*Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

 

Robin Graham:

Fabulous to be with you, Kathy, even if it is on Zoom nowadays. I’m excited to be a co-author with you for “ABCs of Murmuration,” and it’s going to be a fun time that we get to interview each other. Thank you. Probably best if we get started by you just doing a very brief overview of your extensive experiences so people have an idea of where you’re coming from.

Kathy Hagler:

Thanks, Robin. I’m Kathy Jan Hagler, and just to start off, I’m originally from New Mexico. Then I moved to Texas, then to California, then to Idaho, then to North Carolina, and now I’m in my 37th house. Just a little background to say I’ve been around and done a lot of things.

My career really started when I was a dean of a community college, and then I decided to go out on my own and become a consultant. My background is in counseling, business administration, and higher education administration.

My work has been basically through my own company, which started out as the Technology Exchange Center in Orange County, California, then moved into being Hagler and Associates, then moved into being K2OHSolutions. Now I’m actually working on my own as an author. My first book was published about a year ago.

It’s called “Art of Scars,” and this is the second book. What I noticed, Robin—and I’m so glad that you’re with me as a co-author—is that one of the things I’ve seen in organizations over time is that the culture of an organization has a really hard time coming together around a vision of who they want to be. I decided that it would be a good idea to work with you, after I’d been through five of your classes, to talk about what we can do with individuals that actually then come together as a group and then come together as a larger group in a company to actually be successful and sustain their work.

That’s how “ABCs of Murmuration” came about, and I’m really glad to be with you in writing this book and look forward to being interviewed by you today.

Robin Graham:

Beautiful. Thank you, Kathy, for that brief overview of your amazing background. Thank you very much. Thirty-seven houses—goodness.

Kathy Hagler:

A lot of real estate.

Robin Graham:

A lot of real estate, a lot of remembering addresses.

Kathy Hagler:

That’s right.

Robin Graham:

We’ve got some questions that I’m going to ask. Because of your passion around all of this—we had agreed that in some of our interviews, we’re focusing just on the what or the how or the why—but for you, it’s really a combination of all of those.

I look forward to your viewpoint, kind of from the big observation of how all this fits together. We’re using the idea of the starlings and their habits of murmuration. Maybe we can start with just a brief explanation about the starlings and the murmuration, in case someone’s listening who doesn’t really know what that is.

Kathy Hagler:

For many centuries, it’s the starlings that actually create a murmuration. A murmuration is those phenomenal, magical pictures when you see the birds doing these amazing ballets in the sky. The starlings are the only ones who actually—it’s called murmuration. Fish do something like this. Other birds do something like this. Other animals do it. But starlings are the ones that actually call it murmuration. We got really interested in this because it’s one of those things in nature that always works. And as I’ve seen culture in organizations, they don’t always work.

What I wanted to do is find out: Is there something in nature, something that’s been around for a long time? And if so, what were the principles? What were the things that came together so that, like starlings, they could actually create a process where they can fly together, stay in the sky, survive, and meet their goals?

It’s the starling murmuration, and it occurs in the US, it occurs in Europe, and it occurs mostly in the wintertime when they’re coming together in those interesting formations to actually find a place to sleep, find a place to eat, and also find a mate. All of those things come together in the wintertime.

I just read an interesting article that updated even my own knowledge, and that was that the largest group ever seen was six million. Six million starlings that came together in one of these wonderful swarms. I figured that if six million starlings can come together, organizations with a hundred people or a hundred thousand people can look at what are the principles that underlie the starlings being able to do this and survive.

Robin Graham:

Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you. And part of this is really inviting communities or organizations to walk a new way.

Why is it critical for us to do things differently and to walk a new way?

Kathy Hagler:

If you think of an organization—let’s say this is a construction company—and let’s say it’s a construction company that actually is a company, and that’s actually a living entity. A murmuration is like a company.

That particular company has its own mind, it has its own body, and it has its own spirit, just like a person. If you think of something like Congress, they even call themselves “the body”—the House, right? They call themselves the House. And of course, that’s a good example of something that needs to learn to walk a new way.

