The Art of Real-Time Leadership with Carol Kauffman

An effective leader knows what the right thing to say and do between every stimulus and response. This is the core idea of real-time leadership, which focuses on the art of achieving steadiness and freedom amid the external challenges happening around you. Discussing this even deeper with Tony Martignetti is Carol Kauffman, author and assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School. Together, they talk about the three dimensions of leadership, having intentionality at every action, and giving yourself the space to create the right reaction to anything that comes your way. Carol also shares her life’s most important flashpoints that led to her biggest decision to become a psychologist and leadership coach instead of pursuing a singing career.

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The Art of Real-Time Leadership with Carol Kauffman

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest for this episode, Carol Kauffman. Carol is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, where she won a $2 million award to launch the Institute of Coaching with Cofounders, Margaret Moore and Susan David. She also won the inaugural award for a Culture of Excellence in Mentoring. She's a Visiting Professor at Henley Business School. She's also the Senior Leadership Advisor at Egon Zehnder, where she has trained hundreds of consultants and coaching skills.

She co-authored an incredible book with David Noble titled Real-Time Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes Are High. It’s truly a brilliant book. It was published by the Harvard Business Press in 2023. Thinkers50 has shortlisted you as one of the top eight coaches in the world. You're ranked #1 Leadership Coach by Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches with over 40,000 hours of practice working with people from all walks of life, from aspiring leaders to CEOs, elite athletes, and royalty. It’s amazing. You live in the Boston area. I'm so honored to welcome you to the show.

I am glad to be here. I'm intrigued by the conversation that we're going to have.

We're going to have an interesting conversation. What we often do here is take some journey into people's lives and see where they come from. Where are this person's, what we call, flashpoints in their journey that have revealed who they are? What I want to start with is thanking you because as a coach, advisor, and someone who does a lot of work with people in the field of coaching, I am so grateful for the work you've done and for setting the landscape for all of us who do the work we do.

Thank you, Tony.

Before we get started, I want to say that this space is all about sharing what you're called to share. As you're going along the journey, let's pause along the way and see what kind of themes are showing up. We'll give people a chance to see what we want to maybe double-click on. With that, where do you want to begin?

I was raised in a kennel. My dog won the Westminster Dog Show Best in Breed. It was a Toy Poodle. My first job was working with violent horses. I went from that to being a psychologist to being a coach.

Slow down for a moment here.

Nobody knows all these things.

That is remarkable. You were working with horses. I'll start there with this idea of you saying violent horses.

The first one was incredibly so. Mostly, he would bite people and then hurt them. He was an abused horse. When I encountered the horse for the first time, I didn't know he was a violent horse so I interacted with him. For some reason, he adopted me. I was the only person who could get close to him. Eventually, I was able to ride him.

One time, many years later, I was talking to a very high-up guy in a $50 billion organization. He was a real narcissist. Imagine this elegantly dressed European man who goes, “I get it. I understand. You went from alpha horses to alpha men,” for which point I cracked up. I realized, “Here's this guy who has the psychological insight of a gnat.” He put my life together in a way that I had never thought of before. That's a through line.

Sometimes it takes that insight from someone who you wouldn't expect. Horses hold so much wisdom in the first place. It's amazing what we can learn from them. I've done some work with horses along the way and it's been beautiful to see how they trust us and begin to trust us and how we have to react and shape our own being around them.

I did some equine training. One of the things we had to do was put our hands on the horse's neck right in front of the withers and do mindfulness meditation. You could see if you had done it because if you did it, the horse would lower its head below its withers. If not, it would keep his head up. That was my original career until I broke my leg. I realized you should never have a career where your body has to be healthy.

Also, your mind. That's the other thing that we have to also be mindful of. Sometimes, we get into work where we're spending a lot of time focusing on helping others. It can be very taxing for us. We have to take care of ourselves and self-care becomes an important part of this. I'm sure we'll be diving into that as we move along. I want to know, this experience must have been the impetus for you to think, “Psychology is the path for me,” but was there anything else that you were thinking you might end up doing besides psychology?

