295: Enable Family Transitions with Doug Gray
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https://youtu.be/GigFOIkP3BI
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Doug Gray, Family Wealth Advisor, Succession Planning Expert, and Founder of Action Learning Associates, is passionate about helping leaders flourish through agency, curiosity, and collaborative frameworks.
We discuss Doug’s ADFIT Protocol for Leadership Development, a simple and effective framework that assumes people don’t need to be “fixed” — they need the structure to grow. Doug also explores how family businesses can navigate succession by understanding emotional dynamics, empowering Next Gen leaders, and shifting from control to collaboration. His latest book, The Success Playbook for Next Gen Family Business Leaders, gives rising leaders the tools to step into their future with clarity and confidence.
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Enable Family Transitions with Doug Gray
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Doug Gray, Family Wealth Advisor, Business Change Management Agent, Organizational Leadership Facilitator, Succession Planning Advisor, and Executive Coach. He’s also the founder of Action Learning Associates and the author of three books on leadership. Doug, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much, Steve. Pleasure to be here.
Yeah, great to have you. And let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and how do you manifest this in your practice and in your activities?
I like to go big. So, to serve tens of thousands of leaders, I’m not sure how to quantify it, but I think the idea of serving others in their leadership development journey is the most important “Why” I can imagine.
Yeah, well, that certainly can be rewarding. Any particular reason it’s important to you to serve others?
We don’t use the verb serve enough. I live in the south where Chick-fil-A is abundant and people will openly ask, how may I serve you? Which is a delightful question. Greenleaf was an academic and a Quaker who asked, how may I serve you? And service servant leadership emerged from that philosophy. And I think we need to do a better job of serving one another’s needs.
Yeah, I love that. Really, this mindset of looking at the other person and thinking about the other person rather than ourselves and not be self-serving, but be other serving. It’s definitely a resonance with me.
It’s primary also in leadership development, but also in learning. Curiosity is the result of, like you worked in executive coaching for a long time. And curiosity is the currency of learning. To what extent can you become curious about the other person on the call? Similarly, right now, your podcasters are thinking, oh, this Doug Gray guy, he’s fairly weird. And they get curious about various things. And they ask questions or they invite you to do so. And that curiosity is what impels us to learn. It’s what enables us to use tools like AI. Coaches are great at writing prompts, thankfully.
What I love about AI is that anything that comes to mind, I’m a very curious person. And I hear a word, I say, where does this word come from? And then I can immediately ask AI and then I can go about my business. It doesn’t take any effort and better insight. So yeah, I agree. I was talking to a client just the other day, a new client, and he asked whom should I bring to the team into discussion? And we went through different perspectives and still there was some uncertainty in his mind about who has the potential to be leader. And I asked him, which of these people are curious? He says, oh yeah, some of them are not curious. And then he connected the dots that if they’re not curious, they’re not going to learn, they’re not going to grow, they’re not going to be leaders.
That’s right.
Yeah, totally agree with that. Okay. So I’m very curious about the framework that you’re bringing to this show. And we discussed in the pre-interview about this idea that people don’t need to be fixed because they have agency and capacity. And this is something that you’ve done a lot of work around. So first of all, I’d like you to explain to me and our listeners, what do you mean by people not need to be fixed and the agency thing, and then talk about your framework that is addressing this, the ADFIT framework.
Sure. Probably representative of all of us who have tolerated schools, we’ve tolerated educational systems where there’s a gap. Here’s Doug, here’s what Doug needs to learn. That’s a competency gap of some sort. Same with most companies, especially top-down hierarchical structures, where there’s a skill gap, a competency gap. Doug needs to learn this before he can be promoted, let’s say, or exceed expectations and get a significant bonus at the end of the year. Well, that model is dominant in our culture and it needs to be, probably. There’s always going to be hierarchies that look like this. There’s going to be managers and direct reports. It’s ancient. Thankfully, it creates a sense of order in the world.
If we didn’t have it, that’d be a whole different problem. But what is also emerging is that those without agency, without the capacity or the belief that they can speak, too often feel oppressed or suppressed or repressed. And boy, there’s so many examples of this throughout history. We can look at every feudal king and the kleptocracy that emerged from that and the protection they provided, but the servitude they created. And we see it today in countless examples. We mentioned privately, our girls are 29 and 30. We encourage them to be articulate about their thoughts and emotions. They’re both happily employed in large companies and they have agency. They’ve selected companies that are unique in that way. And I’m so proud of them. But not every woman who is that age in our country can say that. And not every father can say that. Agency is a thing. It’s quantifiable. I’m a business psychologist, so I can assess it, measure it, develop it. And when people do a better job of expressing themselves, this disappears and this appears, which is more of a collaborative discussion.
In literature, the use of women’s voices in art, the articulation of marginalized groups is more and more expressive. In politics, so when we think about the need for people to express their voices and affect change, I think it’s dramatically shifting. I’d like to hope that at least because then
more people will be involved in their own leadership development and then they need a little structure.
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And that’s why I developed the ADFIT protocol.
Very good. So, the ADFIT protocol helps people leverage their agency or recognize their agency and then manifest it? What does it do?
It does in part. Here’s the backstory. I’ve managed executive coaches for a long time and been one since 97. I had two partners in the DC Metro who said, Doug, you’re an executive coach. I said, really, what’s that? And I’ve been ever since trying to answer that question because there are people who say, I’m a coach and they’ll say, here’s your skill gap. You need to step up and here’s what you need to do. Adhere to my plan. And I think that’s fraudulent. It’s absurd. It’s sanctioned and it’s unethical. What if instead we define the client’s agenda and use that to create a process that assumes that they will flourish? I’m a business psychologist, but I’ve studied positive psychology, which is a shift in how we describe behavior.
It used to be we’d focus on three things, anxiety, depression and violence. We needed to. So most of the psychological literature described that up until roughly 25 years ago. The shift in the published research now asks questions like how do I lead a fulfilling life? How do I flourish? And how do I serve others? How do I support others so that they might flourish? When I was at doing a bunch of that research and at an international conference, I emerged from that and hastily coalesced all my notes into the ADFIT model. And then I validated it in my dissertation, which I did in my fifties. And the reason I did it is because I met too many people who said that they were coaches but did not assume the best in others. They did not assume that people would flourish.
The A and the D are what defines the client. In other words, if I were working with Steve, I would want to assess your strengths and your capacities. And there are many validated assessment tools. Many are free, many are good, and I can give people lists. And then the D is to define a meaningful outcome. What is it that Steve thinks is important in his leadership development? We have the A and the D, then we can work together for a period of time and stay focused on Steve’s agenda. And that’s why they needed to be trademarked. In each session, I’ll a
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