their work is to help mid-career and executive leaders unlock the next level without overworking and neglecting their personal lives.
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Leading Without Burnout with Michelle Troseth & Dr. Tracy Christopherson
I’m Melanie Parish. Welcome to the experimental leader podcast. I am an author, an executive coach, a part-time facilitator and a content creator.
I am Mel Rutherford. I’m McMaster University’s first transgender department chair, and I’m the co-host of the experimental leader podcast.
What are you thinking about today?
Mel, well, I’ve been chair for almost five years now, and I’ve been looking back at all of our activities that we’ve done together as a department for the last five years, and looking at how values-based governance is created over time. We started in my first year as chair with a core values exercise and created a document that became our core values document. And once you have your core values, once you’ve made those explicit, there’s a bunch of other structures you can build. One of them is we’ve done a gap analysis to compare our procedures and processes to our core values, to make sure those are aligned, and update our SOL document to align with that. And we’ve done. We’ve created consensus based decision making, which fundamentally is rooted in values, because when you when you have concerns about decisions that are being made, those concerns are tied to the values that you share, and you talk about how whether or not this decision that you’re making is aligned with your values, and we’ve been able to create, we’ve been able to follow Dr Loretta Ross’s model of calling in rather than calling out, because a calling in conversation is also rooted in values. You start that conversation by naming your shared values and then naming your intentions and making sure you’re in alignment with core values, so the core values, the naming of the core values, and following this path of values-based governance really opened up a lot of other processes and possibilities for us.
That’s pretty cool. I’ve been thinking about consensus decision-making, too, mostly because I’ve been facilitating some consensus decision-making for a group that I’m a part of. And I think you’ve, I actually, like, I know that you have facilitated consensus decision-making a lot more than I have. Like, I we’ve taught workshops, and I know it theoretically, and I’ve used it, and I’ve been on boards and things where we used it, but this time, I’m seeing it and in kind of a new light, and, and I think, you know, people tend to make up that consensus is great if you all agree, and, and what I’m finding is consensus is fantastic when you don’t agree. And I think it scares people when they are faced with differences of opinion about something, but I actually think that consensus forces people to take a second and hear a different point of view. So if you don’t agree, the worst thing you can do, I think, is to outvote somebody. It’s really violent because they just get overpowered by the majority. But with consensus, if somebody doesn’t agree, you can be curious about it. In fact, someone not agreeing is a clue, to me, as a facilitator, to say, hey, wait a second. What about you? You didn’t agree with this. What’s going on with you? And you elevate the dissenting voice, and you find out what they see that the rest of the group doesn’t. I also think it’s interesting that once the person who doesn’t agree hears all the other people’s positions, they may shift in some way to find a solution that wasn’t on the table and integrates the other people’s concerns or thoughts. So I’m actually pretty fascinated at the moment about how not agreeing makes consensus the best decision. I also. Is the best decision when you do agree, because it’s fast and implementable, and you can do it really fast. But I don’t know that I had ever fully taken in the power in the midst of disagreement.
The more I use consensus, the more I love it and learn about it. It’s so full of possibilities.
Yes, do we have guests today?
We have two guests. It’s a great day. We have Dr. Tracy Christopherson and Michelle Troseth. They are co-founders of Missing Logic, and the core of their work is to help mid-career and executive leaders unlock the next level without overworking and neglecting their personal lives. So I am super excited.
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Tracy and Michelle, welcome to the show.
Well, thank you for having us.
Thank you.
It’s great to be here with both of you. Welcome.
So I’ll just start by saying, How are you experimenting in your work and life right now?
Well, we are experimenting in many different ways. We’re experimenting on how we work together, which has changed and evolved over the last 40 years, and especially since starting a business. And we’re virtual So Tracy said one part of the country during the winter I’m in Michigan, and even planning our days and how we connect and running a business has changed over time. So we’re definitely experimenting at that level, and then also what we’re bringing in our business too. We’ve done a lot of experimenting that I’m sure Tracy can share a little bit about that.
Yeah, so we did some experimenting last year with engaging professional organizations as affiliates for our work, so they would promote the work that we were doing with leaders around being burnout proof, and it was a it was a great experiment to connect with them, to serve their leaders in a way they couldn’t. And so that was a great experiment. And then currently, we’re experimenting with bringing what we learned in working inside a billion dollar international company to the smaller entrepreneur who’s trying to create a team of virtual assistants. So that’s another experiment that we’re
doing right now.