As we think of the house and an entity being an organization, like a construction company, they need to lay new snow. What that means is a skier would say, “You know, I’ve been skiing down this path, and what I need to do is new snow needs to fall.”

That term comes from Pennsylvania skiing culture, where instead of referring to a snowpack, they would say, “We’re going to lay new snow,” meaning “Let’s find a new trail. Let’s find a new way to ski down this hill.”

In looking at organizations, what I wanted to do with 40 years of experience is find a new way to help them lay new snow, as far as the culture goes. In thinking about laying new snow, I want to read you something before I talk about laying new snow from Chinese Taoism. It’s actually Lao Tzu’s words, and they’re useful for mastering the art of leadership in business.

I’ve used this several times in organizations where I could help them think of their mind, body, and spirit. It’s a famous quote that comes from the Tao Te Ching: “Thirty spokes share the hub of a wheel, yet its center is what makes it useful. You can mold clay into a vessel, yet it’s the emptiness that makes it useful. You can cut doors and windows from the walls of a house, but the ultimate use of the house will depend on the part where nothing exists. Therefore, something is shaped into what is, but its usefulness comes from what is not.” 

Robin Graham:

Wow, thank you.

Kathy Hagler:

This ancient wisdom perfectly captures what I’ve observed in organizational culture. If you think about an effective organization being the mind, body, and spirit, the body is the entity. The body is what you see—it’s the entity, it’s the vessel. But it’s the space inside that actually serves the customer. It’s everybody coming together that serves the customer’s needs and expectations. And that’s what a company is all about—serving the customer.

If you think about the hub of the wheel, the middle—which is the culture—the hub of the wheel actually connects. If you think of a wheel, the hub connects all the spokes together. The hub of the organization, which is the culture, connects all of that together and connects it to the rest of the world, which are the customers. And you can’t see how that operates. We can’t see the culture. You can see a process. You can see a construction company putting up a building. You can see it laying the concrete for a road. You can see it building a bridge. But you don’t see the workings. And that gets down to what we call the mind of the organization. And that mirrors the subconscious and the conscious minds of all the people in the organization.

If you think about it, you and I and everyone listening has a subconscious mind that actually controls about 95% of our behavior, and our conscious mind controls about 5% of our behavior.

It’s the individual subconscious minds of each person and their Beliefs and habits that come together in this hub or this culture that we’re calling WE. And this culture comes together as WE, and then as it flows together, it drives the organization.

I had the opportunity to travel with Edward Deming, who was well known for quality management and continuous improvement. And I loved it when he said that people processes are unknown and unknowable. What that means is they can’t be seen. It’s the energy in the center of that wheel.

But if you don’t have the center of the wheel, the wheel doesn’t go and it doesn’t Connect to the people. Think about what we’re doing in the mind of the culture as the center of the wheel. It’s the most critical part. It’s the hub. It’s the culture. It drives the nothingness. And if you think about it, there’s nothing in the hub, and we can’t really see what’s happening in the culture. It’s all the people.

In contrast, the body of each person is seen. We can see those bodies; you can see their words and actions, just like you can see the walls of a house that hold up this room I’m in, but you can’t see the space. This nothingness makes it actually fit the needs of the inhabitants, which is the mind. It’s this nothingness. It’s what happens there. But the space that actually holds this up—it holds the possibility. If it doesn’t fit the needs of the people who live there, it’s not functional. And what I’ve seen in organizations is that this part of the hub—these people—don’t work together very well. If the WE doesn’t work together very well, you have to trace that back to the ME, who’s having some issues with their own subconscious and their own conscious, and how are they working as an entity?

In murmuration, you can see the birds design the whole flock. But it’s the inner workings—you can see the flock, you can see the flock doing this—it’s the inner workings of each bird, every individual bird, that makes the difference. The body of the process are the behaviors that you see. They’re the processes and the practices. But the actual mind is the hub of what makes this happen.

