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Dr Ciela Hartanov was part of the founding team of The Google School for Leaders and Head of Next Practice Innovation and Strategy at Google, She is a psychologist and human behavioural expert and is the founder and CEO of Humcollective, in this episode, you can learn:
Why some leaders run towards disruption with excitement yet others will be afraid?
How we become our own psychological architects.
What is "Innovating Next Practice?”
The four perspectives of emergent mindset.
Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com
Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA
Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services
Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband, or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors, and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush, and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov is a special guest on today's show. She's an ex-Google executive, psychologist and the founder and CEO of humcollective. But before we get a chance to speak with Ciela, it's The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: It's been a while since we've dug into the history books to find those lessons of leadership that we can draw on. So, I thought we'd start with a couple today. In the early 1960s, a marine biologist and author, Rachel Carson was working to overcome some immense personal and professional challenges. On top of writing what would ultimately become Silent Spring. Her watershed book, exposing the dangers of synthetic pesticides and their impact on the environment. Carson was fighting a battle on a whole other front, cancer. Professor, Nancy Cohen, chronicled the stories of her and others for Harvard Business School and Cohen focused on attitudes and actions in the face of crisis that made a positive difference to the world. Carson's moment of forging her crucible, stretched out for more than two years, Cohen writes, this long slow burn demanded again and again, that she find her way back from the perceptive despair and then recommit to her mission.
Her ability to stay the course, finish her book and exert enormous impact was fueled only by her unrelenting dedication to a mightier cause. Despite being played by a series of health complications that took great physical and emotional tolls. Carson remained staunchly committed to her mission. Cohen described it as to bring the wonders of the natural world to the public and to spotlight the responsibility we each have to protect the earth and to sustain all life and Cohen notes that unlike many other prominent leaders throughout history known for their charisma or aggressiveness and assertiveness. Carson was shy in retiring, almost quite introvert whose leadership approach was characterized by a quiet, determination, resilience, and stone wall commitment to doing purposeful and driven work.
Frederick Douglas was an abolitionist like Carson. He was driven by deep sense of mission. After escaping from slavery in 1838, he used his experience in bondage to become a leader in the anti-slavery movement and a champion for black freedom. In her book Cohen notes. Douglas realized that in order to enact large scale change, he had to be self-committed and to create his own internal, moral, intellectual, and emotional infrastructure, a framework for both understanding the power of slavery and how to consistently and effectively combat it. Douglas devoted a great deal of effort to building his framework within himself. He then used us to develop an effective leadership style. This would've been thorny and complicated work. We can often imagine the series of conversations he'd ever had with himself as he started to work through his own architecture. Cohen had written that these internal discussions had formed a cornerstone of Douglas's leadership, helping him make day to day choices, communicate with the mission and navigate through the moments of doubt and despair. All individuals who aspire to lead effectively must build their own foundation.
Throughout his life. Douglas used his perspective and personal experiences as tools to fight for social change. He also used his writing and public speaking to inspire others, to stand with him and Douglas recognized that making a significant impact required motivating and empowering his fellow citizens and used his communication progress to achieve that objective successfully. Cohen goes on to write. We long for a leader like Frederick Douglas, who understood that the country could only achieve its full potential when Americans faced and write the critical wrong that Douglas led from the lecture hall and from the newspaper stand, which was as much or more than he did through the offices of elite politicians. He believed that positive change began with ordinary citizens and his work, a leader to help them affect the individuals who governed them. So, their leadership hack here is, whether you are a mid-career professional or an emerging senior leader or brand new to leading others.
The stories that these iconic individuals in part are important, real-life lessons that we can learn from. So, by fostering engagement and cohesion, amongst your team, finding a purpose that connects your passion and developing a leadership approach that informs how you inspire and mobilize others. You can become a more courageous leader and take your career to the next level. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Big shout out to Karen, one of our regular listeners. Who's introduced us to the work of Professor Nancy Cohen. If you've got any insights or stories that you want us to showcase, please get in touch.
Start of Podcast
Steve Rush: Dr. Ciela Hartanov is our special guest on today's show. She was part of the founding team and the Google School of Leaders. She was Head of the next practice Innovation Strategy at Google. She's now a Psychologist and a Human Behavioral Expert and the founder and CEO of humcollective, and innovation strategy firm, preparing organizations for the future. Ciela, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.
Steve Rush: So, I'm really fascinated to learn about how you meandered through corporate life to end up leading humcollective. Tell us a little bit about the journey?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Well, meander would be a good description of how I think careers are built these days. When I started graduate school, I actually thought I was going to be an academic and that was my presumed path. And there was a sister school to my school that I was attending in cultural psychology in IO psych school. So, I started moonlighting and wondering, hmm, what are these other students doing? What are they learning? And I realized, you know, it was fascinating because I was learning a lot about culture, human behavior, and organizations from a very specific sort of academic lens. But on the IO psych side of the school, they were actually working with organizations, and they had projects where they were working with leaders who were struggling. And I just became really intrigued about how do you apply the theory in practice?
Steve Rush: Right.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, I started moonlighting even more and ended up doing sort of a dual degree in cultural psychology and human behavior with a sort of a subset in IO psych so that I could actually bring the theories and practices into organization. So, I abandoned the academic path and went into corporate. I started with a leadership consultancy called the Ken Blanchard Companies, which is a small family run company, which is very unique family run companies are, which we can talk about. If that's interesting to you?
Steve Rush: Very well known nonetheless.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: [Laugh], yeah. And he wrote The One Minute Manager, which many people know is sort of a seminal leadership book. And I think that was an introduction to me around, gosh, how interesting? How leadership becomes this really critical and evergreen part of organizations. And so, I had firsthand ability to see that inside this consulting practice. And I had a wonderful mentor who threw me into a job that frankly I was not qualified for, but she saw something in me and said, hey, why don't you go and reorganize our international consulting practice. And I got to travel a lot, to England and Singapore and other places. Rethinking the structures and practices. So that was my first sort of foray into change management, and it really stuck. So, I have a real system thinking mind. So, I was like, okay, this seems like the right path for me. And at the same time, I was finishing my doctorate degree and this same mentor just pushed me out of the nest. And she said, I think you've done all you can do here, which was a really seminal moment for me and my career. And I ended up at that point moving into tech and I stayed in technology firms for the remainder of my career until now where I'm running my own consulting practice. So, it's like, I've come full circle.
Steve Rush: Yeah, indeed. Of course, you were part of that massive growth in Google.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Yes.
Steve Rush: That must have been a fascinating time in your career to see that evolve?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Absolutely fascinating. And speaking of leadership, I think you see this inflection point where leadership needs to look different and change. And I saw that firsthand not only for myself as a leader, but also for the leaders that I was leading. And that became a really important and critical pivot point for myself and my career and what I was doing at Google. When I started thinking about, you know, leadership needs to look different in the modern workplace, both for scale, but also because we're really moving out of the industrial era. So how do we do that effectively? And because of that, I pitched an idea to build an innovation practice inside the people function at Google, which I think is probably the first one that's ever been built. Hopefully now there's more. But what I came to realize is that we needed to have much more of an innovation lens on developing people on thinking about how the people practice needs to evolve and beyond the industrial area logic. And that puts a squarely of course, where most organizations are now grappling with the future of work.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: And that's true in every single organization across the board at this point, which is part of the reason why I left to build my own consulting practice, because I think every organization needs to find their way forward in a contextual way. And that requires some support and some expertise.
Steve Rush: And as part of your time at Google. You talk about the future of work. Now you're perhaps ahead of the game a little bit in visioning and strategizing what the future of work could be at Google. And it's now probably form almost part of most of our routine lives today, and you've created the next practice innovation strategy there.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Yes.
Steve Rush: So, what is next practice innovation?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So next practice innovation is using foresight and anthropological methods to anticipate what likely is going to happen next, looking at scenarios, and then merging that into a strategy that works for the organization specifically. So, what I am a big fan of is, it's called next practice for a reason, because I think replication is a really, bad idea when we're trying to look at what's next for an organization and help an organization leapfrog. So, I understand the value of best practice and benchmarking as a way of understanding but replicating becomes a challenge because then we all become the same.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, the idea about inventing next practice is the call to action that every organization has the opportunity to think wider and think bigger and be at the forefront of their industry, their people practices. And now more than ever, I see that when it comes to the future of work, organizations can't replicate what other organizations are doing because it needs to work in context. So, I see that across the board, when we talk about things like hybrid work, this is a grand experiment and every organization's going to have to grapple and take some next practice bets for themselves to see what will work inside their own organization.
Steve Rush: And there's no playbook here either is there?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: No.
Steve Rush: Because all organizations are so diverse and so different to your point, it's around just figuring it out and finding out what does work and doesn't work.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, there's no playbook, but there is an innovation process and practice. And that's what I want leaders to know is that there is a process to hold onto. The process I run is a three-step process that gets you all the way from scanning and the big ideas to thinking about what do you need to employ in your strategy now to build the next practice for your organization? And how do you look at that over time and adjust as you go and be much more, you know, adaptive over time. That all is a process that is completely possible. I'm leveraging the work that I did at Google building the innovation next practice lab. So, this is all tried and true, the process itself. So, there is no playbook, but there is a way forward.
Steve Rush: Right. I love the unconscious anchor in the language next practice as well because it's forward looking. It's allows the unconscious behavior to be a little bit more visionary, doesn't it?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Absolutely. And I think that's really exciting, you know, when we can unlock ourselves from the fear of uncertainty, which is a natural human reaction, when we don't feel stability, we feel scared, fight or flight, we know that. But what this gives us is an anchor and a hold to say, how do I, before were looking, and then how do I enter that place of awe and excitement about what's possible? And that's where human ingenuity comes from. It's within us. That's part of our human nature.
Steve Rush: So, what's the core work you are undertaking there with humcollective?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, there's a few things that I'm really interested in right now. The one piece that I'm focusing a lot on is research that I think is going to become even more essential as we're looking at the new age of work. And that is how do we look and build the next practice of culture and connection inside organizations. So, we've spent a lot of time thinking about flexibility, personalization, and where we do the work. Now we need to turn our attention to how we do the work in this new context and how we build those essential connective tissues that make up an organization. So that's where I'm focusing most of my research and my conversations with organizations right now. I really believe that if we only focus on flexibility, we will lose the fabric of what makes an organization sing.
Steve Rush: It's a really interesting cold concept, this hybrid world. I've noticed, you know, through the journals I've been reading, the blogs I have been reading over the last couple of weeks that people are getting a little bit uncomfortable with hybrid now, and we're starting to creep back to being more present in the office and less flexible. What's your take on that?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: I think that's because we haven't invented the next practice of how we build that connective tissue.
Steve Rush: Right.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, my call to the organizations that don't want to backslide is, okay. Now's the time to think about what is the next practice in culture, connection, networking, and start building some of these next practices. So that there isn't a backslide because I understand why there's a backslide, because it's what we know about how we build bonds is by being in the office.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: And even employees I talk to are saying, you know, I left this organization that I joined during the pandemic because I don't feel any resonance or connection to this organization. And so, there's a longing on the part of the employees to feel that connection as well. So, the organizations that do answer that call are going to be the employers that are able to draw the best employees.
Steve Rush: It's almost an unconscious corporate muscle memory, isn't it?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: That's right.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: I mean, it's like any habit change, you know?
Steve Rush: Right.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Like it's so easy to go back to what we've known and where we've been. There's no judgment in sort of the backsliding because it's natural that we would want to gravitate and grab onto what we know, but this time is a time like any other where we can truly invent the modern contemporary workplace. And I hope organizations and leaders will take that call.
Steve Rush: I think, you know, if they don't, there's a real risk to their future attraction and retention strategy as well, by the way.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Yeah, and we're already seeing that of course.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Right. That even though you know, the economics are different now than they were when this whole great resignation conversation started. I think what we're going to continue to see is that one, because employees have started executing more choice. They're going to be reticent to let that go. And the employer employee contract will continue to adjust whether or not organizations go kicking and screaming or not. It will still continue to be present and in an important conversation that leaders are having around, gosh, how are we defining this new contract? And are we getting ahead of the game?
Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely. So, with so much uncertainty around the world, you can have a look at companies, locations, countries. There seems to be so much uncertainty and volatility around us at the moment. What is it that makes those leaders and those people in business run towards it and get, you know, excited about that disruption yet others might feel that this is something just want to avoid and hide away?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it goes back to what I sort of described about the human condition. If there's too much uncertainty, our brains simply cannot handle it. So, we retreat. And because this is sort of a cognitive issue, my recommendation for leaders is always to find a place of stability inside that uncertainty and those leaders who do find a place of stability are able to go towards the uncertainty with openness excitement, because they have a stable ground to come back to. So, I did a big study while I was at Google about what are those most transformative, agile adaptable leaders doing? And it was exactly to answer your question, why do some run towards the uncertainty with excitement and why do some retreats? And what we found is that the core of it was that they had a set of stability practices that they never would let go of. And that could be anything from, you know, showing up to dinner at 6:00 PM every evening with your family to a meditation practice, to an exercise regime. So, it was nothing grand, but it was specific and consistent. And if you find that consistency where you find that stable ground for yourself, then your brain will feel safe enough that it will allow in that uncertainty in a way that it'll look at it as novel and exciting.
Steve Rush: That's really fascinating. I think, you know, I've studied this genre of leadership and you find that most successful leaders have these rituals that they put aside in their practices and routines.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: That's right.
Steve Rush: To create either conscious stability or indeed recovery time. But I've never really noticed it as a tactical, almost safe location to go where you have that anchored routine. I think it's quite fascinating.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: And it was really actually surprising to me. I thought there would be something else that created that for these leaders. I thought, you know, maybe they had a background where, you know, they had grown up all over the world or traveled a lot or something had created inside of them, the ability to handle different conditions and no. Really it all came down to your point about having a ritualized practice around stability so that they were ready and able to take on the volatility.
Steve Rush: Yeah, love it. So, if we think about the future of work that we're in at the moment, it's fair to say, it's going to continually be uncertain and there's going to be things that are going to be unknowns of the future. What kind of give maybe tools and ideas as to how we might best embrace that uncertainty?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, the first thing I think is important to realize is that the pace of change is not going to reduce. And so, the place that I always start when we are thinking about organizations and leaders, is building awareness about that truth, and helping educate around why that might be the case. So, I really do encourage leaders to get educated about driving the shifts in organizational life, but also just the colliding forces that we see. So, I do a lot of work with leaders, helping them see what are the shapes, the, you know, the future signals that are shaping, how organizations are going to change? Doing scenario planning. So doing all of this awareness building is another way for us to gain comfort around the uncertainty, because then you're starting to understand the shades of what might be possible. Of course, you're not predicting, but you're giving your mind and understanding around what might be possible.
Steve Rush: Right.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So that requires all of us leaders. But I think also just all of us employees who are working in the world right now to become a bit of a futurist. So that's the first piece of the puzzle I think, is really important. Is this awareness building around, why is this happening?
Steve Rush: There's also a bit there as well, isn't there? About just being uncomfortable, being uncomfortable.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Mm-Hmm, so that's the second piece I was going to say, which is going back to sort of yourself inside this uncertainty. I know that this idea of self-awareness gets overplayed a lot. I think it's because we misunderstand it, but one of the things that I'm writing, I'm writing a book right now. One of the chapters that I'm writing about is called the sensing self. And I think it's essential in this era of volatility, uncertainty. There's a lot of names for what we're experiencing right now, but we need to anchor and find ourselves and become what I call a sensing self, which is the ability to understand ourselves, but understand others and also understand the context that we're inside of. So, it's this elevated idea of self-awareness. So, I talked first about becoming a better futurist and understanding the context, but it's equally essential for you to understand yourself inside that context so that you know, how you can make moves to be effective inside that context.
