Linda Ginzel, PhD has been a member of the Chicago Booth Faculty since 1992. She specializes in negotiation skills, managerial psychology, leadership, and executive development. Recent interest is focused on what she terms Leadership Capital: the courage, wisdom and capacity to decide when to manage and when to lead. In 2000 President Clinton awarded her a President's Service Award, the nation's highest honor for volunteer service directed at solving critical social problems. She is also the two-time recipient of the James S. Kemper Jr. Grant in Business Ethics. Professor Ginzel has been choosing leadership long before she decided to write this book. From pioneering the volunteer student council at Gorman Junior High School in Colorado Springs, establishing the first Psi Chi Chapter at Denver’s Metropolitan State College, creating the business of customized executive education at the Chicago’s Booth School of Business and founding the influential nonprofit organization KID. Her mission is to guide others in how to be wiser, younger. In addition to her responsibilities at Chicago Booth, Linda is the cofounder of Kids In Danger, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting children by improving children's product safety. She also served as director of the Consumer's Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports. Professor Ginzel is a charter member of the Association for Psychological Science, as well as a member of the Academy of Management.
In this episode, Dustin talks with Dr. Linda Ginzel about her latest book, Choosing Leadership: Revised and Expanded: How to Create a Better Future by Building Your Courage, Capacity, and Wisdom.
You'll discover why leadership is a choice and how to put the responsibility for personal growth and professional development in your own hands. Professor Ginzel explains the difference between choosing to manage and when to lead.
Choosing Leadership is filled with opportunities to answer tough questions of yourself, process your own lessons, reflect on your unique experiences, and create your best future self. It’s more than a book. It’s a lifelong companion on the road to being wiser, younger.
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Dustin Burleson:
I’m so honored to welcome Dr. Linda Ginzel to the program to discuss her latest book.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
So, wow. Let me tell you a little bit about the, it's a revised and expanded edition of Choosing Leadership. New publisher. I'm so proud of this concept. I call it a hybrid book, obviously, my COVID experiences of hybrid teaching. It's basically the same workbook, a little edited, not a lot. It's really the same workbook, but there's an additional hundred pages. And this hundred pages is, I call them leadership modules, and it's how to teach the activities in the workbook.
Dustin Burleson:
Very cool.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
I cannot tell you how excited I am. What I'm trying to do is to help people take more responsibility for their own growth. And I always say, "It's great if you have a teacher or I don't know, some expert come and talk to you about leadership or whatever." But you also, we, each person, everyone has wisdom and knowledge. And a lot of leadership is contextual and personal and a result of who you are, what you're trying to accomplish, who your audience is. There's no consensual definition of leadership. There's no one who has the answer for you. So if we go around looking for these answers, I mean, people will sell you anything you're willing to buy and you can get answers. But whether they're useful for you.
So my whole thing is that I'm trying to see the grassroots leadership development movement. I want people everywhere to be able to understand, appreciate how much knowledge they actually already have. And to articulate that, to value that, to share it. The idea I have about how to teach this is, I call it individual written reflection plus collective wisdom. So we spend a little bit of time by ourselves quietly with a pen. I will send you my green pen.
Dustin Burleson:
The green pen. I've heard about the green pen. Yes.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Yeah. Page 111. Pablo Neruda said that he wrote his poetry in green ink because green is the color of esperanza. Do you know what is esperanza in Spanish? Hope.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, I love it.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Love it. Green is the color of hope. It's beautiful. It's a great way, when I was an assistant professor at Stanford, one of my senior colleagues, Jeff Pfeffer, he's probably the most prolific writer in all of organizational behaviors, trained as a sociologist. He told me, "Linda, what we do, our students, we help them, we teach them how to manage meaning." And I thought, "Wow, what does that even mean, manage meaning? I have no idea what that means." So I'm slow, but good. 30 years later I'm figuring it out. And so the idea of the green pen is that it's a symbol. It's a symbol that kind of captures my gist, my essence. I'm very practical, very practical girl. And it's a pen. I always tell my students, "If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist. If you don't write it down, it's a figment of your imagination. And if you write it down, then it becomes data, the data of your own experience. You can collect data, you can organize it, you can store it, you can revisit it. But if it's in your mind, if it's in your imagination, we can alter that pretty easily.”
