1% Better Podcast: Tom Goodell

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1% Better: Tom Goodell, Founder of Linden Leadership
Quick Links

Learn more about Linden Leadership
Check out Tom Goodell’s book The Four Fields of Leadership
Connect with Tom Goodell on LinkedIn
Connect with Craig Thielen on LinkedIn

Key Takeaways

• The Importance of Self-awareness and Emotional Regulation in Leadership: Tom Goodell emphasizes the significance of leaders being able to control their own emotions and body, highlighting the transformative power of meditation for personal development. This aligns with the Field of Self, one of the Four Fields of Leadership, suggesting that self-awareness and emotional regulation are foundational for effective leadership and personal well-being.
• Complex Systems and Human Dynamics: Goodell’s eclectic background—ranging from playing the Asian game of Go, to studying mathematics and computer science, and engaging in Zen practice—contributed to his understanding of complex systems and human dynamics. This diverse expertise underscores the importance of viewing organizations not just as mechanical systems but as human systems that thrive on trust, joy, shared purpose, and high performance.
• The Four Fields of Leadership: The concept of the Four Fields—Field of Self, Interpersonal Field, Field of Teams, and the Organizational Field—is central to Goodell’s approach. These fields represent different dimensions of leadership and organizational dynamics, emphasizing that leadership development is not only about personal growth but also about enhancing interpersonal relationships, team collaboration, and organizational culture.
• Continuous Improvement and the Myth of Overnight Success: The podcast discusses the concept of achieving “1% better” as a method of continuous improvement. It challenges the myth of overnight success, highlighting that significant achievements often require years of dedicated effort, underscoring the value of patience, persistence, and incremental progress in both personal and organizational growth.
• Adapting to Complexity and Rapid Change: In a world characterized by rapid change and complexity, particularly with the advent of generative AI, Goodell advises leaders to focus on self-awareness and mindfulness. By becoming more aware of their internal states and reactions, leaders can better manage cognitive overload and make more effective decisions. This approach not only helps leaders navigate complexity but also fosters a culture of resilience and adaptability within their organizations.

1% Better Episode 6 Transcript

[00:00:00.170] – Craig
Hello. I’m Craig Thielen, and this is the 1% Better Podcast. Today I’m speaking with Tom Goodell, calling in from warm and sunny Minnesota, which we don’t get to say all that often over the course of the year, so we’re all happy about that. Tom is President and Founder of Linden Leadership, who focuses on establishing and sustaining leadership and cultures of high performance. Tom is the author of the book, The Four Fields of Leadership: How People and Organizations Can Thrive in a Hyperconnected World. An outstanding book, by the way – It’s one of my favorite books and I highly recommend it. So Tom and I met over 13 years ago, and I was going through a leadership development program, and Tom happened to be one of our instructors. He just was great and really brought to our whole program this notion of how you control your own emotions and your own body and picking up on those things. It was incredibly enlightening. In fact, I think it was probably a prelude at the time, Tom, to what is in the book one of the Four fields, the Field of Self. And I’m very pleased to say, Tom, you got me started on the whole world of meditation, and I’ve never lost it, that was a great inspiration. And so we’ve just been friends and colleagues and shared insights ever since then. So, Tom, welcome to 1% Better.

[00:01:16.390] – Tom
Thank you, Craig. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

[00:01:19.630] – Craig
All right, well, let’s jump in. Let’s start with your background. Tom, if you want to just briefly take us through… I’m always curious someone who’s in the leadership field, and you are so immersed in it, and we’ll talk more about your book… How did you get into leadership coaching, leadership development? It’s not something that there’s college degrees for, and a lot of people think, I’m going to do this. So very curious if you take us through your background and what led you into this work.

[00:01:47.120] – Tom
Yeah, thanks. It was a long and winding road. It was absolutely a journey, and it’s one that continues to this day. I always tell people I work with that I learn as much as they do in our work together. I started my father was very eclectic person. He was an inventor. He was very creative. I grew up in a household full of books on every kind of subject you can imagine. When I was very young, about five years old, I learned to play the Asian game of Go, and people who know that game know that it’s unique in that it challenges you both intuitively and aesthetically as well as logically. And I’ve always felt that playing Go from an early age really formed my way of seeing the world and interpreting my world. So I was raised in an environment full of curiosity and exploration and learning, and I think I inherited a lot of that spirit from my father. After high school. I actually went to work in film and photography for a number of years and then decided to go to college, where I studied mathematics, computer science, and biology. And about the same time, I started,

[00:02:55.190] – Craig
Studying the furthest thing away from leadership, as you can get. Right. Mathematics and science.