Steve Rush: Yeah, one of the things I love about your work, I read an article of yours in The New York Times. I think it was a few weeks back, was around this whole notion of psychological architects. And you have this real strong belief that we're in control of building that architecture for ourselves. I'd love to just understand a little bit more about that.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, for me, I think that, so I have a psychology background obviously, and one of the pieces of work that I spent a lot of time when I was at Google thinking about was mindset. Why and how do we build our world beliefs? And that these become sort of our operating system and they dictate our choices and our behaviors, and those mindsets don't have to be static. Those psychological ways of sort of viewing the world don't need to be static. We can work with them and change them. And what we've learned through neurosciences, that there is this cognitive flexibility that's possible. We see it all the time with children because children have a much more modular sort of minds. And then they start spaces in the mind, and then it starts to harden over time. But as an adult, we can still architect that for ourselves too, where we're examining our mindset and making it object to ourselves, and then we can work with it and change it. So, when I talk about self-awareness from a leadership standpoint, what I'm actually talking about is working with mindset at the deepest level around that sort of psychological architecture versus getting a 360 feedback, for example.
Steve Rush: Yeah, so is it as simple as making a choice of which mindset you have, or is there some deeper activity that needs to take place for that to happen?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, there is deeper activity. The thing about mindset when we're really working with the deepest core of our mindset is that it's deeply attached to our identity. So, what starts to happen is if you believe something to be true about you, it's a bit hard to unravel that, right? So, where I see leaders getting most stuck about not being able to handle uncertainty or change is because them having to change, to grapple with whatever the situation that they're in hits that sort of a root issue around their identity. So, to have the biggest sort of impact around mindset, we're really talking about working with your identity. Now there's entry ways into that though, that don't feel so overwhelming. And the way into that then is to start working with what I call assumptions. So, looking at assumptions means that you start having other people or yourself name what you're assuming about a situation.
So, an example of this might be, you know, I'm entering a situation with a colleague, and I always have an issue with this colleague, for example. We don't seem to see eye to eye. And so, what starts to happen over time, you might notice is that every time you enter that meeting with that other person is that you are coming with an assumption that that meeting is going to be dismal, for example. So, the work then is to start naming your assumptions about how you're entering into different environments. And then you start trying to shift that. So that would be as easy as when you're entering this meeting, you could say, okay, I know that I'm entering with an assumption that I think this meeting is going to be a disaster. How do I reframe that for myself? Let me just reframe that. And maybe you don't even believe it, but you're just repeating it to yourself a reframing, you know, this meeting is going to go well, this meeting is going to be unexpectedly excellent. You know, you just sort of start reframing in your own mind. And then what starts happening over time then is then your mindset actually starts to shift, and those assumptions start to shift. So that's the easiest place to start is just working at this sort of assumption level.
Steve Rush: Yes, neat way of using assumptions because often folk use assumptions in a different way. And that creates other behaviors. So, paying attention to assumptions can often, without being really thoughtful about it, reinforce some negative behaviors, right.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: That right.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: That's right.
Steve Rush: Awesome. Now you have this notion of emergent mindset.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Yeah.
Steve Rush: Which comes with some principles and some perspectives I'd love to get into them.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, one of the things I'm thinking a lot about is okay, if we are the psychological architects and we need to work with our mindset, then what might be some of the mindsets that we would want to be holding to handle emergence or uncertainty. And I use the term emergence on purpose because I think that's a more accurate representation of what's happening right now. So, what's starting to happen is we're living more and more in this interconnected environment. And because we're in this really interconnected environment, there's these emergent outcomes that happen all around us all of the time. And so, it means we have less control over the outcomes. And a great example of this, just to give you a visual is, there is a park across the street from my house, and there's a lovely walkway that's been built and paved, et cetera. Except now there is this path through the dirt that has been created because people have started walking through this dirt, right.
Steve Rush: Right.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: And so, this happens all the time in parks. Like urban planners. This is their worst nightmare is, that they try to plan where people are going to walk and then people walk somewhere else. And then what happens is, then a brand-new path through the dirt gets built. That is an example of emergence because you and I didn't agree that, that we were going to do that. But what happened was each person sort of started doing that. And then it became a collective outcome that we couldn't have predicted beforehand. So, this is what I believe is happening inside organizations, inside societies is that we are all participating in this grand, you know, experiment of modern work. And it's really hard for us to predict where that walkway is going to be, for example, because we're all participants in it. So, in order to handle that kind of interconnected emergence, we need to hold a different set of mindsets. And this is true for leaders, but I believe this is true also for everyone who is working in the modern context. So let me share with you what I believe this emergent mindset is made of.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: And there's four sort of shifts that I ask people to think about and take on. And I would invite your listeners because we talked about assumptions. When I share with you this shift, think about what assumptions are you making about that shift? What assumptions automatically come up for you, because then you know what your mindset is that you're already holding and where your resistance might be. So, the first one is moving from predicting to adjusting. This one is essential because really businesses need to respond to the changing needs of the environment. And what this gives us is the ability to access human ingenuity against the context of something that's not predetermined. So, one thing that we've spent a lot of time doing in organizations is trying to set up sort of predictive strategies around what is going to happen. My question then becomes instead, why don't we ask ourselves what might happen and how do we adjust to the future? How do we build systems that are more adaptable and that maybe it's not a repeatable practice, but it's still essential so that we can adjust over time? So that's the first one from prediction to adjusting.
Steve Rush: Like it.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: The second one is from simplicity to nuance and anyone who has read my work or any of the podcasts I've been on, I am on a big diatribe I guess you could say about us moving to a more nuanced point of view again. We have oversimplified the understanding of how organizations worked. We've tried to build structures that predict, like I said, and that we are really obsessed with this idea that there's right and wrong, and that's not how the world works. In complexity and emergence, what we're dealing with is that there's all of these sort of irreducible parts and it's reduction is thinking is not going to help us. What will help us is understanding more nuance about a situation. And that requires taking multiple perspectives and understanding and seeing all of the shades of gray versus turning our eyes from it.
So that's the second one from simplicity to nuance. The third one is moving from data to insight. So, I know we have a lot of data. We have a lot of big data that we've worked with and I'm a fan of data. It's absolutely essential to help us create more multiple perspectives and more nuance if we use it in the right way. So, I really believe that we need to take data and make it more nuanced and more interesting. And by that, I mean, it's not enough for us just to push out a data set that tells us an answer. Instead, we need to look to what I call thick data. And anthropologists are the ones who came up with this idea of thick data.
Steve Rush: Right.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Which helps us delve deeper into sort of the meaning behind what the data's telling us and illuminate the human experience inside that data. And that's where true insight comes from. We need more insight these days. We don't need more data. We just need more understanding. And that comes from diving deeper into this idea of thick data.
Steve Rush: Love it.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: And then the final one is from moving from linear to indirect. And this one I find is the hardest one for people to grapple with, because I know we all love a step-by-step plan. And often on podcasts, I get asked, you know, what are the five things that a leader needs to do right now? And I never answer that question because that's linear [laugh].
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: And that's not how we're going to make our way through. So, we need to get more comfortable with an indirect path these uncertain circumstances will lead us through sort of a murky winding road. And we have to account for that and how organizations are built and how outcomes are achieved.
Steve Rush: And it's interesting because we are naturally drawn to linear step by step process, aren't we?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Well, we've been taught that.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: But if you look at children when they play, that's not how they play.
Steve Rush: No.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, I always look back to sort of the essence of the child brain, because we can pull that forward. And in brain science, they're learning more and more about the fact that the right hemisphere of our brain is not linear at all. And it's where the creativity lives, but it's all preverbal. So, once we start moving it into the language part of our brain and we try to articulate it, that's where we start getting the step by step, because we're trying to articulate something that's not articulate, can't be articulated, right. So, it's sort of the idea that how can we build back into our whole brain and allow that to thrive inside organizations because that right side of the brain has a lot of non-linear connections that are being made that can unlock a lot of potential.
Steve Rush: Yeah, such great perspective. Thank you for sharing it. So, this is where we get to turn the tables a little bit, and I'm going to consciously not ask you for your top three. I'm going to ask you for your three most indirect nonlinear hacks.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: [Laugh] that's a great question. So, as you know, I'm not a big fan of hacks. And so the place that I will go is back to what we sort of talked about throughout this conversation, which is where and how can you get the space as a leader or otherwise to allow your brain to wander, to allow yourself that spaciousness where that right brain can start doing its thing, where you can start being more excited about the future, because what I'm starting to see more and more right now is that leaders feel so pressured and constrained and burnt out that the innovation part of their job has been completely crushed. And I think that is a real shame. So, if there was one called action, which is not necessarily a hack, but I think it's essential to deal with these modern times is get yourself some spaciousness, find your way out of the churn and the day to day so that you are investing in a long-term creative process that ultimately will create the next practice for your organization. But you can't do that if you don't get yourself off the hamster wheel.
Steve Rush: Definitely so, and you know, I've said before, actually, you know, even though our show is called The Leadership Hacker, my job is to hack actually into your mind and into your experiences.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: [Laugh].
Steve Rush: Not to shortcut any solutions because we all know there aren't any right?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Right, there are any and yet I think what we've learned from sort of the research on habit formation is, and I'm a real big fan of James Clear who talks a lot about how habits are formed is that it's about the doing so when I say something that is like simple, like make sure that you have at least some spaciousness in your week, what matters there is that you do it regularly. And that is what is probably the biggest hack if you will, is using the habit formation research to be able to change your behavior over time.
Steve Rush: Yeah, and the next part of this year, we call it Hack to Attack. Essentially is where something hasn't worked out as well. We may have learned from it. It may now be a force of good in our life or work. What would be your Hack to Attack?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Mm-Hmm, so when working in innovation research, you have a variety of different people that you're working to influence. All those people from those who are, you know, the operators who are spending most of their time on the job, building out outcomes and OKRs all the way to people who are much more visionary. And I've learned, I have to say the hard way that in order for people to get excited about the future, you really have to meet them where they're at with a story about, you know, how this relates to them. And this seems obvious in retrospect, but because I am such a big thinker and I'm always looking around the corner, that's what gets me excited. But if I come forward with that, for someone who is not like me, or doesn't think like me, that can feel really intimidating or even nonsensical. So, I've learned over time that to become an effective visionary, you have to be able to tell the story in a way and multiple ways that people can understand. And I think every leader who's created a vision probably has learned this, but I think it's essential that how we talk, the narrative that we build is just as important as the vision that we've decided on.
Steve Rush: Yeah, that's very true. Very true. So, the last part of the show, we give you a chance to do a bit of time travel now. You get to bump into Ciela at 21 and give her some words of wisdom. What was it going to be?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, the words of wisdom that I keep thinking about right now that I wish someone would've told me when I was 21, is that it is about the process, not the product. And this is a bit counterintuitive of course, to how businesses are run, which is often about output and what is the product you're producing. But in life, it's really about the process and having what I've been reading about lately, which is called active patience. So, setting into motion your plans, your hopes, your dreams, your desires, and then making steps towards that. But alongside that waiting and have patience around that and enjoying being inside the process versus just waiting for the outcome to be achieved.
Steve Rush: I love that notion active patience.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Mm-Hmm, I'm loving it too.
Steve Rush: Yeah, as you said it. I'm thinking I need some of this [laugh].
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Dr. Ciela Hartanov: We all need some of this, right?
Steve Rush: Yeah, I often find myself being impatient in delivery and I'm missing the journey, right?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Absolutely, and you know, I think things are always unfolding in ways that we can't really always expect. And you could say this is serendipity or luck, but there is always an unfolding that's happening if you're doing enough work. I think one of the things that we've sold, that's a myth in the Western culture is that if you work harder, you try harder, you'll achieve more. That's not actually the sort of the physics behind outcome.
Steve Rush: Right.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: You set something in motion, and it'll become like a flywheel. And that's why that active patience is essential because you don't know how that's going to evolve and change, but you can be part of it and do your one essential component.
Steve Rush: I'm sold on the idea. I'm now going to be, as soon as we're done into some research to find more about active patients [laugh] and for our listeners, they're also, I'm sure going to want to learn to find out a little bit more about your work, when the book's coming out? all of that kind of stuff that you're doing now with humcollective, where's the best place for us to send them?
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: So, if you could find me on LinkedIn at Ciela Hartanov, that's where I post most everything. And if you want to reach me, feel free to reach out via my website@humcollective.co.
Steve Rush: We'll make sure your links in our show notes as well.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Wonderful.
Steve Rush: Ciela, thank you so much for taking time out your busy schedule. I know you are super, super busy at the moment, so it's been a great opportunity for us to have you on this show, dive into your mind and thank you for being part of our community.
Dr. Ciela Hartanov: Real pleasure, Steve. Thank you so much. Take care.
Steve Rush: Thank you.
Closing
Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.
Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.
Leaders Learn from Leaders with Adrian Simpson
Épisode 122
lundi 18 juillet 2022 • Durée 46:17
Adrian Simpson is a Co-founder of Wavelength leadership group; for over 20 years he's taken top leaders into the boardrooms and shop floors of the world's most successful, innovative and admired companies. Today you can learn about:
What makes a great leader?
Why leaders learn best from leaders?
How great leaders talk candidly about failure.
The secrets behind some global transformative cultures.
Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA
Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services
#some audio issues in this show – thanks for your patience.
Business Leadership Under Fire with Pepyn Dinandt and Richard Westley
Épisode 113
lundi 16 mai 2022 • Durée 47:16
Our very special guests are global business guru Pepyn Dinandt and Military Cross holder, ex-army Colonel, Richard Westley OBE. They teamed up and wrote the book Business Leadership Under Fire. This is such a compelling show, packed full of hacks and lessons including:
Why establishing leadership can stop your platform burning
The “Who Dares Wins” approach to strategy and tactics
Building and managing an excellent leadership team
Team and organization structure to maximize business impact
Join our Tribe at https://leadership-hacker.com
Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA
Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services
Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband, or friend. Others might call me boss, coach, or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as The Leadership Hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors, and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush, and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you
Success Mindsets with Ryan Gottfredson
Épisode 23
lundi 13 juillet 2020 • Durée 43:56
Ryan Gottfredson is a mental success coach and cutting edge leadership consultant. He is also author, training and researcher, and recently written the bestselling book, SUCCESS MINDSETS. You can learn from Ryan:
Mindset is a driver for our behaviour
Companies that focus on mindset are more productive
Behaviours and Mindsets get mixed up
How our Mindset impacts how we think, learn, behave, and also shapes our physiology
Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA
Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services
Frank Zinghini is the guest on our show today, Frank is the CEO of Applied Visions Inc and one of the world’s top thought leaders on digital applications: You will learn
How he grew his business from his basement
The parallels in leading people and the digital agenda
The role trust plays in leadership
Leading his customers is as important as leading his team
Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA
Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services
Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Strategy First with Brad Chase
Épisode 21
lundi 29 juin 2020 • Durée 42:26
Brad Chase was the mind behind some of Microsoft’s largest and most successful initiatives, In episode 21, Brad explains why building winning strategies is the single most important element to business success, what he calls "the business success imperative." Learn from Brad:
Countless tips and a useful, memorable model to help leaders build first place strategies
Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA
Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services
Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Reframing Culture with Siobhan McHale
Épisode 20
lundi 22 juin 2020 • Durée 36:07
Siobhan McHale is a culture transformer with a track record of making workplaces better. She’s helped thousands of leaders create more agile and productive workplaces and written the best-selling book, The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change.
What we can learn from Siobhan today:
What Culture really is
The importance of looking at Culture through a commercial lens
The value of “Reframing Culture” for people, their roles and organization
Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA
Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services
We can all relate to the fact that a strong vision defines success in personal and business life. In this episode Dr Oleg Konovalov, #1 global thought leader on culture, coach and best-selling author will discuss:
Vision is not a gift, but a well-structured algorithm that can be taught.
How to create and execute a strong and compelling vision.
Leadership is a system of growing
Why knowledge is the sexiest thing of all
Don’t rush to call yourself a leader
In this episode - there’s also a bonus 101 on emotional intelligence from yours truly!
Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA
Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services
Nic Marks is the special guest on show 18. He is the CEO and founder of Friday Pulse, Statistician, Happiness Expert, and Ted Speaker. Learn from Nic about:
What happiness is and how to measure it
How feelings and emotions come before cognition
Why some nations and people are happier than others
What leadership activities increase happiness in the workforce
How human appreciation increases happiness in us all
Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA
Transcript: Thanks to Jermaine Pinto at JRP Transcribing for being our Partner. Contact Jermaine via LinkedIn or via his site JRP Transcribing Services
Kristin Zhivago is the President of Zhivago Partners. She is a revenue coach, digital marketing expert and author of Roadmap to Revenue. In this episode you can learn about:
Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.
Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband, or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors, and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush, and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you
Adrian Simpson is a special guest on today's show. For over 20 years he's really been immersing himself in amongst some of the top firms around the world, including the likes of Apple, Tesla, Netflix, and Google. And we're going to dive into some of those leadership secrets, but before we do, it's The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: Purpose is a real key part of all leaders’ capabilities, but often leaders get it wrong. Commonly, we see leaders think that purpose should be the same as their company's vision, mission, or purpose, but it shouldn't. Believe writing a leadership purpose statement is not a onetime exercise at all. It's something that should evolve, and it should connect the individual to the purpose of the organization. It's incredibly important and it needs deep insight and deep thoughts. So, what is leadership purpose? Your leadership purpose is your statement about who you are as a person and how you bring those unique qualities into your world.
First and foremost, leadership purpose is about your values and what's important to life for you. It's often also considered as your why statement or your reason, your beliefs. Think about your leadership purpose statement as being your beacon, enabling people to have a real clear understanding of what your direction in life and work is. In doing so, it'll help you drive the right behaviors on a daily basis and keep you engaged when circumstances around you can be challenging. It doesn't need to be overly complicated. Your leadership purpose statement must be a living and breathing document that you can share so, others understand it too. And it'll likely change as you change as a person, or your career grows or changes shape. So, you should always update it regularly. And remember your leadership purpose will not only help keep you grounded, and you stay on your path, will help you be a better leader and the leader you're meant to be. Most important, it sets a declaration of the kind of support you're prepared to give as a leader for the people around you. So, they can also buy into your journey. So simply put, think about the purpose, your why, and make sure it describes your values, your beliefs, and your vision, and how that aligns to the organization that you work and serve with. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Let's dive into the show.
Start of Podcast
Steve Rush: Adrian Simpson is a Co-founder of Wavelength leadership group. For over 20 years he's taken top leaders into the boardrooms and shop floors. Some of the world's most successful, innovative and admired companies, including Alibaba, Netflix, Apple, Tesla, Lego, and Google but a few. Andrew, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Adrian Simpson: Thanks, Steve. It's great to join you this morning.
Steve Rush: Really looking forward to diving into some of the lessons learned from some of these huge conglomerates, but tell us a little bit about you, your background and how you've arrived to do what you've done?
Adrian Simpson: Gosh, so yeah, so a very, very brief resume. Started my career in retail with John Lewis Partnership then decided at sort of age 21 to go off to University in Manchester, did a degree in business and marketing. And just after University, I managed to stumble into a role with the incredible Tom Peters Group. And for those that aren't old enough, Tom Peters was certainly in the 1980s, nineties, the most successful management guru of his time, his Jim Collins of his day, who wrote an amazing book called In Search of Excellence and sold many millions of copies and to give us sort of sense. So, I was putting him on stage in the 1990s at about $120,000 U.S. dollars a day back in those days.
So, and then one day, yeah, after being at the Tom Peters Group where I was helping put him on stage and find some, he really wrote about companies that had kind of amazing cultures that really just sort of got it. And indeed, I'm still visiting some of the companies he wrote about wrote about 30 years ago, like Southwest Airlines. The phone rang and a small innovation company called What If was on the phone. And one thing led to the other and a conversation snowballed into a coffee, a coffee into a lunch, a lunch into a come join us. And I moved into to join What If for 11 years. When I joined, we were 10 people when I left, there were 355 countries. And it was the ride of my life and had an incredible opportunity there to provide our clients with some inspirations, started running for the study tour events, and then 14 years ago made the jump to co-found Wavelength.
Steve Rush: So, what is it specifically that Wavelength do?
Adrian Simpson: Our specialism is bringing the outside world in. Basically, we scour the world looking for examples of practitioners. What are the leaders? The organizations that have compelling stories to share with our clients and really providing our clients with a combination of what I would call inspiration, education and provocation. And our hypothesis really is at the level at which we operate at, is the leaders learn best from leaders. So, as I mentioned, sort of, you know, scouring the world, looking for practitioners you know, got real experience on topics that our clients were interested in. Albeit, you know, I was literally in America 10 days ago with a group of 20 leaders from all around the world. We had clients from Australia, from India, from Japan, from the Middle East, six across North America, the rest from across Europe, from lots of different organizations.
They flew into Dallas Texas on a Saturday. We began on a Sunday morning with a sort of half day workshop. And then for the first day and a half, we spent going inside the legendary Southwest Airlines and Ritz Carlton, really focusing on excellence in culture and leadership and service. So, they can value the three and a half days, looking at innovation, disruption, new business models, what's next? And what's next? Next. Doing some set piece visits but also doing some incredible things like going for drives in the world's first, fully autonomous robots, taxis operated by crews to have no drivers in them at all [laugh] or doing metaverse meetings in the metaverse, Oculus quest headsets.
So, we do things like that to very, very intense one-week immersions for very senior business leaders. We have at the other end of the spectrum, we have a digital only program called inspire, which is every single month. Typically, on a third Thursday of the month, we take a cohort of leaders from lots of different client companies live inside a great business, somewhere around the world of an audience with a really accomplished leader. Last week we hosted a session with Alastair Campbell on mental health. Next week, we have the former Prime Minister of Denmark. Helle Thorning Schmidt on how to lead the country. We've got Jesper Boring coming up IKEA Chief Exec. We've hosted Alan Jope Unilever's Chief Exec. We are hosting Tim Steiner, Ocado Chief Exec in September, and they are just short, sharp, regular doses of live world class inspiration for our clients. And we've got amazingly 700 people signed up to that program from around the world. So, we do, you know, whether it's digital only, short, sharp, live inspiration, whether it's weeklong, or we have other programs, one called connect, which is sort of, has about 50 people on it and is UK based, it runs about nine months or whether it's just, you know, helping clients bring speakers in for a particular offsite or conference. But again, any speakers we will use, will be practitioners.
Steve Rush: How awesome. So, you managed to really bump shoulders with, and as you said, immerse other leaders with these great leaders from around the world. What's the reason your focus is heavily aimed at making leaders learn from other leaders.
Adrian Simpson: I just think there is a relevancy that you cannot get and that applicability that you cannot get from any other kind of learning when it comes to leadership is in my view. Now I'm not for a second saying there is not a role for, you know, academics and business schools and some kind of provocative, rigorous thinking. I think there is a role for that, but I suppose my best sort of summary when I had a chief exec who has been with me, a chap. He was chief exec of a fortune 500 company. He came with me to America for a week. He came with me to China for a week. And I said, you know, John, why are you doing these programs? And he said, it was very simple Adrian. He said, my previous HR leader, he said, kept on telling me to go to Harvard.
And I kept on saying to her, tell me where I should go to business school to learn about business from someone who never run a business and I'll go. He said she didn't. So, I didn't [laugh]. And I thought, and he said, so when, you know, she put in front of me the chance to spend a week in the U.S. alongside peers from different industries, different sectors, learning from companies and leaders that were perhaps bit further ahead of us in terms of their narrative. He said it was a compelling proposition because they know what it's like to sit in my seat. They know what it's like to sit it as a board director with multiple stakeholders, internal and external, limited resources, having to make informed decisions. And he said with the greatest respect, no academic, no guru, no consultant knows that reality unless they have also at some point run a major business.
So I think it's that sort of you know, real applicability I think and I think it's, you know, what, I've, I've learned as well is that, you know, when you give clients the opportunity to hear from other leaders and learn from other leaders, you know, it's easier almost to swipe with glee, if you like, what it is that they've done, you know. I mean, I'll just give you an example. There was a, you know, I actually did a podcast myself with a tremendous guy called Fred Reid couple of months back, and Fred was the founding chief executive Virgin in America. He was the president of Delta Airlines, the president of Lufthansa. He went on to work with five years of Brian Chesky Airbnb and he also did a stint with Larry Page at his private company Kitty Hawk. So, you know, he is worked with Richard Branson, Larry Page you know, Brian Chesky, and also been a twice president and onetime CEO. And I was talking to him about the challenge of, you know, communication and how do you, as a leader, you know, build an understanding in the business of what business you are in and operational realities. And he told this fantastic story about when he was both at Lufthansa and Delta faced with that challenge, he decided to create a board game. And basically, what he did was he would invite cross sectioned cohorts of leaders from across the business, whether it's air stewart’s, pilots, mechanics, ramp agents, didn't matter. And they would be invited to take a day out, fully paid to play this board game.
But what the board game was full of was real operational data and decisions. And in sort of teams of eight, they have to like to make a decision. Are you going to give people a 3% pay rise? Are you going to buy new uniforms for the air stewardess? Are you going to pay the loan off on that plane? Are you going to buy the new plane? Are you going to make invest in the innovation fund? Because innovation director says we're not innovating fast enough. Are we going to, you know, are we going to hedge on oil right? And he said, throughout the day, they had to make real operational decisions based on real operational data that we'd given them from the airline. And he said, the only decision in the day they had to make was to appoint a president. And he said, it was hilarious. They all pointed each other and said, it's you, it's you.
What do you get when you smudge one of the world's global business leaders and one of the UK's top Army Colonels? The answer, Business Leadership Under Fire, our special guest today are Pepyn Dinandt and Richard Westley OBE, and they wrote the book, Business Leadership Under Fire, but before we dive in with Pepyn and Richard, it's The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: Have you ever heard, focus takes you where it takes you? Inspired by a blog by Seth Godin many years ago, he had a focus of depth of field, and I'll share a story with you around how and why focus is so important. Picture the scene. There are two runners, both have exactly the same capability, exactly the same pace and the same injury, an injured left toe. The runner who's concentrating on how much their left toe hurts will be left in a dust by the one who's focused on winning.
Even if the winner's toe hurts just as much. Hurt of course is a matter of perception. Most of what we think about is, we had a choice about where to aim that focus, aim that lens of our attention. We can relieve past injustices, settled old grudges, nurse festering sorts. We can imagine failure build up its potential for destruction and calculate its odds. Or we can imagine generous outcomes that we're working on. Feel gratitude, feel compassion for those that got us here and revel in the possibilities of what's next, we have an automatic focus are instinctive and cultural choices, and that focus isn't the only ones that are available to us. Of course, those are somewhat difficult to change, which is why so few people manage to do so, but there's no work that pays off better in the long run than focusing on positive and progressive outcomes. Remember the stories that you tell yourself, your story is your story, but you don't have to keep reminding yourself of the story you've told yourself before. If that story doesn't help you change positively for the future, it's probably not the right story in the first place. So, focus on the future stories that you want to tell yourself, and guess what? Those stories become a reality. That's been The Leadership Hacker New. Really looking forward to our conversation with Richard and with Pepyn. Let's dive into the show.
Start of Podcast
Steve Rush: I'm joined by two very special guests on today's show. Pepyn Dinandt is a business executive with 30 years’ experience successfully leading and restructuring companies in challenging situations as CEO and Chairman. Or in Amsterdam, Pepyn has lived in a number of countries over the years, including Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, South America, and UK, where he attended University and now lives with his family in Germany. And he's joined by Richard Westley, a military cross holder, who's commanded soldiers and operations at every rank from Lieutenant through to Colonel and environments of desperate situations, including Albania, Afghanistan, Balkans. He retired from the army in 2010, having been responsible for pre-deployment training for forces bound for Iraq and Afghanistan. Between them, they teamed up and wrote the book Business Leadership Under Fire: Nine Steps to Rescue and Transform Organizations, Pepyn and Richard, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Pepyn Dinandt: Hi Steve. Yeah, good morning. Happy to be with you.
Steve Rush: Me too. Hi Richard.
Ricard Westley: Hi Steve.
Steve Rush: So, a little bit about your backstory independently, and then we maybe find out how you kind of collided to come together to write the book. So, Pepyn, a little bit about your backstory?
Pepyn Dinandt: Well, after leaving University, I somehow ended up in Germany and after spending three years at McKinsey, which was my paid business school, as I like to say, I landed my first CEO role in Eastern Germany, which was then just, you know, unified with Western Germany. And I ran a company which had a revenue of 50 million euros, but also losses of 50 million euros. So that was my first contact with the challenge of rescuing and transforming businesses and challenging situations. And I had so much fun. I mean, obviously it was very tough at the time, but I had so much fun doing that, that I have kind of never left that type of challenge.
Steve Rush: Brilliant. And I guess it's the thrive of being able to rescue those firms that has kept you in that space, right?
Pepyn Dinandt: That, plus the fact that you know, these are environments where you need to learn, because if you're not willing to listen and learn, you know, you're going to fail. These are always very, let's say complex situations, they're fast moving, they're fluid. And you know, it really kind of sharpens your skills and obviously, you know, some cases have been more successful than others. You never have only just big successes, but I thoroughly enjoy helping teams be the best version of themselves and you know, rescue these companies, rescue these organizations.
Steve Rush: Yeah, and Richard, before what you do now, have you always been a military man?
Ricard Westley: Yes, I joined the military pretty much straight after school and spent 25 years as an infantry officer serving around the world. Almost exclusively in operations and training roles. I managed to avoid the major staff roles and the ministry of defense for my 25 years. And then I left earlier than I, perhaps needed to, but I was ready to move. And I spent the last 12 years working in a number of appointments in commercial companies and now run my own consulting business.
Steve Rush: Great. So, when did the stars align for you to both meet?
Pepyn Dinandt: Well, I have been always interested in the application of military best practices in business. And I had met about four years ago, a gentleman called Tim Collins. The famous Tim Collins and you know, I had been discussing these ideas that I had about this crossover between the military and business. And he introduced me to Richard, that's how the two of us met.
Steve Rush: And then Richard, from your perspective, what was the moment you thought, how we are going to do some business together, we're going to write a book. How did that come about?
Ricard Westley: Yeah, so Tim. I was working with Tim at the time, and he mentioned Pepyn. So, he would you be interested in a conversation. I said, well, I'm always interested in conversations, and I generally like meeting new and successful people. So, you know, Pepyn and I had initial discussions and then some supplementary conversations and started looking at some sort of solution for leaders. It was a discussion over a number of months really. And then the book was a nice fallout because at that time we were in lockdown, and I think Pepyn, and I were both looking for something else to occupy our minds. And hence the hence the book,
Steve Rush: Of course, when you think of the role that the military play versus the role that the commercial enterprises play, there's such a lot of crossovers in this sphere of leadership isn't there?
Pepyn Dinandt: Yeah, I think, you know, when we sat down and this is interesting because as Richard just said, you know, we started working together without actually having physically met each other. We were basically, you know, we got to know each other digitally and spend a lot of our early relationship on Zoom. So, you know, we used these experiences, both Richards and myself to kind of look at our learnings, our insights, you know, from good and bad experiences, as well as insights from research we did on successful leadership cases, as well as fade leadership cases and developed from that, the concept for, you know, the book, including obviously the nine steps and Richard being, you know, a very hands on guy than me. So ultimately being somebody who's you know, a hands-on executive, I think developed a book, which is very much rooted in real life experience, has a down to earth approach. We believe is straightforward to understand because it's nine steps, with which we try to really cover all angles that we believe is important for leaderships facing transformation challenges. And ultimately, we produced, we believe a very practical guide for leadership when transforming organizations.
Steve Rush: Yeah. It's a very chronological approach to how leaders can really consider how to transform and continue to grow their business, which we're going to dive into a moment. But I want to come to you first, Richard, just to explore the parallels from military leadership to commercial leadership, we've been very fortunate to have a number of major generals appear on the show already. And the one thing that's been really consistent from them is that leadership as a behavioral almost has been drilled from the very moment you join an organization, but actually that's often learned in the commercial organization. Been interested in your spin on things.