And I guess I’m curious, when you think of translating something from large company to entrepreneurs, what are some of the thoughts or values that you apply to that?
Well, I think what’s really interesting is we are applying some of the same concepts we worked with with working with 1000s of leaders across North America, and the work we did do in our in our big work with the with the global company. But I really comes down to culture and how we connect as humans. And one of the things that Tracy and I have really spent a lot of time on is helping people become what we call polarity intelligent. And I just this goes so well with what you guys were just talking about in your intro. You wouldn’t believe it. And that is that polarities come in pairs, and they’re often values. So we help people entrepreneurs understand you don’t need either or thinking in your business. You can have a great professional life and a great personal life. You can make directive decisions as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, and you also can have shared decision making with your team. It’s an and in both and then we also have weaved in the importance of having healthy relationships with your team and really bringing intention, getting to know them as people, even though they’re virtual and work all over the world, as well as meaningful dialog to really explore, be curious. I love that. Be curious, learn from each other. And the dialog that we bring to entrepreneurial teams is that everyone has a wisdom you don’t have. Just because you’re the founder or CEO doesn’t mean you know everything. So it’s really creating that team culture, yeah, and it’s principle based.
So all of them are sets of principles, and we have found over the years, when you operate from a sense of principles, clear principles that guide everybody in the organization or the team, it’s much easier to work collaboratively and move towards the things, move towards that shared purpose, as you’re talking about earlier.
How do you think you get that shared purpose? Like, how do you what’s the if? How do you go from nothing, like we just do what we do, to having something more explicit?
Yeah. Well, I think it starts with dialog like and really learning each other and what your you know, what your desires are, what you hope to get out of, of what your the meaning of your work together. And so I think it starts with that, and then, and that has to be aligned with your values. What’s your true north? What are you really going for so I think that’s the first thing that comes to my mind.
That clear sense of purpose, yeah, and how everybody is contributing to the purpose. So that other element is the clarity on what everybody’s role is, but also what their unique gifts and talents and strengths are, and to balance those across the team and keeping always in the forefront, you know what the shared purpose is, what you’re all driving towards, and then managing these tensions that show up when we have differing values, like you were talking about, to understand, To dig deep and understand what is behind somebody’s point of view or perspective or value, so that we can all learn because we’ve had experience many other people have never had, and they don’t even know the experiences that you’ve had that are influencing your point of view, your perspective or your preferences. So those are key elements as well.
So if you as you’ve been doing this work over the last few years, what has surprised you the most?
Well, that’s a great question. Yeah, I think what surprises me the most is the resistance people have to it. And I think that that we are so ingrained in our own preferences, that we you know, that we’re not that we’re not willing to explore beyond what we have experienced. And believe there’s so much to this world. There’s so much to all the people that we work with and that we’re engaged with. And I think it just it’s a little bit surprising that in this day and age, we’re not more open and willing to hear and see others for all of who they are and what they bring to us.
Yeah, I think another surprise that came to Tracy and I is we have been best friends and colleagues and very much shared a shared purpose in the work that we were doing. And it wasn’t until we were probably about three years into our business that we realized that we were a walking polarity. We didn’t realize how different we were from each other. I mean, it’s kind of easy to mask it and go through life as friends, but when you’re in a business together, and it’s like it became very obvious that her preferences were different than my preferences, and that created tension. And then, and then we realized, but this is our gift, like we bring two perspectives in almost every situation, and it’s also helped us kind of come more to the middle to have that consensus when we have to make a decision, because there’s only two of us, we can’t have a vote, so we have to talk through those things. So that was another surprise, definitely.
That’s super interesting. I’m, I guess I’m curious. I am. I always think we talk about women and sort of work life, balance, all of that. But I, I, I don’t like that. We talk about it only for women. So what’s, what are some of your approaches or thoughts about, you know, how people, how people start to create what they want in a balanced life?
