"Be open, perceptive and humble about whether your activities are leadingto what the world and the future demands of you. Then you are ready for the future."
Having enthusiasts in your company who enjoy their work, are proactive, think about what they do and lead the company in the right direction.
This is the dream of perhaps every owner who grew up from the 1990s driving methods.
So why do so many people fail?
It should be remembered that these enthusiasts are usually not only experts in their own fields. But they are also mature individuals, open to the kimpulses of the environment and humble to what they themselves can do.
Why should they go to you if you are not? That's the million-dollar question.
Yes, leadership is changing and the demands on bosses and owners are changing. That's why I took someone who has been following global trends for a long time to study this topic and bring them to us in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Someone who knows how important it is to constantly work on yourself. Someone who knows how to build a great team. And then what to eat. That someone is ... Vladimír Tuka, MCC, co-owner and CEO of Neuroleadership s.r.o., one of the most famous coaches and the first holder of the highest coaching certification of the International Coach Federation. I was interested in ...
🔸 How important is humility for a person?
🔸 How to get engaged and proactive people out of passive people?
🔸 How to find your own "why" within the organization?
🔸 What are the principles of building a good team?
🔸 What impact does coaching have on a company's profitability?
HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN OPENNESS AND HUMILITY (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Before I introduce my guest, I'd like to ask you a favor. If you've liked anything on Zážeh so far, if you've taken away an idea, if you've written something, if something has pushed you somewhere, I'll ask you to subscribe. That way you won't miss any more episodes or any more guests, and you'll help me navigate the social media algorithms a little more smoothly so I can invite even more great guests like today's one. Today, I want to cover a topic that I've been working on with a guest, why the boss should be the coach and why he shouldn't put it off. To do that, I've invited Vladimir Tuka, hello.
Vladimir Tuka
Hello.
Introduction of the guest and where is his favourite place in the Krkonoše Mountains?
Martin Hurych
Vladimír is one of the best known coaches in the Czech Republic, the first holder of MCC certification according to the International Coaching Federation and the co-owner and CEO of Neuroleadership. Before we get into coaching, I like you because you are a fan of the Giant Mountains. Come on, tell me what place it is where you are guaranteed to always be alone, because the Giant Mountains are often a big mass destination these days. As a fan of all the backcountry trails, where is your favorite place to go?
Vladimir Tuka
People don't like to exert themselves too much, but if you go along the Buchar trail, you won't meet many people there, and if you go along the Petrský valley, then maybe to Pec, there aren't many people there either. The White Elbe Trail is beautiful, although quite full, but the Woodcutter's Trail is not so full. If you go back to Vítkovice, it's not so full there either.
What does he like in the mountains?
Martin Hurych
A lot of people here have some affection for the mountains. What do you think it is that we need mountains?
Vladimir Tuka
When you walk those 25, 35 km, at first you are still thinking about who knows what, but then the mind relaxes, you let go of everything and you start to perceive the beauty. In the winter it's about the fact that it's very white when you're on those skis and there's that majesty. We're not small, but we're not that big, and let's not kid ourselves about how
we are, because that humility is there in front of those mountains and it's completely natural. It's good to go there to recharge it.
How important is humility for a person?
Martin Hurych
How important is humility for a person?
Vladimir Tuka
In my opinion, increasingly important, because we are not alone here. Even the best are beginning to realise that they can't do everything on their own, and the times are getting more and more demanding and require new things. Even though many people don't like it, new things are logically and naturally connected with failures. When we are humble, we accept that there are obstacles, traps, not everything is as we think it is and we accept the reality as it is. Then we can reflect on it and figure out the way of behaving and acting that will help us get where we want to go. So that humility is increasingly important, and the higher up you are, the more important it is. The more you build up your ego and cockiness and status and importance, the more likely you are to fail.
How did he go from corporate to his own coaching practice?
Martin Hurych
You're a media active person, you have your own podcast, when I put you into Google a bunch of stuff popped up. Let's still take a few minutes to introduce maybe the people who name
Vladimir Tuka hears today for the first time. You started out in the corporate world, I have traced that, you say you started out in diplomacy, I have not traced that, and today you have a company that produces leaders and coaches. What was the path between these two poles?