Ricard Westley: Very much so. I mean, the military has the luxury of being able to devote time and resource to training and developing their people. And officers go through the RMA Military Academy Sandhurst. Mottos, serve to lead and behaviors are really focused from the get-go. So, you know, a young graduate who spent three or four years at university in quite a selfish sort of environment is suddenly thrust into a very pressurized, initial six weeks of a yearlong course where they're put under significant amount of pressure and strain to behave in the right way. And doesn't matter how good or well prepared they think they are, or how fit and robust, or how intellectually gifted they are by about day 10 of the RMA Military Academy Sandhurst. You are so stretched physically, emotionally, mentally, you are quite exhausted, and you have to reach out left and right, and grab people and say, look, we need to work together here.
This is not about me. This is about us. And so that team bonding which then translates into the leadership of that team you know progresses and then going through your military career, you know, you are prepared for every new role you go. You are course trained and you are developed. And then at the collective level, you know, units or battalions or regiments will prepare for operations, deploy on operations, recover from operations, then start that circle again, that cycle, of course, in the real world, in the commercial world, companies don't have that luxury. You know, they are on operations 24/7. And so, it becomes really important at that stage that the leaders make time to develop their people and to nurture their talent. So, I think there are things that both can learn from each other. The final point I would say is that business find themselves in very, very volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous circumstances most of the time, and certainly now, and the military is designed for that voker, uncertain world. And so, to me, it's a natural progression for the military to talk to business because they're comfortable and are designed for that voker world.
Steve Rush: Yeah, Pepyn, I wonder from your expense of being chairman and CEO on a number of businesses, whether or not there's room for that preparation to take leaders out of the operation space and really immerse them into some intense training and support.
Pepyn Dinandt: Well, look, the practice in most corporations is unfortunately completely different to what Richard has described. In other words, people are not really prepared systematically for leadership. And in the book, we talk about the so-called career X point, which is an interesting phenomenon we've seen with many failed leadership examples where people, you know, over time, they do learn initially, and they advance in their career. But when you get to a certain level in organizations, you suddenly believe your now CEO, head of big division, have been successful in the past that you don't need to learn anymore. When the learning line crosses the career line, which keeps going up and the learning line flattens, we talk about the career X points, and that's when people basically start making mistakes in business.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Pepyn Dinandt: And that's why it's fascinating to look at the crossover because especially the British military, you know, very, very actively train their leaders to be good, not many businesses do it that way. It's more always, you know, advancement by chance, advancement by opportunities, but not those systematic.
Steve Rush: Yeah, that makes those sense. So, let's dive into the book and the nine steps and maybe get some perspective from you as to how the steps within that book can help us and Pepyn we start with you. The first step in the book is that building platform, you call it establishing leadership. Tell us about that?
Pepyn Dinandt: So, Steve, you know, you coach leaders, you coach people that run businesses, you know, so you're seeing a situation where there is an obvious problem with the business.
Steve Rush: Right.
Pepyn Dinandt: Financials are declining, for me, for us. When we define the steps, especially the first step, we said, you know, this is an environment. This is an opportunity. This is a window where you take that situation, and you call out a burning platform. And with that burning platform, you basically achieve two things. First of all, you establish yourself as the leader, that's going to take charge of this situation. You know, that's about conveying the fact that you are safe of hands, having simple messages on, you know, what's happening and what's going to happen and projecting certainty as a leader, in a sense of conveying to people. You have a plan; you're going to get this done.
You're going to save the situation. So that's the establishing leadership part. The other part, and this is very often something that you see with formally successful businesses. You know, the organization, which is ultimately the people that work there are in the comfort zone. That's very often the reason why the business in trouble in the first place. And one of the things you need to really focus on is to galvanize the organization into action, into a change mode by explaining why they need to change. And that's why it's so important to do that in the very first step. If you don't get people in a mentally ready for small or big change, you're going to have trouble later on with the other steps.
Steve Rush: Yeah. Complacency is a real killer in most organizations, but often people don't even realize they're in that comfort zone until others like you or I, or other people on their team pointed out to them and go, this is a problem [laugh]. So, step two, Richard, you call in the book analysis and determination of mission targets. So very much a military focus. Tell us how that translates?
Ricard Westley: Yeah, so the military has a command philosophy called mission command. What we would call you know, empowerment and it really centers around telling your people what you want them to do and why, but not telling them how to do it because they should have the technical skills and they may well be considerably more able than you to actually do the, what. What this chapter is about is really making sure that you understand the intent of your boss or bosses or board or shareholders at whatever level, making sure that everything you do and all the direction that you give to your subordinates is in line with that. And what's required here is real clarity, real clarity of vision to make sure you've got it right. And then clarity of expression to make sure that everybody, you know, from other board members down to the people on the shop floor, really understand what you are about and why you are doing this, so that's what it is. And chapter two really digs into that idea of getting the big idea, right. And then conveying the message as simply as possible to your people.
Steve Rush: And it's that simplicity that often gets lost in translation, because my experience tells me that the more simple people can align to a common goal, purpose, mission, vision, the more likely they're going to achieve it, the more complex it becomes, then people lose that through a bit of diffusion.
Pepyn Dinandt: Yeah, you know, Richard and I, we had a discussion about step one and two in the sense of what comes first, but we like to use the following analogy. I think, you know, if you're going to be the new chef of a restaurant before you actually get told, you know, what the goal is, what the mission is, it's good. That's step one, to get to know the kitchen and the team before you do that discussion. Why step one first and then step two.
Steve Rush: Yeah. It makes sense. There's been lots of debate about which comes first. And I think I concur with you that you have to, what if you just think of the chronological order, you get hired first before you decide what you're going to do exactly. And it follows that same principle, doesn't it?
Pepyn Dinandt: Yeah.
Steve Rush: And in step three, you talk about the evaluation of the environment. I kind like this theater of operations. Tell us about that?
Pepyn Dinandt: You know, steps three is, ultimately very big step, but we like to keep it simple and practical. It's the moment when you look as a leader closely at your competition or in the military term, your enemy, as well as your, you know, your customers, your market that you are serving, or in the military term, the environment that you're operating in. And we've seen my own experience, learnings, you know, good and bad, but also from the research we did, we've seen a truly great business leaders, never underestimate their competition. Everything they do is centered around staying ahead of the competition. And, you know, I talk about the degree of skill and business acumen. So, what's important is to know your business very well from both an inside perspective and from an outside perspective, know your strengths and weaknesses and those of your competition, because very often when people develop strategies and we'll talk about that in step four, you know, they overestimate their own strengths, and they underestimate the strengths of their competition. And interesting under step three is the fact that you may find things. You may find out things about your business, about the competition, where the mission you've been set under step two becomes maybe not even only just difficult, but maybe even impossible. So, you know, we do write in the book that after step three, it may be necessary to revisit step two, depending on what you find out.
Steve Rush: Is it fair to say that there will be a continual revisiting of step two as their business and their firm or their mission if you like starts to evolve?
Pepyn Dinandt: No, I think if you do it properly, and there's a great Chinese general called Sun Tzu who wrote a book, The Art of War two and a half thousand years ago, you know, and in my experience, as he says, if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of one hundred battles, but if you know, neither of the enemy, nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. So, in other words, if you do your homework properly and you really know your business well, and you really know your competition, well, I think you can then move on to the next steps. I think could be that instant
that instant where you need to go back once to step two. Yeah, but at some point, you just need to have done your homework. Otherwise, you're in trouble as a leader. Anyway,
Steve Rush: I suppose it plays to the philosophy of having no plan B.
Pepyn Dinandt: Yes, exactly.
Steve Rush: Yeah [laugh] like it. Yeah, so in step four, I love title of step four, who dears wins. It's a very common used phrase in the military. I think this comes from the SAS, if my memory is correct. And this is about strategy and tactics, Richard.
Ricard Westley: Yeah, and step four. I mean, I guess the theme that runs through step four is that simplicity rules. The military uses the acronym kiss, keep it simple, stupid, or keep it short and simple. But that strategy for me is about getting the big ideas, right. Giving clear instructions to your people as to what you want them to do. Supervising the execution, but not getting too close. And then having a good process for lessons identified in order to inform best practice. And the chapter actually draws on some work by Michael Porter, where he talks about cost leadership, differentiation and focus in niche markets in order to ensure that, you know, you can deal with your competitors, but stay on track. And as Pepyn says, it builds on, you know, you build on your strength and you attack your competitor's weakness, which is very much in keeping with the military maneuvers approach, which is, you know, find the enemy's weak point and exploit it whilst defending you know, your center of gravity.
Step four, gets into an idea about risk taking and how you manage risk, how you mitigate risk and accepting the fact that you can never rule out risk. So, it leads on to stuff that we talk about later, such as contingency planning. And it also indicates that occasionally you have to go back to your mission and say, okay, something's happened. Something's changed. Is the mission still valid in its format at the moment? And therefore, you know, am I okay to crack on, or do I need a little bit of work here so that I can get on with the other steps?
Steve Rush: It's an interesting spin on risk too. Because research has provided loads of evidence over the years that those organizations and entrepreneurs and business leaders who avoid risk actually prevent growth and stifle innovation.
Ricard Westley: Absolutely, absolutely right.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Ricard Westley: You know, from a military perspective, I always encourage my junior commanders to take risk. You know, my mantra was, go now with a 75% solution and tweak it. Because if you wait for the hundred percent solution, somebody will get there first.
Steve Rush: Yeah. And I guess that spins then into step five Pepyn in the book, which is around determining the best course of action. And I guess the question I had was, is there ever a best course of action?
Pepyn Dinandt: Well, that's a good question, Steve, but if we take a step back, one of the fascinating things for me, you know, looking at the crossover between military and business is that. Step five is something which in the military, in the best practice cases of the military is always done very, very, very well, but in business, not done very often. And the reason it's the following, you know, in business, a situation is typically where the leadership and the let's say top team develop a plan and then basically give the plan to the organization to get done. But what we say in step five is that, you know, if you want to do it properly, what you do is, you sit down as the planning group with the execution group and you get, you know, you brief them on what you want to happen, and they are allowed to give their feedback.
And you know, you have to take the time to get that feedback. You, you know, you really have to also be open for a reality check of your plan. And the SES here is brilliant because, you know, in their mission success cycle, which is plan, brief, execute, debrief. The brief part is so important where the guys that have planned go to the guys that are going to execute, present the plan, but get feedback from the people that will be executing the operators and then maybe even change the plan because they see that from an execution perspective, things that are not well thought through maybe even unrealistic. And this reality check, that’s step five. Entails is something whereas a leader, as a CEO, you need a healthy ego, you know, to be able to deal with that. Because it means that somebody may criticize your plan. You know, one of the people that you are going to be hiring or that you're going to be entrusting with opening the French office of a company that is up to now only sat in Britain. You know, he may be telling you, well, this plan's not going to work because ABC and you have to be able to accept that criticism and go back and redo the plan. So that's why step five is critical. And it's unfortunately not seen so often in business, you know, not well done in business.
Steve Rush: And I love the notion of healthy ego. Again, similarly, there's been a lot of research that, and in fact, to be fair, there's been lots of publicity and things written, ego is a bad thing, and it is if it's overplayed and it's not helpful, but having a healthy ego gives you confidence, direction and purpose. And I wondered what your spin on that would?
Pepyn Dinandt: Every leader need ego. By definition, a leader has ego, but the problem that we have, and we saw this when we did the research, especially for the bad leadership cases, you know, many of these leaders are egocentric. And we see this, for example, again, in the military, the special air services I think is very, is a great example here. You know, you can have great leaders that haven't healthy ego that are, let's say, aware of their own limitations, are open to criticism. And basically, as you, in that podcast mentioned, you know, they don't have a centric ego, but rather a healthy ego. And I believe that that you know, good business managers, good business leaders, not necessarily founders entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, but the people that are entrusted to lead these businesses in the second-generation. Key is for them to have a good, healthy ego, because it's so important to creating a learning organization.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Pepyn Dinandt: And that stops you from, at some point in the future, getting into a problem where you need to do transformation.
Steve Rush: And that also will help you find other people around you who bring additional strengths and characteristics, which is leading into step six, which is about building and managing that excellent leadership team. Richard, this is essential in the military as well as in the corporate world, isn't it?
Ricard Westley: Yeah, it is. And you know, this, whole idea of pulling together and then maintaining a high-performance team is absolutely crucial to mission success, as is, you know, spotting and nurturing potential. And we've already mentioned you know, committing time and resource to developing your people to make sure that team that you've selected is then maintained and developing your team to make sure, you know, they've got clear aligned, you know objectives and values. Those teams need to be encouraged to communicate frequently and effectively, they need to be collaborative, you know, that sort of collaboration breaks down the silos that can often slow up business. And that team needs to build trust through relationships, but it also needs to be able to learn and adapt. And we get onto that in step nine, but it is, it's about making sure that you get the right people and that you don't default to just people, you know, but actually getting the right people and the right job, and then giving them the responsibility
Steve Rush: And step seven plays into that lovely, doesn't it? As part of that whole organizational structure in order to get the right people in the right place to get the best results. Pepyn, what's your experience of making sure that in that space you've got the right people?
Pepyn Dinandt: Yeah. Look, I think, in my own experience, very often you come into a company that is in trouble and you have to very quickly, you know, go through your steps and act. So, one of the key questions is to look at the culture of the organization and to try to understand, because often, as I said before, these companies have been successful. So for example, find a customer centric culture in this company, or is a very technical culture. It's important to understand, you know, what you're dealing with because ultimately, as I said before, the organization is, another way of saying, you know, five thousand people, ten thousand people, you know, whatever the size of the company is, you need to get them to do something different. So, is it a dynamic organization or is it a company that is clearly in the comfort zone?
You need to understand this because then you have to organize yourself to take that plan and make sure you develop the structure that has maximizing the business impact from what you're trying to achieve. My own experience, Steve is that in general, smaller units are much more effective than large units. But the thing that ultimately guides, you know, the structure that you're going to be implementing is, what you are facing in the market. In other words, are you competing against smaller competitors who are organized in smaller entities? Is it a local market? So, you know, once you have all this information, you can then develop and define the structure that you believe.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Pepyn Dinandt: Is going to be most effective. But what you need to do is, change it, only for the sake of getting it out of its comfort zone. So typically, I find larger structures, more functional organizations, and typically I define them smaller. And I like to call these business units that have, you know, delegated responsibility, or as Richard said before, you know, where the people leading these smaller entities take responsibility and have freedom.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Pepyn Dinandt: And degree of decision making.
Steve Rush: That makes load of sense. So, step eight, Richard, there's two words in there that have really interesting connotations. Campaign delivery. So, for me, when I read that, the first thing I thought of is, oh, this is wrapped up in a campaign strategy at IE. There's a start and end. There's lots of moving parts all in the right places. And of course, the one thing that's essential in every business is you have to deliver, what does it speak to?
Ricard Westley: Yeah. So, you've got your plan and you're probably feeling quite proud of your plan. But how can you stress test it? And how's it going to survive contact with a competitive arena. And that's absolutely based on the military assertion that, you know, no plan survives contact with the enemy because your competitors or your opponents on a sports field for that matter, they have a vote. And have you contingency planned against their likely responses you know, what is the market going to do when you introduce some new product or service in there, which disrupts, what is their default setting going to be? And how do you plan against that? And this whole idea of contingency planning is that, of course you can't plan against every possible contingency. And I always in the military planned against the worst case and the most likely case, because if you've got a contingency plan for those two, anything else happens in between, you can sort of tweak it, but it is about war gaming and red teaming.
