The Spirit of Leadership: Aligning Values with Action, with John Mitchell
What does it mean to lead with both purpose and integrity in a world that often separates the spiritual from the professional?
In this thought-provoking episode of the Spirituality in Leadership podcast, host Andrew Cohn sits down with John Mitchell, a leadership development consultant, coach, and fellow "recovering lawyer," to explore the intersection of spirituality, faith, and effective leadership. John shares his unique journey—from growing up in a military family with broad exposure to diverse faiths, to his current work helping leaders align their actions with their deepest values.
The conversation explores the challenges of congruence—ensuring one’s behavior aligns with one's stated beliefs—and the importance of interconnectedness as a guiding principle in leadership. John offers practical insights for leaders across sectors, from corporate executives to faith leaders, on how to navigate hypocrisy, foster inclusivity, and make decisions rooted in integrity.
Whether you're a corporate executive, faith leader, or purpose-driven professional, this episode offers powerful, practical wisdom on navigating ethical dilemmas, embracing inclusivity, and making value-aligned decisions in complex environments. Listen now to discover how spirituality can be a strength—not a side note—in leadership.
Key Takeaways
Faith and spirituality aren’t the same—but often overlap.
Congruence matters. Leadership credibility stems from living your values consistently, not just preaching them.
Leaders need mirrors. Coaches can help by reflecting back a leader’s own values—especially during moments of self-doubt or hubris.
The best leaders check themselves. High-integrity leaders actively ask, “Are my actions aligned with my beliefs?”
Inclusiveness grows from spiritual awareness. A belief in interconnectedness leads to more inclusive and effective leadership.
Discernment is not judgment. Leaders must evaluate situations with clarity without falling into prejudice or rigidity.
In This Episode:
[00:00] Introduction: Faith vs. spirituality
[03:00] John’s childhood, military upbringing, and multifaith exposure
[06:00] Spirituality through the lens of connection and nature
[10:00] Diversity, integration, and spiritual evolution
[13:00] Coaching faith leaders and guiding them through their own frameworks
[18:00] The danger of ego and the pedestal problem
[24:00] Leading with integrity—lessons from a transportation executive
[30:00] Self-checks and internal congruence as a leadership discipline
[36:00] Discernment vs. judgment in decision-making
[39:00] Leadership in law firms and the challenge of tough decisions
[41:00] Closing reflections and where to find John online
Resources and Links
Spirituality in Leadership Podcast
John Mitchell
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Transcript
John Mitchell: A sense that faith and spirituality don't have to be the same thing, that perhaps faith may be a subset, at least for me, of spirituality. And that started to evolve.
Andrew Cohn: How the application of these types of principles contributes to more effective leadership.
John Mitchell: When somebody very loudly talks about their faith or talks about their beliefs, talks about their spirituality, and then behaves in a way contrary to it, if that's not where your ideas come from, where your values come from, and it's this more, you know, spiritual place that's not defined by anybody else other than by you.
Intro: Welcome to the Spirituality in Leadership Podcast hosted by Andrew Cohn. Andrew is a trusted counselor, coach and consultant who works with leaders and teams to increase productivity and fulfillment in the workplace. If you'd like to connect with Andrew about individual or team coaching, leadership workshops, or team alignment, Please go to www.lighthouseteams.com. Enjoy the podcast.
Andrew Cohn: In this episode of the podcast, I speak with John Mitchell. John is a fellow recovering lawyer as am I. We've been connected for about 15 years. He is a leadership development consultant and coach and counselor and advisor. Just a very wise man with a lot of interesting experience. He's very matter of fact and very clear. And I know that John has a very strong connection himself with spirituality and leadership, both in terms of his own approach and practice, but also fueled by or informed by his childhood, which he talks about in the podcast. He also has worked with senior leaders in the faith community in various churches and also with a number of corporate leaders who, as he says, it's just who they are, how they bring their faith to their work. And we talk about congruence, connectedness, interconnectedness, being inclusive. John's full of wisdom in a very easy way, and I'm sure you'll enjoy the conversation.
Welcome back to the Spirituality and Leadership Podcast. I have with me today my old friend, colleague John Mitchell. Although I don't think we've ever met, even though we've met each other, not in person, even though we know each other, I guess around 15 years or so. Thank you so much for if you're watching the video, John's got a deep, deep fire pit in front of him keeping him warm in the northern Michigan climate there. But thanks for being with us. And John's a lawyer, a coach, a very creative thinker, a leadership companion. But let me read your words because I love what you've written at the top of your LinkedIn profile. John Mitchell, an avid learner on his own leadership journey, he partners with others who seek to enhance their leadership skills to make the world a better place. Provocative, irreverent, fun loving, empathetic. Welcome to the podcast, John Mitchell.
