Curiosity, Humility and Clarity: Empowering Others To Flourish – a conversation with Chris Harte, Chief Executive and Partner at Morton Fraser MacRoberts LLP

Welcome and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me, Anni Townend, the podcast that helps you to grow confidence, care and courage in your leadership.

I created this series of candid conversations for leaders to share their inspirational personal leadership stories, weaving together the threads of their life - the people, places and experiences that have shaped them and made them the leader that they are today.

Together we delve into what they really care about, their values and beliefs, their passion and purpose and how they live and weave these through their leadership every day, in all that they do.

They offer valuable insights and rich experience to help and inspire you on your own unique leadership journey. If you are not already please subscribe to the podcast, review and share it. Thank you!

About This Episode

In this episode I am delighted to be in conversation with Chris Harte, Chief Executive and Commercial Real Estate Partner at Morton Fraser MacRoberts LLP - a leading Scottish law firm committed to providing straightforward advice, clarity on cost and to building strong trusting relationships with clients ensuring that their evolving needs are met with focus and care. Together we delve into:

• What it means to "Serve to Lead" and that leadership is not about you.
• The importance of Being Curious  and to remember firstly that "the issue is never the issue", and secondly ‘not knowing’ all of the answers is a feature not a bug!
• How focusing our energy - not dispersing it - is key to strategy and that limitations can be useful, and helpful rather than a hindrance.

Chris’s three key encouragements to leaders

1. Help others to succeed - be a leader - focus more on asking questions than providing answers;

2. Identify priorities - use limitations to help focus minds on conscious choices;

3. Retain a sense of perspective - keep a sense of humour close at hand and don't take yourself too seriously - a wee bit of humility goes a long way.

To contact Chris:

LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/chris-harte

To find out more about Morton Fraser MacRoberts LLP follow them on linkedin and do go to their website.

To listen to other Leaders in Conversation with me Anni Townend go to my website, www.annitownend.com

A big thank you to my support team at the Conscious Marketing Group for helping me with all the marketing of the podcast, to Coco O’Brien for the wonderful intro and outro music, for the lovely design, and for the excellent editing and sound production.

To contact me Anni Townend do email me on anni@annitownend.com visit my website www.annitownend.com, subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting with you, thank you for listening.

Transcript

Anni Townend: Hello and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me, Anni Townend, the podcast that helps you to grow care, confidence, and courage in your leadership. I created this series of candid conversations for leaders to share their unique, personal leadership stories with you to encourage and inspire you on your own leadership journey.

Together, we explore the people, places and experiences that have shaped them and made them who they are today and their passions in their leadership. 

If you haven't already, please do subscribe, review and share the podcast. Thank you for listening. 

Today I’m delighted to be in conversation with Chris Harte, Chief Executive and Commercial Real Estate partner at Morton Fraser Mac Roberts, LLP, a law firm committed to providing straightforward advice, clarity on cost, and to building strong, trusting relationships with clients, ensuring that their evolving needs are met with both focus and care. 

Welcome, Chris. 

I'm really excited to delve into your key three themes, what it means to serve to lead and that leadership is not about you, the importance of being curious and to remember firstly, that the issue is never the issue, and not knowing all of the answers is a feature, not a bug, and finally, how focusing our energy, not dispersing it, is key to strategy and that limitations can be useful and helpful rather than a hindrance. 

Chris, I'm truly delighted to be in conversation with you today. 

Chris Harte: Great to be here, Anni. Thank you. 

Anni Townend: I know from our having worked together and having partnered with you and your leadership team over the years, that you place a lot of value on learning, on thinking, but most importantly, on sharing your learning and your thinking with others.

So it's especially wonderful to have you as a guest on the podcast, sharing your story, your learning, and your thinking with an even wider audience. So thank you for making the time today. 

Chris Harte: My pleasure. 

Anni Townend: I'd like to start, Chris, by asking you about the people and the places and experiences that have shaped you and made you the leader you are today, who loves learning and thinking and helping others to do their best thinking. Where did it all start? 

Chris Harte: I was the first generation, myself and my brother, to attend higher education, but learning was always part of the environment we grew up in even though it was a very standard council house working class kind of environment. And my dad was quite politically active, so having debates and discussions about things was pretty normal. I always felt we were positively encouraged to have a point of view. provided we could speak to that point of view.