This was a flashpoint moment. I was in college. I was also a folk singer and a songwriter. That's what I thought I was going to be next. I had a small band. My backup was real musicians when we got the first chair in the Boston Pops. I had a hard time because I've been playing the guitar and I couldn't tune the guitar so that it didn't hurt their ears. I got comfortable talking to an audience because I'd have to strum the guitar and put the head of the guitar where the tuners were behind me so my bass player could tune the guitar for me. I got comfortable talking to a crowd.

Fast forward. I'm graduating. I'm a Psychology major at BU. One of the people I knew, a psychiatrist named David Allen, had these meetings at his house that were only for psychology people who had Master's and above, but I wanted to go. This is the flashpoint moment. I approached him and said, “I know I don't have a Master's but I'd love to come to the meeting.”

He said, “You can come to the meeting but you have to leave your first meeting. It will be 45 minutes lecture and 45 minutes concert. You are going to have to describe how it is you made the decision to be a singer or a psychologist and then you must write a song about it,” to which I said or perhaps blind, “But I haven't decided yet.” He said, “You will by then.” That was a real flashpoint gift from this guy. I started thinking, “What did I love about being a singer?”

I had done some big gigs where you've got balconies and lights on you. I thought, “What was my favorite concert?” My favorite concert was when I was supposed to sing at Bates College up in Maine and somebody hadn't done the PR. I show up and nobody knows that I'm coming. We go into the auditorium and have our PA system as if nobody's there. I'm like, “Thirty people.” I'm like, “We're not going to do this. I'm not going to sing to a big audience with 30 people in there.”

We went and found a big screened porch somewhere on campus. I remember vividly that there were four young women sitting down on the floor down to my left. When I was singing, they had tears streaming down their face. I realized, “If that was my favorite concert, I wanted to be a psychologist.” That was how I made the choice. I had to go about getting myself into a grad program, which was not easy.

I love that story. It’s so profound. What I love about this too is this idea that when you're challenged in that way, first of all, to be put into this make-or-break moment or think about this in this way, it's what the most powerful coaches do. They put you out on your edge to think very deeply about what it is that you want to experience and be willing to put all out there for yourself. In some ways, that was one of the biggest coaching questions you could have been given.

It was great. It was raising the bar. I love that when I said, “But I haven't decided,” and he goes, “You will have by then.” It forced me to think about myself in a different way.

Psychology becomes a thing and you're immersing yourself in this world. Did you take to it very easily because of your background and excitement? Tell me about the journey.

There was another flashpoint moment. Sometime after that, I remember I was outside with my mother digging in her garden. I'm whining again. Some of my best interventions are when I'm whining. I'm like, “Mom, I don't know what to do.” It was right around the same time because, at that point, I was thinking if I wanted to be a teacher and I wasn't sure. What my mother said to me was, “Figure out what you love to do, and then figure out how to get paid for it.” At that time, I was like, “I don't know what I want to do.” She goes, “You'll figure it out.”

I remember the phone rang. I went inside and talked to a friend of mine who wanted some advice. I came back out and the phone rang again. I went back in. Someone was asking for advice. For the third time, I was like, “This is what I love to do.” That was right around that time. These two different people challenged me in a unique way that helped consolidate and harness in me what I wanted to do. In psychology, it was what I was doing on some level anyway. It gave me a whole framework that I could use to understand what I was doing.

It's this idea that we sometimes overlook the gifts that we have. It’s like, “This is just what I'm doing. It's how I'm showing up.” As I often see, the gold is hidden right in plain sight but it's about tuning in to that gift or thing that we have.

That's a never-ending journey. I still think people will say, “Carol, what is it that you do in coaching that you see those who terrify people are being tamed as it were by you?” I'm like, “I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just doing it.” It would help me if I could articulate what it is I did better because then I would be more able to help others do it but it's hard. I just want to do it.

It has me thinking of this idea that we should do what comes naturally to us instead of making it harder than it needs to be and then figuring out how we sell it or talk about it later. If we try to get too bound up into, “How do I make this something marketable? How do I talk about it before I do it,” then we get bound up and have a lot of anxiety about it. We put a lot of worry into things. Why worry? Do what comes naturally.