And this is not confined to the military or to business. One of the examples we cite in step eight was the way that the British Olympic Committee approached their metal chances and the matrix that was created by the likes of John Steele and Peter Keen in the committee that they would go and pour over, you know, twice a week to make sure that actually they weren't missing something. And if they need a contingency plan against, you know, an outbreak of, you know, foot and mouth in the country just before, what were they going to do? So, war gaming and red teaming, you know, which businesses should do, but often pay lip service to become really important. And finally, it comes down to accountability. Yeah, it's the leader's responsibility. You know, you take the credit when things go well, I'm afraid if they don't, then you've got to be held accountable. And it's all down to you at the last at the last count.
Steve Rush: When you start to get people to think about plan for the end planned. The mindset will take you to what you know, or broadly what you can anticipate. But I bet that's changed in the last two years. Me included by the way, got caught out big time with how the pandemic through that perspective to us. And I wonder if in the future organizations will be more thoughtful to that because of what's happened in the last few years.
Pepyn Dinandt: I think Steve, you know, step eight is, obviously, it's the execution of the plan, but it's so much more than that. And, you know, I learned for example, an interesting military term, which I believe is also very applicable to business, which is UDA. You know, this is something developed, I think during the Korean war where they saw that the inferior U.S. jets were winning against superior Russian jets flown by the North Koreans. And somebody figured out that the reason was because the pilots flying those American jets were much more in tune in what was going on in the world, let's say, applying a concept that was later called UDA, which is observe, orientate, decide and act. In other words, they were, you know, able to adjust to what was going on in the field. So as Mr. Von Moltke a famous I think Prussian General once said, you know, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And that's why we also emphasize in step eight that a leader needs to be close to the action. Needs to see what's going on in the field with his plan so that he can adjust real time. You know, as Richard just said, have a contingency plan, but make sure the leader is leading that change of plan together with this team.
Steve Rush: Which is why step nine is also then so important, which is that final after-action review.
Pepyn Dinandt: Yeah, and the after-action review is something for me personally, that was completely new. I learned this from Richard, you know, Richard can maybe add to this because he was very instrumental in bringing that to the British military, but this is a very interesting concept. And this is by the way for the SAS, their last step in their four-step model. So, you know, when you have finished your transformation program, be it, you know, a cost take out exercise or a relaunch of a growth initiative. You know, you sit down with everybody which includes the boss, but also the people that have been, you know, executing parts of the plan and you have an open and frank and honest discussion as to what went right, what was good, but also what did not go right? And what can we learn for the next time?
So, it's seldom a business leader. I have to say that is, you know, able to sit there in the room and take constructive feedback, open bracket, maybe sometimes criticism, you know, of their plan and then take that and think about it and, you know, change things for the next time. But as I said before, this is something which is so important to do, right. Because you create with it, the ultimate learning organization. And I, myself, you know, as I said, this has been a great, interesting learning for me personally. I have seen it in very successful organizations where this is practiced. Maybe not so systematically as we describe it here in step nine, but it's definitely something I would recommend for all companies to do because it’s so powerful.
Steve Rush: Yeah, and it stops repeating mistakes in the past and focuses you on building on the strengths that you've achieved as well.
Pepyn Dinandt: But also, you know, just a signal from leadership to do this, to you know, sit there and take criticism. I think it's so powerful for the organization because it just sends a signal. You know that there is a culture of openness where if it's constructive, if it objective, you know, people can step up and say, look boss, I don't think this is the right way. I think we need to do it differently because 1, 2, 3.
Steve Rush: It's a really pragmatic nine steps. I'm really delighted that we were able to dive into them and get into them and we'll allow our listeners an opportunity to find out how they can get a copy and dive to learn a bit more about your work later on. But first I'm going to turn the tables a little bit. And this is part of the show where our listeners have become accustomed to where we get to hack into your leadership minds. So, I'm going to come in turn and quick fire, top three leadership hacks from you both. Pepyn kick us off?
Pepyn Dinandt: My top three leadership hacks. One, you know, as I said before, absolutely paramount to get your first step right in a transformation situation. If you don't get that right, you're in trouble. Second, the plan is nothing. The planning is everything, you know. So, I love that saying from Benjamin Franklin, fail to prepare and prepare to fail. And three, if you want to be a really good leader, then you need to have a healthy ego because that is a key to being very impactful and leading a learning organization.
Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Love it. Richard, what about your top three leadership hacks?
Ricard Westley: First thing I'd say. Two leaders is a need to learn to listen and really listen. Not, listen to respond, but to really listen, to understand their people because otherwise they'll miss so much more than just the technicalities and the practicalities. They will miss stuff that involves culture and culture is important. Second one is, you know, whatever you do, issue clear instructions, let people know the intent, the why, and empower them to get on with it. And thirdly, you are there to make decisions. And as my first colour sergeant said to me, you know, at the end of the day, Mr. Westley, you have to make a decision, good decision, great. Bad decision, regrettable. No decision, unforgivable.
Steve Rush: Yeah. And bad decisions lead to learning as well [Laugh] you know.
Ricard Westley: Indeed. Yeah, yeah. You've got to fail to learn and thrive.
Steve Rush: That's it, yeah. So, the next part of the show we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is where we ask our guests to share an event, a story or experience where something has particularly not gone well for them in their work or their life, but as a result of it, they've learned. And it's now a force of good in what they do. What would be your Hack to Attack Pepyn?
Pepyn Dinandt: Yeah, look. First was when I was a, you know, first time CEO I had come from McKinsey, and I thought as many McKinsey do, that I could walk on water and do it all alone. But I was lucky because through fortunate circumstances, I very quickly learned that it's individuals that may play the game, but teams that beat the odds. And that's been one of my mantras ever since. And the other one is that later on in life, I learned the hard way that not every mission is accomplishable, yeah. So as a leader, you need to be brave enough to stand up to your board, sponsor, owner, and explain that this mission that you have been set is impossible and will not work as envisaged, you know, and not many leaders are brave enough to do that.
Steve Rush: That's very important lessons learned there, and I can particularly resonate with the last, because there comes with a fear of particularly if you’re leading somebody else's strategy, letting them know that they've also screwed up in the process.
Pepyn Dinandt: Yep.
Steve Rush: Yeah. Richard, how about you?
Ricard Westley: Yeah, I'd harp back to a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia that very nearly failed. I mean, very nearly failed. It nearly brought down the UN and the British Prime Minister, John Major offered his position up to the cabinet because of what had happened to us. And we managed to model through and the town that we were defending did not fall unlike Srebrenica just up the valley and sadly but I would say what I learned from that is, you know, the depth of mine and other people's resilience and how you have to keep working at that and keep topping up their resilience banks when times are tight. I learn to never give up, to keep thinking, keep moving, and again, keep contingency planning at every level,
Steve Rush: Really powerful lessons, particularly in times of crisis like that as well. You can rely on those foundations to help you through, can't you?
Ricard Westley: Indeed.
Steve Rush: So, the last part of the show is you get to do a bit of time travel and all the years of wisdom you've been able to attain in your more mature days, you get a chance to bump into yourselves at 21 and give yourselves some advice. What would Pepyn advice to Pepyn at 21 be?
Pepyn Dinandt: Well, by the way, I wrote the book or we wrote the book or the idea for the book came about of providing my younger self, something useful and practical to work with. But to answer your question directly, I think for me, knowledge and experience, you know, the realization that these are greatest weapons in times of trouble that, you know, the good and experienced people that have trained it and done it a hundred times before. They are so valuable to you as a young person. And as a young man, I would advise myself to adopt the scout mindset. So be curious, be open, be grounded and learn. So, to listen and learn from those more experience around you, because typically, you know, young you, does not know at all, even if you think you do.
Steve Rush: And the scout and soldier mindset are those kinds of different perspectives. And we can use a metaphor of almost a kind a growth and curious mindset versus a fixed and closed mindset, right?
Pepyn Dinandt: Yes, exactly.
Steve Rush: Yeah. Richard, 21. I guess you were heading off at Sandhurst, weren’t you?
Ricard Westley: I was pretty much passing out at Sandhurst at 21.
Steve Rush: Oh, yeah [Laugh]
Ricard Westley: What I would say to myself there is, the one thing I really learned is the most, for a military commander, but also in business, I guess that one of the most important information requirements you have is time. How much time have I got and when do I have to achieve this by? And so, I would say to young RJ Westley at 21 or 19, get better at time management. Because I don't think I was terribly good at it. And of course, I was fueled with the mindset of most young infantry officers that wanted to go and earn their spurs, go and prove themselves and yeah, and go into violent situations and win. And I guess what I would say to that young person is be careful what you wish for.
Steve Rush: Yeah, very good advice, indeed. So, I've had a ball talking, I could spend the rest of the day diving into these subjects because as you probably already know, I'm a bit of a leadership geek and you have an enormous amount of lessons that we can learn from. So firstly, thank you for sharing them so far, but if our listeners did want to get a copy of the book, learn a bit more about the work that you both do now. Where's the best place for us to send them?
Pepyn Dinandt: Well [laugh], there is a website, www.businessleadershipunderfire.com where they can learn more about the book. And then there is a link on the website to go directly to Amazon where they can then order it. I think that would be the recommendation for your listeners.
Pepyn Dinandt: Perfect. And we'll include that link along with any social media links that you have in our show notes. So as soon as people listen to this, they can dive straight in and find a bit more about what you do. It just goes without saying, to say, thank you ever so much for coming on our show, joining our community here on The Leadership Hacker Podcast. Pepyn, Richard, thanks very much.
Pepyn Dinandt: Steve. Thank you very much.
Ricard Westley: Absolute pleasure. Thanks.
Closing
Steve Rush: I want to sign off by saying thank you to you for joining us on the show too. We recognize without you, there is no show. So please continue to share, subscribe, and like, and continue to get in touch with us with the great new stories that we share every week. And so that we can continue to bring you great stories. Please make sure you give us a five-star review where you can and share this podcast with your friends, your teams, and communities. You want to find us on social media. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter @leadershiphacker, Leadership Hacker on YouTube and on Instagram, the_leadership_hacker and if that wasn’t enough, you can also find us on our website leadership-hacker.com. Tune into next episode to find out what great hacks and stories are coming your way. That's me signing off. I'm Steve rush, and I've been your Leadership Hacker.
Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.
Steve Rush: Ryan Gottfredson is our special guest on the show today. He is a mental success coach and cutting edge leadership consultant. He is also author, training and researcher, and recently written the bestselling book, SUCCESS MINDSETS. Before we get a chance to speak with Ryan, It is The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: In 1962, John F. Kennedy gave his famous, “We choose to go to the moon speech”, and in just 2,503 days, Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon. It was indeed a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind, but the entire world celebrated the moon landing, and ironically, if you think about the way that we’ve evolved, we put a man on the moon 13 years before we put wheels on luggage. What is the reason for that? What mindsets
and the best minds in the world were focused on putting that man on the moon and not making normal travel a bit easier, so mindsets was a massive driver. Most would say to be a great leader; you need to have a great mindset, right? When it comes to investment in leadership, it is estimated that organizations worldwide will spend roughly about $350 to 400 million a year.
But research by Brandon Hall Group found that 75% of that spend was rated by those organizations as not very effective, so how come? Well, it turns out that very few will focus on mindsets as part of the overall development of leadership. So does mindset contribute to the bottom line results as well as the behaviours of those that lead organizations. Growjo a company that highlights and predicts the fastest growing 10,000 companies across the planet, and this includes existing companies, as well as start-ups.
One organization has always demonstrated the right mindset from the get go is a company called LetsGetChecked and its number one on the list. Peter Foley, their CEO and founder started the company in 2015. He was inspired to start the business after suffering testicular cancer at the age of 16, following a rugby accident, which went undiagnosed for a long period of time. It was this experience that led him on this journey to create home testing kits in the world of medicine. Mindset has been a massive driver for Peter and mindset has been a massive driver for the way that they do things. Now, if you were thinking they are only successful because of the coronavirus, that is your mindset talking by the way, you would be wrong. Their business started in 2015, but also had product that they could pivot when the opportunity presented itself, to having the mindset that was allowing that thinking was key critical to their success now. When asked, Peter said, mindset is at the heart of our success, and that has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news insights or want to share anything with our listeners, please get in touch.
Start of Podcast
Steve Rush: Joining me on the show today is Ryan Gottfredson. He is a mental success coach, a cutting edge leadership consultant and researcher. He is the author of the bestselling book, SUCCESS MINDSETS. Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan Gottfredson: Steve thanks for having me on. I have been looking forward to this.
Steve Rush: Me too, so mindset is a part of all of our lives and our work. So I'm really excited to get inside some of your research, some of your thinking, some of your work. But before we do that, tell us a little bit about how you got involved in the subject and what is you're doing at the moment?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah and I appreciate you asking, and let me even preface this by saying; I think that most people, when we start talking about mindset, they are like, oh. This is this fluffy concept. That is dealing with our state of mind and that is how I used to see mindsets. And what I'm now found is I've kind of dove into the academic research on mindsets and even the neuroscience on mindsets that our mindsets are truly the most foundational aspect about ourselves.
And so, as I mentioned is I originally didn't think this way about mindsets. How I came upon mindsets was when I did my dissertation, when I was at Indiana University. I did that on leadership and this allowed me the opportunity to look back at the last 70 years of leadership research. And what I found is that the primary focus of all of this research has been around answering the question, what do leaders need to do to be effective? And I think it's a really important question to answer. But also at the same time, it feels a little short-sighted to me because I don't know about you, but I think of leadership as being less about doing the right things and so much more about being a certain type of person. Being somebody that other people want to follow, and so my focus for the last seven years is how do we tap into this being element of leadership and everything has led me to mindsets because they're so foundational to everything that we do.
Steve Rush: And I suspect in the last 70 years, there has been a massive shift from what was once acceptable framing and mindset to what we are experiencing today, right?
Ryan Gottfredson: Mindsets is relatively new, so in terms of leadership research, the language really has not changed. I mean, 70 years ago in the 1950s, we were identifying the same leadership behaviours that are important as we are today. And we're just calling them different things, so we might say transformational leadership or a responsible leadership. Well, those aspects of those forms of leadership were identified back in the 1950s. So I think it should lead us to think why haven't we gotten more effective at developing leaders and I think the reason why we haven't gotten more effective is most leadership development programs overlook mindsets. In fact, I just did a pretty big data collection where I surveyed 150 organizations and what I found is only 12% of these organizations focus on mindsets when they develop their leaders.
Steve Rush: Wow.
Ryan Gottfredson: And when they don't focus on mindsets, they say that they're effective at developing their leaders only one third of the time. When they do focus on mindsets, they say that they're effective at developing their leaders two thirds of the time. So it has doubled the effect if they focus on mindset.
Steve Rush: That is really interesting data too, isn't it?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, fascinating. I mean, it was great stuff for me being a promoter of mindset.
Steve Rush: I wonder how much of that ironically is due to the mindsets of the people leading the organization, right?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, and you are so right, because when we start talking about mindsets and we want to focus on mindsets and organizations. What that is suggesting is that we have learned that in order to be effective leaders, we've got to deepen our self-awareness. And that's the first place that we need to start.
So we should not start with, here's all the things that you need to do to be effective. It's, let's dive into ourselves. Identify our mindsets; identify our fears and our insecurities that are holding us back. And let's address those before we start focusing on the doing, because we could focus on the doing all day long, but if our prevailing negative mindsets are still there. Those negative mindsets are going to resist any of the changes that our organization might be trying to make within us.
Steve Rush: Got it, so having done extensive research and continue to do research and transferring that into your consultancy world. What kind of things are you working on right now with individuals and organizations?
Ryan Gottfredson: Great question. The thing that I have been doing is I have developed an exercise that helps people awaken to their mindset. So here's the thing that we need to understand about mindsets is our mindsets are things that most of us aren't conscious of, but they are dictating how we think, how we learn and how we behave.