[00:03:01.450] – Tom
Exactly. And at the same time, I was beginning to immerse myself in Zen practice and started studying with the Zen master, Katigiri Roshi, here in Minneapolis. And all of that sounds like lots of disparate interests that don’t really have much to do, as you said, with leadership. But in fact, underlying all of them, I think there’s two threads or two themes. One of them is understanding complex systems… that art, science, music, mathematics, spiritual pursuit is all really about how do complex systems work. And it’s also all about human dynamics. And after college, I actually worked as a Biochemist for a few years and then became really intrigued by the explosion of computer technology and worked for several years in what today is called Enterprise Architecture. That term didn’t exist in those.

[00:03:51.380] – Craig
It didn’t. And I didn’t even realize that was one of your stints along the way.

[00:03:55.370] – Tom
Yeah, it was called Information Engineering back in those days, basically the same thing. And what I kept seeing over and over was that no matter how well we architected business processes, no matter how well we designed the data structures and the logic of the company, if human beings weren’t performing well if there wasn’t high trust, if people didn’t have high self-awareness, if they didn’t find joy in their work, if they didn’t have a shared purpose that they were passionate about, all that other work really didn’t make much difference. And organizations didn’t perform well. And I sometimes encountered organizations that performed really well that hadn’t actually done that much with their business processes or their data architecture, but they had great cultures and great leadership. So I became intrigued with the question of what really makes a human organization function. And human is the operative word there, because up until that time, I think we were all viewing organizations as mechanical machines rather than the systems that human beings create.

[00:04:58.660] – Craig
The industrial age. Right. That’s our leadership was modeled after either the industrial age or military.

[00:05:06.060] – Tom
Right, exactly. Those two things. And it’s all about logic and rigid control, and it denies the human spirit and the things that make human beings function well. So it was kind of a wonderful thing for me that I was alive and working and thriving at a time when all those different interests of mine could come together into a coherent view of, oh, this is how we can really understand human organizations. Which, of course, led to my work around The Four Fields and ultimately the book I wrote, and the work you and I have talked about many times over the years.

[00:05:37.690] – Craig
I love the fact that you kind of go back to being inspired by your father and the game of Go and this whole notion of systems thinking. I think it leads into the next question here, which is this whole notion of 1% Better, how do we improve? And I love the idea that you just have this sort of learning growth mindset. You’re always learning as you’re teaching, as you’re writing. And so this idea of 1% is a lot of times breakthrough results don’t happen by some big move. It’s this small, incremental, consistent improvement that happens that all of a sudden leads to something that’s a breakthrough. So I’m just curious for you this notion of improvement. And again, you introduced to me this notion that improvement is not just professional and how you show up and how you do your job, but how you view yourself and feel yourself and embrace your emotions and how you pay attention to those things. Because that is going to show up in one form or another of how you interact with people. So how do you think about improvement at the personal level and professional level?

[00:06:34.180] – Tom
Yeah, thanks. That’s a great question. And I also just want to say I love this idea of 1%. I saw a quote recently that I really thought was great. I don’t remember who said it, but they were writing about huge breakthrough successes that we see all the time in the news. And the writer said in their experience, every overnight success took at least five to eight years to develop.

[00:06:57.830] – Craig
It’s interesting that you say that, because we’re released episode three, which is Paul Batz, who’s another great leader that’s in the Twin Cities, and he indicated that in many cases takes 17 years to get a breakthrough result. And The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, it took 17 years to develop and then write the book. And so we always think about these breakthrough moments, but a lot of times it’s perseverance and just keeping at it that takes a long time to develop. It’s interesting.

[00:07:25.710] – Tom
Yeah, absolutely. And it tends to explode on the scene when it reaches a critical mass. And then we never see the five or seven or ten or 15 years that went into getting to that point where it exploded on the scene. So I really like this idea of 1% improvement. I’ve been taking tai chi classes and my tai chi instructor, somebody asked a question and she said you can’t make big change fast. You do it slowly and incrementally. You practice five or ten minutes every day, and over time you keep seeing this gradual evolution of improvement. So I think you’re really onto something with this 1% improvement notion.