John Mitchell: Thank you, Andrew. It is a pleasure to be here and thank you for inviting me. And I've had a lot of fun having conversations with you both over the years and more recently talking about the podcast.
Andrew Cohn: Excellent. Thank you. John and I shared this path as recovering lawyers in the leadership development make the world a better place space. But I don't want to speak about your background or your story. I might start with the question, and I know a little bit about this, but could you please share a bit about your interest in this topic, your interest in the connection between spirituality, broadly defined, and leadership. I know it's a part of your work, but tell me how you approach this. By the way, I love the fact that we can ask each other compound questions without raising objections. In this space I'm asking.
John Mitchell: And we don't get an objection.
Andrew Cohn: No, sir.
John Mitchell: Okay, so let me go backwards a little bit and start early on in terms of my experiences with the concept of spirituality. And it really came to me as a small child growing up in a military family. My parents were both Protestants. And I won't, I don't even know the exact denomination, but they both were people of faith. And in the military environment, there were many people of faith. And in those days, faith and spirituality, and maybe still today, for some people, they were considered the exact same thing. So I grew up in an environment where your faith equaled your spirituality, your spirituality equals your faith. And as I grew as a child and my father moved up in his military career, we reached a point where he was a base commander. And, you know, we might go to church one Sunday, you know, just to show the base commander being out there. And it might be a Methodist service, we might go another Sunday and it could be, you know, a Baptist service. And, you know, in the military, there's not enough faith leaders for every single faith that's present. Like there's Mormons, there's Jews, there's all sorts of different, you know, faiths, you know, in the military.
So you might have the same three or four faith leaders actually doing all these different services. And so one of the things that I grew up with was a broad exposure to many, many different faiths. And in fact, as a slightly older child, maybe middle school child, my best friend's mom was the Kool Aid mom in our neighborhood. Every kid hung out at her house, and they were Catholic. And so it was Saturday that I was going to mass with them because I was hanging out at their house. I practically lived there in the summertime, so really broad exposure. And it wasn't until I was probably in college that I started to get a sense that faith and spirituality don't have to be the same thing. That perhaps faith may be a subset, at least for me, of spirituality. And that started to evolve. I had a great class at Northwestern with a Rabbi that was all about looking at lots of different faith traditions and trying to discern commonalities between them and also trying to discern what those traditions were trying to tell us as humans about our place on the planet and maybe our future. And so that was a fascinating course. And he was very provocative. I mean, he was literally out of central casting. This old Jewish man is probably within two, three years of retirement and Rev Polish. And he was just phenomenal. He really pushed us to think and he challenged us all the time.
And that really helped me start. For myself personally, I'm not saying this for everyone else, but for myself personally to unbundle faith from spirituality. And the idea of faith for me was often about dogma that was related to a particular religion and a set of religious beliefs. And spirituality became more of a belief system about there being part of something and that there's something greater than me out there in existence, not necessarily knowing what that is, but a belief that there was that. And also a belief that came out of at least Jewish mysticism that I really got fascinated by in this class. A belief that everything is connected. And that became a belief that as I moved through life, it became a more strongly and closely held belief for me. And that really influenced my thinking about spirituality.
And so one of the things that I was lucky enough in my path as a child into adulthood is I've always been able to be in travel a lot, first of all, and be in environments where I get to be outside, both in urban environments and also out in what I would call nature, where there's not a lot of man made things there. And I discovered that one of the things that was really interesting for me is especially as a young adult, the more I was in nature, the more I felt connected to literally anything and everything, and the more I felt that that was really this definition of spirituality for me, and that's carried through in one shape or another to this day. So that's kind of a long answer, Andrew, but that's really where my interest in the topic came from, was really my childhood. And then early adulthood and going from a belief that faith and spirituality were exactly the same and then coming to a place where perhaps they're overlapping and one may be a subset of the other. And so that's, you know, where I've arrived at.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah, beautiful. And what strikes me about the story is this exposure to different faiths. And I love what you shared about, you know, there were more faiths than there were religious leaders to perhaps lead services. There's sort of a fluidity. So could it be that ? I may be about to say something that's totally radical, and I don't want to offend anyone, but could it be that the Methodist leader was leading a Mormon service? Is that even possible for this?
