Adaptive Leaders: Damian Goldvarg on Mastering Leadership in Current Times

Pity Party Over

In the evolving post-COVID word, the leadership paradigm is changing to keep up with the evolving requirements of the new generations and a fast changing technology.

In Dr. Damian Goldvarg’s lastest book, Leadership for Current Times, empathy emerges as a crucial trait for effective leadership, which requires a genuine willingness to understand and connect with others’ perspectives.

Dr. Goldvarg also underscores the practical benefits of strategic thinking and foresight in leadership. By developing skills in anticipating future trends and challenges, leaders can make informed decisions and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast platform.

Please check Dr. Damian Goldvarg’s Liderazgo Para Los Tiempos Actuales: Nuevos Paradigmas Y Habilidades De Coaching, soon available in English. Use the affiliate links to support Pity Party Over at no additional cost to you.

Subscribe to Pity Party Over for more insightful episodes. Questions? Email Stephen Matini or send him a message on LinkedIn.

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: As a collective society, we've been talking about COVID and all the ramifications of COVID. And I think we are definitely realizing that the post COVID is probably just as harsh as the actual pandemic. There are a lot, a lot of different ramifications. And you decided to write a book about it. So I was wondering how the idea came about.

Damian Goldvarg: Well, I started working in a book on leadership. So I have been training leaders for more than 30 years. And I wanted to write one on coaching skills for leaders.

So I wrote already eight books, was author of books on coaching skills for coaches, mentor coaching, supervision in English and Spanish, nd this time, I wanted to write a book on coaching skills that I could use in my trainings; When I train coaching skills, I can use that book as a manual, but also my colleagues who benefit from it.

I thought they can use that also with their clients when they are coaching leaders because they had all exercises and activities. So I thought I would be sharing that.

I started writing the book and then COVID hit. And then I kept working with the book. And then I was thinking, well, things are changing now. So I think what about working on how COVID is affecting the work and the leadership?

I started looking at working in a hybrid environment, working virtually, talking about the mental health sequels from that, how people are affecting the level of stress that they had during COVID and after COVID. I think that there were a lot of emotional experiences that leaders needed to deal with and being overwhelmed by their own experiences, but experiences of their teams.

The idea with this book was to answer, okay, how leadership is changing and what leaders need to pay attention to. And I think that the leaders need to be more focused on these formative relationships and also developing coaching skills, being more coaches.

Some are already doing that. The ones that are not doing that needs to look at it because you know they're going to get behind in terms of their requirements for the new generations.

And then it's interestingly because when I was getting ready to send the book to the publisher, I sent the book to a few people to give me feedback. And several of them from medium don't have the word COVID or post-COVID in the title of the book, because people are tired of it, are burned out. They don't want to hear anything about it too cold.

So I said, OK, so let's go for the third name, Because first at the beginning, we have a leadership coaching skill for leaders. The second title was post COVID leadership. And now the final title is in Spanish, and the book is totally translated, and I am working on the edition of that.

It's called “Leadership in Current Times,” What is required right now, what is right now in this moment, what is required for leaders. I decided to take from the name post-COVID because out of the reaction of people were telling me, "That's it." I said, "Okay." But it's interesting, Stephen, because I hear from some people that they like it to be reminded that it's post-COVID, et cetera. But you know what? I had COVID for a second time last month. So it's not gone. It's still around.

I have a friend of mine that I was talking to him yesterday. He has been very sick, even though he had vaccines. And he was one of the most careful persons that I have ever met around COVID and finally took for him too once. And there is a lot of more cases now in LA County where I live.

Stephen Matini: So when you introduce these concepts to your own clients, usually, how do they react?

Damian Goldvarg: It makes sense to them. I work globally, and because I am originally from Argentina, I work in Spanish a lot. And the Latino cultures tends to be compared to the American culture or the European cultures, a little bit more authoritative in terms of having more distance, power distance between leaders and their reports.

It's more like, and also have a tradition from Italy, Spain, the father figure, and this parental, and the resistance, and the disrespect to the authority. It's a different kind of relationship. And many times, these leaders are not very collaborative in their approach. They feel responsible.

They feel responsible when they want to take care of things, and they may not engage as much as the colleagues, as peers. There is this distance in hierarchies that we see that is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So sometimes that for leaders who feel that it's their responsibility that they need to make their decisions, they don't engage and include people in decision-making. They have, I think, the hardest time to listen to these ideas. And sometimes it's really, really in their system. So it's not easy to change the mindset. So I try not to force anything.