You asked how I think about improvement in a business sense, improvements, about eliminating waste and increasing efficiencies and effectiveness. And as we talked about a few minutes ago, that was viewed as entirely an industrial, mechanical, logical challenge for a long time. And what happened was tons and tons of energy and years of effort and vast amounts of money were spent doing things that didn’t produce the results that people wanted. And finally they started to step back. And that’s where the Seven Habits showed up. It’s where Emotional Intelligence showed up. It’s. Where Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline showed up. All of them saying, you know what, our industrial military approach to these things is not going to create thriving human systems and we need to look at them differently.

So to me, to create a thriving human system, you have to look at what makes human beings function well. And that is not typically it’s not essentially a cognitive logical question. It’s a question of introspection and understanding what actually happens inside human beings moment to moment, day to day, that determines their behavior. You can teach someone the ideas of trust all day long, but the minute they get emotionally triggered, they’re not going to trust somebody no matter how well they understand that. But if you can help them recognize inside themselves, oh, they just did.. this other person just did something. And I noticed that I started to get tense physically and my emotions, I started to get defensive. If I notice that, then I can regulate that and I can shift how I am. So I respond to them in a way that instead of creating conflict, creates curiosity and collaboration. That’s really where high performance comes from, is through self-regulation and the management of our relationships and then our teams and our enterprises.

[00:09:56.990] – Craig
So one question before we jump into the book, you engage a lot with different leaders and different organizations and so you see a lot of different behaviors. And I’m sure you see a lot of leaders and organizations going through this shift of this old industrial age thinking, command and control. And the world is not a command and control world… it’s moving too fast and it’s too emergent. And I think the world shifted to what you were alluding to, that people are starting to almost awaken to. It’s just not about me showing up 8 hours and doing my job. It’s, do I get enjoyment? Am I fulfilled? Is it mission driven? What we used to call work life balance, which I think even that term is even improper, like they’re two separate worlds that don’t collide. Well actually, we’re a human, so it’s all one. So what do you see as the biggest obstacles that leaders today face?

[00:10:46.030] – Tom
Well, I can think of that question on two different levels. One is what are the obstacles out there in the world that they face? And the other is what are the obstacles inside themselves that they face? I think out there in the world biggest challenge they face is the complexity of the world. And I think even though we’ve made huge progress in the last 40 years around understanding the importance of human dynamics, there’s still a very strong tendency to resort back to the false security of being logical and analytical rather than paying attention to how do people feel, what do they need in the moment, what’s actually happening in them and in our relationship. So I think in the world outside, it’s the complexity of that that is the biggest challenge that leaders face, because, as you said, the world is changing too fast. We can’t predict the future anymore, even in very short terms often. I think internally, the challenge that leaders face is the challenge of really becoming deeply self-aware and learning to regulate themselves, so they actually are as fully resourced as they’re capable of being. So they actually can tap not just their analytical intelligence, but their emotional intelligence and their intuition and their creativity, so that they can respond in the moment to whatever needs to be addressed in the moment and respond in a way that’s effective rather than kind of wrote from what they’ve learned from books. So I think that it’s that internal growth and development that’s the challenge on the inside for leaders today.

[00:12:19.130] – Craig
And do you see, Tom, that it’s more acceptable today? And when did this shift happen, where it used to be all about your job and there was certain protocol in Corporate America, so to speak. But what you discussed, that was work related, very scientific, very structured, very organized, versus the people side of things, the spiritual side, the full person’s talents and interests, what’s going on in their life and in their head and then their emotions. I mean, clearly it seems like in the last five years, it’s now more mainstream. I was just at a breakfast and I listened to a gentleman who leads up a major corporation in the Twin Cities. And the question was, what do you recommend to other leaders? And one of the two things he recommends was find a place to decompress, like, find a place where you can unwind yourself, whether that’s meditation or fishing or whether it’s working in the dirt or whatever it is, find that and do it consistently, because that’s an investment in yourself. That wasn’t something we heard ten years ago or 15 years ago. So I’m curious because you introduced me to that 13 years ago, have you seen a shift? And I’m just curious, from your perspective in your career, how have you seen that shift?