John Mitchell: It is possible in the military, and especially depending on the size of the base that you're at. So in the United States, there's not nearly the pressure for the military to be providing services on base. They do, by the way. They do, but there's not nearly the pressure because there's often a huge variety of faith choices off base. But when you're overseas, when you're in another country, and if it has a predominant religion, that predominant religion may be the primary off base resource for faith. And if that doesn't happen to overlap with your faith, like when I lived in England, if you weren't part of the Church of England, that wasn't going to be a great resource once you went off base. Now, in rural England, where I was living, it was not like London, where London had all sorts of faith, you know, sure. You know, organizations present and faith leaders. In rural England, just like many parts of rural America, there weren't these options. And so what the military tries to do is provide, or at least in those days, tried to provide those opportunities for people who had a particular faith to worship in their own way. But the military also couldn't have 27 different faith leaders all on one small Air Force army base. And as a result, they might only have a few who have to wear lots of hats, so to speak.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah, I appreciate that. And you're sharing that. I'm recalling some of my dad's stories of being in boot camp in Georgia when he was in the Navy, and him talking about just how he had never met people from some of these different faiths. He grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, and he had never met people from these different communities. And sometimes it was scary, and sometimes they had these outrageous beliefs about him and his faith. But just how the military breaks down barriers that way.
John Mitchell: It's very interesting that the military was forced to integrate. That was, you know, Congress made that decision, and the president enforced it. And that's many years ago, which gave people like my father, a black man, huge opportunities. So it created a chance for different, you know, races to connect. It created a chance for people with different religious beliefs to connect. So for me, at high school, you know, some of my closest friends were a group of Jewish students and a group of Mormon students. And, you know, when I graduated from college, lots of my friends were Jewish because that was a big community at Northwestern. There weren't a lot of Mormons, at least that I encountered at Northwestern. So it was one of those things that I found very interesting that there were faiths that I was encountering earlier in my life that I wasn't necessarily encountering with the same frequency later in my life.
Andrew Cohn: Right. So suddenly you notice the mosaic is changing, perhaps in trying to figure out why, but even otherwise, just to recognize that that changes. And one thing I would just point out here, and I know it might be somewhat controversial to say this, but integrating the army was perhaps one most significant successful diversity initiatives ever undertaken.
John Mitchell: The racial integration of the armed forces really created this incredible opportunity for people of all different races to have an opportunity they never would have had otherwise, including people like my father, who was a graduate of Boston University. And yet he would not have had. Even with that degree in Aeronautical Engineering, he would not have had the same opportunities had the military not been integrated. And that then led to integration in other ways. You know, gender. You know, we had women in the armed forces then in a significant way, and we finally have women in combat roles in the armed forces, which is changing opportunities for women in the military now. There's certain jobs you cannot get if you haven't served in a combat role, and so that's now creating opportunity. I don't think we've done nearly as well with the LGBTQ community in terms of integration, although there are members who self identify as part of that community who are in the military and are in significant posts within the military. And I hope that our country finds a way to continue in that tradition when creating these opportunities in the military and in other parts of our society as well.
Andrew Cohn: Absolutely. So, as you know, this podcast, among other things, is really focused on bringing these spiritual dimensions, or we don't need to call them spiritual, but these particular dimensions are perhaps most important to us as individuals into our leadership for the benefit of ourselves and our teams and our organizations. And I'm curious to know, as a coach, particularly as a coach across all different types of sectors, it's not as though you only coach lawyers or people in the faith community, which you have, as we've discussed, but again, a very broad question. How have the concepts and ideas around interconnectedness around the different faiths you've been exposed to, how do they come into leadership, and how do you work with leaders to bring the benefits of their spirituality into their leadership?
John Mitchell: So one of the things that I'm always looking for is congruity between what people say their values are and their behaviors. And I'm human and my clients are all human. So we all fail to be congruent with those two things consistently. However, most of us are trying to be consistent. We want to live our values. And so that's one of the things that I'm looking to see in my clients, especially my clients who are in leadership roles, is, you know, what are their values and how are they living those values? Are they doing it in a way that's consistent, or is it just, you know, a showpiece? And when I have a leader who is a person of faith and I understand what their faith is, they don't always tell me this. But if I know what their faith is and I know something about their face, values, and traditions, one of the things that I can often do is literally utilize their faith as a mirror so that they can check in with themselves on how consistent they're behaving, not with what I think is important, but what they've told me is important to them because they've said their faith is important to them. And that's been interesting to do, especially since, as you said, I've coached some faith leaders, not just people of faith, but literally faith leaders, ministers, priests, rabbis. And when I do it in that environment, it's almost funny Andrew. I mean, it's almost funny because sometimes somebody will stop me and say, well, John, you're not Catholic, how would you know that? I'm like, well, I've been around the planet a few years. I've been to Mass, I've got friends who are Catholics. I know a little bit about the faith or whatever the faith might happen to be. But that faith leader is often startled to realize they'll see exactly what I'm doing very quickly in the moment, and then they're startled that I know something.