Our memory, our wishful thinking, all the biases, these cognitive biases that normal neurotics have. So normal neurotics is a term that, you won't find it if you Google it. There's no such thing as a normal neurotic. It's a term that I created for my students to help them understand the difference between therapy, clinical psychology, and what I do, which is experimental social psychology. And so what I say is that I only deal with normal neurotics. I don't have any experience or any training with the clinical population. Because everybody's always asking me, "Can you help me understand my crazy neighbor or my boss?" I say, "No, I only deal with normal neurotics people like you and me."
Dustin Burleson:
I like that phrase.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
It's great actually, because it's like we are, normal neurotics are pretty successful. We're pretty smart. We have a pretty high sense of self. And as a result, we go around trying to maintain or enhance our sense of self. And in psychology, this is called self-verification. If you were clinically depressed, I hope no one listening is clinically depressed, but if you were, you would seek people who have the same low opinion of you because it's congruent with your view of self. We don't like a discrepancy between how we see ourselves and how others see us. If we're not clinically depressed, we're normal neurotics. We go around seeking people and experiences that maintain or enhance our sense of self.
And so this is what drives all these biases and heuristics that people are talking about, behavioral economists have discovered social psychology and are writing about our biases and heuristics, overconfidence. Why are people overconfident? Because we want to believe that we're right. We have this sense. Why do we have hindsight bias? Because we think that we knew things. Of course we predicted that. Of course we knew that was going to happen. It's obvious.
Well, as I tell my students, if you don't write it down, how do we know you predicted that? You could really believe you did and it not be true. You can't go around writing everything down, so you have to decide what's worthy of further articulation. Anyway, but this is all about the pen. I have this mantra, repeat after me. "If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist." You want to repeat after me?
Dustin Burleson:
Let's do it.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
If you don't write it down...
Dustin Burleson:
If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Thank you. That's exactly right. So that's why I give a pen. And then the green pen, Pablo Neruda, hope. And it's so interesting because the idea with the symbol is that it should be relatively easy to... It's readily available. It's not expensive, so it's not a cheap pen, it's a Pentel Japanese good quality pen, but it's not expensive. So I don't have to say, "Can I afford to give green pens to all these students? Let me think. Do these students, should I give them to these and not to these?" No, I don't ask that question. Every one of my students gets a green pen. So I'm going to consider you, Dr. Burleson, I'm going to consider you one of my students. I'm going to send you a green pen.
Dustin Burleson:
Oh, cool. Thank you. I love the meaning. And I have been a long proponent with our members of writing it down. It doesn't happen if you don't. I love it. And I think if you go back and look at a lot of really inspiring people who kept journals or who kept notes, or even people in contemporary society. I think I listened to an interview with Jerry Seinfeld who said he always keeps a pen and notepad by the nightstand. Anywhere I am, there are five by seven cards and pens, because you'll have an idea and you'll think, "I'll remember it." And you go for a run, and you come back and you're like, "What was that thing I was going to send to that friend of mine? I totally forgot the name of that book." Or you hear an interview. My kids give me a hard time because I will constantly pull the car to the side of the road and jot something down.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
I do the same thing. I have sticky notes. So I put things that I want to remember on sticky notes. And then I have them all over my window at my office. I have them everywhere. I actually wrote for the graduating class, I teach at Booth, and they asked me to write a little, I don't know, blessing or words for the graduation. And I actually wrote about my sticky note collection. And I said that I go around collecting wisdom from others, and here's some of the wisdom that I've had that inspired me. From silly things like my favorite Peloton instructor is Sam Yo. He doesn't talk a lot, but every once in a while, at least the ones I... He'll say something really cool and I just love it. You can make money but you can't make time.