[00:13:28.920] – Tom
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think my career has spanned that transformation in our understanding of business and human organizations. And it continues, which is really encouraging, that I continue to see more and more places that are open. When I was doing this work 20-25 years ago, people really looked at me like, are you out of your mind? Are you really going to be…

[00:13:51.870] – Craig
Got to be honest with you, Tom. When you showed up and we had all these speakers come in and everyone had their topic, you were the ‘gray duck’ or you were the person that didn’t fit in with the other topics. In the first maybe five or ten minutes when you were talking about this, I’m like, what is this about? What does this have to do with leadership? And I kind of felt myself pulling back, and I’m like, well, let’s just be open, and you did a great job, I think, giving us some exercises and let us practice it. And that was my reaction 13 years ago. It’s like, what is this about? Right?

[00:14:22.450] – Tom
Yeah, absolutely. To your point, it is. People are much more open and curious and interested. I think it’s because they’ve seen that the old ways aren’t working. There’s a couple of real challenges with that. I think just as the kind of organisms that we are, we tend to really go cognitive fast because it feels safe to go cognitive and think about things. And I think if you recall from the exercises we were doing in those programs 13 years ago, they weren’t cognitive. It wasn’t, here, I want you to understand how this works. I want you to actually feel what happens when you do something, and it’s that self-awareness piece of your body and your emotions which really run faster and in front of your cognitive, your thinking process.

[00:15:08.290] – Craig
Oh, yeah, it’s like a split second compared to seconds or minutes or months before you catch up with your emotions, sometimes maybe years, for many people. It must be somewhat rewarding to you to see, because you are kind of an early trailblazer, so to speak. Leveraging this in the corporate environment must be somewhat fulfilling for you to see. It kind of come full circle for it to be so mainstream and accepted now. We got a long ways to go yet, but if you look back, it’s come a long ways.

[00:15:39.020] – Tom
It has. I think it’s come a long ways. There’s some real risks and concerns that I have about how I see it developing today. Having become mainstream, it often is treated again as, let’s do a PowerPoint presentation and explain some concepts, and then people can go back to work. And that’s not transformational. That’s just cognitive. It’s more logical and analysis and back to the notion of 1%, as you know, from your own life and your own journey. It takes time, and it takes repeated practice. And often people will say to me, I worked with this CIO in a huge manufacturing company, and he was a great guy, but he also could get really aggressive and angry with people. And to his credit, he wanted to work with me around that, and I worked with him and also with his team. And maybe six months in, he and I also heard from his team saying things like, you know, I don’t know when he changed, but he’s different now.

And so it’s that willingness to stay in the practice, because often these practices don’t show a five minute return or a ten minute or a two day return, it’s just over time. So I think one thing is the willingness to because we really are a culture of instant gratification. I want to send my people to a two-day workshop and then they come back and everything’s fixed and it’s not like that. So I think that’s a concern and a challenge. The other is that I think it’s easy for the work to become commoditized. I mean, there’s a million self-help books out there. And if you look at the research, reading self-help books really doesn’t make much difference in people’s lives other than a short term feel good from reading the self-help book. It’s in the practices and often in having a coach or a mentor or a teacher or a guide of some sort to be in there with you. So I think what’s important is that we really remain true to the commitment to deep practice and ongoing practice and don’t allow ourselves to get fooled into thinking we can commoditize this and have quick bites that answer these deep questions and do these deep transformations.

[00:17:43.960] – Craig
Well, that’s 1% Better. And the great sort of irony about it, like meditation is very mainstream now, even to the point where now there’s very popular apps that you can have that sort of guide your meditation. And I heard a person finally kind of state the obvious on the podcast, saying, the last thing I would want to do to meditate is to get my phone out and to pull up a meditation app, because it kind of is the complete opposite of going internal. And now you’re still dealing with this technology and gosh knows what sort of waves you’re having with the Wi-Fi and with the phone waves. And it’s kind of the opposite of meditation. It’s our way of we have to turn everything into a technology, into a process, into short, quick hit things.

