Deliberate and Aware (with Aaron De Smet)

The Mark Divine Show

Being out of control of something we want to control and fix is a recipe for disaster. When we try to control things, we often react in ways that are ultimately not helpful and can be self-destructive.

Much of Aaron De Smet’s(@AaronDeSmet) work focuses on helping large distributed organizations to achieve growth, innovation, productivity, and organizational agility. Aaron co-authored Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead in a Volatile World. He has been consulting for many years at McKinsey and in prior years at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He is also an expert on organizational design, corporate culture, and leadership development.

Aaron De Smet(@AaronDeSmet) counsels leadership teams as they transform their organizations to improve performance, organizational health, speed, and agility. He holds a P.H.D. from Columbia University, where he studied organizational psychology and business. His expertise spans several industries, including agriculture, biotechnology, chemicals, and transformational change.

“The world has become so interconnected that one small thing somewhere can have surprising effects in ways we hadn't imagined”

- Aaron De Smet

Key Takeaways:

• Self Awareness in Leadership: Self-awareness is a positive attribute regardless of where you are. Professionally it elevates your ability to be present and problem-solve in VUCA environments. There is always complexity when working with other people. On a team, self-awareness always helps, no matter how cognitively taxing it might be.

• Defining Self-Awareness: When experts talk about self-awareness, they don’t just mean the metacognition of personal understanding of what we are thinking and how we think about it. They emphasize that we need to understand that there might be potentially subconscious emotions that are sitting there that are guiding or biasing us. These unconscious drivers can actually be brought into awareness. When we merge the conscious and surface the unconscious, we are more fully self-aware and self-knowledgeable.

• Changes in the Workplace: Even pre-pandemic, the desire for more flexibility regarding when and where one works was on the rise. The reasoning for “going into an office” has changed. The files, phones, and meeting place no longer have to be in one location. Also, what people see as desirable for a career in these next generations, Gen Z and beyond, has shifted.

• Triggers of Grief: Grief doesn’t happen only when we lose a loved one. Grieving is a process everybody goes through psychologically whenever they feel a sense of loss of something loved or cherished. This loss could be a loved one, a pet, an experience, or even a favorite restaurant closing that there was a felt emotional connection to, and the place was loved and cherished. So grief can be the loss of any loved or cherished thing.

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Links for Aaron De Smet:

Deliberate Calm

Work with Aaron

LinkedIn