You can't buy time, you can't make it. So it's like, this is it. This is what we have. And just, I don't know, just little pearls. I know that sounds kind of not very deep, but it's actually really important to remember that we only have so much time, and we have to make the best of it. I always tell my students, my goal is to help you to be wiser younger. And what I mean by that is that, it's okay, we're all aging. And actually as we age, a lot of good things happen. There's research evidence that shows that as we age, we become better perspective takers. And that perspective taking is one of the key skills in successful outcomes, negotiated outcomes, both distributed more zero sum type outcomes and integrative more kind of win-win or integrative outcomes. So we actually become better perspective takers. We also become more trusting. Isn't that interesting?
Dustin Burleson:
That is interesting.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
I think it's because the world is actually not a horrible place in general. I mean, I know it depends on what situations you choose to enter and everything. But I think what happens is that when we're younger, we protect ourselves from bad things happening. And we don't realize that we're also protecting ourselves from good things happening. And as we grow older, as we have experiences that we process and integrate, we realize that trusting more is actually beneficial. And perhaps we trust we're better calibrated at trusting, but we do trust more as we age, and it's to our benefit. We also report being more satisfied with life. Now, I don't know if we just reduce our expectations, but it's great.
I was telling my son, I have a son who's in his late twenties. And he's like, "Mom, these are supposed to be the best years of my life." I'm like, "No way. I'm having the best years of life right now."
Dustin Burleson:
I love that.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
In my sixties, what a great life I'm living. It's such a great time of life. Anyway, wiser younger, the idea is you're never going to be younger than you are today. And that's not so bad, but you can be wiser. And the idea is that just because we have an experience, live our life, does not mean we learn anything from our experiences. So people think that Benjamin Franklin said, "Experience is the best teacher." That's what they think he said. It's not really a very good teacher at all. We have a really hard time learning from experience. What he said is that, "Experience is a dear teacher, it's an expensive teacher." And the reason it's expensive is because we don't learn from it. Just because we have a success, we may learn nothing from it. We may just think, "Yes, I'm good, I did it. I'm always going to be good." If we have a failure, we might be protecting ourself. "Oh, that'll never happen again." Or "That was a one time thing." We may learn the wrong things from our experiences.
So what I try to help my students do, and I hope your listeners, is to try to extract value from their everyday experiences in a more systematic way, writing things down, experimenting, changing your behaviors.
I love that you had one of my quotes that, "If you want to change your identity, change your behavior." It's so true. A lot of people think, "Well, you have to change people's minds. You have to change their attitudes, and then they'll change their behavior." Well, okay, but under a lot of circumstances, particularly choice, free will, if we go into a situation and behave without force or coercion, we often actually change our attitude based on that behavior that we engaged in.
And so I always tell people, “If you want to change your identity, change your behavior. And if you want to change someone else's behavior, change the situation." Be a social psychologist. Look at the environment in the situation. You have much more control over what's in the environment than you do over what's inside of any given individual. What right do you have to try to change the personality of some person that you're trying? What does that even mean? Clinical psychologists can't even do that. So what a manager? Yeah. You think you're supposed to be changing who they are in order for them to change the way they behave? No. The environment, you have so much more control over the environment, the task itself, the other people on the team or in the proximity of this, the incentives. And what about you? What about you being a big part of people's environment? You can start by changing your own behavior, so that's kind of how that all works together.
Dustin Burleson:
I love it.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
It's very practical. Practical advice.
Dustin Burleson:
I want to share with the listeners or the viewers I've got. So this is what, when I was wandering around Booth at the University of Chicago's Seminary co-op bookstore, I came across your slide, which I think is here. I don't know if you can see this or not.
So the podcast, if you're listening right now, you won't. But if you click through to the episode, we'll put up the video. I love that you say you collect wisdom from others, but you've got a lot of wisdom of your own to give. And this just smacked me in the forehead like a two-by-four because it's so easy in business or in relationships to think, for example, an employee who shows up late or an employee who won't do a certain task in the business, we think, "What's wrong with this person? Why won't they- "
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Lazy, lazy, or yeah, not with the program.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, they're lazy. No, it's not. It's actually a function of their environment. It's the situation they're in. It's not the person. And it's so interesting, because a lot of our conditioning from childhood is, I think about how a lot of societies view people that are unsheltered. And they're like, "Oh, that's a situation of character." It's often a situation of circumstance, and it's not the character of that person. It's really interesting. So I love this part of the book, and I know you've got a new addition coming out, so I just wanted to highlight that if you're ever in a bookstore at a great university and you stumble across a great book, you never know, you might get to meet the author one day. And that's why I'm so grateful.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Oh, I'm so flattered. That's so beautiful. Thank you so much. And you actually have the new cover. The cover of the new edition.