Vladimir Tuka
This life teaches you. I just came back recently from a retreat with Professor Peter Hawkins, who says we all subscribe to the school of life, but we don't like the curriculum it offers. If you accept that, you put yourself in situations that force you to work things out. The interesting thing was, when I was studying, I was interested in psychology, it was a totally unique subject, but I was interested in it because it was about how people behave. Then I worked in diplomacy as a lawyer, international law of international organisations, something really very useful, and when the federation broke up I went into business. Every opportunity like that, every major change like that is a threat to our brain, but at the same time it's an opportunity. I didn't shine in corporations because I'm a big democrat and I don't think it's dignified to control people, whip them and sit on their backs all the time.
When I left that position, I was looking for my next path and it led me to coaching. Life puts you somewhere and it's all about where you direct your attention. That's what I know now, it's a question of attention, where you look for that place, you find it.
How to turn passive people into engaged and proactive ones?
Martin Hurych
You said it beautifully there that you were tired of pushing people to perform, to control, on the other hand my bubble often feels like it wants engaged employees, proactive people, but they tend to have that counterpart. When I did coaching training, they said that only those who let themselves be coached can be coached. So, if I don't want to have a directive style in the company as an owner or CEO and I want to introduce a participative and coaching style, how do I get these people moving who are not responding to any stimuli today?
Vladimir Tuka
There's a trap in the very word "stir". You will not change anyone, you will not convince anyone, you will not move anyone, we will move ourselves. Little do we remind ourselves that we must have a reason, a purpose for moving and we forget that. It's clear to us as bosses, we tell it how it has to be, we immediately roll it out to these people, they give us the nod, we're satisfied that we've come to an agreement, and then we get mad that the agreements aren't being fulfilled. Again, I'll come back to the neuroscience here as well, it's probably going to be with us throughout this podcast. One of the important insights about how the brain works, besides the fact that we're all different in terms of how that brain is built and how neurons are connected, is that we each have our own world. That's how that reality is reflected in our neuroconnections, in our heads, but we don't know anything else. If I'm going to act, I have to think about it in my world. It's not like someone tells me and I already know what to do. In the best of my will, I still have to spend quite a challenging period of time and effort translating that into my world and we forget that. That's why we have so little success because we try to push those people, but that's not what it's about, you have to win them over.
First they need to know why, and then we need to let them think about how to fulfill that why. They then get the intrinsic motivation, the intrinsic drive to do things because they understand them, and when we understand things and know what to do, that's the first prerequisite for being successful and doing them.
Martin Hurych
What I see a lot is the following scenario. The entrepreneurs of the 1990s must have had a completely different management style, because otherwise they probably wouldn't have gotten anything out of the country. But as they grew personally, they de facto grew into someone who shouldn't be using that style anymore, but the company isn't doing that rapid evolutionary somersault. What advice would you give in this situation? How do I change from being the directive boss to being the the coach of your own people and the team coach of those around you, and at the same time not to move, but to give impulses to those people to move themselves?
Vladimir Tuka
The cookbook is fairly simple, but not easy. We, when we set out to do something, very often base it on our desires, our will, what we want, but the world is not built on what we want. The world is built on what it needs and we have to live up to what the world needs. The world is terribly complex and unpredictable at the moment. Today it is survival, but in the future it is prosperity, not just survival, but prosperity. Those are the two key motivators for people, survival, managing the threat, prosperity, going for the rewards, and that is not so simple. This is where we need these leaders to realise who they are here for. They are not here for themselves. When I come to coach leaders or work with leaders, I ask what is their purpose, what is their life, who needs them, and what does the future need from them. Look around you and look for the kind of development, the kind of behavior that will not only benefit you, but that your benefit will have a huge positive impact on those you work with. This is a fundamental change of mindset. It's not about me wanting to change, it's about me realizing or not realizing that I need to change and that's where the motivation is much stronger.
Martin Hurych
There are not many people like that.