Andrew Cohn: Would you be able to, without breaching confidentiality, would you be able to share a story, perhaps or two, of what that looks like? What surprised them–what knowledge you brought? I mean, obviously this is not like, oh, I saw a list of values on a website, but perhaps something from your own experience, from your childhood and the exposure to different things. I'd love to hear a story about that if you've got one.
John Mitchell: Sure. So this is a story that's actually common across many faith traditions, and that is that the spiritual leaders see themselves as human, and they'll talk about themselves that way. And some of these faiths, they're predominantly men, so they'll say, like, I'm just a man. Others, they're female as well. So they might say, you know, I'm just a woman. But what they say publicly is, I am just. And what they mean is, I'm human like everyone else. Like my congregation, I am human. The place where they often get tripped up is that as they go through their careers as faith leaders, they are not treated as mere humans by their congregation. And some of them push back on this pretty vigorously. And some faiths don't push as hard to elevate their faith leaders above, you know, of the congregation. But many do. And it's hard to be put on a pedestal and at some point not think that that's the view you should have looking down on the masses. And so there were times when a faith leader was coming to a coach. And by the way, most of the faith leaders I've coached have come seeking a coach because they're running a major organization or a major operation for a big organization. They're faith leaders, yes, but they're also running a significant business, even if it's labeled a not for profit business. And so they're looking for assistance just like any other business leader, and how to be successful, how to be an effective leader. And so as they start down this path, if they find that they're not having the success that they want, they get frustrated.
They discern what's going on. And one of the things that I find is almost always the case is they started to listen to their own press. They're starting to see themselves elevated, and they're putting a burden on themselves, a set of expectations that are only reasonable if you're more than human. And I won't give you the specific stories, but like, this literally has played out time and time again for me with faith leaders. And when I point out, by the way, if I know the particular faith, I might point them to someplace in scripture or something that would point them to the point that I want them to take away. And they're always frustrated because they know that I'm not part of their faith. They know I went and looked this up. I don't know scripture the way they know scripture. That's the advantage of Internet searches today. You could just put in the idea and you get a result that tells you. And so they get frustrated because, well, why does this guy, why does my coach know this? This is not his belief system. Now what they fail to see sometimes is the beliefs and the values between many faiths overlap incredibly.
They may express them differently. The basic ideas, though, overlap incredibly. And so you could come up with some of the same values by being a part of another faith or some of the same values by being part of no formal faith and still have that same value system. So it's one of my favorite things to do with a faith leader that I see that is starting to believe their own press is to gently pull them back down off the pedestal by reminding them what they've told me. They almost always tell me this in the beginning of our coaching. Hey, I'm just another person just like everybody else.And it's interesting how fast they forget that and then that becomes a stumbling block because they have set this set of expectations for themselves that aren't realistic. You basically say, I'm going to do all of these different things that no human ever is going to be able to do, at least not all at once. And then that creates frustration for them. And that frustration manifests itself in other behaviors. Just like all of our clients, we all manifest behaviors that aren't appropriate. And when they're coming from a conflict with your faith, I think if you're a faith based person that creates this incredible, just internal conflict that makes it hard to solve it. My attempt to solve this with my clients is simple. Let's go back to where you told me at the beginning you're a person who's been called to do this and you're not different though than the people who seek support from you. So I don't know if that answers your question Andrew, but that's what I try to do.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah, definitely. And right. So you're holding that mirror, as you mentioned earlier, and that mirror perhaps is a mirror that's a little more simple, perhaps a little more clear, a little more. Let's go back to what the principle is as opposed to, as you said, believing your own press. And it's interesting because if we've coached people in the corporate world or in law firms or in government as we have. And they hold themselves to some impossible standard. That impossible standard could be, I should know this already. I should be above this whatever. Whereas in the faith community, it could be I should do this because I'm more than human. I want to be careful about using even language like that with human beings. I appreciate the effort to bring them back. Here's what you started with. And just trying to, I mean, obviously coaching is very often about simplifying, coming back to some small, consistent steps one could take and having reasonable expectations. What is that thing we've seen recently about the formula for happiness is expectations minus experience. So if the expectations are divine expectations, if I am expecting myself to walk on water, I'm probably going to be disappointed. Appreciate what you're saying there.