And so the other thing I heard that was a simple truth, which is people talking about why I want to get enlightened. I think some guru, I don’t remember who it was, Ramdas or one of them, said, first thing you have to do is take the outcome out of the equation. If you’re trying to get some sort of immediate reaction or some sort of outcome, you have completely lost the point. Right? The point is the process. The point is not, I got to a certain point, now I’m enlightened or now I’m Buddha. If you’re even thinking like that, you’re a million miles away. It kind of goes back to basic.

Well, let’s talk a little bit about your book The Four Fields. I think it’s an incredible book and it includes all of what we’re talking about here, the introspection, the self, and then it includes your relationships with other human beings one on one, and then includes team environments and includes larger systems. So tell us a little bit about where did that notion of Four Fields… like, when did that into your mind? I think it’s brilliant, but where did that emerge from?

[00:19:24.150] – Tom
So it definitely was an evolution. We did talk about how long it takes to do some of these things. I think I started journaling for the book in 2001 or 2000. I started seriously writing it in 2012 when it was published in 2019. So it was definitely a long evolutionary journey. Many of the concepts in The Four Fields were there for me and I worked with them for a long time. It was somewhere in that, probably first five or eight years of working on the concepts for the book, that the notion of fields really came up. And again, I have a strong science background. I was very aware of the notion of fields in the world of physics and in the world of science. And I started to recognize that a lot of what I was working with really is human fields. And as I say in the book, I believe human fields are real. We’ve all had the experience of running into somebody, a friend or a work colleague and looking at them going wow, what happened? Or what’s up? And they didn’t say anything. We just sense that something’s up or walking into a meeting and right away knowing that everybody’s excited or everybody’s worried and you pick that up without anybody saying anything. And that’s the human field. And we actually do, there are experiments today that demonstrate the human fields and we do those in some of our workshops.

[00:20:41.690] – Craig
Like you said, every single person, if you go, have you ever walked up to someone and you feel positive energy, or you feel negative energy? Of course we all do it right? And it’s such a great analogy or tie in. And of course, energy is a big part of the spiritual world and a lot of the new age is about energy and everything is energy and everything is a wave. And so this notion of a field, I really like it because we all have fields we give off and we sense them. I think everyone that’s so intuitive on just how we interact with other people or it really is brilliant and it ties to the science world with magnetic fields and all sorts of different fields that we have. I just think it’s so appropriate, especially for the four that you’ve chosen because I think people, they know it, but no one’s really put words to it before.

[00:21:32.640] – Tom
Well, yeah, and some of the questions I was really in, in looking at how do we understand the human dynamics of organizations. Were around… we’ve got this huge amount of literature around leadership and culture and trust and process and information and all this stuff. And as I say in the book, it was much like a Tower of Babel where there were all these different ways of looking at these things, but we didn’t really have a coherent, consistent integrated view. And in the sciences, what scientists are always looking for what they call first principles or unifying principles. So like in the early 20th century in physics, there were all these experiments with light and with time and with waves and particles and it was very confusing. And then Einstein came along and said, well, E equals mc squared, very simple, profound, simple equation. And all these things, suddenly you could see how they all emerged from that. So I was looking for the unifying principles for human dynamics in organizations and I really believe that disciplines of The Four Fields provide that. And what we’ve seen over and over as we’ve worked with organizations using The Four Fields is that overall, the dynamics of the organization become very healthy and trust goes way up.

And I’ve seen some wonderful examples of where just the recognition of the Fields and the dynamics and the practices around them fundamentally shift relationships and the quality of teams. So that what was previously dysfunctional and not performing well turns into sustainable high performance. And one of the things I’ve always talked about with the four fields is that it’s a method for creating high performance that can last for generations that have truly become sustainable.

[00:23:13.310] – Craig
I can see that. And I think a lot of times companies, they try to say we’re going to drive this change and it’s organizational wide and we all know that change happens, doesn’t happen as a corporation or as a department, it happens at the individual person level. So the fact that we’re putting all four of those levels on the table and a lot of leaders are like I want my team to work better. If you’re not comfortable with yourself or you’re not really at peace with yourself or have clarity of mind and know what your true north is or know where you are going as a person, well, how do you expect your team to gel? And so to be able to have those Four Fields, those four filters, so to speak, and say, well, how am I doing it at this field, in this field? Because they’re all interconnected, right? You can’t have a great organization unless you have great teams and you have to have people that are feeling great about their role and all that. And so it really does connect the dots where many other books or viewpoints sort of leave off the self or leave off the organization or leave off the one on one, is also an important field.