Vladimir Tuka
There aren't many of them, and I don't want to pass my soup right now, but these people who realize they can't do what they want to do, they call their coaches and they just call me and then we talk about these things. The transition from that directive to participatory style is otherwise very challenging. The current leadership is moving at the highest levels towards collective and collaborative leadership. There was a heroic leader in the 1980s, Jack Welch and his ilk, who was that hero and everybody followed him. The 90s says it's not quite that, it's not just about that, but we have to have those followers. That was looking a lot more interesting, I'm gonna tell you where to go, I'm gonna give you a vision, I'm gonna give you this, and you're gonna follow me, because that's the main thing. It turns out that even that's not enough. The current times are about leadership is about relationship, it's a social process between the leader, the leadership and the third side of that triangle is the purpose of why that relationship exists, it's not without purpose. It's not about I'm an employee, you're a manager, you do this and we have some struggles against each other. There's a purpose to our relationship and we're not here to fight, we're here to fulfill that purpose. If those leaders realize that, then they can adjust their actions because it's not about them being great, having great people, it's about those great people and them being great needing to fulfill a purpose. If they know that purpose, then things will happen.
Martin Hurych
So now are we talking about a purpose type, Synk's why is the company here, or are we talking about something more particular on a human level?
Vladimir Tuka
That's the why of Synk, the why is very personal, that is, what is my personal why, my mission, and that's not enough. That's not so important, what's important is how your personal why relates to why you're here, why you're in this relationship, why the company is here, what the future asks of you. Then you go in that direction and of course that translates into your personal why, but this is something, the why, that you don't just look for in yourself. Let's look around why we are there for others, where they need us because we ourselves draw from others.
Martin Hurych
Can we give some real-life examples to give us an idea of what that purpose is at the moment?
Vladimir Tuka
At the moment we have a team, it doesn't have to be the top team, it can be a team that has a certain place. That place and that team's mission is not what they make up to be a mission, it's that they think about who their work serves. We have internal clients that we're here for, we need something from somebody, so we need to communicate with them. Here we may have external clients, the boss upstairs, subordinates downstairs, in short the team has a group of people and they need something from us. We're not there to do whatever we want, we're there to fulfill what we're there for. The multistakeholders that we're there for, that need us, when we fulfill those, that's the purpose that we're there for.
How to find your own "why" within the organization?
Martin Hurych
I understand that. On the other hand, a lot of smart books now say that I have to find meaning in this work. A lot of people would look for muss in it, I have to, I have a bunch of people I have to satisfy. So how do I find the positive in it so that I enjoy the work and I'm not always looking at it with this perspective of, you have to push me into this because I'm not enjoying it here? I understand that I'm sure it's going to be different at different levels of that human being and knowing. The moment you have, say, a manufacturing company, I suppose you can only use it at most somewhere at the administrative or white collar level. But the experience of manufacturing people is that they find that way of motivating themselves to do it, much harder.
Vladimir Tuka
Again, this is very pragmatic. Nowhere is it written that sugar and the whip may not work, but nowhere is it written that even for people who are mostly routiners, sugar and the whip is perfect. Because the more pressure, unless it is extreme, the greater the performance, but at the expense of creativity. But that's not where you want them to be creative, that's where you want things done the right way. That's more where the master is, he's the manager, but he's not the leader. It doesn't mean that those people, even though they know what they have to do, they don't know why they have to do it.
So there's always some part of why we're here. That 10, 20, 15%, some part of it will allow those people to think about their work and come up with some improvements. But they have to respect something, that's the muss, you can't do that, it doesn't work without that, but there is still that human element of leadership, of having a purpose. Let's look at those customers of ours, how to better and better equip those cars to meet the needs of the customers.
How to start implementing this approach in practice?
Martin Hurych
So, going back to the original topic, can we tell you a practical cookbook on how to get started, for example? Let's say we're listening to someone who says it's great what those two are saying, it makes a lot of sense, but how to start implementing these things in their company is still not clear to them.
Vladimir Tuka
Development has three components. 70% is practice, 10% is education, online courses and 20% is reflection. So it's not only doing, but also reflecting. That's what is considered a certain standard today. But before you even start to educate yourself, to develop yourself at all, you have to have a reason. People feel that they keep having the same failures over and over again, they are stuck and they don't understand how it's possible. That's called the heat experience, the burning experience, and that's where the engine has to be. If everything is going well, don't change anything, it's pointless, it's exhausting, it's stupid, but when you bump into it, it keeps repeating itself, then it is time for you to look for another way of doing and thinking.
