Joshua Berry: How Open Curiosity Creates Better Leaders Than Control Ever Will

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. It’s my pleasure to introduce you to today’s guest, Joshua Berry, CEO and co-founder of Econic and a nationally recognized author, speaker, and facilitator of change. For more than two decades, Joshua has worked with fortune 500 companies and high growth startups to help leaders rethink how performance actually happens, shifting from command and control leadership to team led results through Econic. He’s helped organizations like John Deere, Procter and Gamble, U.S. Bank, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and others build culture. Cultures rooted in learning, experimentation, and shared ownership. Joshua is also known for his dare to be naive philosophy, challenging leaders to test bold, counterintuitive ideas that unlock innovation and momentum in uncertain environments. Joshua, welcome to the show.

Joshua Berry: Thank you. Trisha.

Trisha Stetzel: Super. Yeah, I’m super excited to have you on. I think that there’s a lot in what I just said about you that we’re going to talk about today, which is going to be fun. So before we get started, Joshua, tell us a little bit more about you.

Joshua Berry: Sure. I think it all starts with the fact that I’m a father of four. Uh, it’s birthday season, so they will soon be 12, 14, 16 and 18. Married to my high school sweetheart, also named Trisha and spelling it the right way of T r I s h a. I live in Lincoln, Nebraska. That has been a great home base for over 25 years, but has allowed me to do work in over 40 different countries while still having a great place to raise a family.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that, thanks for being a great dad. I have the opportunity to be on a podcast called Girldad. I’m really excited about that, so you should take a listen to it.

Joshua Berry: I will.

Trisha Stetzel: It’s going to be fun.

Joshua Berry: I love two of mine are girls, so I will check it out. Thank you.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that you’re welcome. Okay, so Joshua, I think I’d just like to dive right into, um, the way there’s there’s so much happening in the world right now. Lots of change, a lot of, um, uncertainty, things that are happening around us that we can’t control. And I know you have some thoughts around how we view work and ways that we can use our work to You shift the way we’re doing things, whether it’s inside of the work or outside. So tell me a little bit about I’m going to call it the sandbox. So tell me more.

Joshua Berry: Yeah, I love to think of work as a sandbox. If any of the listeners are probably like you and me, we still have to work for a living and therefore we’re required to show up and, and do work, and we get a choice of how we want to use that time. And I view work as a phenomenal sandbox for us to be able to practice more of the behaviors that we need in society, right? So it’s like a bonus, like we have to go do it. Many times we’re put into situations with people we wouldn’t normally hang out with or talk to, and we have to figure out how to make something better together. And so when I think again about all that we need in society in terms of, of better discourse, more trust, more resilience, uh, Ease your ability to to change our mind when new thinking and new facts come about. Um, these are all things we get to practice at work and get paid for it. And so I just love again, the work that I’ve done for the last couple of decades has always been at the intersection of business performance and people and trying to create these spaces for people to practice those types of behaviors.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that. So, Joshua, can you give us an example of something where you’ve been able to use that sandbox?

Joshua Berry: Absolutely. Uh, some of our early work at Econic was helping build innovation labs and incubator programs within large companies. And oftentimes, uh, the issues that some of those innovators or entrepreneurs would run into were their own limiting beliefs about, I can’t try this thing because if I do and I fail, uh, then traditionally I’m not going to be seen as a high performer. And yet that’s exactly the type of behavior that we needed to instill in them and coach. And so a lot of our programing and workshops weren’t just teaching them. For instance, how to experiment or how to build rapid prototypes of new ideas. It was working on their own inner work, what I call groundwork, in terms of what voice is telling you about your worth when you fail at something. Now that’s a phenomenal sandbox, because just imagine if we had more people who are a little bit more thoughtful about saying, I really want to try something new in work or in life or at home or whatever it might be. But what will people think if I fail? Well, these incubator programs and innovation programs we got to build gave people routine practice on exactly those types of behaviors. And what they began to see is that when they embraced some of those things and they started to realize, oh, I tried this, it failed. I’m still okay. Um, they actually were a little bit braver in other aspects of our lives, too.

Trisha Stetzel: Mhm. Yeah. Wow. I love that I picked up on a word that you used that I really like, which is, which is entrepreneur. Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Joshua Berry: Sure. It’s it’s a $2 word that we use when we’re talking about people who have been designated for more innovative or entrepreneurial work within an organization. And so we typically refer to them as entrepreneurs. Um, and there’s a lot of, we can fill a whole episode on what you need to do to be a successful entrepreneur. Set the system up for it. But that’s what I mean.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. I love that you talk about embracing bold and, and, and counterintuitive ideas in your dare to be naive work. So what a powerful, naive hypothesis you’ve tested that actually accelerated outcomes.