What’s the spirit of an organization? Well, the spirit of an organization—if you take murmuration, for instance—the spirit of murmuration is basically: Where are we going? How are we going to get there? And what drives them? Well, what drives them is survival.

What drives them is: Where do we sleep? Where do we eat? Where do we actually make babies? Where do we do all of these things together? In murmuration, the purpose is survival. That’s the spirit of the organization.

Why is it critical for an organization to walk a new way? As in murmuration, an organization is all the people where they come together for their work. Their survival mechanism is making that organization work. If we can follow nature and say, if the murmuration works, if we can figure out what the birds do—even though we think it’s bird brain—if we can think what the birds do and we can behave in that way as individuals, then what we can do is follow what has worked for centuries, which is we can have a vision of murmuration.

What’s interesting about this is, in doing the research for the book, I looked and it says that only 30 percent of small businesses are around after 10 years.

Why don’t they survive? Well, it lists five reasons. The first reason is ineffective leadership, and that really has to do with the fact they don’t have a vision. They don’t see where they’re going. They don’t understand the purpose that they need to survive.

The other thing is lack of attention to the environment. Well, if you think about the birds, they’re watching these hawks come in from every different direction. It’s constantly paying attention to the inner self—which is what do we need? How are we going to survive? —and what’s the environment telling us?

The other thing is not attending to the customer demand, which is the fact that all six million of these birds have the same need, and that is to survive. They have to come together. And the final one for these businesses is lack of adaptability.

It’s lack of adaptability to be able to really adapt to what the other people in the murmuration are doing, or the other people in the business are doing. That’s the reason I believe we need to walk a new way with business, and we need to follow this nature’s path to harmony, which is murmuration.

Robin Graham:

That’s beautiful. Thank you for all of that. In your research, one of the things that you discovered were these ingrained starling habits that we took to create ABCs of murmuration.

A means Awareness, which means attend to the now. B is Belief, which is adapt to new perspectives. And C is Connect, which is act as one.

As we’re presenting this, can you explain how each of those ingrained starling habits can show up in an organization?

Kathy Hagler:

Absolutely. The first one is Awareness, which is the A, and that is actually attending to the now. One of the things that the birds do is they’re very present. They’re very present in the now. They’re not thinking about what happened yesterday or what happened tomorrow, because what they’re doing—as successful organizations need to do—is Awareness and attention to the present moment.

When you go into an organization where you feel that attention to the now, you feel the motivated spirit of the people. You feel the energy, just like you do with the birds—they’re doing something together in the moment. They’re respectful to each other. They appreciate that everybody has their back, and they’re sincere to the other people in the organization.

They handle the current issues because they’re not lost in the past, or they’re not thinking about the future. They handle the current issues with compassion to each other, with wisdom and empowering suggestions. They courageously discuss their plans for the future in murmuration, and they challenge each other in the landscapes. They want to fly together.

Now, the organizations that are actually going into survival mode—you can feel it. You can walk in the door and you can feel fear, and you can feel apathy, and you can feel hostility and antagonism, but you feel it in that hub. You don’t see it in the processes, in the body. You feel it in the mind of the organization, in the hub, in the culture of the people.

The current situation with many organizations is really untenable because those people don’t fly together. They don’t work together. The decisions are made by default. And it’s really apparent by the behavior and the language of the people that they don’t want to be there together.

That doesn’t work if you’re going to murmurate, if you’re actually going to get together for survival. It’s the limiting habits of the people—each individual person—that’s part of that. The habits are actually created from the past.

If they’re actually taken in by those habits and they can’t break out of those habits, they’re hooked into their past Beliefs, then what you’ve got is a bunch of people—not WEs, but you’ve got a bunch of MEs in there with their habits because they can’t get out of the way of their limited Beliefs and the way things used to be. They’re controlled by the fear of their past. And remember, their subconscious minds, where their habits are, control 95% of their behavior.