Yeah, so I think first it starts with, what is balance? What does balance really mean to us. And so many people feel like they have this vision of the scale, right? Everything’s 5050, have to have 50% of my personal life and 50% of my professional life. And so the first place we started is balance is dynamic. It’s never static. It’s never about 5050, so shaping the way you think about what balance can look like in your life is really one of the first elements to know that life is going to life. There’s always going to be a time when your professional life is going to pull you towards it, you know. I mean, just look at what happened with covid and like different people got pulled to their family or pulled to their professional side of their life, and that’s going to happen. The key is that you maintain what we call this dynamic balance and flow between the two. So if something happens, let’s just say a family member gets ill, and you’re having to give more attention to the family, to the personal side of your life. It’s not to drop everything that’s happening in your professional life, but what are the things that you can do to maintain as much of the positive outcomes as possible in that aspect of your life while you shift more attention to your personal life? Same thing on the professional side, it’s about not totally letting go and giving everything to that element of your life that’s drawing your attention, but always maintaining some kind of action that’s going to keep you experiencing positive outcomes in the other aspect of your life. So that’s the that’s the dynamic part of it. You go with the flow, and you just, you just kind of stay in this equilibrium, keeping it equal, but not like 5050.
So if people engage with you and engage with your business, how’s that going to change their lives?
It helps them see balance in a whole new way, and also really the strategy of how to leverage when it comes like, let’s just keep on the theme of work life balance, to really see their professional life and personal life and what is so good about both, but then to create their own strategy of how they’re going to take action in both of those areas. And then, I think the magic of it is we help them realize, how are you going to know when you’re starting to slip? How are you going to know when you’re leaning too much one way or the other? And so we help them identify their own personal early warning signs, which is different for every single person. So we always encourage them too, to just, you know, ask the people they work with, ask the people that they live with. How do you know if you’re spending too much time at work or at home? As an example?
Yes, oh, go ahead. Sorry, Michelle, yeah, I was gonna say it. It’s just a It’s a strategy. It’s not just words. You don’t talk about it. We have a whole blueprint that we work with clients on to really help them to do that really well, and to just look at it through a whole different perspective and the and when they see their life on paper like that or on a tool, they’re like, no wonder I am exhausted, because they can see they’re so out of balance.
So, yeah, so I think having a burnout proof life, that’s one of the outcomes. I think the other is what what we give them is a superpower. Most leaders, entrepreneurs are problem solvers, and most of the challenges that we face in life are not problems. There are these dynamics, these polarities. So when you can recognize that you don’t have a problem, that you actually have something that has to be managed and leveraged over time, and that that is represented by tension. Then we look at the tensions we experience differently, and we have a way to sit in that tension with in healthy relationships and meaningful dialog, to move through the tension, to get to that place where we can have a more well rounded perspective of the experience that we’re having, and we can move together towards a shared purpose. So it is something that most people aren’t even aware of. We weren’t taught this when we were children. We weren’t taught this as leaders. So it really becomes a superpower and a compliment to problem solving skills, and it’s not only applicable, it’s applicable in every aspect of your life. So it really is a game changer for individuals.
Well, where can people find you?
Well, you can find us at our website, missinglogic.com, and we also have a book called polarity intelligence, the missing logic and leadership. And we do have a book, website, polarityintelligence.com as well, and we’re on Instagram and Facebook as the polarity power pair. So follow us there as well.
And I think you have a podcast as well.
Yes. Burnout Proof Leadership
Perfect. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to have you on our show today. Thank you for being here.
Thank you so much.
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Well, that was super interesting. I love when they said that most leaders are problem solvers, but most problems, most challenges, aren’t problems to solve.
They’re polarities. I thought that was super interesting.
That. I thought that was really interesting. And I like this idea that when you’ve got a polarity, it doesn’t mean you have to choose one or the other. You can look for the wisdom in both sides.
Yeah, I think, I think that’s right. And I think that as I become more experienced as a leader, I’m more the more sides there are to almost everything. So I think, I think it’s a really interesting way to shift how I go through the world. Yeah, well, it’s been great to be here with you guys today. Go experiment.
Go experiment.
Important Links:
Michelle Troseth & Dr. Tracy Christopherson
Dr. Tracy Christopherson and Michelle Troseth are co-founders of MissingLogic ® .
The core of their work is to help mid-career and executive leaders finally unlock their next level without overworking and neglecting their personal life by tapping into Polarity Intelligence®.
Tracy and Michelle are co-authors of the book Polarity Intelligence: The Missing Logic in Leadership and co-hosts of Burnout Proof Leadership (previously known as The TRU Leader Podcast). The polarity power pair is known for helping leaders balance leading and living so they can be TRU leaders—thriving, resilient, and unstoppable.
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