So, for example, and I think there's many people that are familiar with fixed and growth mindset. When we have a fixed mindset, this means that we are naturally mentally programmed at the current moment to see challenges and failure as things to avoid, because they send a signal to us, that we are a failure if we were to fail. But when we have a growth mindset, we are mentally wired to see challenges and failures as things to learn from and so, depending upon our current wiring, we non-consciously approach challenging situations differently. Those are the fixed mindset; they are inclined to back away from those challenges. That is just there natural processing those with a growth mindset. When they see challenges, they are inclined to approach them and that is their natural way of processing. And if we've got a group of a hundred people in the room about 50% are going to be more fixed, the other half are going to be more growth. And the 50% growth are going to naturally approach challenges, the 50% fix, are naturally going to avoid that very same challenge. And they're unaware that they process the world differently. They may not understand what mindsets that they have.
And so one of the reasons why I love focusing on mindsets, because when we do this, we help people awaken to themselves at a level that's deeper than they've ever gone before. We are starting to make these previously non-conscious mindsets become conscious to them. And as they become conscious to their mindsets, then they become empowered to do something about them, to change them if they need to and as they shift their mindsets more towards the positive, they're going to unlock greater success across their life, their work and their leadership.
Steve Rush: So superb and I think most people listening to this will be familiar with the terminology of growth mindset and fixed mindset, but due to your extensive time and research. You have taken it another level deeper have not you? You have found out some different dynamics to mindset; tell us a little bit about that?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, so when I first started to come across research studies on mindsets and saw that they had powerful effects on how we think, learn and behave. My first question became, well, what mindsets do I need to have? And I literally, I do what an academic shouldn't do, but I did what most normal people do is I went to Google and I type in Google. What mindsets do I need to have to be successful? And I start pulling up dozens and dozens of articles and what I'm finding across all of these articles that I'm pulling up is that the vast majority of these articles, aren't even talking about mindsets, they're talking about behaviours. And so this led me, okay, I really want to come up with an answer to this question, what mindsets do I need to have?
And so I then went to the academic literature and I opened the flood gates. Just to try to find any study that is out there on mindsets, and what I found is that mindsets are being studied across psychology, education management and marketing. And they have been for the last 30 years, but across each of these different disciplines and domains. They are focusing on their own pet mindsets or their pet set of mindsets. And so what I've done in terms of my work. Is I have just pulled all of these different mindsets together into one framework, and so I focus on four different sets of mindsets. Each of these sets range on a continuum from negative to positive, which allows us when we understand these different mindsets. It allows us to identify where we fall along each of these continuums, are we on the more negative side? Are we on the positive side? So where are we currently at and where do we need to go in terms of shifting our mindsets to unlock greater success.
Steve Rush: I never really thought about the concept of behaviours versus mindset, but they are completely different. And now you've just mentioned that you're incredibly right to point out that people do get behaviours and mindset mix up, don’t they? Behaviours is the effect of a mindset, right?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, so behaviours is largely driven by our mindset. So let me give you another example here. If we've got a closed mindset, so this is another continuum that I focus on. A closed versus open mindset. We've got a closed mindset. We generally think that what we know is best, and when we think that what we know is best, our primary focus becomes on being right. And when our primary focus is on being right, then that shapes our behaviour.
So we're going to be the one that's quick to provide answers. We are going to be the one that is quick to shut down others ideas, particularly if they differ from ours, because we are going to be inclined to see these different perspectives and even disagreements as challenges and as threats. But if we foundationally have an open mindset, which means that we believe that we can be wrong, instead of believing that what we know is best, our focus is no longer on being right. It is focused on finding truth and thinking optimally. And when our focus is on finding truth and thinking optimally, then our behaviours change. We shift from being the one that wants to provide all the answers to being the one who's asking all the questions and inviting feedback, inviting new perspectives, because that's the only way that we're going to ensure that we're thinking optimally and that we're finding truth. And so this is just hopefully another example that paints a picture that our mindsets, our mental lenses, that we wear. Shape how we process in our world and shape how we behave in our world.
Steve Rush: That is a great metaphor. Those mental lenses that we wear. Because that is how you would see then, the world that is presented to you. Right?
Ryan Gottfredson: For sure. Do you care if I give another example, that has been pretty powerful for me.
Steve Rush: Yeah, please do.
Ryan Gottfredson: Okay, so, and this was originally introduced to me by one of Brene¢ Brown books, Rising Strong, and in her book, she asked the question, do you think others in general are doing the best that they can? And in prior to reading this book, I'll be honest with you. My answer to that question would be, no, I did not think that others were doing the best that they can. And one of the places where I saw this in my life is when I would come across a homeless person, asking for assistance.
And that's pretty common here in California, where I'm at. In fact, I learned that half of the United States homeless population is in California, and so this means it's not too uncommon for me to pull up to the street corner. And there's somebody standing there asking for assistance. Well, when I would see them as not doing their best, and this is a form of what I call an inward mindset, then I was really quick to be critical of them. That is how I would process this. I would think, what are you doing, asking for my hard-earned money when you are just standing there, why don't you do something more productive? And I would be less inclined to help them or navigate that situation in a way that's aligned with my most ideal self. But when I read this book by Brene¢ Brown and it led me to ask the question, what if I saw this person as doing the best that they can?
And, and as soon as I asked that question, are they doing the best that they can? I quickly grow empathetic because that leads me to ask another question. What in the world has happened in their life that has led them to believe that this is the best way to live? And so when I look at these homeless people through this new lens, I no longer am critical of them. I am very sensitive to what has gone on in their life and I am much more inclined to help them and to navigate that situation closer to my ideal self. And so this was a huge change for me, just a small change in terms of how I saw them as not doing their best versus doing their best. Changed how I thought about them and how I behaved towards them, and I did the same thing, goes with leaders.
So we've probably all had leaders who saw us as not doing our best and we've had other leaders who see us as doing our best, and depending upon that lens, that they looked through. Shaped how they interacted with us.
Steve Rush: Right, and there's a very similar parallel I talk to my clients here, which is on the principle that every leader's action has a positive intent. Now the landing of the action may be very different than it is intended, but the intent is driven from a place of positivity, either for them or their organization. And it's the same principle with mindset, I guess, if what you just described.
Ryan Gottfredson: No, for sure. And you bring up such a fantastic point because when across these four different sets of mindsets is, there are desires that are associated with the negative mindsets and other desires that are associated with the positive mindset.
Let me maybe if I could just let me give you four different desires and I'm going to pose the question to you, which is, tell me if these desires are desires that society in general suggest our desires that we should have. Is that okay?
Steve Rush: Go for it.
Ryan Gottfredson: All right.
Steve Rush: Yeah, let's do it.
Ryan Gottfredson: Okay, so here is the four desires, and again. Tell me if you think society suggests that we should have these desires. So they are a desire to look good, the desire to be right, the desire to avoid problems and a desire to get ahead. Would you say that society suggests that these are good desires?
Steve Rush: I would say that would be a fair assumption from what I observed, yeah.
Ryan Gottfredson: Right. I mean, I feel the same way because I mean. These are very justifiable desires. Who wants to look bad, be wrong, have problems and get passed up.
Well, nobody does. I think the kicker here is we need to ask ourselves the question. When we have these desires, where is our focus? So if we are focused on looking good, being right, avoiding problems and getting ahead. Our focus is primarily on ourselves, and these are the four desires that are attached to the negative mindsets. And I think a lot of us get here because it's very easy to justify. And often, because we just don't understand that there's higher order desires to have. So on the positive mindset side, instead of having a desire to look good, we have a desire to learn and grow. Instead of a desire to be right, we have a desire to find truth and think optimally. Instead of a desire to avoid problems, we have a desire to reach goals. And instead of a desire to get ahead, we have a desire to lift others. And across these two sets on the negative side, when we have these self-focused desires, and what I called self-protection mode. But when we shift over to the other side, the more positive side, we move into what I call as organization advanced mode or contribution mode. And so, what you said is that people act with intent for either for their own personal benefit and when they're in self-protection mode or for the betterment of the group around them, in contribution mode. And if we can awaken to these fundamental mindsets and their desires, then we could get a better sense of how we are operating. And he quality of how we're processing. Are we in self-protection mode or are we in this organization advance or contribution mode? Does that make sense?
Steve Rush: That is awesome. Yeah. I love it. It makes loads of sense. It is filling lots of my thinking gaps as we are kicking this through, so that is great stuff. within the research you've kicked around. You also stumble across and have called out promotion mindset and outward mindset. What does that refer to?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, let me start with this continuum that deals with prevention versus promotion. So on the prevention mindset side; this is when we have a desire to avoid problems. On the promotion sides, when we have a desire to reach goals and to make these ideas come to life. Let me share an analogy. If we are a ship captain in the middle of the ocean and we have a prevention mindset. Our number one focus is on not sinking, so we don't want any problems to occur. We don't want to take any risks. We don't want to rock the boat, and when we have this mindset and we see a storm coming towards us on the horizon, because we don't want to end up in the bottom of the ocean. Our natural inclination is to run from the storm and go to a place of safety. But we've got to ask ourselves, is that place of safety that we run to maybe a Harbour or a port.
Was that the destination that we originally set out for? Well, usually not. Well, those were the promotion mindset on the other hand. It is not that they are not concerned about sinking because they are, but their focus is different. Their number one focus is on reaching a destination and I am making progress towards it. And so when the storm comes on the Verizon rather than immediately run from it, they ask themselves, does this storm stand between me and where I want to go? And if the answer is yes, then they prepare to take on the storm and they're become willing to take the risks of going towards the storm, braving the winds and the currents of the sea, because they know that that's the only way to get to the destination that they chose. And so effectively, those are the prevention mindset end up going the course of least resistance.
And they operate in a rather comfort focused way as those with the promotion mindset that become willing to do the difficult things to reach goals. And they're much more purpose centred.
Steve Rush: And it is not about taking more risk or being Maverick, either, is it? It is just about being focused in one direction versus another. Right?
Ryan Gottfredson: For sure. I mean, I don't have a podcast myself, but I'm on a decent number of podcasts. I look at podcast hosts like yourself, and I am thinking, man. Why would somebody start a podcast? It is a lot of work to do it. I mean, if I was going the comfort route, I would never start up a podcast. The only reason why I would start up a podcast is if that was one-step in a larger destination that I am seeking, then in order to get to that destination, starting up a podcast is maybe the most important thing that I can do. Now, I think every podcast is a little bit different, but whenever I am talking to somebody like yourself. I am thinking, man, this person has got to be promotion minded. Cause if they were not, they would never start up a podcast. I don't know. Does that resonate with you?
Steve Rush: Yes it does. It for sure resonates. So if we start to think about how our mindsets can help us, it not only having the right mindset will help us unlock performance in what we do, but also there are some medical implications in having the right mindset too, aren't there?
Ryan Gottfredson: There is and this is where the science is super fascinating. Is not only does our mindset shape how we think, learn and behave, but it also shapes the physiology of our body. Let me give you an example of a research study that was done, and so in this research study, they went to a group of financial professionals that were all stressed out and this actually occurred near the last economic collapse about 10 years ago. And they broke these financial professionals into two groups and they showed one group, a three minute video about how stress is debilitating. They showed another group, a three-minute video about how stress is enabling. And these are both backed by science around stress and then they tracked their engagement, their performance, and their blood pressure over the next two weeks. And after two weeks, what they found is that those who saw the stress is enabling video had higher engagement, higher performance and lower blood pressure. One of many studies that showing that just how we see our world. Not only shapes how we think about our world and even behave in our world, but how our body actually processes our world. Pretty cool stuff.
Steve Rush: Really fascinating research, isn't it?
Ryan Gottfredson: Oh yeah.
Steve Rush: So if I’m a leader listening to this and I am thinking. I have a bunch of people who are in my charge, who I want to support, grow, develop, and mentor. How would I start that journey on evolving and helping them evolve their mindset?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, great question. I mean, it is a little bit tricky because for most of us, we are not conscious of our mindsets and when we are not conscious of our mindsets. 1, that makes it difficult to introspect about them. 2, is most people don't know what mindsets are even out there. I mean, when I ask groups, can anybody identify a mindset that they need to have to be successful? The two most common answers that I get is no answer or positive mindset. Which I think positive mindsets is a good answer, but it is also a really vague answer, and so when we don't even know what mindsets are out there, we don't have labels to mindsets. There is no way we are going to ever be able to introspect about that. If a leader in the organization wants to help their leaders or employees to awaken to their mindsets, the most foundational aspects about themselves, I think the first thing that they need to do. Is they need to help them learn the language of mindsets.
They need to put labels to mindsets and help them understand these different sets of mindsets. And that's one of the reasons why I love talking about this is because we're just giving people our language now, it gives them the opportunity to introspect about their mindsets. And then in addition to that, and hopefully help make it easier for folks is I've created a mindset assessment of people could take. It is only 20 questions; it is free on my website at ryangottfredson.com but what it does is after answering these 20 questions, they get results on the quality, their mindsets, relative to 10,000 other people who have taken the mindset assessment. So not only does the results of the assessment, give them these labels and descriptions of the mindsets. It also helps them to awaken to their current quality of their mindset. And when we understand where we are, and we understand where we want to go in terms of shifting our mindsets, then we become empowered to get there. The results also have a guidance on activities that people can engage in to activate and strengthen their mindset so that they come to rely upon their more positive mindsets as they go throughout their day-to-day lives.
Steve Rush: And it is fair to say as well, that mindsets will shift based on scenarios too, right?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah. Great point, so how we have the mindsets that we have now, and I think it's interesting to point this out that most of us probably just intuitively think that how we see the world is the best way to see the world. I mean, if we thought we could see the world in a better way, we would have done so already. So we have just got to, 1, we've got to awaken to these different mindsets and as we do so, as I mentioned, we become empowered to shift these to the positive.
And so part of what shifts shapes our mindsets is. 1, our life's experience up until now and then 2, the current culture in which we operate within. So if we are working in an environment that is highly competitive, we are going to be inclined to self-protect. If we are operating in an environment that is very collaborative, we are going to be inclined to organization advance and to contribute, and so our mindsets are shaped by our environments but we aren't at the mercy of those environments. So regardless of our circumstances, we can always be intentional about the mindsets that we want to bring to those circumstances.
Steve Rush: Got it, and therefore, I guess there is probably a propensity to have a certain kind of mindset that is almost like a core mindset. Is that fair?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, and this is where I think, as we went through those four different desires on the negative side, on the positive side, and we said that society suggests. That it is good to be focused on looking good, being right, avoiding problems and getting ahead. I mean, society as a whole is essentially incentivizing more the negative mindset. And I think that one of the reasons why more people don't have positive mindsets. In fact, across the 10,000 people who have taken my mindset assessment, only 5% are in the top four tile for all four sets of these mindsets, so most of us have gotten some mindset work to do.
Steve Rush: Right, That is interesting alone, isn't it? I suspect those 5% that are in those top core tile are the ones that have high levels of self-awareness, who practice being aware to their mindsets too.
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah and that is what I found is, as I have talked to some of these folks that are there. Is one, they have invested a lot in themselves and in deepening their self-awareness, they seem to be consistent learners. Also, one of the things that I found is that these folks have generally they either, or because of the world that they shaped around them, they have created a world around them that incentivizes these more positive desires. So if there is somebody, or if there is a context that is really draining on them. They realize the negative effect that that might have on their mindsets. And they try to get into a better place, a better state of mind. So they are generally much more intentional about the context and the environments that they play within. And so one of the things that I found is. I do coaching with leaders is the leaders that have a tendency to have more of the negative mindsets. It is just part of an observation is that those that have the more negative mindset generally were raised in an environment where they did not feel very safe. Those that have the more positive mindsets, they were generally raised in environments where they did feel safe. And that isn't to say that we, can't shift our mindsets as we go older. It is just, when we are in a safe environment; we are more inclined to take on the positive mindsets just naturally.
Steve Rush: Right, so lack of safety equals more prevention, more safety equals more promotion?
Ryan Gottfredson: For sure. Yeah, because we feel this Liberty in this ability to go beyond our current station, as opposed to just want to self-protect.
Steve Rush: Got it.
Ryan Gottfredson: Yup.
Steve Rush: So now I am going to turn the lens a little at you, and not only have you researched, spend lots of time thinking about leadership. We want you to think about leadership mindset hacks. So if you were to share your top leadership mindset hacks for our listeners, what would they be? Ryan.