That gets us to the other part, which is B, which is the Beliefs part. How do you adapt to new perspectives? Well, just as a story that I’ll tell: as a young entrepreneur and CEO, when I started my business, I had employed this wonderful young woman who actually facilitated a lot of our meetings with the big corporate clients. What I noticed, and what the clients told me, is that she had acquired a lisp.

She became very nervous when facilitating meetings with our clients and one of the clients came to me and they said, “We don’t know what’s going on, but she’s got this lisp, and she says a strange phrase between each of her long statements.”

I cared about her as a person, talked to her, and informed her of this. One of the things that we introduce in our book is called the jam jar theory. The jam jar theory simply means that she was sitting inside—a little person sitting inside a jam jar. She didn’t see that behavior. But the people on the outside could read her nervousness and they could read the label of the jam jar. And they said, “She’s really nervous. She’s really uncomfortable about being here.” What does that mean? Well, she didn’t know it, but they did. Past Beliefs, her habits, whatever caused the lisp, created this part about it.

She was very grateful for the feedback. She acknowledged her fear. She acknowledged the fact that she was sitting in a jam jar and she didn’t realize that she had this lisp.

The company supported her through a complete process of actually shifting from some traumatic experience that she’d had in her childhood, where these behaviors were created that caused these limiting Beliefs, and she was totally unaware of it. The people in successful organizations are really open to talking to their employees and learning about the things that need to happen so that they can help support the people in the organization to shift their Beliefs. The thriving organizations—those that I have seen—provide support to those individuals to help them shift their Beliefs and shift their perspectives.

If you have a perspective that when I’m around people, I’m going to be nervous, there are processes that you’ll learn about in the book that can actually help you shift those Beliefs so that you don’t have a lisp anymore and you don’t have a habit based on the trauma that you had in the past. It’s really about the trust and respect of each person or each bird to be the best they can, not only for themselves, but also, it’s about evolving.

From ME to the WE, where she went and presented in front of the other people, to the US of the organization that she was supporting.

For organizations that are in trouble, what about people that don’t shift? They’re dispensable. I actually had one of my clients tell me early on, “If the people don’t change, we just change the people.”

Which means, you know, we’re not going to spend time helping you actually shift any of your Beliefs. We’ll just get somebody else. You’re dispensable.

It’s not just about identifying these Beliefs, but it’s about being there and helping the people shift these Beliefs. And if you don’t do that, and if you think about an organization that has 100 people or 5,000 people, murmuration won’t occur because they have all of these Beliefs that are limiting and they all clash.

That gets us to C, which is Connect as one. It’s evident from the outside in and from the inside out when organizations are murmurating. If you use the jam jar analogy, the people in the jam jar know when they are part of the whole. And the label on the jam jar will read “team member.”

I’ve been privileged enough to see organizations that murmurate. In the book, I’ll talk about several organizations that I’ve seen murmurate. Now, they don’t fly around the sky, but they’ve been in business for over 100 years.

Of course, there’s a great book out called “From Good to Great” that talks about organizations that have been together 100 years. And these are some new findings that we have that follow murmuration about what keeps you in for the long term.

Robin Graham:

Yeah, beautiful. Thank you. You know, as you spoke about habits, there are toxic Beliefs or behaviors that we have that impact how we can work together.
One of the things that we bring into the book that I wanted you to take some time on is: What are the three areas that we’re saying people can take action? To Step Up, which means to initiate first action; to Step Back, which means allow others to Step Up when it’s appropriate; and then the third one is Step Together, which is about embracing mutual trust and respect that you spoke of a little bit ago.

Can you just go into a little bit more explanation about what are the toxic behaviors that stand in the way of doing Step Up, Step Back, and Step Together?

Kathy Hagler:

Before I do that, let me tell you where these came from.

This is one of the beautiful parts—as you know, in the book that we’re putting together, these birds have been studied a lot. As they were studied, their behavior was studied. What they found was they all did three things.

When they come together, they Step Up, they Step Back, and they Step Together. Now, this is our human language for what they do. But basically, when the seven birds come together—which is they come together in groups of seven—one of them actually pops up when they see a hawk.