John Mitchell: Oh, I'm sorry–but another just quick example. So one of my clients, a catholic priest leading a large organization, and he cared so deeply it hurt at times. And he was responsible for the spiritual life of literally thousands of people. And he did everything he possibly could, including stretching himself so thin that when was in a meeting, including one of his spiritual supervision sessions with somebody, he couldn't help but look at his phone. And so for me, instead of talking about, from a psychological standpoint, how that impacts people, what messages he's sending, which is what I might do in a more secular setting, I actually asked him about some of the stories from the Bible. And for him it was always stories about, you know, Christ or one of his disciples. That was the stuff that would get this particular client. And I'd always ask him, you know, obviously they didn't have cell phones back in those days, but I'd say, you know, obviously there's a lot going on in the world and what's the takeaway from these stories? And he'd always just sigh and say he was always so present. He was there for people, John.
And I didn't have to say anything else like he got the message. And it wasn't me trying to bring it in from some other quadrant that maybe is important in my life but not important in his life. It was me bringing it in from a quadrant that is important in his life. And I can't always do that. I mean, I don't know every faith out there, you know, so if I work with somebody of a particular faith, sometimes I can do this, sometimes I can't. I can almost always, though, find something that's a basic tenet of their faith, to reconnect them to that helps them see that what they're trying to do based on the expectations they're placing on themselves is setting them up for something that is impossible, which means they're setting themselves up for failure. We have enough people in our lives who do that to us. The last thing we want to do is do it to ourselves.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah, beautiful. And I love the practicality of that and the simplicity. Of course it sounds simple. As you share with me. It may not be simple at the time or feel simple at the time, but the simplicity of that and the reconnection. I'm hearing a theme of kind of reconnecting rather than getting caught up in the expectations, other people's expectations also even getting caught up in the–I don't want to say obsession...
John Mitchell: That's not the right word…
Andrew Cohn: But the over identification with I've got to really be there for everybody all the time, which is impossible.
John Mitchell: It's impossible. And you know, the reconnection is a great point that you're picking up. I hadn't thought of it in exactly that way. That is what I'm trying to do, in part because it's a strongly held belief they already have. I'm just reconnecting them. I don't have to teach them something new. I don't have to convince them of something which is a lot easier for me if I can reconnect them to a strongly held belief they already have. And so that's one of the things I try to do. And in other areas, like when I'm working with a lawyer and maybe it's around business development, I try to show them that's a role. That's all about relationships. And they have other relationships in their life where they've been successful. And so becoming successful in another area doesn't mean you have to learn a hundred new things. It means you have to learn how to apply something from one part of your life to a different part of your life. And if you can do that, you're going to be successful. And it's a lot easier to take something you're already good at in one part of your life and transfer it to another part than to have to learn something completely new. So that's why this whole reconnection thing for me is powerful. And I also don't end up in arguments with my clients either. They're the ones that have this connection to this belief, not me. If they want to reject that belief, that's fine with me. But until they do, guess what? You're stuck with that.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah, well, beautiful. And it comes back to holding up the mirror. You said this was important to you. How well are you doing it? How is it potentially getting in the way if there's an overextension? Where are other places you can leverage this strength, for example, other relationships you might need to develop? So I wonder if you could talk a bit about how the application of these types of principles contributes to more effective leadership, whether that be individual leadership, organizational. What do you think?
John Mitchell: So one of the things that I've seen that gets my emotions aroused is when somebody very loudly talks about their faith or talks about their beliefs, talks about their spirituality, and then behaves in a way contrary to it, that sets me off.
Andrew Cohn: Wait, you get triggered by hypocrisy, John, what's the matter with you?
John Mitchell: Just a wee bit. Just a wee bit. And so one of the things that I noticed is there are some people in the corporate world whose faith is publicly not hidden, but relatively private. They're not shouting it from the mountaintops, but as you get to know them, they're happy to share aspects of their beliefs. And I've seen some leaders–what I'm thinking of in particular was the very senior person in the public transportation sector in a massive public company. And one of the things I noticed was that he literally was constantly trying to run that business, consistent with his belief system. And he was very…
Andrew Cohn: Let me ask a quick question. Does that mean he was out with it and he would talk about his belief system, or is he one of the people you were talking to that you wouldn't necessarily know.
John Mitchell: You wouldn't necessarily know unless you followed him, you know, unless you were reading about him in the newspapers and reading down to the 15th paragraph where they mentioned, oh, he did this. He was part of this charity, he's part of this church and did this, or this synagogue and did that. You know, that type of thing. Again, it wasn't hidden, but it wasn't. I'm shouting it from the rooftops–this is my belief system. However, as I got to know this person, I had the opportunity to have a lot of conversations with him and to see him in action. And what I noticed was that he very consciously checked himself on how he was leading and whether that was consistent with his expressed beliefs. And there were times–so, again, think about a large public transportation company. You've got unions, you've got investors, you've got all these different stakeholders involved that have different opinions and different approaches and different issues. He was always trying to figure out, how do I do that? How do I deal with all of these important stakeholders? In a way that's consistent so that if I do something they don't like, I'm consistently doing something they don't like because I think it's the right thing to do, not because that was expedient in that particular union negotiation. As an example, I'm sure he wasn't perfect.