And in the lively family debates, we would have kind of hold your own for your point of view. That was very natural to me. And I still find even now people maybe think I'm a bit verging on argumentative, and I realized, goodness, it was just how I grew up that when you had a point of view, people challenged you about it, why do you think that? See, I always had to be prepared to be challenged and see it as a normal way of just testing things. So that, that was always quite natural for me, I probably owe a lot to that experience growing up. 

Anni Townend: And where did you grow up? 

Chris Harte: West Lothian, which is between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

As I say, pretty kind of normal upbringing there. I'm in the middle of three sons. And both my parents always worked hard, but particularly my mom had some pretty grotty jobs at times. But as I say, we sit in an atmosphere where learning or reading particular books or reading particular newspapers, it wasn't a thing for other people.

We were, I think the only house in our street where, you know, by way of newspaper, we would get both the tabloid and the broadsheet. And that was relatively unusual. And therefore to me, that kind of breadth of interest. I wasn't really thinking about it in that way at the time when I was young, but when I look back now, that was unusual, and it does speak to that kind of idea that why shouldn't you read both if you want to?

You'll learn something from both, as opposed to one source being the, quote, right source. So that was certainly very much part of our upbringing in West Lothian. 

Anni Townend: That speaks very much to something that is really important to me around diversity of thought and bringing curiosity, which is one of your passions is to be curious.

And it sounds as if in your childhood, you were really encouraged to be curious and to explore different points of view and to debate them, to challenge each other and to be able to back them up. 

Chris Harte: That’s right. And the act of being challenged was never experienced as a kind of attack.

And, that has always felt quite healthy to me. I suppose that's always the nature of nurture debate, to what extent was it environment?

To what extent is it just how maybe we were all built a particular way? I don't know. But certainly as I look back now, that kind of, curiosity I can see being present, a part of family life. 

And one would never have steered away from, as I say, a particular book, a particular piece of reading. Reading was really important. It's the way you could quite easily, in that generation, satisfy that sense of curiosity. We were even of a generation where before there was a public library, there would be a kind of mobile library van would come round our street with books.

And again, I suppose my experience looking back, and I'm only really reflecting on it now as you've asked me, it was that I could have read anything, as opposed to reading a particular type of book or whatever just read stuff, so if somebody would hand you a book, the reaction would be I'll just read that and see what I make of it.

As I grew up, there's an American author, Saul Bellow, he wrote a lot of the Chicago characters that were both streetwise and bookwise. And that always seemed to me, growing up where I grew up, quite a kind of attractive ambition, that you should seek to be both streetwise and bookwise.

Anni Townend: I like that a lot, be streetwise and bookwise, and how you came upon that through the mobile library and going to libraries and where we get information from now is so wide and broad, isn't it? And seeking out, we have to actively seek out information that may be different from what our feeds feed us.

Chris Harte: Don't get me wrong, there are obviously opinions out there that are beyond the pale, particularly in terms of how communications are working in the social media world of the 21st century but equally we can't be too fixed and seek to exist in echo chambers.

And that, your point you make about diversity of thought, diversity of approach I think that's just such a hugely important part of being a kind of rounded citizen. 

Anni Townend: And as you were growing up, what drew you towards the law and to the career that you have chosen? 

Chris Harte: So the very short and truthful answer is that I had an ambition to study English at university.

My older brother was already studying law and he said no, don't do English. It will be harder to get a job. Do law. So there'll be an easier path to a job now, and also he said I think you'll quite like it. Which actually turned out to be true to be fair to him. But I suppose the other, more practical aspect of where I grew up is that having an eye on how one might make a living was not irrelevant if I could put it that way.

So that seemed to be a factor to which one, which should give a degree of weight. Once I started studying it, I did actually find that I enjoyed it. Law teaches you to think in a particular way, I would say. Now that's not the only way to think, certainly there's a level of analysis that kind of comes with it, which I think can be really quite worthwhile.

And part of that is actually to seek to bring perspective to something to seek to be a bit more detached. It's not about not caring about things, but ultimately, to serve one's client well as a lawyer, you have to see the downsides of your client's position as well as the positives.

And that's not a bad kind of skill to have in life to see. All aspects of a scenario. So that's certainly something that I think the study of law teaches you, which I think is useful in life and certainly useful in leading a business. I think the other way of thinking that the law brings out is, to some extent, they cut to the chase. There can be, the classic legal question, exam question in law is to set out a big long scenario and ask one to consider the legal issues. And you have to really identify what are the issues here actually? Okay. And whilst that is something that comes through studying law, again, I found it to be quite a useful kind of skill in life and in business.