The other thing is about naming what you're doing or finding the words to be naming it. David and I talk about that in our book. There's a lot of research. We've had some speakers at the Institute of Coaching Conferences where putting something into words makes it more likely that you can do it and you can then understand what you're doing better. Even when it comes to naming what emotion you're having will then help you manage it better. There is something to being able to articulate, at least to yourself, what you're doing separately from trying to sell it or anything but at least to think, “What is it that I am doing?” Listen to what other people say if you don't quite know yourself.

When you put an idea into words, it becomes more likely to be accomplished.

The doing comes first in some way. It’s the activity of getting out and doing some things, whatever activity that might be, putting a name to it, and then being able to get out and tell, “Yes, this has become clear to me.”

Some people might think, “If I can't describe what I'm doing, am I any good at it?” Let's not confuse that with being able to coach or speak and talk about it are two different skills. Someone can talk about coaching beautifully but they may not be able to coach.

I want to get back into your story and talk about what happens next. When I think about the IOC, this amazing institution that you've been at the cornerstone of starting, how did that come to be? We're making a big leap from where you were to where you started this but tell me about the early days.

It's again one of these flashpoints that you talked about, only this time it came from me. This was the following. It's 2003 and I've gone to a workshop and there's a coaching training organization called MentorCoach. I went to the first day and thought it was great. What happened is the guy who runs it, Ben Dean, a very smart psychologist, said, “After five minutes, you've seen my entire emotional range. You may be wanting to leave.” He was joking like, “Someone here is going to win free tuition at the end of the day but you have to be here to get it.” We all laughed. He wasn't boring at all. I thought he was great.

I did not win that. He said, “I'll have a follow-up call and one person will win from there.” I went to that and 35 of us. That's Sunday. Monday comes. I'm sitting in my office. All of a sudden, I have this feeling like, “Carol, you've won the coaching.” I remember thinking, “Great. I'm going to be unhappy when I don't win it.” It never occurred to me that if I was that unhappy for not winning it, maybe I wanted to do it and I should pay for it but that didn't occur to me at the time.

It's Monday afternoon and I opened up my email. It's the note from MentorCoach and has the numbers 1 to 35 on it. It says, “Two - the winner.” I was number two. The flashpoint occurred and three words changed my life. Without these three words, you wouldn't know me and the institute wouldn't exist. I was wowed when I saw that I won it. I thought, “This is an important moment.” Never could I have imagined how different my life would be. I had a little oak roll top. I took my chair and went in front of the wall.

I'm not a big meditator because I'm too nudgy but I said to myself, “This felt important. If there's a life lesson for me right now, I want to know what it is.” A short while later, the words that came into my mind were, “Don't hold back.” Tuesday comes. I'm thinking, “Don't hold back.” Nothing particular. Wednesday comes. I'm reading and then I have a break. I was bored. I wandered into the mail room, stole somebody's copy of the American Psychologist, started reading it, and thought, “It's by some former President of the American Psychological Association. I'd like to talk to this guy.” What's your next thought? “Like this person wants to hear from me.” It then was like, “Don't hold back.”

I realized at that point that if I had an idea to do something, I had to do it unless there was a good reason not to. In that case, I didn't call the person but I did email. At that point, I didn't know that this person responded to every email he got because he's addicted to bridge and he waits. I then became friends with Martin Seligman. We wound up traveling the world together and hosting his birthday party for six years. It refers people to me. That was like, “Don't hold back.”

The next week, someone presented at the ICF conference. I said out loud, “I'd love to present at the ICF conference.” I remember he looked at me and went, “Carol, you want to present at ICF? That's a long shot.” I'd been a coach for three months but the thing was I wasn't allowed to hold back. I had the idea so I had to do it. Many stories later, I wound up being invited by the ICF to present a keynote. When I was talking, I had this strong feeling that there was an important conversation. This is on tape.

You could say this to coaches, especially at ICF. I stopped and said, “Listen, I need to let you know that I had this intuitive hit. There's somebody here that has something very important to say to me and I want to make sure whoever you are, say it.” I give the talk and this woman comes up to me, this adorable blonde. She starts to talk to me. It turns out she lives in Wellesley and it turns out to be Margaret Moore.

Margaret Moore is the person who, a few months later, will say, “Carol, coaching needs an academic home and you need to provide it,” to which I said, “No.” Six months later, she did it again, I said no. Six months later, she said it again and then finally, I was like, “Okay, fine. I'll start an institute but it'll be the institute I want, not the institute you want.” She wanted to do a wellness institute and I was interested in positive psychology and leadership coaching. That was part of how the institute happened. Don't hold back. I see a Margaret Moore.