[00:24:15.810] – Tom
The interpersonal field? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. The Four Fields you just asked for your listeners, The Four Fields are the Field of Self, which is how am I showing up and managing and regulating myself, my inner state. The Interpersonal Field, which is what happens when two fields of self come together in a relationship. And I believe that each field has a wisdom and an intelligence and capabilities that are greater than the parts. So I know that in my relationship with you, we’ve created things that neither one of us would have created separately. So there’s an intelligence there in that relationship. And then you have the Field of Teams, and then you have the Enterprise Field, and each field is composed of the fields within it. So to your point, often I’ve been asked to come in and work with a team that’s not functioning well. And what we see is the team’s not functioning well because the relationships among the team members aren’t good.

[00:25:06.120] – Craig
Exactly those interpersonal relationships are somewhat dysfunctional or spread.

[00:25:09.420] – Tom
It’s a good diagnostic tool for seeing where do we actually have to intervene.

[00:25:13.820] – Craig
Let me ask you this. What’s the most practical advice you could give a leader, or leaders who just have this feeling, which I think many do, that the world is just moving too fast, it’s too complex, as you say in the book, hyper-connected, and it’s overwhelming. Now we have a new emergent, Generative AI world, and it is now mainstream, and it’s incredibly intimidating, to say the least. And so what would be the most practical advice you could give a leader that feels this and feels like I or my team can’t keep up?

[00:25:47.780] – Tom
The first thing I would say is, I think it’s quoting the Bible, know thyself. Step back from the cognitive overwhelm is we live in a world that’s designed to create cognitive overwhelm, and we’re all exposed to it. Whether you’re leading a big corporation or just raising some kids or raising some dogs. We live in a world of overwhelm. And the place you have to start is by stepping back and learning, as your previous person was saying, learn how to decompress and create a practice of decompression. Then in that decompression, really start to study yourself, really start to notice first how does your body responding to circumstances like under stress. I know my core starts to tighten. I know that my jaw starts to tighten. Learn that about yourself, because that both gives you great information. Oh, I’m beginning to get stressed and I’m beginning to get reactive. If I notice that, then I become a choice about it. We say choice follows awareness. So if I become aware of what’s happening in me, I can be a choice about how I am, and then I become more aware of what’s happening in others, and I’m at greater choice about how I interact with them.

And so it moves out from the field of self into the interpersonal into the field of teams. And I think what happens with leaders who really do these practices, they no longer become overwhelmed by cognitive overload, and they become much more intuitive and sensing. So they’re able to be in any context and sense what that context needs in the moment and then respond in the most effective way possible. And that’s an intuitive aesthetic practice as much as it is cognitive. And so, again, I say in the book, it all starts in the Field of Self. I think self-mastery is the challenge for leaders today, and everything else follows that.

[00:27:34.720] – Craig
I love that. And it’s also more authentic, right? Because you’re paying attention to yourself, and that’s allowing a more authentic person, which there’s been lots of books around that.

[00:27:44.600] – Tom
Well, then you experience greater joy, and the people that you lead and the people around you see you as a joyful person, and they’re attracted to that. Yeah.

[00:27:53.510] – Craig
There goes a positive energy field. Right?

[00:27:56.140] – Tom
Exactly.

[00:27:56.920] – Craig
You start attracting people, and good things happen. Well, hey, last question on 1% Better is looking back at your career, if you had one thing to share with your grandkids or the younger version of you, a little piece of wisdom, what would that be?

[00:28:10.480] – Tom
I think it’s the same thing I said for leaders. I would say, know yourself.

[00:28:14.640] – Craig
I think that’s a Gandhi quote, if you want to change the world, start with thyself. Right?

[00:28:20.120] – Tom
Yes.

[00:28:21.580] – Craig
Well, thank you so much Tom, we can talk forever. I appreciate everything that I’ve learned from you and really enjoyed our conversation today.

[00:28:29.780] – Tom
Thank you, Craig. It’s always a joy and for me, always a learning experience to be in conversation with you.