I don't know everything that he did as a leader in my couple of years though, that I got to spend with him, I really saw him focus on this–I won't even say struggle, because I don't think it was a struggle. I saw him focus though on is my behavior consistent with these close held beliefs that I have? And one of the things that he showed me that was interesting is there were times where there was a limit to how far he thought he could go with something in his corporate capacity. And yet he might decide that's not far enough. So in my personal capacity, I will go even further. It might be that his company is going to support a local charitable organization and he can only take it so far, reasonably. Given all the other communities this company operates in, he can't support everything. But he feels like this one particular project's really important. So the company writes a check for X. He writes a check, a personal check for 2 times X. Talk about putting your money where your mouth is right?
Andrew Cohn: Right.
John Mitchell: And the specific example I'm thinking of was one that was based on his belief from his faith. So different from my belief, but a similar belief about this idea of interconnectedness. And he decided that this project was so important because it provided opportunities for people, you know, who were just tragically under-resourced communities who had very few opportunities. He's like, this is not good enough in terms of what my company can do. And I don't think I can reasonably take it further. So I'm going to do this myself. I'm going to write the next check. And that's what he did. So that's an example of one of these leaders that I've seen. Are these very strong beliefs, often based in their faith or spirituality, who are very consciously trying to make sure that they go through the world not just on Saturday or Sunday or whatever their faith happens to, you know, worship every day of the week, operating in a manner consistent with their belief system. And so to your point about the hypocrisy, yes, that does upset me. And I'll be the first to admit it. I have my moments as well. And I love it when you're just–
Andrew Cohn: You're just a man.
John Mitchell: I am Just human. Exactly right. And so I do see it in society a lot more often than maybe other people do, when people are very consistent between their actions and their beliefs and their stated beliefs. Because I'm watching for that. And so I think I'm more attuned to it maybe than the average person. And so for this person, the first time I noticed it hooked me. And in the entire time I had a relationship with this person, I paid attention to that. And that's why I feel like I can say with some authority that at least in that couple of year period, there was this very conscious effort on his part to behave both in his corporate capacity and his individual capacity, consistent with his belief system. And for him, his belief system came from faith. It was not a secular belief system that came from his faith.
Andrew Cohn: I appreciate the way you shared that he would check on his actions. Is this something that is aligned? Is this something that, and even just the process of that conscious checking for congruence that way is a very important leadership skill. Whether I'm checking against principles of my faith or principles of whatever it might be to just take a pause and consider mindfully whether my actions are lining up with my stated values.
John Mitchell: That was a super valuable lesson that I learned that has impacted me both as a coach, but also impacted me as a leader, you know, in my own business, but also in other organizations in which I play a leadership role. It's that idea that you just highlighted by checking in and making sure there's congruence or when there's not. Like when you check in, you're not always going to find congruence. Sometimes you're going to say, oh, I'm off. And that's a course correction opportunity. And so that was a super valuable lesson for me because this person was at the very top of a big public company. And the fact that he was doing it wasn't his board of directors, it wasn't his, you know, C-suite, it was him making these decisions. It's a complex business that's highly regulated. And so the opportunities to do things that are expedient and will get you into a really good place, but maybe not totally consistent with your beliefs. That was something that you could be tempted with every single day. And so I love the fact that every single day he was consciously thinking about this, constantly trying to decide, am I behaving consistent with my belief system? And again, I don't know his whole belief system, but I know the parts that he's shared with me over conversations over the years. And I could see things that he did that sometimes I thought were interesting. Like, huh, that's an interesting choice. Not sure I would have made that in my own mind. What I was really saying is I'm not sure he would have made that choice either if he had a choice. In some ways, he didn't have a choice because he had decided he was going to try to behave consistent with his values and his belief system. So once he made that choice, it actually limited other choices.
Andrew Cohn: Well, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. It could be a very challenging thing or a simplifying thing. I must do this. I don't even have to think about it. Other choices flow from some of those more primary choices.
John Mitchell: Exactly.
Andrew Cohn: Yeah. And it's funny, as you talk about that, I think about the clients. I'm sure you hear this phrase a lot too. But our corporate clients are often dealing with employee survey data. Pulse surveys, voice of the customer, whatever it might be called. I have one client that they refer to as cruise views within the organization. And how interesting to think of this as a pulse survey. But the pulse is internal.