Margaret and I talk, bond, and decide to do work together. This exquisite woman comes up to me with great cheekbones and sounds like a TV anchor. She goes, “Carol, you have world-class material but let me tell you, you are not ready for the world-class stage yet.” She had this wad of paper in her hands, 3 or 4 sheets of paper all rolled up. She slapped her hand with it. She said, “I have some feedback for you. Trust me, it's not for the faint of heart. You touched your level here seven times. You did this and that.” Every single thing she said was right.

She ended with, “I feel called to be your coach.” I thought, “This was a sales job. I'm sure for X hundred bucks, I'll be glad for you to be my coach.” She continues and says, “I will only coach you for free. You may not make an appointment. You must call me on my cell phone and interrupt me at anything I am doing. If you want to make it on the world-class stage, you have to impose yourself on people. If you can impose yourself on me, you can impose yourself on anyone.” I was so terrified. I didn't call her for four months. I called her again. She picked up the phone.

This was Ruth Ann Harnisch, the woman who became my coach, became my trainer in many ways, and then gave us the $2 million to start the Institute of Coaching. This all goes back to those three words when I won the coaching. A lot of people think I've had this incredible confidence. I'm not particularly confident. It's just whenever I had the thought, I had to do it. Confidence made me do it. People thought I was confident because I did all these things but no. Eventually, I had to reverse and go from, “Don't hold back,” to, “Just Say No.” Unless there's a good reason to do something, don't do more. It took many years to get there.

It's such an amazing story. It reminds me of the year of saying yes. You go through a period of leaning into the possibilities of what's out there that builds confidence because you're stepping into arenas where you probably would have never dreamed but things open up from there. I have this model I use in my coaching, which is about expanding your vision and narrowing your focus. When people feel like they're stuck, they get stuck because they don't see the possibilities in front of them. They're looking at the wall but they need to look at the possibilities and say yes, and eventually, start to say no because they figured out what they want to move forward with.

Extend your vision and narrow your focus.

It's hand in hand with what you said. At some point, you have to start saying no because you realize that you've figured out what is for you and you've created a place that works for you but at first, we have to expand and figure out what's possible. I think about even the earlier days of your journey, how you were not sure where you were going to be, singing or working with horses. Leaving yourself open to possibilities was always what you were doing. It's so amazing. How did Susan David become into the mix?

She's wonderful. I knew Susan. I'm very proud of my relationship with Susan. I met her probably around 2004 when she didn't even live in the United States yet. It was at the Gallup organization that had a positive psychology summit for the first few years. I met her. I don't know if she was in her twenties or what but she was like a baby. There was something going on at the Gallup organization and we bonded. I do remember this. I remember looking at her and thinking she was amazing. I remember going, “Susan Davin, someday you are going to be a household name.” She's like, “You're out of your mind.” “Susan, I promise you, I know this. You are going to be a household name.” She's then a household name.

It's amazing. I think about you, Margaret Moore, and Susan David. There's so much we owe to the three of you around being able to build an organization like this but also being able to put so much thought leadership into the coaching arena overall. I'm so grateful. I want to shift gears. Tell me about the book. David Noble is amazing but I want to hear from your perspective what brought the book about. This is your first book. There was a lot of pent-up demand for you to be able to put a book out in the world. I'd love to hear what are 1 or 2 insights you want to share from the book that you want to bring into the space.

Thank you. The core message of the book comes from a quote from Viktor Frankl, who was a psychiatrist who survived four concentration camps and came out a better person. One of the things he said was, “Between every stimulus and response, there's a space.” Stimulus in this case is what's coming at you. It might be a project that is crashing or a difficult conversation. How do you respond? What do you think? What do you say? What do you do? How do you leave? What he says is, “Between every stimulus and response, there's a space, and in that space is where we find our freedom.”

The main thing for us is no matter what it is that's being thrown at us, how do we stay steady and create a space for ourselves? The book Real-Time Leadership talks about how you can create that space. It’s like, “I've created the space. Now what? How do I step into peak performance at whatever it is and function?” That's when we came up with these four buckets of what we call real-time leadership, and there’s an acronym MOVE.