As a coach, part of my job is to challenge mindsets and being patient because different people need different time to look at things from different angles. And at the end of the day, everybody has the right to look at reality the way that they want. I have an invitation and the metaphor that I use is the glasses.

I said, okay, you know, your sunglasses are blue, you see everything blue, are you willing to take your sunglasses for a minute and put one that are green and see if you're willing to look differently with different color things. And sometimes people are willing and sometimes they are not, but it's their decision.

Stephen Matini: What usually does the trick, meaning those who actually shift, you know, or somehow they start wearing a different pair of sunglasses, you know, tinted differently, what helps them making the shift?

Damian Goldvarg: Sometimes if everything is going very well and they're being very successful, and they do not have any reason to think, why aren't we going to change? We're very successful. We have done things like that.

If people have a challenge and suddenly they have not been as successful, they are not selling as much and there are a lot of complaints or there is conflict crisis. Then when people are realizing, okay, we are not going to keep being successful with past practices. So we need to look new ways of doing things. So they've been forced by the market or the circumstances, you know, because of economy and the changes.

There are some jobs because of AI. Some jobs are being redundant. And I'm telling my colleagues and they don't like to listen to it. But they said, you know, eventually in the future, I also will replace some of the work of some cultures. And so you need to be prepared. You cannot be saying, no, I don't want to listen about it. I don't want to say.

No, it's like, okay, we are supposed to be open to what's happening in the world, and we need to have a dubious responsibility. Being on top of technology advances, trends. So I do believe that we can also show the trends to the leaders, and they may choose not to pay attention.

Stephen Matini: In your opinion, if someone is not that empathetic, can the person actually transition and to become more empathic, which is one of the key features of the post-COVID leadership?

Damian Goldvarg: Definitely. I do believe it's possible, but the person needs to be willing to go there. Like, for example, what I do in my work with my clients is I start with the 360, where people receive feedback from the boss or other people in the organization, peers, and deliver reports, sometimes also customers, other third parties.

So I collected data and I shared with them the perceptions that people have about them. And sometimes the perception may be that they are not empathic enough, that they are not showing that they're understanding. And sometimes leaders say, okay, I want to work on that. So they make a commitment, intentionally, decide to do it. And sometimes everybody feels like they are not being empathic and it's too bad, their problem.

They can still not be empathic, but still they care in their heart. They do care about people, not that they do not care, but it's difficult for them to put themselves in the shoes of other people, but they may not, they don't have the ability to even realize that they are doing that. And when you point it out, and when you share that with them, not everybody is willing to accept it and integrate it and work on it. It's also different levels of maturity.

At the end of the day, I don't think any of them, in my experience, mean bad. I don't think, if not, they are bad people. If not, they are bad. Is that some people may or may not have been able to develop over life these skills? So they may have good intentions.

And I do believe also what in my experience is based on generational issues, the older, the more difficulties they have to adapt to the new trends and the new tendencies and being willing to listen because they have a lot of experience and they have been successful and they know what they've done, they know what they know.

When I train coaches, you know part of my job is to train coaches and supervisors and team coaches, I use a model where I tell them that there are things that we know that we know, things we know that we don't know, but there are things that we don't know that we don't know.

I got a PhD in Organizational Psychology, so I know a lot about organizations because that's my area of expertise. I don't know, for example, Chinese. If I want, I can go and learn. There are things that may be very difficult for me to learn, but I still can put effort. But then there are areas in our life that we do not know that we don't know. So in this area, when I ask, what do you think is there?

What do you think is there, Stephen, in the area that you don't know that you don't know? You're going to answer the question. In the area that you don't know that you don't know, the way that you may answer is nothing yet, because there is not something there that you don't know that you don't know.

But because there is nothing there is a lot of opportunities there. But the first element is to ask yourself, what I may not know that I don't know. So how do I get there with my clients in coaching? It's like, okay, what do you think is going on? And they answer to you. And then I ask, what else? And they answered.

And then what else? And then the client said, I don't know. And I said, okay, take your time. And what else? So suddenly, something that is not in that awareness, they start going and exploring and going deeper.

And I use a metaphor of the iceberg, whatever people coaching to explore that are underlying beliefs, emotion. So you start going deeper and deeper and to say, OK, what else? And what else? And then you can start making new connections. So that is one of the ways to be aware that there are things that you don't know that you don't know that you want to discover.