Anni Townend: And that getting below the surface of an issue that is not really the issue Is very relevant in leadership because the issue is not always the issue and bringing your curiosity, your passion for curiosity, something that you were well educated in throughout your childhood and applying it not only to the law, but also to leadership.

Chris Harte: I think it would be difficult to lead well without having some level of curiosity. And partly that is, as you say, because it may be too far to say the issue is never the issue, but the issue is rarely the issue. There's usually something else going on, particularly if you're in a people organisation and most organisations, to some degree are about how people operate individually and in groups.

Looking below the surface is to get a sense of what might be going on for an individual and manifesting itself in a different way or what might be going on in a kind of group dynamic, it's a big part of leadership. So being curious about that and as I sometimes reassure myself that, not knowing all of the answers is actually a feature rather than a bug, right? Because, often people look at any kind of leader as someone who will have the answer. Sometimes one might, but often I think that, the job of leadership is to make sure that we're asking the right questions and we're turning our energies to the right questions. 

Anni Townend: Absolutely. And thinking about curiosity, myself and my colleague, Lucy Kidd, we've created what we call our Collaboration Equation. And one of the building blocks of that, Chris, is bringing the combination of curiosity, care, and courage, because it takes courage as a leader not to know; to be a leader and not to know the answer and instead to be thinking about asking the right questions and not even knowing whether they are the right questions takes courage. But to go there and to combine that with care and with curiosity, we have found to be very effective.

Chris Harte:  I often say to younger colleagues that it's important to be confident And it's definitely not arrogance. Do not confuse the two.

And to give an example of what's the difference between arrogance and confidence, I said if you're sitting in a meeting and something has been said or discussed that you don't quite follow. The kind of an arrogant thing is to nod blithely along and assuming you've got it where you maybe don't quite get it.

The confident thing is to say, sorry, I don't quite follow why x means y, but in a way that we're discussing here, can you maybe just go back and explain that in a bit more detail for me. I said that's the most confident person in the room. So I think whether it's courage, confidence, I think those are big factors in being able to ask the right questions and be curious in the way that's productive. 

Anni Townend: I agree with you completely and I think that's why we combine care with confidence and courage because if you care enough and have the courage and are curious to ask the question then that helps with confidence and with commitment to what's happening and to having the conversation, maybe not knowing what the answer will be, but confident enough to have the conversation.

And I have heard myself say, if you're the person who asks the question, you will probably be asking it for other people too. People will be quietly and hopefully loudly appreciative that you have asked the question. Chris, you talked about serving clients, but something which I know is important to you as well is that leadership is about serving.

Chris Harte: I've always been taken by this idea of serve to lead. And how I've always seen it, is that we're all in service to a larger kind of objective or ambition.

And, that is a big job of leadership to be clear around the objective or ambition that you are in service of. If we're going to have an ambition for the business to succeed, what we really mean is that we want the people in the business to succeed, or if I'm honest, enough of the people in the business to succeed, right? Because it's hard to deliver a world in which absolutely everybody succeeds at the same time in the same way that probably feels a wee bit unrealistic.

But certainly I think it has to be the key of your leadership goal that the business will succeed through people and therefore your job is to help those people succeed and to be in service of that success. It's not that I am devoid of ego and have no interest in personal success, but it's always felt pretty obvious to me that my own success will be attached to the success of the business and that success of the business will be delivered through the people in the business succeeding. 

So I will get to success in the way that I suppose, will feel satisfying and give me a sense of confidence through helping other people succeed. It's just such a key part of what we do. Conversely, looking at the other way, the more negative way, if people within the business feel blocked, feel unsupported, feel discouraged, feel lacking in energy. That doesn't sound like a recipe for success. 

Anni Townend: It doesn't. And it doesn't sound like it would attract clients to be taken care of by you, or to trust you. And I know as a firm, you talk about building trusting relationships.

Chris Harte: Certainly, we've always and I've always seen the business as creating a kind of supportive platform that allows the talented and ambitious people within it to succeed in the way that they want. And about two thirds of our people are directly client facing and about a third are supporting the client facing teams. So there is a mix within, within the business, but everybody has a client of some sort, right? Whether it's internal or external and it's about helping each other to deliver in that way as well. 