No matter what is being thrown at us, we must learn how to stay steady and create a space for ourselves.

M is to be Mindfully alert, mindful as we think of meditating but alert like an athlete. O is to be an Options generator for any stimulus that's being thrown at you to have four pathways forward. V is your Vantage point. Validate your vantage point and see who disagrees with you. E is how to Engage and effect change. The primary concepts are if you're going to be mindfully alert as a leader, mindfully alert to what?

We came up with the idea of the three dimensions of leadership, which is what you need to do, managing the external demands on you, who you need to be, and one question is, “Who do I want to be right now,” and then how you need to relate to lead. That's the three dimensions of leadership. I'll do M and O. O is what's your stance moving forward? In tennis, if something comes to your forehand, you have one stance for that. If something comes to your backhand, one stance for that. We think of what stances you need to take for the things that are thrown at you.

There are four of them. The first one, which you'll probably know, is lean in. Something comes at you, either a sudden opportunity or something's crashing. Can you lean in? Roll up your sleeves and take action. There's lean back, which is if something is thrown at you, instead of jumping in and taking action, you lean back, go for the data, be rational, and make inquiries. Look at the overview. Something's thrown at you. Your other option is to lean with, which is nurturance and caring.

If we're talking about scale, it’s culture. Whether it's a difficult conversation or merger and acquisition, how can you be thinking about it? “Do I lean in and take actions, lean back and do diligence, or lean with, caring and culture?” The last one is the tough one, which is your capacity to save yourself. Don't leave. If something is thrown at me, I do not have to catch it, change my stance, or do anything. The best large-scale example of that is Dreyfus in Barbarians at the Gate. It was one sentence that has stayed with me forever.

There was a challenge coming towards him. He said to himself, “This is a battle I cannot afford to win.” He was able to say, “No, I don't need to prove myself or do anything with power. I can't win this battle.” Let's say you're giving a talk somewhere or you're leading your team and someone makes a snide remark or something insulting. Do you have the capacity to not get activated and not lean in, lean back, or lean with, but be able to make a space for yourself? Those are the four stances.

The fourth stance is different from all the others. The others are all things you're doing. “I'm being action-oriented. I'm thinking. I'm caring.” In this one, you do nothing but it opens you up to receptive learning. When I did nothing and said, “If there's a life lesson for me right now, what is it,” that thought came to me. I had thought, “I want this. What do I need to do? How do I need to think? Who should I connect to?” That's all the things I would have thought out but wouldn't have given me the space for something to catch up with me. Those are the 3 dimensions of leadership and the 4 stances.

This is not my first time hearing this but it's so brilliant because I think of this as even if you're going to be acting, there's still an intentionality to the action. It's not like you're immediately reacting to whatever's in front of you. You're giving yourself that space to create your reaction instead of immediately jumping in, which oftentimes I've seen. I'm sure you've seen this in a lot of the leaders you've worked with.

You see everything as a nail and you're a hammer. You're coming in and saying, “I'll jump, react, and have quick decisions because I don't have time to mess around.” They yell, scream, and lean in. The reality is that's not what's needed. Most of the time, that's going to fail. What we need is people who can take that pause and realize that pause is where all the action happens. You build muscle through understanding these models. The way you described it is you get good at this after a while.

It does take a lot of reps but also it's the other way. For some people, if something's thrown at them, they don't know what to do or they lean back into more data or go to analysis paralysis. That group goes, “I better lean in.” When I was a CEO, I hadn't seen this directly but someone in the executive told me that during an executive committee meeting, they'll say, “Tony, lean in. Carol, lean back. Perfect, he's leaning in.” I was very entertained when I heard that.

I want to get back into some of the things that you've learned about yourself. I often ask this to people on the show. What is a lesson, insight, or something that you haven't shared already that you think would be interesting for people to know that you'd like to share about your journey? You've had a very interesting journey.

I've been very fortunate. I've also taken advantage of all the opportunities that have come my way but a lot of opportunities have been given to me that weren't given to other people. Why does Thinkers50 know me? I'm labeled as one of the top eight coaches in the world and that's happened a couple of times but there are thousands of coaches as good as me. It just so happens that they know me. Therefore, I got that accolade.