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, great question. I think the first place that I would do. I would take the mindset assessment. The second one that I would do is, and let me just share with you a personal story on this, and I think one of the reasons why I focus on mindsets is I probably need the mindset work just as much as anybody else. And as I look back on my adult life, I primarily had a prevention mindset. I was focused on just playing it safe, I did not want to be an entrepreneur. I never wanted to take on any debt and right about the time when I started to do my deep dive into the research on mindsets, I had a CEO give me a book and he says. This book is going to change your life and the book is called The Five Minute Journal.
And I look at the title and I look at him and I'm very gracious. Thank you very much for giving this book. But in my head, I'm thinking there is no way in hell I'm journaling. Like this is not going to happen. Right? And so I bring the book home and I opened it up and sure enough, it's just five minutes a day. In the morning, it is inviting me to ask three questions. What are three things that are grateful for? What are three things that would make today amazing and fill in some self-affirmations. And I decide, I'll give this a shot. I will, do it for two weeks. And if something happens great, if not, I'll just toss it in the trash, and so I started doing this and every day, as I answered that question, what are three things that would make today
Amazing.
What that was doing, was activating my promotion mindset. And as I did this repeatedly over time, my promotion mindset became stronger and stronger and I became focused less and less on, how do I just kind of make today, go by easily and more about how do I make today Amazing. How do I make today better than yesterday? How do I make this week better than last week? And so after doing this for the course of several weeks, I felt the shift over to a promotion mindset and as I made that shift, well, that's when I decided I want to start up my own consulting business. I want to start doing public speaking. I took on debt to start my business, and then I decided to write my book. If you would have asked me three years ago, if I would have ever thought that I would be having this conversation with you. Talking to a guy across the pond and just having had a book that's hit the wall street journal and USA today, bestseller list, I would have said, you're crazy.
I don't see how that's ever a possibility, but that was only because I was looking at my world through a prevention mindset, as I shift to a promotion mindset. Well, I started to think and operate in very different ways, leading to us having this conversation.
Steve Rush: Mindset habits then.
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, so that is one of the keys and if you take my assessment for each of the different sets of mindsets, I identify different resources and activities that people can engage in. And if we could create a habit of activating and stimulating our positive mindsets, those will become the dominant mindsets that we rely upon as we navigate in our world.
Steve Rush: Super. Next thing we want to kick around is what we call Hack to Attack. So this will be a time where things haven't worked out for you, maybe something that's gone terribly wrong, or we've screwed up at it. We call it Hack to Attack, where we have used this as a lesson in our life and our work as a positive thing, or a positive force for the future. What would be your hack to attack?
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah, great question. Early into my entrepreneurial venture. One of the things that I decided I wanted to try my hand out because I had seen other people who have been successful with this and I wanted to create an online course. And so I decided to create a somewhat of a quick and dirty online course, just to kind of learn how to do it. And I soaked up a, you know, a fairly sizable amount of financial capital to invest in learning how to do this and bringing it to life. And I brought it to life and I probably ended up selling only 10 courses, if that, right.
So from the outside perspective, this was a colossal failure but and part of this is partly cause I'm trying to take a growth mindset towards this. I don't look at that situation as a failure because I look back on that and I think, Oh, I'm so glad that I went through that experience because I learned a lot. I learned that I was not in the right position to create an online course. I learned what it takes to create an online course. I learned what I need to do to build a stronger foundation so that when I want to roll out an online course, it is much more successful. And so that was about two years ago. Fast forward till now is during the COVID-19 shutdowns is I've created an online course called High Octane Mindsets, which is designed to be the deepest and most comprehensive course on mindsets today and is designed to help people transform their lives, to get unstuck and blast towards a brighter future. And so now I've just been rolling this out over the last couple of weeks, and now I'm in a position where I'm much more successful because of the lessons that I learned previously.
Steve Rush: Super lessons to have and helping you in your work today.
Ryan Gottfredson: Yeah.
Steve Rush: So Ryan, the last thing we want to do is do a bit of time travel with you and we affectionately take our folk back to bump into themselves metaphorically when they are 21. What would be the advice that you would give Ryan when he was 21?
Ryan Gottfredson: Oh man, I could give a lot of advice, but the primary thing would be that you've got to focus on mindset. I mean, I vividly remembered this experience when I was 21 and I set a new year's resolution for myself that year. And the new year's resolution was essentially to improve my social life.
So I had just transferred over to a new university and I just wanted to make more friends and have a more, more social experience. And all of the goals that I set for myself for my new year's resolutions were around behaviours. Here are the things that I am going to do. Well, what I was overlooking was my mindset, and at the time, I did not have very positive mindsets. I had a fixed, closed, prevention and inward mindset. And so while I felt like I tried really hard on changing my behaviours, but I just didn't feel like it led to any positive results. And what I didn't realize at the time was, and I kind of gave up on goal setting because of this, because it was a really frustrating experience for me. The reason why it was so frustrating is because I was overlooking mindsets. I could change or try to change my behaviours all day long.
But if my prevailing mindset stayed the same, I'm going to continue getting the same results.
And that a much more natural way of developing ourselves is to not focus on behaviours, but to focus on the underlying mindsets and as we shift our mindsets forward, naturally our thinking and our behaviour and our success will follow. And so if I could go back to myself at 21, I would say, wake up to your mindsets and focus there and your personal development efforts, because it's going to be so much more natural and so much more effective. And that is not going to be as a frustrating experience as what you tried to do, really [Inaudible 00:40:27]
Steve Rush: Great advice and you certainly stirred my mindset today. So I will be heading over to take that assessment, let me tell you official.
Ryan Gottfredson: All right.
Steve Rush: Now, folks have been listening to this. So those with a growth, open and promotion mindset will be thinking, how can I find out more about the work that Ryan is doing at the moment? Where would you like to find out a little bit more about what you are doing?
Ryan Gottfredson: The best place to goes is my website. So that is ryangottfredson.com there you will find information where you can take the mindset assessment for free. You will find information about my book. I have a bunch of promotional giveaways associated with my book. You can learn about my online course. I've also got a tool that's called a digital mindset coach, which taps into the neuroscience behind mindsets to help people shift their mindsets more towards the positive. So whole bunch of resources that are there to help people awaken to and strengthen their mindsets, so that is the best place. Second best place is probably LinkedIn, so if anybody wants to connect with me on LinkedIn would be happy to do so.
Steve Rush: Super and we will also put the links to the mindset assessment, your website, and indeed, to the book, SUCCESS MINDSETS in our show notes as well.
Ryan Gottfredson: Perfect.
Steve Rush: Ryan it has been super chatting to you today. It has been really thoughtful. You have stimulated huge amounts of thinking in me and I am sure that is the case for our listeners too. So I just wanted to say on behalf of The Leadership Hacker Podcast, thanks for being on the show.
Ryan Gottfredson: Hey, thanks for having me on and thanks for being willing to dive into mindset.
Closing
Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.
Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.
Frank Zinghini is our special guest on today's show. He is the founder and CEO of Applied Visions, Inc. He is a founder and board member of Code DX and also the world best thought leaders on digital applications. But before we get a chance to speak with Frank. It is The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: According to research, your smartphone is about 10 times dirtier than the average toilet seat; and given that you spend about 47 times a day on average touching it, that's pretty disgusting at the best of times, and during a pandemic it's downright dangerous, but it doesn't stop there. Just think of how many small items you touch frequently throughout your day, that you can rarely clean. Your computer mouse, your keyboard, maybe remote controls, jewellery, keys to name just a few. All of these items are likely to come in touch with some form of bacteria, which could be potentially harmful, right? So as you consider stepping up your disinfecting routine and as we come toward the end of this wave of the pandemic, we shouldn't really be taking our hygiene for granted. Now we bought you leadership innovation stories before and innovation is an important part of leadership and leadership development. Along with digital tech and innovation, it now means that you can carry your own disinfecting case with you anywhere like. Developers have created what they call the Clean Tray UV light sterilization case. It portable case uses four UVC led lights to kill the bank 99.99% of germs and bacteria on dirty surfaces and it can be done in as little as five minutes. The company said that sort of average twice as fast as any other UV devices, completely eliminating and disinfecting any material surface from plastic to leather. It is about 8.3 inches and Clean Tray is lightweight, enables you to carry it anywhere and disinfect just about anything you can, that you carry with you. Such as your iPod, AirPods, phone, tools, jewellery, watches, and so on. And for those of you that are in touch with your senses, they've even integrated a whole for essential oils, allowing you to infuse your belongings with a fresh smell.
Creative thinking and innovation is a key component of leadership. Our listeners have shared with us a couple of crazy Apps that are trending right now. The first is called Cuddlr. It is a location based social networking app, and basically allows you to find people in your area who just want a cuddle virtually or in person. Cute or creepy? You will be the judge. If you have ever misplaced your car in a multi-story car park or in a location. There are a number of apps that will help you “find my car” but this one is a find my car app with a difference. It is called Carrr Matey, You guessed it. It's got lots of rrrs and it lets you know where you parked your car, but instead in a Pirate Accent, crazy, you may think, but its trending now and stealing all of the Looty from all of the other trending apps, there must be some secret pirates among us.
And if you're considering building an app, maybe now is the time. In 2008, when Apple launched the app store, there were only 500 apps available. At the last count between iOS and Android, there are almost 5 million apps in usage and of these apps, there were over 400,000 apps that help you…. you guessed it, build Apps. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any insights or information that you would like our listeners to hear, get in touch.
Start of Podcast
Steve Rush: I am joined on today show by Frank Zinghini, he is the founder and CEO of Applied Visions Inc. He is an entrepreneur and one of the world's best thought leaders on software development and digital development. Frank, welcome to the show.
Frank Zinghini: Oh, it is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Steve Rush: It is our pleasure too. You are very welcome, so you have are really interesting backstory. You now lead a multisite, multi-disciplined business, of three companies, but it did not start that way. You started off your business from your basement as a one man band. Just tell us a bit about the backstory?
Frank Zinghini: I did. I don't know if it's a typical backstory, but it's an interesting one. After graduating college, worked two very interesting jobs that I really enjoyed, but in each case after about five years or so on that job, it just got a bit stale. And the first time I went on to a second job, and the second time I had sort of stumbled into an opportunity to do a little bit of freelance work at night. Moonlighting work in my basement, as you say, and found that interesting. I was actually building a helicopter simulator for a small business here in my area. And finished that one and they asked me to do another one and I was sufficiently disengaged, I guess at my day job that I decided to take the chance and try doing that as a full time engagement. And that led to another thing and another thing and another thing and hired people and got more customers. And 31 years later, here I am
Steve Rush: Awesome, so from flight simulators to digital development, that world has changed significantly in 30 years, hasn’t it?
Frank Zinghini: Three or four times over, yeah.
Steve Rush: Right. So how has your business morphed, changed or adapted?
Frank Zinghini: Oh, it’s well.. it has changed; as I said, several times over the years. Where we are now in terms of what technology is capable of doing for businesses and for consumers. I mean, it was the stuff of daydreams when I started all this. I mean, I started this before we even had personal computers, which I just realized it makes me sound old. But the value that you can realize by applying software and technology to pretty much any domain that you can imagine is just incredible. The ability to build something effective and get it out in people's hands and bring value out of it in a relatively short period of time compared to how it used to be. It is just amazing and it has really become an integral part of every business.
Steve Rush: Right.
Frank Zinghini: When I first started it was sort of a back office thing and, you know, yes, there were computers and yes, there was software, but it was always in service of some internal function and now it really is the business.
Steve Rush: Yeah and that digital forms part of every single business and across all channels.
Frank Zinghini: Absolutely.
Steve Rush: Whether it be marketing, frontline, back office.
Frank Zinghini: Absolutely.
Steve Rush: You almost can't experience going to work these days without having to bump into an element of technology that's continually evolving. Right?
Frank Zinghini: Absolutely. A message I try to convey to customers all the time. I sum it up, as your App is your business. There is a lot more to it than that, of course, but you really cannot, you know, with few exceptions you cannot have an effective business in today's market without a digital presence.
Steve Rush: Right.
Frank Zinghini: Without a digital side through the business.
Steve Rush: So Applied Visions Inc. At the moment, what's your core focus with your clients, helping them with their thinking, their digital footprint, et cetera.
Frank Zinghini: There is a phrase. That I am not particularly fond of but maybe it is just because I don't like phrases like this. But digital transformation, but it's really building that digital side of your business, exposing your business to the digital world, having that presence being in your customer's pockets, on their phones, being in their lives, wherever they are. Being in the physical devices that are either in their homes or in their businesses or in their factories. Your business needs to be where your customers are wherever they are whenever they are there. And that is all summed up under that digital transformation phrase, but it's really helping companies achieve that.
Steve Rush: Right? And it starts with that conversation, I guess, with leaders as to, you know, what's their vision for the organization and then you come in and help them decipher and translate their future business vision and how your technology and apps and applications can support it. Right?
Frank Zinghini: Absolutely. That is actually on a good day, it is like that. Very often, my job starts with helping them form the vision in the first place.
Steve Rush: Okay.
Frank Zinghini: There are so many businesses out there that are just, you know, fighting the good fight day in and day out. And they're working the way that they've always worked and trying to keep it going. And the world is changing around them and they're slowly sensing that maybe things are different enough that they need to do something, but they don't exactly understand what it is and how to do it. And I get involved with those leaders as early as I can to help them see that and understand it and get their arms around it and figure out what that means for them and how to get to that next step in their evolution.
Steve Rush: That's key critical, Isn't it?
Frank Zinghini: I love it when a customer calls me up and says. We want to this digital transformation thing. Can you come in here and do it for us? I love that, but more often than not, it is, “what is all this digital stuff about?.. and how does it feel affect me?”
Steve Rush: There is also a common misconception, Isn't there that digital transformation is this thing of the internet and Apps and applications and platforms and software; actually digital transformation starts with human people thinking about what it is they need to try and do and therefore vision is absolutely where it starts. Isn't it?
Frank Zinghini: Absolutely and to the theme of your show, it is all about leadership at the customer side as well, because you can't just throw up a whole digital platform and tell your staff, okay, here it is, start doing this stuff now. It is an enormously transformative process for the business and the people inside that business need to understand it. They need to see where it is going. They need to see how it affects them and they need to see how their lives will change when you go down that road.
Steve Rush: And in your experience, not only being a leader of a digital and software business, but actually facing into organizations whose leaders are going through an element of transformation, change or digital transformation. What would you say has been the biggest impact for leaders as they have gone through this evolution?
Frank Zinghini: Well, there are lots of impacts, good ones and bad ones. I think the biggest impact on a good way that they see once it all starts to work. Is that they have a much closer bond to their customers than they have ever had before. There is this initial fear that I see and I deal a lot with mature businesses. Businesses that grew up around older technologies or without technologies at all, but they have an established business. They have an established customer base and I am talking about business to consumer, business to business, it is all the same. It is what, is your relationship to your customer? And they fear that going digital will somehow change that. You know, when I want to talk to my customer, I pick up the phone and talk to them and that is all I need and that is okay and you can still do that.
But once they have the technology in place, once they realize that now their business is in their customer's pocket, 24 hours a day, they actually have a better relationship with that customer. They have not given up anything. They have gained the ability to reach out to the customer whenever they feel like it. They have gained the ability to bring back data about that customer's behaviour that they never had before. And they could still pick up the phone and call their customers. Except now, they are much more thoroughly equipped for that call. They know more about what that customer is doing. It is always a joy to see that take place and to see that realization, the customers that wow, this stuff really works.
Steve Rush: Data driven insights is fundamental, not only for the way that we interact with our customers, but actually how we interact with our internal teams as well. Right?