If what you're doing, the way you're thinking, what's driving you, is no longer working, then it's probably a good idea to learn about other people's views or other approaches, other practices. If you're an expert, you've become an expert, you're the best in the whole company, and now suddenly you're a manager, because then you're sure to make a fantastic team as well, then it could be the other way around. Because we have this expert mindset, I'm the best, I know best, but it doesn't work.
We have to come to the point where we start to think that there are other perspectives and it's not about being the best, it's about using the expertise of others, how to win them over, how to draw them in. That's where we start looking at different approaches, talking to different people, maybe going to another department for some experience. A white collar worker will go into manufacturing, spend a month there and suddenly find that it's a bit different, or go into a charity and suddenly there are different perspectives.
The third component is that if this doesn't work, this works for others, what will work in my practice. That's where it's about starting to try. I'm fascinated by firms that tell me to tell them my best practices for how a team should work. I say it can't be done, there is no team that is like theirs. I can give them some procedures, but there is no best practice, they need to create that themselves because it is part of their whole being and direction. I don't know it, you don't know it, but together we know we have a chance to figure it out. So those are the three components, I have the pain, I have the burning experience, I look for other worldviews, a really different mindset, and then I implement them in my practice. It's simple, but not easy.
How many of us are capable of real reflection?
Martin Hurych
Before we move on to teams, is there any idea how many people are even capable of such reflection? Going back in a big arc to the beginning, I have to have humility there, I have to be able to admit that I'm not the best and I have to fundamentally look for the cause in myself from the very beginning. But very often I hear the view that they are the jerks. I'm even reading a book right now called Surrounded by Idiots that describes exactly this. I'm not to blame for anything, I do what I can, everyone else around me are the jerks. How many people are there who are even capable of such reflection?
Vladimir Tuka
As far as I know, they're few and far between. But again, it's that they haven't come across enough to make them think about themselves. There's such a simple philosophy behind it. If I've been successful in the past, I must be successful in the future. It's nonsense. Past success will absolutely not guarantee future success; on the contrary, the more I try to replicate the past, the more chance I have of failing in the future. The times are changing so fast that we have to keep learning. So I don't know the number, I don't know the percentage, it's probably not that many, but it's probably going to increase, because it's quite difficult, in my opinion, to stand up to the old way of thinking nowadays.
What are the principles of building a good team?
Martin Hurych
We talked about coaching before the shoot, you have a production of coaches both internal and external. From what I'm seeing from afar, the coaching world, team coaching is becoming a very big trend.
Something tells me that since I'm swimming in one-on-one coaching, coaching my entire team will be dramatically more difficult. You've noted here that there are some principles to building a good team. Can we go over those principles here?
Vladimir Tuka
I'm taking Professor Peter Hawkins' approach and I'm taking it because in my selection of all the courses that I've seen in the world and that I've applied to and gone through, it seems to me to be the most meaningful. The first and fundamental thing is that every team needs to know why they exist as a team, but it's not that we're going to make it up, we're going to make a mission statement. We need to know who we're here for and what they need because that's why we're here. We need to know what those investors want from us, what our customers, suppliers, employees or the community need from us. If we don't know why we are here, if we make it up, we want to be first, we want to be the best, we are just pitchforking ourselves because nobody cares about being first, about being the best. We depend on the others, there is this interdependence. So you have to understand the purpose and that purpose is independent of who is on the team. That purpose is determined by the very existence of that team and whoever comes there has to come to terms with that.
Then we have to go to what. That again is about what we need to accomplish to fulfill the purpose, the long-term goals, the KPIs, the team KPIs, what are the roles, what do we need to accomplish this year, what is the whole charter of that team. That's where we're headed. That team needs to be able to act in a way that they can fulfill the why and the what. How do we internally need to act, learn to work together in a way that we're able to fulfill the why and the what? That's still not enough.
There is another thing, because we are not here for ourselves and we need to keep reminding ourselves of that. We are here for that and for someone else, so we also need to be able to communicate with the teams next door in the office, with clients, with suppliers. But even that's not enough, because if we stay with those four, we're de facto doing that classic thing of adapting the past for the future. We'll do more of what has worked, we'll tweak something a little bit, but that's not enough. We still need to increase our team capability and capacity to meet the needs of the future. If that team is really going to deliver on what it is there for and ensure the prosperity of itself, its division, its whole company, then it needs to learn to be ready for the future. These are 5 disciplines that are good to learn.