Then what happens is when somebody—one of the other birds—sees a hawk, they go to the side and the one that Stepped Up follows that one. They Step Back and they follow that one. And if there are no hawks, they fly together.

One of the things I’ve noticed in organizations is that Stepping Up, Stepping Back, and Stepping Together is not something that normally happens in an organization. What we did was—ineffective leadership, many organizations have the top-down ineffective leader saying the leader at the top, everyone under follows that person. We’re using instead what’s called a leaderful approach.

This approach really aligns these three things. What the leaderful approach says is that everyone in the organization is a leader in their area. It’s leaderful.

Everyone has the opportunity to be actually Stepping Up, not just one person at the top. Each person realizes that they’re responsible for their work. They’re the leader of their work.

Then they take the initiative. That’s the Step Up. They take the first step. They take all of their Beliefs, their feelings and emotions that result from the value of doing their best. What they do is they do their best and Step Up and initiate. And they’ve learned to shift their limiting Beliefs so that they do the very best possible.

Now, toxic behaviors that can stand in the way of this: if they have fear of failure, if they feel powerless or like a victim, if they don’t have the knowledge or skills to do their work, or if there’s no confidence. Training is a really big part of having people feel leaderful. “This is my job. It’s my job to Step Up and actually take the initiative.”

What does it mean to Step Back in a leaderful organization? Leaderful behavior has set the stage for each person to take the initiative and the responsibility to move to action when they particularly need that skill. All welcome their skill and all welcome their leadership abilities.

It’s not as if the person at the top says, “It’s me and I’m in charge.” All of them are leaderful. Then the feedback to those who Step Up—providing positive feedback—builds their confidence, and actually their performance gets stronger.

Each person’s perspective and their abilities grow and expand. The leaderful workforce actually begins to shift those limiting Beliefs, which basically says, “I’m okay. I can do this work. I’m in charge. They’re going to have me do this work.”

The toxic behavior is if an organization just believes in top-down hierarchical leadership structures where they don’t believe that anyone else has a brain. One of my other mentors, Myron Tribus, used to use this wonderful PowerPoint where you had the leader at the top with a suit on and a hat. The people on the next level had suits and sometimes dresses, but they didn’t have a hat, and the people at the bottom didn’t have a head.

To me, what this is saying is: Don’t allow that to happen. Allow all your people to Step Up. Create a leaderful atmosphere where people have the confidence. And then you get into Stepping Together.

It’s collaborative thinking. It’s behavior where they all meld their knowledge and skills together. It’s a combination of everything. And that’s what creates the body of the organization. That creates the processes, that builds the walls of the house, and it’s strategic thinking, which then helps them come into a leadership position and have a good place in the market. All of these have to flow together.

Stepping Up, taking the initiative; Stepping Back so someone else can take the initiative; and then working together. I know for you and me, as we’ve written this book together, we find a lot of Stepping Up, Stepping Back, and Stepping Together. People have told us it’s really hard to co-author a book. It seems to have been really easy for you and me, because I think we’ve done that, and I think we learned that from the birds.

Robin Graham:

I agree.

Kathy Hagler:

I think one of the things that happens when you don’t have that is communication skills. And more than anything from our work together, Robin, is that communication is really critical. And that’s really—it’s the lack of believing there’s a singular expert.

There are many experts. In fact, in our book, we’ve interviewed seven other people who are experts who are coming in and helping give us some information. We’ve Stepped Back and listened to their expertise too.

The last thing that really keeps a toxic behavior is just an overall lack of trust and an overall lack of respect for other people in the organization. Those are the things that actually an organization has to do: Step Up, Step Back for a leaderful approach, and Step Together, because those were the three habits of the birds.

Robin Graham:

Right. Beautiful. And it all starts with the individual bird.

Kathy Hagler:

It actually starts with the individual.

Robin Graham:

It rolls up. Start with the individual—go to the team. We call the individual ME. Go to the team, which we call WE. And then the whole organization is the US.