Dustin Burleson:
Yes. Yeah. So tell us about the new edition.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
I'm excited. Thank you for asking. I thought you would never... No, I'm joking. Thank you so much. It's coming out November 22nd. I have a brand new publisher. The book is a hundred pages longer, and I think $8 cheaper, so it's much more affordable and accessible.
Dustin Burleson:
Wow, cool.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Right. And my idea is that it... You know how I'm always talking about DEI, so this is my diversity equity inclusion initiative. I want to make the kind of leadership education that we get at Booth and available to people outside of my university, and not just to other universities. I started working with high school students on choosing leadership. I've been teaching executives for over 30 years. So are you saying that people are going to see this video of us talking?
Dustin Burleson:
Yup.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Okay. So see, you see. It's people say, "30 years? You don't look that... " It's the Asian genes. I know. I know.
Dustin Burleson:
You started when you were two. You got your PhD when you were two years old.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So I always say that, not now, you flattered me so much, I just lost my train of thought. I just want to keep going. Oh, the new book. Right, right.
Dustin Burleson:
I do want to highlight that you have one of the most popular courses at Booth School of Business for executives. But you're taking it all the way to high schoolers. And we talked off camera before we started, that attorneys are putting this to use in law school, and physicians are putting it to use in medical school.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Surgeons.
Dustin Burleson:
And we're putting it to use with dentists and orthodontists, so thank you. But yeah, this is a much broader application.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
I'm thrilled. This is sort my way to, so I'm old now, older. I'm in my sixties, and I've loved my career. And I have a great career. I want to make a difference outside. I want to make a more durable difference, broader. And so I'm trying to go younger. And so two years, ago I started teaching college students for the first time. I've always taught MBAs or executives, executives in the world. But two years ago, I started teaching Choosing Leadership to undergrads at the University of Chicago, the first leadership class. First of all, undergrads near Chicago are so smart. They are smarter than, honestly, most graduate students at other institutions. And I say that not lightly. I mean I've taught at Kellogg. I went to Princeton. I taught at Stanford. These students are amazing, and I feel so honored to be able to reach them at a time when maybe I can make a bigger difference for them, maybe.
I love my executives, but they've made a lot of choices. They have fewer degrees of freedom than the high school students and the college students. And I'm teaching and creating curricula for some high school students who have never even thought about leadership as a choice, leadership as a behavior, haven't been exposed to social psychology or these notions that we... So the book is intended to be accessible to a very broad audience. It's not intended for executives alone, although, that was my original audience. So the book, I call it a hybrid, and obviously the COVID influence of hybrid teaching. And I think about it as learning with one hand and teaching with the other.
So you have the first part, 140 pages of the workbook, where you actually write in the book. We're talking about the green pen. And then the second part of the book has the leadership modules where you can create group activities to teach other people. So I have mothers and daughters doing this together. I have people doing book clubs. Executive coaches are using it. Just different ways that different people are teaching these exercises, these activities that help people to define leadership for themselves and think more complexly about the choices they make and what it means to create a better future.
Dustin Burleson:
I love it. It's literally is, I mean, you could teach a semester long course or do all of your lunch and learns with your team leaders and your employees. You could pick a chapter we talked about. I think the attorneys you mentioned or the physicians, I think, are taking a chapter, teaching to each other.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
The students are in teams. But it's a graded course. I mean, it's a real course. It's in Bloomington Indiana, Professor Henderson, Bill Henderson is doing it, because I visited the classroom. I was a guest there. He has them in teams. So he introduces chapter one. Then he puts them in teams, and teams teach chapters two through six. And then he closes with chapter seven. And the teams decide of the chapter, what exercises do they do, what other materials might they bring in from outside the book that they think relate, and they teach each other. And it's brilliant. Why didn't I think of that? What a great idea. I'm trying to get people to take more responsibility for their own growth and this whole point about how you learn so much when you teach, and they're teaching each other. It's just great.
