Change is the only constant. That’s something we’ve been hearing since ancient times. But when I ask any entrepreneur, they say change is now happening faster than ever. This month, I talk to Tyler Parris, who has spent most of his career managing change.
We talked about learning the hard way how to create change, change fatigue, finding out that your day job no longer fits, the chief of staff role, personality profiles, understanding all the roles we actually play at work, how critical self-awareness is, code switching, and the Johari window.
Tyler Parris has not only been a corporate chief of staff, but has spent the past 12 years coaching people in chief of staff roles. He leads Giant Leap’s inaugural peer mentoring group for executives, based in the Seattle area.
What follows are excerpts from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
On why he was drawn to the chief of staff role
“About 15 years ago, my wife, Katie and I had our first child on the way. Some of my goals outside work were changing, and I was working in a consulting business that was pretty demanding of my time and energy. So I left that job, and went to manage patent acquisitions and licensing operations at Intellectual Ventures. There, we grew from zero revenue to half a billion. And that led me into the chief of staff role, which actually stoked my passion for coaching, as I orchestrated and helped lead continuous change efforts there for the executive leadership team.”
“The company even paid for me to get my coaching certification, which eventually enabled me to step out on my own as a coach, and write a book on the chief of staff role. What I realized in my chief of staff role was that I really liked coaching more than my day job.”
“I had been in project, program, and operations management for about seven years. And if you know anything about Strengths Finder or other personality profiles like it, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say two of my signature strengths are developer and connector. I love connecting people to ideas and resources and tools that help them get where they’re going. It’s what gets me up in the morning. It’s what I feel like I was made for. I know how to lead with questions, and help people identify blind spots, and create practices and solutions that become habits. I love doing that in a one-on-one coaching situation, or in groups as well. To me, there’s not much better in life than, after a workshop or a mentoring session, when someone says, ‘Wow, you really helped me think about X differently or do Y differently.’”
On how to overcome ‘change fatigue’ in startups
“Intellectual Ventures was in a pioneering field. They were trying to create a capital class out of intellectual property, so that you could buy and sell it on an open marketplace, similar to the way we buy and sell houses on a real estate property marketplace today. And it just hadn’t been done before, and there was no template for it. We were kind of figuring things out as we went, and so as you can imagine, it involved a bit of trial and error. It involved borrowing from some of the models and templates that we found in the world around us, but trying to use them in new ways. And I likened my time at Intellectual Ventures to working in Edison’s garage way back a long time ago, but bigger, and with more expensive toys than Edison might have had.”
“Nobody had really ever tried to do what we were doing before. And so there was just a lot of iteration, and a lot of folks felt like the dust hadn’t settled on our last change before we introduced a new change. And one of the things we ran up against was ‘change fatigue,’ as I’d call it. The work became understanding that the world around us is changing faster and faster. And we can sit and complain about the pace of change, or try to adapt and keep ahead of it, and build structures or frameworks from which we can operate more effectively.”
On how to best manage change
“Something we talked about then was how the way you adapt to different contexts can really help you manage change, whether it’s personal, or at scale with an organization. And that understanding your own change journey isn’t enough; you have to understand others’ contexts as well. And so there’s just this constant need to be aware of our environments, to think systemically, and be aware of what’s going on so that we can adapt.”
On how the most effective senior leaders take it to the next level
“I was an English major, so I think of Shakespeare, and ‘Sonnet 138’ when I think about the best tools for senior leaders. On the surface, ‘Sonnet 138’ seems like a poem between lovers. But it’s really about appearances and pretense and self-awareness. The point of the sonnet is that we aren’t simply who we say we are. Most of us have a lot of roles that we play in our lives; we are parts of a system. And at work, we have many roles, some of which overlap, and some of which are in conflict. And sometimes there are even parts of our roles that we don’t realize we’re playing.”
“How do you see yourself in relation to your coworkers? What are the parts that are unknown to you? What are the parts that are unknown to other people that you haven’t communicated to others? You know, it can be really interesting to try and function in an organizational context if we’re not self-aware and not aware again of the dynamics with other people.”
On what the Johari window can teach us about self-awareness
“A lot of people are familiar with the Johari window. It’s a graphical model of interpersonal awareness invented by a couple of psychological researchers in the 1950s. Those researchers say there are things we know and don’t know about ourselves, and things others know and don’t know about us.”
“And I just find, more and more, that self-awareness is an important skill: maybe more important than technical skills or knowledge, both at work and in your relationships. Honing your awareness really increases your chance of transformational success. And a lot of my work has been consistently: how do you cultivate self-awareness?”
On how he learned to be adaptive
“I learned the rails of change from a very early age. First, as a child of divorced and geographically dispersed parents. I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, and then my mom remarried a British guy, and we moved to England. I became a third country kid, or 3CK as it’s known.”
“Second, as someone who scaled socioeconomic classes in the course of my career.”
“And finally, as someone who found measures of success in different environments: the military, Scouts, nonprofits, and the corporate world.”
“So by the time I landed in a chief of staff role, I had many times over adapted my speech, my dress, my mindset, and the importance I gave to different values that were part of my core skill set. I didn’t ever wholesale change my values to fit an organization, but I’ve certainly emphasized different ones at different points. I’ve done what, in some circles, is referred to as code switching. And I learned a lesson in that.”
On what most helps him create change in organizations
“I did not meet with success in my chief of staff role or any of my other roles by just transferring what I know about change to other people, like, ‘Hey, here are the three easy steps to change management.’ I didn’t just share my experience, even, and hope that it helped others — or at least, I tried that, and learned that didn’t yield the results I was looking for. And I certainly didn’t just implement change, and hope everyone would get on board, or see the brilliance of the change. Well, okay, I probably did that too. But again, I ended up learning the hard way that it doesn’t really work.”
“What I had to do was understand the context, not just of where I was coming from, but where my team was coming from, the shifts they were making, and the potential costs of those shifts to them, in order to craft solutions and communications that work for their world.”
Tyler Parris develops senior leaders. He “has long had a passion for facilitative leadership. It’s an approach that’s not about being a technical expert, but thinking about the group or team’s objectives, designing the time to meet those objectives, and steering the group through the ideation then prioritizing ideas, to turn thinking into concrete plans.” Before becoming a certified executive and leadership coach, Tyler built and managed teams in companies, nonprofits, and the US Marines. He has done extensive research and writing on the role of the corporate chief of staff.
Tyler leads Giant Leap’s newest peer mentoring group for executives, based in the Seattle area. Find out more about this group.