But usually the paradigm that we live, we don't do that. In our paradigm, usually we have things we know and things we don't know. We don't even realize that there are things we don't know that we don't know.

And that worked really well for my father, who for many years, he knew everything. And I was able to convince him to go for coaching training. And I follow him and my mother, both of them are psychologists. So I follow them to become a psychologist like them. And then I convinced them that they followed me to become coaches. And it did change the way that my father communicated.

In my perspective, this is what I see, what is very difficult to say things are like this, like many people say, OK, things are like this, because it's for them like this, but they don't realize that it's their perspective. And there are other perspectives that can be valid. You may not agree with them, but there are other possibilities, and there are other perspectives on our perspective, and it's just ours.

So that's really changed and transformed the relationships. So why I'm going to that, why I give you this answer, because we are going back to your question, really, how do you work with people who don't want to or are willing or open to go to the empathy?

So with this model, you can invite them to see what they are not seeing. So maybe what they're not seeing is how much pain they may be causing to people because they are not being empathetic. They may not be aware of that.

Stephen Matini: As you were talking, another thing that came to mind is the notion that the importance of having people, it could be a coach, it could be sometimes a psychotherapist, people that help you making the transition.

Somehow I have this distinctive perception that the whole area of mental well-being is not just a nice thing to say or something you should give to employees. It really is a thing. You know, it should not be underestimated. If it's not dealt correctly, it can have disastrous consequences.

And I think that everyone is slowly realizing how difficult this moment is. You know, it's super difficult on youngsters. It's difficult on everyone. Sometimes you find out about what you don't know through the help of someone who can gently guiding you there.

Damian Goldvarg: Yeah, that's a reason why it's so important to have somebody to work in your life, a therapist, a coach, the professional who can help you to see what you're not seeing and to support you in your endeavors. So I believe that we may have good partners or friends who can also be supportive on that, but it's not the same because they also have their own agendas.

But when you work with a professional therapist or coach or mentor that helped you to, I would say, develop that well-being and also to have clarity in terms of your goals. It provides support too. I believe at the end of the day is to have a life that you enjoy, that you love your life. And what do you need to do to really love your life? I do work with two supervisors. So I use supervision as my work.

And I also have a mastermind group. So in this mastermind group is a group of colleagues that we meet and we support each other with our goals and activities. And I have friends and I have my partner, but I also look for spaces just to look at the work.

And when you spend the time dealing with your therapist or with a coach, looking at your work, looking at your life, and that allows you to stop, analyze things, and make some decisions that you may not do if you keep going on and on and on and on without stopping and reflecting.

So I do believe that this is part of when I train coaches to talk about how we live our life in a mechanistic way, like work in the morning, special tea, have breakfast, have a routine. And then at the end of the day, you brush your teeth again. I say, oh, I can't believe it. It went so fast.

And then the weekend comes and you say, okay, it's Monday again. How is that possible? You remember when the weekend? And then the holidays come and say, oh my God, it's Christmas, unbelievable.

So you leave your lesson in the way that we live with so much going on and so many routines, we may sometimes lose track of breathing, spending time in the here and now, enjoying the present, looking at our dissociating ourselves. And this is what I do in supervision when I train supervisors in coaching is you separate yourself and you look at the work you're doing as a coach in supervision.

And I use that idea in life in coaching too and in our work, in different places where it's super vision, you disassociate yourself, you look at yourself. And what do you see? Are you enjoying what you are seeing? Do you think it's what you want? But there is a mismatch and not alignment between what you want for your life and how you are living your life. And that's, as you know, one of the key elements in coaching is people coming to coaching because they are not happy with their lives.

There is no alignment between their values, what is important to them and how they are working or where they are working. So these are areas and opportunities. And I do believe that to have a better world, just being a little bit more idealistic, having a better world for everybody, to the extent that we have more level of satisfaction. Satisfaction means you are meeting your needs and your needs are not only we can go with the hierarchy of Maslow categories of what I will need.

But after you have your basics covered, full room, job to pay everything that you need after you cover your basic needs, them belonging, self-realization, the opportunity to grow and learn and maximize your potential and have dreams. And so I do believe that it's important that we also stop and spend time looking at that.

Stephen Matini: In terms of needs, relationships really take center stage in this moment. You were referring the importance of really nurturing the relationship that you have with yourself. And this is something that I see a lot of people acknowledging the importance of coming together in a world that seems to have become so transactional, you know, mechanistic, as you said, instead of to find out how it is important to be human with other humans.