Joshua Berry: Yeah, yeah, I’m I’m known, uh, in the speaking world and others is that naive guy. Uh, and it is, it’s, it’s, I’m not completely, willfully ignorant about the world, but I do believe that so much more is created if we believe in what can happen and the optimism and the beliefs that are driven from that. And so a concrete example of it is, you know, most organizations say, uh, our people matter and the growth of our people matter. But a naive belief that I have is the growth of the people matter even more than the business growth. Um, both are important. We need both of them. But at the end of the day, uh, people growth, even over business growth is kind of a naive hypothesis. And a story I like to tell about it is there was a manager named Michael, uh, who we were working with, who gave me a call and he was looking for a mentor for one of his teammates high potential, high potential person. And he asked if I knew someone who could mentor him. I racked my brain a bit and realized that there was somebody I could refer. But this person worked for their competitor down the street and I said, uh, I’ve got someone I could introduce you to have that person meet with the competitor.

Joshua Berry: And he paused for a bit, and Michael eventually said, okay, let’s set that up. Now, what was fascinating was like traditional management logic would say, why would you ever send one of your star performers over to meet with a competitor? But Michael, when I asked him later why he did it, and I had a hunch right as he said, I win either way, right? If I care so much about his growth and development that I’m willing to do something that might be perceived as risky. He’s going to know that I cared that much about him, and his growth was more important. And the counterintuitive thing that happened is the loyalty of that high performer actually grew because there was there was factual evidence, right, that Michael cared so much about his growth and development. And so that person went, he learned from this other mentor and continued to be a high performer at that business. But it was kind of the when push comes to shove, like actually showing your actions back up your words in terms of your belief and your employees development.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow. That’s amazing. And just thinking about the culture that you can build with this, um, we’ll call it, these are your words, strategic experimentation and learning, right? Strategic experimentation, even being naive and trying things, right. Uh, even some counterintuitive ideas. How, how do you build that kind of culture in a business?

Joshua Berry: Uh, yeah, you have to, you do have to have great leadership who have done their own groundwork, their own inner work to be able to understand that there might be other ways. And you mentioned this during the intro. That’s hard. If the culture is is stuck in this idea that you need to command and control everything. I think the best organizations and the best leaders have understood that change is happening too quickly for everything to be prescribed and controlled. And and nobody wants just their team members sitting around waiting to be told like, hey, what do I do next? Uh, so the future from our research and our understanding is what we call team led results. And to build a culture that is focused on team led results, you can’t just jump into that experimentation that you mentioned. You actually have to do a couple of steps before it. And it’s what we call groundwork and we call alignment. The groundwork is, again, what’s the inner work for the team, helping them change their relationship to change? And, uh, specifically how you can do that is create space for teams and individuals to be able to work through where maybe some of their limiting beliefs are related to the work or what’s needed. Once some of that work is done, then you can do alignment. Alignment is about just getting clear on things like what are the expectations for my role? What are our expectations for growth? What are what are the unwritten rules that I see people, uh, behaving as if they were truth that we need to call out. And, uh, once teams have the trust and are able to work through some of those things, then all that experimentation, then all of the progress and the things people used to hire us for right away, like start to fall into place.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to you brought in something from your bio, uh, around the command and control to team lead. We’re right now in our workforce, um, generationally, we have lots of, lots of ages still in the workforce, Absolutely right. Where when I was growing up in these bigger brands, it was very much command and control. And what you said is what needed to get done and the team executed. And we did that over and over again, where the culture and business has shifted a lot to team led. So what are your thoughts around this very broad age range of people in the workforce and everybody, you know, kind of shifting their mindset?

Joshua Berry: Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: Together.

Joshua Berry: Yeah. To your point, generational differences are real. Um, there’s a reason why stereotypes exist because there is some truth to those things. But what I invite for organizations and we just did, um, we’re about eight months into a 12 month leadership program with about 180 leaders. And they specifically wanted to focus some of the content on the communication styles of five generations in the workforce. So this is near and dear to my heart. And one of the first things that we said is we need to help all people in the workforce, regardless of age, get to a space where they understand that they have agency to either be defensive or open and curious. Yeah, we’re not going to change the history and experience in the decades of experience that brought you to here and some of that preprograming. But we all have agency. Diana Chapman and a couple of others wrote a book called the 15 Commitments to Conscious Leadership and Commitment. Number one. I see you nodding your head is that there’s a line and we have a choice every single day. Do we want to stay below the line where we’re defensive and we’re committed to being right? Or can we flip above the line and be open to learning and committed to learning, even if it proves that we’re wrong. And so the first step, regardless of age, experience, whatever it might be, is can we own that we have agency to be able to make that, that that shift back up because we’ll always drift down like we’re too busy. We make assumptions, all these things. We’re always going to be defensive first, but can we start to create space where we can pause for a moment and get back above that line?