One more application at Booth in Human Resources, Char Bennington, our head of employee development, she forms staff members, volunteer if they want. It's an opt-in kind of training program, to be in teams, cross-functional teams, and they work through the workbook in teams, and it's so beautiful. I was outside the bleacher, our downtown campus. And a young woman came up to me and she's like, "Professor Ginzel, I am facilitating, I'm the facilitator for chapter five." And she was so excited. I said, "Really? That's great. What does that mean?" And she said, "Well, I get to decide which activities. I set up the Google Doc.”
The way that she was so excited about this, I understood that I don't think she has in her daily activities at work the opportunity to do something like this, otherwise, it wouldn't be so exciting for her. She gets to practice leadership by creating the space for this learning to take place. She gets to facilitate the learning of her peers. It creates so much agency. It makes you feel, I don't know if the word is powerful, maybe we should feel more powerful, especially at work. We should feel that we have more agency. And I think that that's what trusting our people to learn and teach together. Again, I think I had mentioned this, of course you can pay a consultant or a teacher something to come and talk to your people, but how much wisdom everyone has inside of them and how much we take that for granted. So this idea, individual written reflection and then collective wisdom, and we can raise the IQ, the collective IQ of our teams and groups. How much? I don't know, but what a great opportunity.
Dustin Burleson:
It's fantastic. To steal a phrase or at least a concept from Barry Schwartz and his book Practical Wisdom we give to all of our team leaders, that gives them a sense of purpose if they're learning something new and teaching it to other people in the company. But we've had spouses come and say, "I just want to thank you. My wife, before she worked for you guys, was never reading books, was never, and she's so excited to be a part of these sorts of things." I love that. I had a thought in my head, I was like, "Every employment practices a company should make your book mandatory reading." We're going to lower the HR incidents because we have more better leaders.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Absolutely. No, but it's also absolutely true. Because I'm thinking, this is the most cost effective leadership development on the planet. I mean I was in Singapore teaching for the executive MBAs. And one of my students at Baluns is the new CEO of the Institute for Human Resource Professionals, and so he runs training programs for the HR people who run trainings for their company. He's a new CEO of this initiative. He told me that he bought books for everyone, $10 a book. Where can you get a resource like this that you can leverage and use? And I'm really not trying to do an advertisement, but I really believe so much in this. I do. I believe so much in it and I just think that it has so much opportunity to make a difference in people's lives.
We're putting a press release out on the new edition, and she asked me for a quote. I was thinking, "Gosh, what do I say that I haven't already said in the book or haven't already said." On my website I have all these videos that you can use if you want to teach the concepts as well, short videos, 30 seconds or two and a half minutes. And I decided that I'm going to say something like, "If you want to do the work of building your leadership skills, together with your long-term commitment, this book will be your companion."
Dustin Burleson:
Yes. Yeah, it's a true toolkit. So I have the former, current edition before the new one comes out. Listeners to the program will know this, because I say this to most of the authors we invite on the program because they have amazing books, "With many books, I will find the 10 or 12 pages or the one or two chapters I really like," and this sounds horrible, so don't tell your publisher. "I will tear those two chapters out, and I'll keep the dust jacket and put it on the shelf." Because I have thousands of books around the house. They're everywhere. But your book, I wouldn't touch a single page. It's all got to stay because it truly is something you will go back to over and over again. It's a companion.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
I'm so honored. I'm so honored that you say that. I tell them, "This is my adult dissertation." This is basically the distillation of my teaching of my work since I got my PhD. And I always tell students, "Everything I say to you in class, it's in the book somewhere. It's there."
Dustin Burleson:
That's rare, I think, because a lot of professors have a book," and maybe it's really deep and narrow on one topic. But you get the sense when you open this book, Wow, this is someone's entire life's passion." And we were talking about, before we hopped on camera, that you laughed, if you don't mind I share the story on your phone, one with the screensaver or the background is a picture of the book. And your kids are like, "Most people put their kids there." And I said, in my head I'm going, "That's because they haven't written a book yet." Because it is a birthing process.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
It's like a child.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. So I love that. Tell us a little bit about what was that transition like for you when you started to think, "Hey, I've been teaching executives, so these are CEOs of fortune 100 companies." And you've been all over and then you made that decision. Was that a little scary for you? What was that like when you decided to go start teaching undergrads and to broaden the audience?