That's where coaches are useful because when I meet with managers and top leaders, they tell me to take care of a person because they don't have the time. It's normal because the day-to-day business is demanding, they have so much going on, and that caring for those people under them is demanding. The
The key message is that we will prepare the team and the leader together. I will coach the team first to meet all the 5 disciplines and he will gradually take over, so that when I'm done, he will coach his team. It goes on forever.
Martin Hurych
I'll allow myself one devil's advocate question. Isn't asking you to take care of them an abdication of responsibility?
Vladimir Tuka
It would seem so, but many leaders don't have the training to take care of their people's development. If you need to work with that person, you also need to have the skills, and not all leaders are true coaches. A leader coach is not a coach, a leader coach is about the transaction. It's about addressing those things maybe for the future, but not worrying so much about development. These people are doing something and they're learning, they're developing, but the long-term development is not there. There are things that a person, even a potentially very good worker, needs to unlearn, needs to learn something and doesn't have time to do. So it's a handover of responsibility to the coach, of course, but the most important part of the responsibility still remains with the leader because they are in contact with that person day in and day out. He has to make sure that what he's figuring out, what he's putting himself into, is going to fit in and he has to give him feedback. In that day-to-day contact, he has to support him in his development.
What impact does coaching have on a company's profitability?
Martin Hurych
Let's do a little marketing window now. There are a bunch of people who suspect that they should go down this path or are already going down this path to compete, there are a lot of doubters, for example. Let's tell them, if I decide to transform my company in this way and I go into this coaching, participative, collaborative leadership, what's it going to give me in the end. We're posting for small businesses, the owner is looking for some return on investment in almost everything they do. What will this change bring me in your experience?
Vladimir Tuka
Let me put it a little differently. It fascinates me how often business owners and top executives look at coaching and developing people as an expense. I say no way. You've got a person or a team here, what's all the cost that's around? They'll say some amount. What percentage is that person or that team fulfilling what they're supposed to be fulfilling? 50%, 40%, 30%? If you want them to fill up to 80% after a year, after two years, what do you save? The calculation is very simple. Again, it's not like I'm gonna fix this guy. 70% of the development is in the practice and the owner or the CEO cannot absolve himself of responsibility. We will work to make sure that he or she acts thoughtfully, that he or she changes, that he or she thinks, that he or she really matures, because sometimes he or she needs to mature into those roles, but they have to provide that day-to-day support. In that combination, the payoff is high.
Martin Hurych
Frankly, I wouldn't want to join a company that treats coaching as an expense. I was more thinking of it as showing people who are thinking of it as an investment, which is a completely different mindset, to show that it really pays off. Plus, I guess we can say that we're talking about working for years. So if I invest for two years ahead, what are the success stories that you see?
Vladimir Tuka
These are obvious. Notice how many teams are de facto made up of experts. I'm an expert in finance, in HR, in technology, in logistics, and just stay out of my business. Everything but collaboration. 6 x 1 is 4 because we're going to have to defend, fight it out, whereas if they collaborate, 6 x 1 is 7, 8. That's the logic of the thing. The key thing is that there are complex challenges, problems facing these teams, and you can't solve those, they don't have linear solutions. They have to solve them together, they have to find consensus on how to solve them together, but they also have to be able to work together to do that. In the same way, a lot of companies treat all complex issues as complicated, they have a solution and they know the solution. But that's not true, it's really complex, it's something else. In the same way they confuse technical with adaptive problem, technical problem, we have a solution, we will find it, adaptive, we have to learn. But we have everything, like it's technical, we already know how to do that, and again we're progressing from the past to the future, even though it explicitly forces us to learn something, otherwise we won't. That collaboration is necessary, and by the way, the owners and those top teams set the leadership tone for the whole company. If there are silos then they can't be surprised because the silos exist at the top.
Martin Hurych
That's a great point, I have a few management teams running through my head right now. What did we forget?
Vladimir Tuka
I think the only thing is to be really open, to perceive and to realize with humility whether what we do leads to what the world and the future asks of us, because we are not here for ourselves. When that humility and openness comes, then we will be ready to go looking for a new solution, not excuses, not gossip, not blame, but a new common solution. That, I think, is the way from today to the future.
Is it worth reading the literature on leadership?