When people, I don't know if it ever happened to you, but people say, yeah, yeah, yeah, the relationship with myself is important, but I don't have time. You know, it's so difficult to have all these things to do. How do you respond to them?

Damian Goldvarg: I tell people that we do have choices. So we choose. I was talking to my friend yesterday and he has COVID and he was pretty sick, even though he had the vaccines and everything. And I was telling him, "Okay, as a friend, just take care of yourself. Just focus on your healing, focus on yourself."

And he said, "No, I cannot do that because I have so much work that if I don't do the work that I need to do, it's going to pile up. And then when I get to do the work, I'm going to be so stressed out that I would rather don't let that to happen." And I didn't argue with him. As I let go, that was his mindset. He was more worried about not having too much work later. That was more important to him than taking full care of his health.

So at the end, that was his choice. But I was thinking when I got COVID, I stopped everything. I just let everything go. It's just time for me. It's time for healing. Time to get better. So then later, when I am better, I will take care of everything that needs to be taken care of. So this is what I wanted to tell him, but I don't think he was interested. So we also need to listen and be prepared. I cannot impose my idea on him. He was telling me that, and he's very convinced about that.

So that was not my time to challenge him. And he had told me in the past that he really didn't want to be challenged. So, you know, you know the kind of client would say, okay, challenge me. I want to see what I am not seeing. He has taught me in the path that he would rather, when he makes decisions, he doesn't want to be challenged. So okay, I let go.

But I do believe that sometimes, again, we don't know what we don't know. So the way that I see it, what you're not seeing is that he needs to take care of himself first, be completely healthy. And then when he's healthy, he do whatever he needs to do.

And he's late with some of his work in not the end of the world. What I like to do is ask my clients, if you look at the situation from five years from now, how will you see it? Because it will give perspective, like fulfilling yourself, looking yourself in the future. Sometimes we realize that what is so important now, if we're looking from here in five years, it will not be as important. It's like I used to have a partner who never, ever went absent to his job. He was always going to work. He was a teacher.

So he didn't want to let his students down. So no matter what, he would go to work every day, and he was very, very committed. And sometimes I would tell him, "Okay, you're too tired. You're not feeling great. Just take care of yourself, you know, calling sick today. They will find another replacement for you."

And he was not willing to do it. And then one day, when they had to make cuts in the district, because he was newer compared to other teachers, even though he was much more committed, doing much better work, he will let go.

And all of his work and all of his commitment, all of that, they didn't care about it. So I was saying, you know, look at that. You know, you work harder. You were a much better teacher than other people, and you still want to let go. Now you look everything, the whole thing at the distance. Will you still do what you did? And now that is a personal decision.

Some people may tell you, yes, I was still the same because these are my values. Some people may tell you, you know what? I didn't realize at the end of the day, they didn't care much about if I would have known that they would let me go as soon as I may not live my life there.

Have you seen that before? And you see that particularly working, people working in big companies where they really work really, really hard. And one day, they say, okay, goodbye. That's a generational issue too. Before people work in company for many years, nowadays, the average job is two, three years, but it's also different loyalty that companies have with employees and employee companies to work rights.

Stephen Matini: It's interesting when you talk about as coaches, we can challenge people, you can provide an observations, you can gently invite them. But then how people react is completely personal. And I still haven't figured out why some people seem to make that leap super quickly, some people never do that.

But I do know that all I can do is just to be the right distance from them, to be there, and then you always have to give them the space to maneuver and to decide what to do.

You have been working in leadership for such a long time. So over the years, you probably may have seen some shifts on paradigm, the way, you know, leadership is. And now, even with your book, you're talking about what is the type of leadership that is needed at this time.

It is impossible to predict the future. But if you had to kind of sense what leadership it will be five years from now, even further ahead, what do you see?

Damian Goldvarg: Well, my, I would say, prediction is that there is going to be much more technology in place. So I think that leaders will need to learn how to integrate technology, AI to their work more and more. It's necessary right now, and more and more in the future.

Some of the functions and some of the work will be done by artificial intelligence. And I believe that leader would need to integrate that and collaborate, be more collaborative. I think organizations are going to be much more horizontal in the future.

I believe that you already see an organization that are lowering all of these hierarchies and all of these flat organizations. So I see flat organizations where leaders are more like here, working as collaborators, where authority would change the authority. That for one part.

Also the networking, the collaboration with networking integrating networks of people working in different parts of the world at different levels. So learning how to integrate different groups of people, colleagues. So in all of this, as you are saying, one of the key elements is relationships, this building relationship, this empathy. If you cannot collaborate as a leader, you will be in trouble.