Anni Townend: Some of the work that I do with the Future Engage Deliver approach to leadership very much is about leadership happens inside of relationship and the bigger those trusting relationships are, the more we deliver together. And I really believe that the commitment to each other's success and to delivering through and with each other is what matters. 

Chris Harte: I think that's absolutely right. It's about doing it in one's own way and in a way that is authentic and that people experience it as authentic.

And certainly one of the ways in which that authenticity comes to life is in how you build those relationships. Because people need to have that sense of authenticity and dealing with a real person here. 

Anni Townend: And I think that relationship with each other, but also the relationship with ourselves, Chris, so that we understand who we are, what drives us, what matters to us, our values and beliefs and why we do what we do.

When you think about your values, what do you stand for given your upbringing, given where you were born and raised and where you work and live and lead?

Chris Harte: That idea of kind of curiosity and learning has always been really important to me, and I'm seeing that in other people, so I suppose one of the things that would cause me frustration is dealing with someone who either consciously or unconsciously believes that learning or development is something they've left behind, or that they're no longer in need of.

I think I would find that difficult. I think we, we certainly see that as a key thing in the organization is that we all have a duty to continue to learn and develop. I think that is absolutely super important. I think equally there's a point around kindness and respect.

I'm not a huge fan of behaving in a hierarchical way. Hierarchies exist in organizations they're built in. But ultimately everyone is doing something important. I often say this, and I mean it actually rather than it just seemed like a nice glib kind of phrase, is that everyone in the business is making an important contribution, otherwise Why are they here?

Okay, but those contributions are certainly different for sure and we're all doing different roles but by dint of that everyone is entitled to respect for that contribution they're making. 

And certainly situations where I see someone, let's say, job title talking down to someone or not treating someone with the right degree of respect would be quite a big trigger for me. 

Anni Townend: I do find that being aware of my triggers and noticing when I've been triggered, the curiosity serves me in those situations, being curious. What is it that's triggered? Which value has been triggered? And how can I choose to respond in a way that is not a reaction, but as a response to the other.

Chris Harte: Absolutely I think that’s a really valuable thing in managing oneself, because often if one takes that kind of second or two to reflect, and you have to be quite honest and truthful to say what I think is actually going on here for me.

I think leadership, whilst it is to serve, I think there is an aspect of it which is to serve well and to serve others well. 

Anni Townend: And something that you and I've spoken about and worked with your team and other leaders in your firm has been around becoming more aware of impact and related to that and coming to your third theme is that of focus and energy and how focusing our energy is so important rather than dispersing it, particularly when we think about strategy and working within limitations.

Something I've given thought to around that and was inspired to think about was a conference I went to some years ago where they talked about not so much limitations, but creative constraints and working within limitations and thinking of them as creative constraints. 

Chris Harte: Actually, I may steal that, Anni. Creative constraints, I think it's probably a better phrase to use in limitations, but I suppose it'd be more of the kind of consistent themes in any organization, I'm sure is. It is the kind of mantras around the limitations. We could do X, but for Y and if we had more money often to invest in it. So there's this kind of thing about limitations. And I think, to me, it's been interesting to try and turn that 180 degrees. Creative constraints exist but let's turn that to an advantage. What are the benefits of that?

And someone once said It's something I'd read or I'd heard that how dull a game ice hockey would be if it didn't have any barriers, right? It didn't have a rink and the barriers around it, right? What a thorough, this huge ice rink, right? What a thoroughly uninteresting game it would be. And I think there is something around, constraints can make it interesting.

I'd also heard someone from more of a creative industry, I think a kind of brand design type agency, and said how they had used this idea of creative constraints was when they think about a kind of mandate or a project they're working on, one of the things they will often, one of the challenges they will give themselves or the team to really get the thinking caps on is what would we do if we had no budget?

And equally could be just ask what we'll do if we had no budget or unlimited budget. But that question of if we couldn't spend money here, but we still had to try and improve something. Yeah. Deliver an objective, create an end. What would we do? And that can be quite an interesting way of turning it around.

And I suppose, to me, there will always be some level of limitation, around time, money, resources generally, and most of the job of leadership, both individually and, for example, as a board, is making choices about where that focus should be and therefore, rather than being almost disappointed by the fact that we can only do three of the five things we'd like to do, I think we should be celebrating the fact that we're going to choose three out of five, so we'll make three good choices.