John Mitchell: Well, the value of that is it's a pulse survey that isn't based on your affect, your emotion in the moment. It's actually based on something slightly more objective. What is it that I believe and I just took action A, B and C, Are those actions consistent with my belief? Which is very different from a pulse survey, because pulse surveys, you know, that's why some people love them and some people hate them. If you've just announced something great like a stock buyback or employee bonuses, that pulse survey is almost always going to be positive, even if a week later another survey would be comparatively negative because those pulse surveys are measuring a single point in time and they're looking at effect. How are people feeling? It doesn't tell you anything about the culture, but it does tell you about the climate. And so I think for him, what's interesting is, yes, on one level, it's a pulse survey because he's checking in frequently.
On another level, though, I think part of what he was trying to do is manage the emotional aspect. I don't think he was trying to get rid of it. I think a lot of times in business, emotion is absolutely an important part of our decision making. I think he was trying to check in on that, though. Is it coming from a place of inclusiveness as an example, versus being exclusive? Am I so upset with this union leader that I'm going to do something that really gets the union not really appropriate because one person should not be driving benefits or punishments for a thousand other people. So I think that's an example of where that internal compass or that internal process of checking in can be so valuable. It doesn't reject emotion. It's also those saying that the belief system is my operating system. The guiding principles for me, is my use of emotion appropriate with that system? And if it is probably the right decision for me, and again, for him, maybe not for me and you, but for him. And if it's not consistent, maybe it's the wrong decision for me.
Andrew Cohn: It seems to me you're highlighting a really important leadership tool of how am I checking in and checking against my values? If it's faith, great. I may be able to open a book and see something. If I'm not connected that way to my faith, but I am connected to my values in other ways. Like, I know people who say I need to go take a walk in the woods to consider whether this is the right decision. Arguably just as spiritual as something else.
John Mitchell: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew Cohn: We want to be careful with that. But there's different ways that we operate in the world. How? What are the ways in which we're checking our behavior, our decisions? Where do we go for that broader guidance, I guess, and reminder and mirroring, if you will.
John Mitchell: And I think that's the challenge is that for someone whose faith, let's say, is more what I'm going to put in kind of that broader spiritual camp where their guidance comes from a broader spiritual place than the faith, because again, for at least in the Western world and in much of the rest of the world, faith has a lot of very specific dogma, behaviors, specific actions that are supposed to come from the faith.
Andrew Cohn: Structure.
John Mitchell: Structure. Thank you. So it is easier to check in when there's an established structure that in some cases has been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, then if that's not where your ideas come from, where your values come from, and it's this more spiritual place that's not defined by anybody else other than by you, it could be a little harder to have that resource to go look at and say, is my behavior consistent with this set of beliefs?
Andrew Cohn: And actually, as you talk about that, that's something that I've heard as an argument from people of faith I know and trust and love who say, if you don't have the religious structure, you don't have the place to go look. And therefore, how do we govern ourselves? Now, that's a black and white view, but it's a view. I understand.
John Mitchell: I understand it as well. And part of me thinks that there's huge value there right up until the moment you make what I see as the fatal flaw and decide that your faith is right and everyone else is wrong. And these are the magic steps, because I can't imagine that we could have all these different religions and they could all be right and have the magic steps, and they're all slightly different magic steps. Right. Like, I don't buy that. And so for something where you don't have that to look back to, but it's still, as you said, it's a good source to check yourself on. You know, you have to look at what are the concepts that seem to be important to me spiritually. Like I told you, for me, one of those is this idea of interconnectedness. So if interconnectedness, it's that we are literally interconnected at, say, a spiritual level, or for those who just want science, at a molecular level, we are interconnected. It means that for me, one of my values has to be inclusiveness because I'm part of all of this. Right. And so it does not make sense, at least in my mind, for me to be thinking about this from an exclusionary standpoint, who are my people and how do I help them and disadvantage other people. It calls for inclusiveness. As I check myself, am I inclusive every day? No. And there's some days I think it's just in the margins and, you know, I'll try to do better. There's other days where it's not. It's something that's really direct. I'm not happy with myself when I realize that. And in an increasingly polarized world that we're in, it gets harder and harder to manage that. If it's coming from a place of we're interconnected and thus inclusiveness is important. It gets really hard to include those who you feel are antithetical to everything that you believe.
Andrew Cohn: Yes. Well, when social media and other things are looking to create headwinds for us to understand and connect with other people, it becomes a tougher thing. If I see someone approaching who looks or feels different than me, the inner story that I'm telling myself is fueled by a number of things that perhaps the fuel wasn't so strong some years ago, and it's more for me to get over in order to approach and connect with that person. That's my experience. I don't want to put that on you.