Stephen Matini: It would be really hard to survive in the long run.

Damian Goldvarg: Yeah, and also inspiration. Always leaders are going to be role models. So it's what kind of role model are you being? So it's what you are doing and how you've been, where you're coming from.

And I do believe that people really appreciate leaders who care about other people, who really genuinely care. And we're talking here that many times people are seeing, and this is a little bit more philosophical and sounds harsh, but some people see other people as objects and objects.

I mean, okay, you are here to do your work, so I can do my work so I can be successful. And we know in leadership, an effective leader is a leader that gets people who are working for them being effective.

So to the extent that the people under the leader are effective, the leader is effective. So the effectiveness of the leader depends on the effectiveness of his or her team.

You have an element where the leader is a role model and wants to inspiration and want to inspire people to want to do their best. That has been always like that. And I will continue to be that way. We want leaders who inspire us, who treat us people and not as objects.

We're talking about objects is easily looking at the reports as people who are going to accomplish for his or her success, or as they see in the reports as human beings, we need the flexibility to walk to work and deal with different needs.

At the same time, aligning the overall vision of the company with the vision of the team and his own vision of their own vision.

Stephen Matini: A huge, a huge element that is going to, it is changing everything. It's really the new generations that just simply think differently. I mean, you really have no choice. In a matter of five years, ten years that the workplace would be heavily dominated by Gen Z. And it's just that different way, you know, that they operate and exactly the way you describe it.

Out of everything we talked about, is there anything that you would say that would be important for our listeners to focus on as a starting point to start thinking about this new leadership?

Damian Goldvarg: Well, there is a field of study that is called foresight, foresight in the studies of the future. And when I worked with leaders in organizations for many years, and I did assessment centers. Assessment Center is where you assess a leader and see what are the strength and development needs. So I work for a company, a big company that they send me all over the world to do this assessment center.

So part of my job was to evaluate what were the strength and weaknesses of the leaders and then coach them, reach the strength, and overcome any obstacles that may be the way development meets. And there were two areas where most leaders worldwide were weak.

One was coaching and the other one was foresight or strategic thinking. Strategic thinking is about not just paying attention to the present and here and now, but looking at the future. It's what you're asking me, okay, what do you need to pay attention to the future? Okay, that is a skill.

And the strategic thinking is also looking at the future. So looking at the future and developing their people were two areas where leaders were not effective worldwide in all different industries. So because of that, I was very interested in that. And that's the reason why I started doing more trainings on coaching skills, meeting that need.

But the other area is foresight for the study of the future, paying attention to trends, paying attention to what's coming, and working not only for what you have in front of you right now, but looking at the future.

Success today, not success in the future. So understanding that and being prepared for that and looking at trends. And yes, you were right. We cannot predict the future, but we can pay attention to what's coming so we can be better prepared.

So I went and I took two certifications in foresight in two different places that leaders in the marketing, training foresight practitioners. So I went to receive foresight training because I wanted to build the skills and the muscles to do that kind of work with the leader that was working.

So I do believe that in the foresight, looking at places where you can look at trends, for example, one particular resource can be the Wall Street Journal. Every Friday, a section called Just About the Future is everything about the future. I don't remember the name exactly right now.

Also, you always help us to meet Harvard Business Review, looking at trends, just looking what their sense of we need to be proactive in paying attention to what's coming and we can go to different places. These are two key places where I look at.

Also I receive emails. This is for free. McKinsey reports, singular university, they report that they send also a weekly newsletter from them. So it's about looking for places where we can learn about trends and paying attention to that in the world.

Stephen Matini: Damien, thank you so much for spending time with me. I have a lot to think about.

Damian Goldvarg:Thank you for inviting me. I hope that this conversation inspires people to learn about these topics. And if they want to reach, if you want to follow up on the conversation, I don't know if you can share also my email.

If people have any questions or comments, I have also YouTube, like 400 videos on coaching and Spanish and English, what is free, and it's a resource. And the books also, you can find them in Amazon.

People may be interested in the books on Coaching for the Spanish speakers, bilingual people who are listening, the book on “Leadership in Currect Times” is coming up in Spanish next month. And the English one, I am working on it. I'm still looking for a publisher for that. So I am working on that.

Stephen Matini: Well, then I wish for your book to do super well and to inspire a lot of people.

Damian Goldvarg: Thank you very much.