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Well yeah, it's not scary at all because I'm still doing the executives. I still have my regular job. I'm just doing all of this in addition. I have a lot of energy, not a lot of time, unfortunately. But we were talking about the fact that you can make money, you can't make time. And so what I'm trying to do is balance that. I'm trying to make better choices about how I spend my time. And so it's not scary at all. It's so exciting, and I feel so energized. I love teaching executives. I would choose executives as my only audi... And I did. For 10 or more years, I only taught executive MBAs at the University of Chicago, at Booth because I started the business of executive education, non-degree certificate programs. And so I was so busy running that business that I only taught one class a year in the MBA curriculum.
At the time, it was in the nineties, told you I'm old. And a faculty member hadn't ever, at that time, started a business within the... And so they had to make a decision. How many classes does a faculty member have to teach in order still be considered a faculty member? And they decided, one. So I taught one executive MBA class each year for a decade while I ran executive education, the custom design executive education. So I chose executive MBAs. I love my executive MBAs.
But there's something for me in my next chapter about these younger people. And I don't know if it's the fact that I'm a mom and being a mom and having my children at about this age and seeing how important and even just life skills and understanding the self and starting about doing some reflection and self understanding younger. I think it'll pay big dividends as these children grow, instead of waiting until they're older and then say, "Boy, I wish I had known some of this when I was young." So it wasn't scary at all, and it's just really... Okay, I'm even going younger. Did you see on the website that I have a children's picture book?
Dustin Burleson:
Yes, yes. There's a lot of listeners who have kids who could benefit from these lessons. Yeah.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Here's the story. This is my passion project. It's based on an activity from the workbook called juxtapositions. So juxtapositions is, one of my goals is to, everyone thinks, "Oh, leader. I want to be a leader. I want to be a manager. Who wants to be a manager? Leaders, leaders have big thoughts. Leaders, leaders have vision. Leaders, leaders are it. I don't want to manage. I want to lead." But it's based on this, a stereotype of what is a leader. People think that leaders and managers are somehow different people. Maybe they're different species. Maybe it's a role, it's a title, it's a person, it's something, whatever.
It's like a dichotomy, but it's not, leading and managing are behaviors. The person is, you could say that person's an executive. In the book, I use the word champion instead of executive because of the broadening of the audience. So the idea is that when you're managing, you're championing the present, the status quo. And that's not a bad word. If we don't have a strong present, we can't have a future, so management is noble. Managing, your feet on the ground, you're getting things done, you're delivering on promises, you're making the streets' expectations, you've got you diapers in the house, whatever you need to do to make it day by day, that's management. And it's noble.
Management is what allows us to send our kids to college and go on vacation. It's what we do. Even if you have a high title and a big credential and big budget, you're still managing a lot of the time. The idea that leadership is a choice, leadership is when we leave, this is how I think about it, it's not the answer, it's just something I have found helpful for my students. Leadership is when we leave the relative stability of the present, and we go to a place that doesn't exist. And that's a risky choice because you've never been to the future. And you have this vision of a better tomorrow, but you don't know what you're going to find when you go there.
And then you've got people following you, and you might be taking them over a cliff. They're believing in you. When you manage, you just need their head. If you have their heart, that's a bonus. When you lead, you need their heart. They have to believe in something that doesn't exist yet. They believe in you, so it's a risky thing. You don't want to make the choice to lead too often. You'll just wear yourself and everyone out.
Dustin Burleson:
True. Yep.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
So the idea, no really, so the idea of bringing leadership down and management up is one of my mantras. So this activity, juxtapositions in the workbook, the idea is, just go with me, think of managing as being here, stability, and the present. Think of leadership as going there, change, and the future. Now, come up with words that are equal in valence that capture the gist or the essence of those two ideas. So here's an example. These are all for my students. Leadership is the moon and management is the sun.