Kathy Hagler:

Perfect.

Robin Graham:

Yeah. Beautiful. Speaking of working well together, how can communities or organizations—whoever’s listening to this, this applies to both—how can they change to increase their effectiveness based on what you’ve learned about the starlings and murmuration?

Kathy Hagler:

It’s been very important for me to put all this together in an organizational framework, even though it works in communities, it works in neighborhoods. I live in a little neighborhood that I’m working toward murmuration, and other people in the community are too, because it’s beautiful when you work together.

The following steps in my mind would help create organizational effectiveness. First, they have to be aware that they have to have this vision, this visual aspect of what’s going to make us actually be successful.

I think if they collaborate on a vision of oneness—on how they murmurate—then this hub, this thing in the middle of the circle, this hub, if it all comes together, then they’ll murmurate and the wheel will roll. What we’re saying is: Have people look at murmuration. Have them see that even though those are birds, that’s what we want to do. We don’t want to fall out of the sky. We want to fly together. We don’t want to be eaten by a hawk, and we want to work together.

Then you clarify and articulate why you want to do that. Maybe it’s so you’ll have a successful bridge-building company. Maybe it’s so you can have a successful AI company, whatever your company is, or a successful university—you want to work together.

First is having a vision of murmuration, something that nature gives us that has worked. Then what you have to do is challenge and support the shifting of individual Beliefs. Acknowledge the fact that, as you were saying, every “ME,” every person in the organization comes with subconscious baggage.

We come with—95% of us was all created when we were really little—but we come with these Beliefs that keep us stuck. We really have to navigate a new mindset. Every ME has to come to terms with the fact that, “Okay, that’s how I used to think, but my perspective has changed. My Belief has changed.” That’s where the ABCs come from. Right now, as Awareness, I have to change my Belief.

Then the WE has to decide to lay new snow. They could say, “Okay, I can change my Belief. I can look at it this way, but we’re going to have to lay some new snow here. We’re going to have to do this in a different way to shift these Beliefs. And we’re going to have to explore maybe a road we’ve never traveled before.”

This connects to recent research on quantum reality and this whole idea of quantum reality. It’s fascinating because what it brings out is that ME is still a part of WE, and ME and WE are still a part of US, the organization. It doesn’t change me to actually work with you. I’m still me. And it doesn’t change the two of us to work with a bigger community. We’re still WE.

What we have to see here is that you move from ME to WE—you want to move with the best ME possible and the best WE possible.

In moving with the best WE possible, I think you should consider three strategies. You have to build supportive team relationships around what I call the three Ps: your people, your processes—the way you do the work—and your place, where you do the work. You have to be comfortable in your space.

You also have to choose meaningful strategies and practices that help me grow and help you grow. If there were a team of seven of us, we could ask the question: What can we all do together? What are our assets? What is the best place for us to be in the organization?

Then the third thing is that we have to demonstrate resilience to an environment. Specifically, one of the things that I know about hospitals is that each floor of a hospital has a different environment. Well, if you think about a different culture, it’s really important that the one floor of the hospital, which might be urgent care, really understands what the floor of surgery is doing. What you’re having to do is demonstrate resilience at every level from all of these different environments that the WEs are together.

Now let’s say it was the MEs together, then the WEs are together, then what when it comes to the organization? We have to understand that we have to become a Secure Base for other people. What that means is we have to have their back. We have to be able to Step Up when we’re initiating, but when we see that it’s somebody else’s time, even if they’re not part of our immediate neighbors or our group, we have to become a Secure Base for them.

How do you support them? How do you respect them? How do you trust them? Then be aware and engage in new opportunities with it, change our perspective, expand our knowledge, and what all happens then is you fly together.

Robin Graham:

You mentioned just a few minutes ago about the oneness. And that really is what murmuration is demonstrating for us—these individual birds and groups of birds moving together in oneness.

What do you see as possible when organizations move in oneness, move together in a murmuration?