Rather than potentially, five, less positive choices and certainly put whatever the cause of the choices in terms of implementation and doing, we will be more dispersed and therefore, highly likely to be less impactful. So I think there's a real question in terms of focus energy, rather it being a kind of almost a kind of negative thing is to actually, great, we can only do three things.

Let's do three really good things.

Anni Townend: I love that and that we choose to do those things. One of my previous guests on the podcast, Raj Kumar, talks about turning priorities into choices because he challenges us with our priorities. priorities move up and down the list. Whereas when we make conscious choices to do something exactly as you say, Chris, to do these three things well.

And I can remember being with a group and one of the delegates talking about, hey, we get to do this, that kind of mindset of we get to do this and we get to do it really well. 

Chris Harte: One of the things we all feel can dissipate or drain our energy is where we feel we don't have a sense of agency. And really choice is giving people that sense of agency. We've made a conscious choice, a positive choice, but as agency we've decided to do X rather than Y, and that can help create energy as well as focus it.

Anni Townend: And I think it helps, especially when you say, and here's why we've made this choice. For many of us, myself included, if I understand the why we've made this choice, it helps me to commit to it, to get behind it. And as you say. gives me energy and helps not only bring focus but also gives me energy and the energy of others because we've made this conscious choice. This is what we're going to do. 

Chris Harte: I get the pushback from time to time. And I'm picking the numbers three and five, slightly random, but we'll be able to say I think we can do all five rather than to limited to three. And my response to that is to say okay. Once we've done the three, Come back, and then we'll go on and do the others.

Anni Townend: As we come to the end of our conversation, Chris, and thank you so much for sharing your thinking and your energy and focus, what are your three key encouragements to leaders to keep on learning, growing, developing? 

Chris Harte: I think they would all come from things we have discussed which is first of all, help others succeed. That is a key quality, a key objective, a key kind of raison d'etre of being a leader and a big part of that is, our job is to make sure the right questions are being asked rather than being the source of and simply the source of answers. At times we can be a source of answers, but even those are often more - Have you tried this rather than you should do that? I think that's a better way of guiding people.

Secondly, on what we've just been discussing, identify priorities. I think it can be a difficult part of leadership and where a lot of tension can arise. But I think again, is your face creative constraints, creative tension, we have different views, we have some divergence around what the priority should be that's positive. We're more likely to get to a robust answer, a better answer, where we've really tested options, rather than said we've got five answers, so let's just do all five things so that we don't, put anyone's nose out a joint or upset anyone. We'll just say we'll do everything.

It can be tempting, but I don't think it's ultimately useful for the business. 

And then lastly, and this is certainly a very human thing, is always retain a sense of a perspective. I think a sense of humor is just so important, right? I often remind myself that there's a lot of things in life worth taking seriously, but yourself should really be one of them, right? So don't take oneself too seriously. Take, I think, what you're trying to do for the organization of your colleagues, seriously, for sure.

But I think retain a sense of perspective, keep a sense of humor close at hand, a wee bit of humility. goes a long way. It's funny you talked about values and triggers. When I see a lack of humility in people, I'll confess it's a bit of a kind of trigger for me. So I think that's really important, but I think that kind of sense of humor, it can really ease tension in a situation, it can help get people inside, it can help build relationships. And it's something that I find very useful. And I think it's something that ultimately you talked about where we've all come from. I got it from my mum. My late mum was the funniest person I ever knew.

And whatever else she could do, she could always make me laugh. 

Anni Townend: Wonderful. A thank you to your mum as well as a huge thank you to you, Chris, for our conversation today. How best for people to contact you?

Chris Harte: So probably best at LinkedIn. And my LinkedIn is simply Chris, C-H-R-I-S dash Harte, H-A-R-T-E. So if you search Chris Harte or Chris-Hart on LinkedIn, you will find me there. And by all means, please do connect. 

Anni Townend: Fabulous. And what about people who are listening who might like to know more about the firm? 

Chris Harte: www.mfmac.com, M-F-M-A-C.com.

Anni Townend: Fantastic. Thank you. Huge thank you to you, Chris, for today.

Thank you so much. And a big thank you to my support team, the Conscious Marketing Group, and to Coco O'Brien, who helps me with the production of the podcast and the wonderful introduction and outro music, which she composed. To contact me, Anni Townend, do email me on anni@annitownend.com

Visit my website. www.annitownend.com. Subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting with you. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Chris.