Trisha Stetzel: Oh my goodness. Yes, I have so many more questions for you. But before we go there, I know that there are some folks who are listening today who already want to connect with you to have a conversation or learn more. Where is the best place or how is the best way to connect with you?

Joshua Berry: Yep. Best places. I put out new content on LinkedIn. That’s the best place to find me. You can search for Joshua Berry and Econic there, or we’ll put that in the show notes. My email address, I love to respond to personal emails from people. So that would be Joshua at Econic e c o n I c.co. And then for more information either on our work. It’s Econic or my personal speaking. And, and oftentimes the topics that I’m most interested in, uh, that’s at joshua.com.

Trisha Stetzel: Love it. Okay. Joshua, I’d like for you to tell me a little bit more about the work that Econic is doing. I know that we’ve, we’ve put some of that in a little bit here and a little bit there, but who are you working with and what kind of work are you doing?

Joshua Berry: Yep. It’s across all sorts of industries. We have some higher education clients now, some insurance, financial services, retail, manufacturing. The only common thread is that they are leaders going through some sort of change, uh, or organizational initiatives. And they’re curious and open. Like that’s the common thread. We also rarely work with people who are completely failing and and they need some sort of silver bullet approach, right? But those organizations who are good trying to get even better, and the type of work that we’re doing with them is everything from custom training and development programs to help them practice more of the behaviors that they need within their organization to executive facilitation work, which might be strategic planning or other initiatives. Um, and then more and more of it is around what we talked about previously, which is the idea of team led results. So more, more talks and workshops and virtual programs, specifically helping team leaders, managers. Move past the stage of burnout where they’re feeling like they have to carry everything themselves. And what we help them do is shift mindset and get some new tools to be able to help their teams lead the results. So it doesn’t feel like you’re constantly like pulling and pushing and, and coercing people to get buy in, to get stuff done. But you’ve, you’ve created the steps and the environment so that the teams actually want to almost like pick you up and carry you forward.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. So just thinking about that particular scenario and a leader saying, well, my, my team is not getting the results they need. So I do have to carry all of the weight of the team and do everything that, uh, everything myself, right? Um, and some of those leaders are even saying that they empower their teams to do the things that need to get done, but the behavior doesn’t always match. What are your thoughts there?

Joshua Berry: Yeah, one of my first thoughts is, um, it’s the reason why we start oftentimes with senior leadership teams is, is they say the words empowerment, but then they, their actions don’t actually represent that they’re empowering people. The classic example someone comes in for a one on one and they’re bringing you a problem or an issue and, um, and you adopt a problem solving type of mindset instead of a coaching mindset, right? Well, and what would you do in this situation and what else? And, you know, there’s, ah, I’m not a pro in this. You are a master leadership coach. I see. Um, but there are a lot of great books out there and great resources that help leaders become better coaches. And I already established we have four kids. Oftentimes it’s the same thing as as in parenting. Like if I did everything for my kids, I can’t, I shouldn’t be surprised if they become teenagers and they still want me to do everything for them, right?

Trisha Stetzel: Then you have a bunch of 30 year olds living at home, right? Absolutely.

Joshua Berry: No judgment.

Trisha Stetzel: No judgment.

Joshua Berry: There’s there’s bad luck in life, right? But we have agency. We have control over those things. And so if you feel like you are carrying everything for people, the first thing you need to do is to look at some of your practices and understand this is back to groundwork again. Um, is there something that is causing some sort of immunity in you of giving up that control? And oftentimes these leaders have built their success on being the one with the answers and being the one who their value was based upon solving things. And unfortunately, they then get stuck into these repeating cycles and loops where they just keep reinforcing those things. I was, I was working with an engineering group, um, yesterday speaking at their event, and we got into this conversation around heroic efforts. And I said, heroic efforts in your organization should be the exception. The moment we start to celebrate always these heroic efforts, what you’re doing is you, you’re celebrating the wrong thing. Because now you’re rewarding a behavior and not always rewarding the fixing of those systems or processes or other things that make it so that you shouldn’t have to rely on heroic efforts. And it’s a counterintuitive idea, but if you have too many heroic efforts, you probably have some systems and process problems that you need to step back and be able to address. And so again, that comes back, though, from leaders having to be honest and serious about what type of culture that they want. And if they truly want to empower people, like what does that mean for them?

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. I want to ask you a little deeper question, if that’s okay. What what drives you or what drove you to this work? Why is this work important to you?