Kathy Hagler:

Well, I’ll give you an example of one of my clients, and it’s TD Industries in Dallas, Texas. The CEO when I worked there was Jack Lowe, but the CEO before him was his dad. They’ve been in business 120 years.

Now I see oneness there. He’s one of the experts that we’re going to use in our book. He’s no longer the CEO—others have come in—but basically what they did is they’re the ones where we learned leaderful behavior. That came from the work of the Greenleaf Center in Indianapolis on servant leadership. Basically what it says is we all serve each other so that we can perform our skills at the very best possible level for the organization.

I’ve watched Jack do this. When I interviewed him, it was beautiful because he said, “You know, my dad, when my dad started the company, my mom and my dad used to have everybody over for dinner—no, for supper. It was supper in Texas.”

Robin Graham:

That’s right. In Texas, it’s supper.

Kathy Hagler:

“We had everybody, everybody in the company over for supper on Saturday nights. And he said, we all got to be family, but we learned that everyone had their job and everyone had their role.”

When Jack’s dad died and Jack became the CEO of TD Industries, what was fascinating is they continued with their work with the Greenleaf Center and servant leadership. Jack didn’t have everybody over anymore because it got really big. When I worked there, they had probably a thousand people. Now they have, I think, 20,000 people, and they have gone from—and for 18 years, they’ve been on the list of the best places to work in the country.

Many years they won first place, and they’re a construction company. That’s not really easy, but what I’ve seen in that is everybody has their place. When I walked in to visit Jack in one of my consulting times, I walked in the door and he was sitting at the reception desk, and I said, “Oh my, I’m sorry, am I late?” And he said, “No, today this is my job.”

He said, “We job share. Today I’m the receptionist and the receptionist is the CEO.”

They had all the people in the field come to work in the office and the people in the office go to work in the field so they could understand and they could have each other’s back. What they did is they built a supportive team relationship.

Jack said a very interesting thing to me when I interviewed him, because I did work for him for about 15 years. I interviewed him recently. One of the things he said is, “You know, we’ve now expanded to where we went from making a million dollars to, we make probably 900 million a year. But we could have made more.”

I thought that was fascinating. He said, “Because it wasn’t about money. We’re here for the people and we’re here for the customers. We could have done better. But we all had jobs and we all had good income for all of our lives.” It’s a wonderful story of sustainability. And they all murmurated.

Robin Graham:

Beautiful. Well, and I think probably you didn’t share it, but I’m sure the other piece is they all have family. They all have the ability to have a home life and not just work.

Kathy Hagler:

That’s right.

Robin Graham:

 That’s why it’s the best place to work. Yeah. Beautiful. In your experience, how did teams of “MEs” adopt the habits of murmuration or oneness in a culture? How can they adapt this?

Kathy Hagler:

I think each “ME” has to be very motivated to really understand their current behavior. Like in Jack Lowe’s case, it’s very important that he says to the people, “We want you to be the best you can be. And we’re going to give you every opportunity to actually work on being the best you can be. And we want you to know what the outside of your jar says.”

We don’t want you just to see inside, but we want you to see how other people see you. There are lots of tools to do that, but we want to know how we’re seen and how we change that behavior. I think organizations have to be willing to invest in tools like Human Synergistics, in tools like the Adaptability Quotient.

There’s plenty out there that do 360s. That says, “Here’s what you see, but here’s how you look to me.” And that’s the outside of the jam jar. Are you constructive? Are you passive? What are you doing that can really help our organization? Each individual ME must be motivated to change the name on their jam jar.

Robin Graham:

And they have to be aware, with someone being able to receive feedback that this is the label.

Kathy Hagler:

That’s right.

Robin Graham:

Your example of the lady—she didn’t know what she didn’t know. You know, part of the key is being open and curious to ask the open-ended question and receive the feedback openly, not go into defense, and then explore it.

Kathy Hagler:

And that’s not easy, but if the organization supports you—my example about the young woman who had a lisp—but if the organization supports you, then you say, “I’m going to do this. This is my chance.”