I'm a good coach but not the best coach in the world, for God's sake, but Marshall Goldsmith knows me. He observed me coaching someone and then decided I was the best thing in the sliced bread. I was there. My motto of life started with dating but it is, “I'm not in control of my destiny.” I'm not in control that I started the institute or this, that, or the other but I was and I am in control of my probabilities. I can keep putting myself in situations where something good can happen that will positively impact me or not. I'm in charge of my probabilities. That was a big a-ha for me at one point.

If everybody's reading who's dating, it's very helpful. At one point, I was like, “I want to find somebody.” I decided that what I would do to increase my probability was I would do something twice a week to meet someone. At the end of the week, success was, did I do my two things, not did I meet someone? When other people are depressed or upset with themselves because they don’t need anyone, I increase my probability so I'm successful in what I have done.

It's the same thing as we think about building our practices. You want to build a bigger practice. What can you do to be in charge of your probabilities and open up options? None of us are in control of our destinies. Life is good. Life is less good. We're not in charge of that. We're only in charge of expanding what's possible.

There's something about this probability thing that is landing with me and this idea that you can't be looking externally for validation. It's about doing what you can to increase your probability that people will notice you eventually and see that you're working hard at making this craft come to life. What's in your control is continuing to show up and doing the two things that are in your control. That's an important aspect of it.

For anybody reading, think about that. For me, it was 2 things a week to meet somebody but it may be what 2 outreaches you can do or 2 things you can write proposals for. What are the things to do that increase the likelihood of you getting what you want and then making sure that your sense of success is you did those things? If something happens, that's great. It may take punches and punches. I had a referral that turned into something very significant. That was because I increased the probability years ago. I did some pro bono coaching for someone who had a lot of money but was part of a gig that I was involved with. It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars getting all the wrong guys.

You’re planting seeds. One last question I have for you. What are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

There are a couple of reasons why it had an impact on me but I loved the Dune series. I'm one of the few people who read all six books. If you make it past book four, you're in the good graph. It's the whole thing of fear that is the mind-killer. Let it to you and through you, which is one of the very early emotional intelligence things. Now, it coexists with emotions so it’s not a big deal but at that point, I remember it being very striking because I'd never heard anything like that before. That was very compelling.

Another book that I read in 2024 that was compelling, and it's going to be odd but it does follow the animal theme, is a book called The Soul of an Octopus. It is fascinating. It takes place here in the New England Aquarium. It's a woman who does volunteer work there and connects with an octopus. For me, what's fascinating about that is it's an alien. You learn how smart they are and how they can connect with people.

The octopus would be in this barrel or something. She would come up to it and it would wrap its tentacles around her and they taste. Someone else would come up and they put their hand in the water. The octopus would smack them to get them away. One of them was annoyed because there was a light that was bothering them so they squirted water on the light to sort it out. They did that repeatedly.

The other thing about octopuses, and it's not octopi but octopuses, is each one of their arms is its brain. They connect to the main brain somehow but what I've been thinking about is what an interesting metaphor that is for a corporation, to have all the different functions be their brains and then have a way to communicate to central but to central to appreciate that, it can't know everything but it's got these eight independent brains.

I found my next book right there. I'm fascinated. I thought I knew a lot about octopuses but I will tell you, I'm intrigued. This has been such a great conversation, Carol. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all your great insights, stories, and the multitudes of who you are.

You're welcome. It was a pleasure, Tony. Thank you for inviting me. I hope people reading get something out of it that can stay with them.

I'm sure they will.

Expanding your vision and narrowing your focus will stay with me.

Thank you. Before I let you go, though, I want to make sure people know where they can find out more about you if they'd like to.

CarolKauffman.com is probably the easiest than to google me and there are ten pages of stuff.

You're everywhere. Thank you so much. Readers, thanks for coming on the journey. I know you're leaving blown away and inspired. You're going to go find out more about octopuses.

We'll have to meet at the New England Aquarium at the octopus tank.

Fantastic. That's a wrap.

Important Links

• Institute of Coaching

• Egon Zehnder

• Real-Time Leadership

• Dune

• The Soul of an Octopus

• CarolKauffman.com

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