Dustin Burleson:
Wow.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
So the idea with the sun is that it's daylight. We're here, we can see. It's relatively clear. It's now. We've got it. The moon, well that's at night. It's a little dark. It's changing. It's kind of over there. It's more uncertain. But what's better? The moon or the sun? Well, you could say the sun, but no. That's not a question we ask, which one's better? They're both important. So why do we say which one's better? Of course, leadership is better. People think leadership is better. Who wants to be a manager?
I was teaching in Hong Kong, I was literally Zooming, of course, during COVID, and it was literally from 1:30 to 4:30 AM Chicago time. So nothing's going on in my house at 4:30 in the morning. And their children are coming home from school. And they're not happy that they're Zooming and that they're not in person, and they're not able to chat with their colleagues or with the professor. So I said, "Look, I'll stay on with you. I'll have coffee. We can chat. And so we can talk about whatever you want. We can talk about work. We can talk about, I don't want to talk too much about politics, but we can go there if you need to, but let's just make it our open... " I called it open office hours.
And their children were coming home and sitting on their lap. And one of the boys, I'll send you an article. I don't know, do you post? Well anyway, I'll send you the article, and if it's interesting to you I'll be happy. But it explains how the story came. So there's the daughter of one of my students. And I said, "Stella, are you helping your mom with your homework?" And she picked up my book, Choosing Leadership, and she showed it to me. And I thought, "These kids need a book. These kids need a leadership book." And then there was another boy sitting on his dad's lap. And I had signed a workbook for him, for his son, right before COVID started, actually the February of COVID. I was in Hong Kong.
I looked at him and I said, ""Did your dad give you that book I signed for you?" And he looked at his dad and said like, "I told you, I'm saving it for him until he's 15." The boy's three years old. I was like, "Oh, give it to him now. Let him put it in his mouth. Let him eat it." I thought, "The bored book. These kids need a bored book." And so what happened throughout the course of that week, we came up with the idea for Leadership Is. And then I said, "Look, I want this available. I'm not going to sell it. We're going to make it available for everybody. It's going to be a downloadable PDF, but I want it available in every language of my students."
So right now there are 34 languages that you can download this little children's book. And they have all been translated by either my friends, my family, or my students. And so if anybody out there listening or watching or goes to the website, it's leadership book, no sorry, choosingleadershipbook.com, under Little Champions and downloads, if you see a language that you know that is not there, send me an email or talk to you. Do whatever you want. But you can have the translation credit. That's what you get, just the translation credit. But I'm telling you, it seems to be pretty popular, because I have people who really want the translation credit because it's meaningful. And the Korean version, it was one of my students and his son.
Dustin Burleson:
Oh, cool.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
They did it together. The Greek version, it's three generations of women, the grandmother, the mom, and the daughter. They sent me an email. They said, "We spent orthodox Easter together, and we just had lamb shank and red eggs, and we translated the book, three generations of women in our family." So amazing. So I want to share that with your audience, because it's just so amazing to be able to talk with your children in your own language and to think about stereotypes of what these kids think.It's just a picture and a word, so it doesn't say that, it has the sun and the word sun and the language and then the moon. And then you can talk about what that means. And it looks like it's for little children, but it could be for adults. My sister-in-law, she teaches, she says executive development, and she uses the children's book with her managers, because they're pictures and you can just talk about what you think and what comes to mind without having too many constraints. And she says it's the best exercise to use the children's book with her managers to talk about their assumptions about leading and managing. Isn't that cool?
Dustin Burleson:
It is cool, yeah. It keeps it open ended. Why put them in too narrow of a discussion? What a beautiful answer. I know there are a lot of listeners and members who go to work every day and they're a professional. Most of our listeners are healthcare providers, and the idea of maybe going and teaching or volunteering and helping the next generation learn some of these things could be scary. That's kind of why I went there. But I love that you say, "I still got the executive coaching. I'm still doing that, but I embrace this kind of different path," that has obviously turned out very well, so I might encourage listeners that that's a possibility. Later this afternoon I'll be at the university teaching the orthodontic residents, and that is one of the highlights of my week. Years ago I thought I never had time or what would I have to give? But you're a wonderful example that that is something you could embrace, so thank you for sharing that. That's a great example.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
No, it's my pleasure. Yeah.