Robin Graham:

Exactly. And again, it’s the whole person that we’re emphasizing, not just the work body.

Kathy Hagler:

It’s the whole ME.

Robin Graham:

Absolutely. Beautiful. You mentioned a couple of strategies or tools. Is there anything else that you’d like to recommend for leaders or individuals to incorporate what we’re seeing as strategic alliance of ME, WE, and US?

Kathy Hagler:

Well, I think that the first one is the vision. And if you could just start with murmuration, it’s not going to tell you how to create a vision, but if you can get that vision yourself—those birds flying through the air and the fact that 6 million of them can do it happily and harmoniously.

But I think as far as getting organizational support to help you with your limited Beliefs, you need to understand those Beliefs. I think you can do that through Human Synergistics, through Adaptability Quotient. There’s a wonderful opportunity to get some training called PSYCH-K®, which is actually how you and I met.

I went through the training to understand how I could change some of my Beliefs. It’s a wonderful opportunity to shift your perspectives. That’s also available to people. And as far as “WE,” there are many companies out there that do team training.

Working with teams necessitates team development and not just training.  A key piece of development is an assessment that gives a pre and post view of team harmony and team culture, such as AQai Adaptability Assessment. Teams or WE are a key piece in the flow from ME to WE to US.  Team members must engage with the mindset of being leaderful, being present and aware, having the courage and grit to shift beliefs and perceptions and connect to others around a meaningful purpose.  They must also actively engage in the conscious habits of Stepping Up, Stepping Back and Stepping together with a common vision.

As far as US, it’s really important. I think that the organization itself begins to understand how it can work best with rewards and recognition for success, both recognizing the inside people and also recognizing the customer. I think both of those are really critical.

Robin Graham:

Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you.

In closing, can you share insights or advice for teams or leaders that want to better understand why embracing nature and the path of nature that we’re bringing to the table for the harmony—which we talked about in the very beginning—the organizational harmony, and how does this contribute to my individual expansion, the team, the overall group success culture? Just, can you summarize what people could understand for why it’s important to do this?

Kathy Hagler:

Well, I can tell you that philosophers and organizational theorists have postulated for decades about the answers to harmony, organizational harmony. As an early adopter and successful entrepreneur for 40 years, I’ve really been fortunate to be mentored by Deming when I traveled with him in process management, by Dr. Peter Drucker, who was actually my main person when I got my PhD, Dr. Rob Cook, who’s with Human Synergistics, Myron Tribus, who really understands quantum theory. I’ve had all these people, but none of them together—they all knew culture was good.

They also all knew it was important to create, to have the culture and process and practices and customers work together, but they didn’t have a good model to say, “Here’s what it looks like.” It’s nature. It’s that simple.

It’s nature. And it’s been working for over a hundred years, and they created murmuration, which is a vision of unity and oneness. Now, they give you all of these wonderful steps—all of these people give you these wonderful steps—but it gets down to the starlings. And I think my research on the starlings is, there’s a wonderful book called “Mozart’s Starlings,” and the wonderful musician Mozart—and I’m also a pianist—but when he was writing one of his famous pieces, he overheard in his apartment somebody humming one of the things he was doing, and he was above a pet shop. He went down and it was a starling that was humming what he was composing. He said, “Oh, this is amazing!” So he bought the starling and found out that they were extremely good at mimicking and could sing anything.

From that, we learned that you have to Step Up, you have to Step Back, and you have to Step Together, then you move to a US. And my last question is: Why wouldn’t we do that? Why wouldn’t we follow a proven model of survival that works? It may be for the birds, but it works for humanity.

Robin Graham:

Yes. And we can learn from nature, and birds are a beautiful example. Thank you very much for bringing out all of this wisdom that you have built as you’ve worked through this. And we look forward to continuing to work together as well as inviting others to learn from this and to read the book and however we can help. Thank you, Kathy.

Kathy Hagler:

Thank you, Robin.