Martin Hurych
That's answered my traditional last question about what we're going to carve in stone, because this certainly deserves it. Is it worth reading the literature that is generally available at this point? Because I think a lot of the literature is stuck somewhere in the 1990s.
Vladimir Tuka
I have always looked abroad for inspiration. It's not that I don't trust our people, but what I've been exposed to has never convinced me. So I really researched and looked among the best, and that's why I met and became personal friends with David Rock, became friends with Professor Peter Hawkins. I draw on them, I look for them and I think that's really the top, that's the absolute top. Learning from abroad is very important, and the value-added and the bounty that I bring is that I bring what I think is useful to our people abroad here because we deserve it. We cannot stay in the past. Certainly in the world today there are already a number of very interesting, very pragmatic, useful and very powerful approaches to changing things. One more point, reading yes, being critical yes, and not being satisfied with just reading and knowing, that's about nothing. Knowing, knowing and applying are the three things without which everything in our knowledge is just garbage in our head.
What are the trends in coaching and personal development?
Martin Hurych
So what is in the world that is coming at us that we don't see yet? What are the trends that we need to prepare for, or alternatively, since we're talking about reading, what should I be reading and applying to stay on the cutting edge of coaching, team coaching and leadership?
Vladimir Tuka
For me, definitely Leadership Team Coaching by Peter Hawkins is voluminous, very practical and there are a lot of tools. Then there's also Cases, a book of cases, where the coaching on the ground is nicely demonstrated. Professor Kaltenbach is another one of those team coaches who already has a sound, he might be more acceptable to some people than Peter Hawkins. For me, it's certainly David Rock as well, and a whole plethora of neuroscientists who are not just behind the studies but are really already publishing and have something to say, like Daniel Siegel, Jeffrey Schwartz, and others.
Where the world is going, there will be fewer and fewer managers, middle management will be reduced, there will be much more distributed leadership as it appears. It's good for all the professionals who are tasked with getting the other people to be just that, to be leaders, to be prepared for that, so that they're not the smart ones who are going to tell the other people and constantly tell them they're stupid when they don't understand something. They have to be able to win them over. There will be fewer people on the payroll and far more corporate associates. There will be those suppliers, there will be specialists for this or that, who will no longer be inside the companies, but will be around the companies. Now I don't just mean coaches, not just trainers, but they will be in IT, they will be in marketing, they will be in HR. Companies will not just employ and fill all these functions with their employees. There are other things like different leadership, more stakeholder- oriented leadership development, it's not shareholder today. Profit at the expense of other stakeholders is really becoming something outdated. It's going out of the world.
Martin Hurych
This means that if the organization of where I exist changes completely under my hands, I cannot use what I learned, which was very likely the traditional hierarchical structure, or I will die.
Vladimir Tuka
That's right. There's this Darwin's Law that doesn't tell us that the one who adapts the most will succeed, but it also tells us that the one who can adapt and evolve with his immediate environment will succeed. There he will succeed, not just by himself, but together in that dynamic interaction. That's the message to anybody, if I'm somewhere, I look at what the situation is asking of me and what I'm going to give to the situation.
Martin Hurych
That's another sentence we can set in stone. Finally, I have one impertinent request. You've listed a bunch of authors here, can we throw, say, 5, 10 books on a simple A4 that you think are worth reading?
Vladimir Tuka
I'm sure. I'm thinking right now of Amy Edmondson, who is fantastic at teaming and psychological safety. That's also one of the thought leaders and leaders in that area today.
Martin Hurych
Thank you very much and I wish you to prosper at least as you have done so far and to be able to adapt to the environment that will change in this way.
Vladimir Tuka
I'll do my best. Thank you very much.
Martin Hurych
You see, we'll eventually have a required reading list for late summer, fall, Christmas, depending on when you listen to this episode. If we've jump-started and sparked an idea in you, something you have scribbled in front of you on your monitor or jotted down on your cell phone, we've done our job well. At that point I'll repeat my plea from the beginning, subscribe, like, maybe forward the episode to a friend, a co-host, if you feel like it could benefit them. You can help us get Ignition out into the world. Be sure to check out www.martinhurych.com/zazeh, where the bonus Vladimir just mentioned is already up at the moment. I have no choice but to keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.
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