Dustin Burleson:
I could talk all day to you about these topics. I want to make sure that our listeners have... Obviously, we'll include the links to the book. And if you're a subscriber of the actual physical Burleson Box Program, you will, probably in Q1 I think, is when this book would be in the next shipment for us. But we'd love to include that.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
That's so cool.
Dustin Burleson:
I'd love to see feedback from our members on letting their employees and team leaders co-learn and teach together. I think that'd be very, very exciting.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
You know what I can send to you? I can send to you, so Char Bennington at Booth created a facilitator guide, a page and a half, and a user's guide. And it's just some tips and things about how you can get your groups together and facilitate, and maybe that would be useful for your people to help them think about how they want to do it. And this is why I did the hybrid book. It's because I thought people could do it without the learning modules. I thought, "Just get people together, and write down your earliest leadership experience and have a conversation, and then show the video." But it helps with people to have just a little bit more structure to hold onto. So I'll send you that, and maybe that would be something that would help your members, your listeners, to take the step to put a group together and to teach and learn together.
Dustin Burleson:
I love that. Thank you so much. I want to end with one concept and your thoughts on it, because it was so impactful to me in the book that I took it and used it in resident interviews that we just had, or in the match process. And so dental students are applying for residency and your quote was, "Questions are tools that generalize across context, while answers are context specific." And I feel like as doctors we always want to have the answer to everything. We've kind of been professional students, and so we're trained to have the answers.
And so you said when you talk to people or interview people, a great question to ask would be, "What's the best question to ask you right now?" I love that, and the people we interviewed just kind of did one of those. That's a really good question, I guess. And then they would go, and it opened up a whole new avenue of dialogue, so I love that the, "What's the best question to ask you right now?" And your thought on questions versus answers. Can you maybe speak to that a little bit for the listeners who might want to take this and put it to work on Monday morning?
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
I would love to. I'm all about turning off defaults and making a different choice. And I think it's a way to experiment with our behavior and to be wiser younger. Because as I said, "We're all normal neurotics, and we're pretty smart, and we're pretty capable, and we're pretty successful. And if you never met me, you'd do just fine. You'd do just fine. But I can help you be wiser younger." And how do you do that? Well, you make a different choice. You change your behavior. We all default on answers. So what if we make questions salient? What if we think about the value of picky or perceptive questions?
So for example, one of my favorite perceptive questions to help people understand their definition of leadership is, “When do you choose to lead?” Not how do you lead or why do you lead, but when? When do you step up and make a risky choice? The answer doesn't really matter. The process is, the answer that you choose will reveal to you something about your definition of leadership, but it's the question that inspired that understanding.
So that's why I say that questions generalize across contexts. And you can use the same question in different avenues, in different ways, and you'll get different answers. And that doesn't mean that we're wrong. Actually, it means that we're right, because we're thinking about what is the answer in this environment with this group for these people, for my goals.
So I actually think focusing on questions versus answers is part of my M.O., my general M.O., which is to, if we focus on personality, turn that off and start thinking about the situation. If we're focusing on leadership, try to turn that off and focus on management. It's almost like low hanging fruit. If we're always doing this, doing more and more and more of the same thing, then the incremental gain is what? But if we do something in an area where we haven't done much, then you can have big benefits from small changes. So I just think questions are so much more important than answers, but really good questions. And if you keep questions handy, they can be very useful. Keep good questions handy, they can be very useful for you.
Dustin Burleson:
That's a great answer. I think we'll end on that. I can't wait for our members to get the book and dig into it and to use it as a tool and as a companion throughout their journey. So Linda, thank you so very, very much for being here.
Dr. Linda Ginzel:
Oh, I'm so honored. And I'll put together some things and send them to you. I hope some of it will be useful to you and to your members. And thank you so much for having me. I really, I've probably said it 10 times, I'm so honored. Thank you. Thank you for supporting my cause and for believing in these social psychology ideas.
Dustin Burleson:
Awesome. Thank you