Joshua Berry: I believe people have so much squandered potential. Trisha. I believe there are people within organizations that are just going about life and work and everything, and either they don’t have or they’ve given up maybe some of the dreams that they have for the type of life that they could create. And then we’ve created work systems that further drain that from them. And, um, that’s why I’m passionate about this shift that we get to make now, to be able to fully unleash people, quite honestly, into the work that they were made to do and use work as that sandbox to be able to help them practice more of those things to get better. Um, yeah, that’s what drives me.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. Yeah. You circled us right back around where I wanted to take us, right, was to sandbox and really thinking about it. Like, I know that some of what we have talked about today resonates with someone out there who’s listening around. How can I create or have this sandbox to really help my people who I know have potential?

Joshua Berry: Yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: Get where they want to go, right? Yeah.

Joshua Berry: So what’s what are some things they can do?

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah.

Joshua Berry: Yeah. The first is, is you, especially if you, you phrased it in a way of a team leader, like you need to be able to know where each of those people want to go and be able to have the type of relationship with them, like Michael mentioned, where you’re okay, even if that’s not in your team, right? Like, and that sounds so crazy. Half of half the people just shut this off. But, but you have to have people who care enough about you and, and they know you care enough about them that they’re willing to have that conversation around. What do you want to learn next? What do you want to do next? Obviously, you need a successful business to create opportunities for people to grow. But if your story is a little bit wider And they could grow over there. They could grow over there, whatever it might be. And all of a sudden, you have a lot more abundance and a bigger sandbox to play in. So I think the first one is the relationship. The second piece of it is are you setting the example for yourself? Right. Um, there are a lot of leaders who say these things for their team members, but they don’t actually talk about it or live it themselves. There’s this one sales leader I was working with, who in private, he would tell me that he couldn’t wait until he reached a certain age.

Joshua Berry: So he finally had enough saves so he could actually go do what he wanted to do. And, uh, and I said, have you ever shared that with your team? He’s like, no, why would I ever do that? There might be some of them that would have that same thought. And what I challenged him on was they probably already have those thoughts. You just don’t know it. Just like you already have this thought. And so, uh, you have to start to model some of those things for yourself and being honest. You know, people you mentioned about generational differences, I know there’s differing levels of what people feel is appropriate to share and disclose within the work environment, but I found very few people who don’t value authenticity and value people just being real and sharing those things, even if it doesn’t align with their normal way, you know? Full circle on the naive naivete thing and being naive. Part of my research in that book showed that we we got the word naive kind of wrong a few hundred years ago. Naive actually just means natural or innate or that thing which you’ve had from the start. And so sometimes when you have a naive belief or naive thing that comes up within you, it might actually be something that is worth listening to because maybe it was coming from a deeper source than you’re giving credit to it.

Trisha Stetzel: I wish we had so much more time together. I’m really enjoying this conversation. So, um, as we get to the end of our conversation, just one, one more thing and I’d like to get your thoughts on someone who’s listening today who doesn’t have that relationship with the people that they work with or who report to them, whatever hierarchy you want to look at or level playing field, how do they, how do they get started when it’s it feels so uncomfortable to get to know their team members at that level so that they can start to work together in this sandbox.

Joshua Berry: Yep. A couple quick ones. Um, one would be just being able to have open conversations about what’s working and what’s not working in the role and then doing something about it. Um, another is, uh, if you use an employee engagement survey, actually do something with the results because oftentimes people are sharing some of these things and then the organization takes way too long or they don’t ever act on those results. So you may already have some of this content there. You’re just not doing anything with it. And then I think the third thing is, is, again, if you are the individual who, let’s say it’s completely blocked and you’re not getting this at work at all, great. Find some other part of life where you can do it, whether it’s at a nonprofit or volunteering for a board or some other places where you can continue to explore and try out things that you might normally not have a chance to do at work.

Trisha Stetzel: Wow. Thank you so much for your time today. This is, um, this is the best conversation I’ve had all week.

Joshua Berry: Thank you. Thank you. Trisha. I’m flu. I’m flu.

Trisha Stetzel: I, I love this. I took so many notes and I love when you talked about the two agencies of being defensive or open and curious. I love that that’s so simple. It’s so simple. Just write it on your wall. Right?

Joshua Berry: Absolutely. And it’s again, not mine. 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. Great book. Go check it out.

Trisha Stetzel: I love it. All right. Joshua, thank you again for your time today. This has been wonderful.

Joshua Berry: Thank you Trisha.

Trisha Stetzel: All right, you guys. That’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation that Joshua and I had, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, veteran or Houston leader ready to grow. Be sure to follow, rate, and review the show. Of course, it helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.