John Mitchell: No, I think it is, in fact, one of my first coaches said something interesting to me. I was telling her that I feel like I'm a very judgmental person in our coach training. It's one of the areas they talk about that makes it very difficult to be a good coach and it makes it difficult to be a good human being or to be an effective human being or good husband.
Andrew Cohn: Yes.
John Mitchell: Hard to be effective though, if you're very judgmental. And she said something that was great. She goes, John, I've called out a few times where I thought you've been judgmental and I'll continue to do that as long as we're working together. I also need to start calling something else out so that you have a better understanding of it. I said, great, what's that? She goes, discernment. Discernment is not judgment. If the person walking down the street towards you has a big stick in their hand and it's covered with blood and you see someone laying on the ground 10ft behind them, you probably should think about stepping out of the way. And for her, that would be a discernment, not a judgment. And for her, the judgment I might make is, all people who look like that guy with the stick are dangerous and therefore they should be avoided. She would say, that's more the judgment. I struggle with that when I've gone back and forth over the years. I did like it though, as a distinction to try to help think about this I think, a very important concept. And it's one that hopefully doesn't give you a pass for everything that you do, but it also does give you the ability to still look at data, real world data, and look at is there a conclusion that needs to be drawn from this data?
Andrew Cohn: Yeah, well. And as leaders in a variety of different dimensions of our lives, we need to make evaluations and make decisions all the time. It's interesting. There have been times when I've been leading sessions, workshops around skill building, about growth, mindset, remaining open minded. People say, no, I have to make a judgment. And I'd say, okay, if you're saying you have to voice an opinion, I'm totally with you. And that's your job and you have to do it. And you may change that opinion tomorrow based on additional information, whatever. Or you could call it a judas. Between two ideas, these terms get blurred, etcetera. When it comes to another person, am I judging that person or am I evaluating their behavior and giving feedback of that behavior? That works or doesn't work? This comes up a lot in men's work communities and the like. What's the difference between data and feelings and judgments? And the judgment is it wrong or is it right? And the energy of wrongness is where we get ourselves into trouble. But we live in a world where we have to make decisions and express those decisions with some level of firmness and definitiveness. That's in part what leadership is about. You've got to make the call.
John Mitchell: Absolutely. In fact, it's one of the challenges that I see a lot of leaders in the legal industry have. And I know we're talking about more than just the legal industry, but it's one that that industry in particular suffers in. And that is a lot of the leaders aren't willing to make that tough decision and just live with it. They want to make the decision that makes everybody happy and that's almost guaranteed to make everybody at least somewhat unhappy. And it's not the best business decision either.
Andrew Cohn: Well, which is also interesting because we often think about the legal industry and the players there as argumentative, when in fact what you're talking about is I don't want to get put, insert myself into some controversial situation. Is that what you observe?
John Mitchell: Lawyers in the legal community, obviously gross generalization here, but where they don't want to be in conflict is in their own organizations on behalf of a third party, like a client. The most zealous advocate I've seen sometimes is the weakest advocate inside their own organization. And so that's just one of those things that if you're going to lead in a legal organization, you have to keep that in mind, both for yourself and the other people that are in that environment.
Andrew Cohn: Right. And as you talk about this, I see that again, as an opportunity to check against our values, to check against our principles. In the interest of time and the way we like to do these podcasts of a certain time, I'd love it if we could just land the plane here. Please tell us. And I apologize to listeners who are saying, I want more. Perhaps we'll do part two. But if they do want more, where do people go to learn more about you and your work?
John Mitchell: So the easiest way to find me actually is on LinkedIn. My business has been around for a long time. We have resisted having a website. At some point, we'll yield to that resistance. For the moment, though, the website. So it's John the Purple Coach Mitchell. And if you put that into a LinkedIn search, you will find me and you'll find all sorts of information about me, including how to reach out, how to contact me. If this is a topic that interests you, I'd be thrilled to hear from any of your listeners, Andrew, and happy to respond to them.
Andrew Cohn: Lovely. Great. And we'll put the LinkedIn profile. We'll link that when we publish the episode.
John Mitchell: Great. Thank you.
Andrew Cohn: Thank you so much for your time and wisdom. And it's hard to keep these things brief when we can talk for hours.
John Mitchell: No, it's been a lot of fun, so thank you for having me. I really enjoyed myself and this is actually one of many conversations you and I have had about this topic, so it's fun to pull it all together into one somewhat concise statement.
Andrew Cohn: Well said. All right. Thanks, John.
John Mitchell: Thank you. Be well.
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