Frank Zinghini: Oh, absolutely. It is so much easier to lead people to a conclusion that you think that they need to be led to when you've got the data to back it up. And you're not just trying to influence them and you're not trying to convince them that you just know what you're talking about. You've actually got data. I mean, there is plenty of things in life and in the world where data is not quite enough. But when you have data, you have data about your customer's behaviour, about the preferences, about their businesses, about their practices that can help support other decisions that you have to make to move forward,
Steve Rush: Given your experience of your clients and helping them with their thought leadership, Frank. How has the pandemic impacted underway organizations? And indeed individuals are either rushing towards digital or using digital in a different way.
Frank Zinghini: Interestingly it is, yeah. It has had all kinds of effects on people's behaviour and the way they look at the world. But when they actually sort of pick themselves up and start thinking about what does this mean to the business? What it really is doing is sort of helping accelerate their move in that direction. They are not necessarily saying, oh, now I have to do things completely differently. Although there is plenty of elements of that but in many cases, they are saying, well, I have been thinking about this for a long time. And I guess now's is the time to actually do it. I can't meet my customers anymore. They can't come into my business. I have to have a different way of reaching them in a different way of interacting with them. These are all things that they should be thinking about anyway, and they should be doing anyway for all the reasons we just discussed about where digital relationships are going.
It is just causing them to think about it more quickly. Now that said, there is plenty of businesses where a true business transformation is forced by this. We have a little corner of our business, where we have a software platform that we built that helps commercial kitchens manage meals subscriptions, prepared meals subscriptions. People can get on the website order, you know, meals for the next month or week. On a certain schedule, pick off a menu and then you can deliver these meals on a subscription basis. And that's been a popular business for a while with small commercial kitchens and now Freshly as an example of a large business doing that. Now we are being contacted by restaurants who are seeing how their lives have changed, probably permanently in terms of how many people they can bring into their place and how many people they can have in the front of the house. And yet they've got this commercial kitchen in the back. That is capable of so much more. They are looking at; can they add this sort of subscription meal delivery to their business? In addition to serving people in the restaurant and to dealing with one off takeout orders through whatever it is. Uber Eats or DoorDash or those things. Is there a way that they can work a recurring revenue subscription model into their business without losing the character of their restaurant? So that is just one example of how I think this current situation is forcing some businesses to actually think about a radical change to what they do and how they do it. But for the most part, it's really an accelerant.
Steve Rush: Sure.
Frank Zinghini: It is getting people to do things or at least think about things that they should have been thinking about for a while.
Steve Rush: And do you think there is an element of digital maturity? So we'll see the businesses that survive and adapt the most, who have a greater and more comprehensive digital strategy versus those that don't?
Frank Zinghini: I think so? I think it is a very necessary thing for them to do. One of the challenges I face when I carry my messages around and talk to businesses and they say, well, we did all that digital stuff. We have a website, and then we had somebody build us an App. But it's nowhere near a digital business. It is a little island of capability, and they don't talk to each other and they don't allow customers to really interact with the business and to serve themselves. It is not a true digital transformation. It is just a couple of pieces. It is the businesses who recognize that and say that was just our first step in this direction. How do we get to the next step? How do we make all this stuff, an integral part of our business? How do we make it really one big digital presence with just several doors into the room? There is a mobile app door. There is the website door. Maybe there is an intelligence device door, but all of it is a digital business that customers are interacting with not little stove, pipes of capability.
Steve Rush: And of course, digital will help them all connect to those elements together to be more effective and provide the right outcomes, for their customers.
Frank Zinghini: Oh, absolutely. And that gets back to your observation earlier about the leadership challenge for the customer. Doing these things because many businesses even to this day are stovepipe internally. You know, people have their domains; they have their areas of responsibility. They can be protective about it and, you know, for years, businesses have struggled to sort of integrate that smoothly internally, but there's still obstacles to that sort of integration when you come in with this digital integration and say, okay, now all that stuff that all you guys do, it's really just one big thing. Everybody is sharing data; it is all available to everyone. There is fluidity between departments. That can be a real leadership challenge to the CEO who recognizes the value of this transformation. Is trying to get his team on board with doing this.
Steve Rush: One of the core tenants of creating a great leadership partnership in the business you're in. Is that element of trust, because you are dealing with some really sensitive areas of conversation, strategy, but also things that could cause huge potential upturns and downturns for the organization. In terms of their risk.
Frank Zinghini: Oh yeah.
Steve Rush: How is it you go about creating that trust with your partners?
Frank Zinghini: That is probably the single biggest challenge that I have as a service provider. Doing what we do, it is all about trust really at the end of the day, all I'm ever selling to customers is trust that we can deliver on this thing that we're all talking about and it's enormously difficult. But we work on it, we work on it by making sure that our message is valid by making sure that we understand their business very well before we even start talking. It's about listening first and talking later, there's a lot of people in this space that think they know everything, and we'll go into an engagement with a customer and start waving their arms around and saying, this is what you should do. This is what you should do, and we will go in and we will listen for a very long time. As long as the customer is willing to talk, we are willing to listen to really understand what they are doing today, why they are doing it and what they hope to achieve. But in the end, it's all about earning that trust because if they choose to have us help them. There is nothing tangible there to start with. They are basically saying, okay, here do this. They are trusting us to deliver on the promise of everything that we've said. I do not take that lightly when a customer finally says, okay, let's do this. I recognize that they have just, you know, handed over their futures to us and their tactics, we can use. We move forward incrementally. I am sure you have had guests talking about agile development and there is this ways of doing this work so that you've got total transparency. Constant visibility as to what is going on and where are you going?
And, we work every day to keep our client's comfort level manageable, so they understand where we're going and that we're moving in the right direction. Let me tell you just a really quick anecdote. I had a client many, many years ago. It was a great client. One of the early stages of the businesses. We brought a lot of successful DOS products over to windows and again, I'm dating myself, but we got into commercial product development very early, and we bring a product field, everything we do. I was working late in this fellow's office once, he was the owner, this a great guy and I wanted to stay. He wanted to go home and I said, you know, do you mind if I stay? And he said, sure and reach and takes his keys out and hand them to me and gives me the alarm code. I said, you sure he trusts me with the keys? And he looked at me, he said. I am trusting you with the entire future of my business, I better be able to trust you with my keys. I had not ever really thought of it that way because I was very young at the time. This is one of my first clients and I never forgot that. Never forgot that, yeah. It is all about trust.
Steve Rush: And it is interesting how we apply that position of trust isn't it and perception of trust?
Frank Zinghini: Yeah.
Steve Rush: There was, you know, perceiving the keys, as a commodity or as a product. Where actually, it is much, much bigger than that. Isn't it?
Frank Zinghini: It was hugely symbolic to me and as I said, I have never forgotten. That was probably, I don't know, 25 years ago, maybe.
Steve Rush: And now as a CEO as well. That trust plays across the way that you lead the team.
Frank Zinghini: Oh, of course.
Steve Rush: Tell us a little bit about kind of how, from an leaders perspective you apply the similar principles.
Frank Zinghini: Yes, it is a slightly different and again, you know, it comes from being a service business. You know, sometimes I envy companies make commodity products, whether they're making cheese or auto parts or something, because there's an inertia to building products and you know, people can come in and go and your products will still come out the factory door. In a service business, the people in the business are the business. They are my inventory, they are my product, they are everything and I love it.
Steve Rush: And that is very different. Isn't it? To a traditional manufacturing business.
Frank Zinghini: Yeah, extreme.
Steve Rush: Because without those individual people who are providing that capability, knowledge and insight, there is no business. Right?
Frank Zinghini: Absolutely and a lot of companies will say that. Our people, our biggest asset but in a service business, and this is true of any service business. And, you know, I have tremendous empathy for anybody who's in a service business. It is absolutely true. The work that your people do, the relationships that they build with your customers. I will earn the trust of a customer and then turn around and hand that trust off to a team and now I have basically put my trust in them to serve the customer. So the whole process of making sure that we are constantly communicating. That I know what is going on and then I have sort of tried to instil the right values in people, so that that trust is earned every day of every relationship with every customer. It is a different sort of leadership and its great fun. I get tremendous satisfaction out of watching our teams do great things for customers. I used to get to do it for myself. I used to write the code. Now I don't do that anymore. Now I get to achieve that satisfaction by watching them do it, but it is a huge responsibility.
Steve Rush: Sure, it is and the other thing that you have become renowned for is that whole thought leadership, which is in fact what the whole Applied Visions is. You know, they hear some information here is some insights. Here is how we apply it. How do you go about helping individuals, organizations with how they lead their thinking or how you lead their thinking?
Frank Zinghini: I said before, it is more listening than talking. What I find in most of my relationships is that customers deep down know what they need. They know where they need to go. They just need to be encouraged to give it voice and they need to be reassured that it is actually the right idea. Too many people in my end of the business treat every relationship as a technology thing. And they'll go in and in the first meeting, they'll start talking about Azure or AWS or this or that or JavaScript, you know, they'll talk about all the technology that has to be brought to bear to solve this problem. But that comes much later. That is the plywood in the two by fours to build the house, but you've got to start out with, how do you want to feel when you're living in this house? What do you want to get out of this house? You know, it is all about that. And it actually become sort of my favourite part of the process now is to work with business owners to really understand what they think their challenges are? What do they think the right answers are and it is very rare that I would tell a business owner or leader is like, no, you are wrong. You are just wrong. Here is what you should do? because they know better than I do. They are right. My job is just to help them see that, well, that is absolutely correct. I see where you are going with that, but here is what that means in today's world. And here's the direction you've got to go with that to achieve what you just said. That is kind of my role is to lead their thinking along until they see the light. I hate to say that, but they see the solution. They see where this could go, and how it can actually benefit them. But they know, they know better than I'll ever know, so my job is just to help them realize that.
Steve Rush: I love that. It is almost coaching, but coaching through a digital lens, right?
Frank Zinghini: Yeah. Actually, I never thought of it that way as coaching, but you are absolutely right and I think, I don't know the number but I'd say 80% of leadership is coaching. One form or another. Coaching or coaxing or getting others to see where they should be going and not just telling them. Maybe sometimes you just got to tell them but most times, most times you're influencing, you're coaching them along, moving them to a conclusion.
Steve Rush: Right.
Frank Zinghini: So, yeah, coaching, I like that.
Steve Rush: Cool.
Frank Zinghini: I will use that.
Steve Rush: If we start to think about you as a leader of your businesses. And how you lead several businesses and you are a board member of another. This is the part of the show where we really want to get into your leadership brain and how you are constructed as a CEO. So at this part of the show, we'd like to talk about your leadership hacks. So what would be your top tips, your top leadership hacks that you could share with our audience?
Frank Zinghini: It is interesting because I consider myself, even to this day, sort of an accidental CEO as I said earlier, I kind of eased into this business and it kind of grew up around me.
Steve Rush: You became the CEO because of the growth of your business?
Frank Zinghini: Yeah, so I never really stopped to think about like, okay, now I should do this and now I should do that. But tips and tricks, hacks. I guess, you asked earlier about how do I get customers? Look at the customer relationship first that, aspect of leadership. You know, how do I get customers to move their thinking forward? And one thing I learned a very long time ago is never to be afraid to invest in building something, to show the possibilities, building a prototype if you want to call it that or even just a really well-crafted mock up or demo to help people realize where their vision could go. Nothing sells like a demonstration. You've got to put that image in people's minds and you know, a lot of people in businesses like mine would say. You can't spend that kind of time and money. That should be paid for but I guess on a larger scale hack that I've learned is to always take the long view and it's worth short term investments to build a long-term relationship. So if I want to have a couple of my guys go off for a week or two, or, you know, build some mock-up of what I believe to be this customer's vision so I can bring it back to them and show it to them and have them go, yeah, that's what we want. That is huge and that is part of building that trust. That wins their loyalty. It generates excitement. It is worth that investment. So yeah, I reinvest a lot in things like that and it is one of the reasons, I credit the fact that we have been doing this for 30 years, where a lot of companies like us have come and gone.
So that's probably one of my bigger, outward, focused hacks. Inwardly, I may have all kinds of things I do. That I just sort of take for granted that everybody does, especially with service businesses. I mention before, you know, you can't just go running around, shouting at people, telling them to do this, do that because you need them to be as invested in the relationship with the customer as you are. So I spend a lot of time influencing, understanding what drives individual people and making sure they're in positions where they can realize that and get the satisfaction that they're looking for. For whatever particular thing actually motivates them and then making sure all that lines up to meet the customer goals. There are businesses, some of them legendary where you can succeed through arrogance, shouting people and calling them stupid and telling them to do this, do this, because I know everything. This is not one of those businesses. I lead a lot more through influence, through guidance, through leading by example. We are all kind of moving along in the same direction. It is not my position to tell people what to do. I don't know if that counts as a hack?
Steve Rush: For sure. It does. You know, the whole kind of philosophy of the traditional kind of 1960-70s leadership is still kind of present in some organizations today, but people recognize that is never going to serve them well in the future. And the only way that you can really be a leader is to be amongst other leaders that you're instilling, in developing and creating.
Frank Zinghini: Yup. Yeah a big part of that is his ego. You know, we are all ego-driven to one regard or another, but when you are in a situation like this and you are leading. You have got to learn to put your ego in the background and look for your own self-satisfaction in sort of larger things down the line. You don't want to just be right all the time. You don't need to be right all the time. Andy Grove, I may be dating myself again? The CEO of Intel wrote a great series of books and one of the things he said that always stuck with me is you can be right, but you can also be dead right. And I try very hard not to be dead right and it often comes from your own desire to prove yourself right. So in that whole influencing thing, it's very important to put your own ego in the backseat and eventually you will have some successes. And then you can quietly in your own little study at home with your glass of single malt scotch. Look at the thing that you just delivered to your customer and say, you know, yeah, I did that. It was really your team that did it but you can say, yeah, I did that. You can satisfy yourself that way, but you don't need to do that in the office.
And again I don't know if these count as hacks, but the other thing that I try to instil on everyone as a cultural thing is that we should never be afraid of failure. I think fear of failure is a great obstacle for people and if you have a culture that punishes failure or mocks it or whatever no one is ever going to take any risks and nothing really interesting is ever going to happen. You’ve got to encourage. I mean going so far, what is the Facebook expression? Fail fast or something like that. You know, that has become part of this, whole break things fail fast. I don't mean that kind of thing. I mean, try something new if it does not work, backtrack, you know, don't go crazy about it, but don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to speak up in a meeting and say, yeah, we tried that thing, thought it was a good idea, but it turns out to be a really bad idea. So we're not going to do that. Great, you learn so much from that. You learn so much more and there is lots of good quotes about this, that I can't pull out of my head right now, but you learn so much more from a failure than from a success.
Steve Rush: You do, don’t you?
Frank Zinghini: Yeah. Always, always. And you have to have a culture that says that's okay.
Steve Rush: We have a lot to the digital world for that principle of failure in business and getting comfortable with failure because it kind of was born in the digital evolution of experiment test and learn and agile development and we have kind of taken some of those principles now. Most organizations recognize that and it might even be labelled as failure. It might be labelled as learning and we just do that. We learn from it. If it does not work, we do something else.
Frank Zinghini: Yeah. It is a little harder in our business and this is again, where, sort of my job to make sure these messages are carried. You know, when you are doing work for customers, it is a service organization and they see something that we might call failure. They think, well, wait a minute. No, I thought you guys were experts. I spend some of my time helping customers understand as well that certain kinds of, I mean, there is bad failures don't get me wrong. I am not saying all failure is good. But you know, I have to help the customers see that this is a natural part of making progress of innovating.
Steve Rush: Yeah.
Frank Zinghini: You can't innovate and be perfect at the same time.
Steve Rush: Was it Thomas Edison who, who created the electric light bulb said that I have been really, really unlucky for many times, but I've only been successful once. It was a thousand times or something like that. He tried to get this light bulb up and running, but it was on the thousand and first time it actually worked,
Frank Zinghini: He got a couple of great quotes like that. I can't remember those either, but yes, and he's a smart guy, obviously. Don't be afraid to fail because if you're not failing every now and then you're just not trying hard enough.
Steve Rush: And failure is where we go next. So this part of the show we call Hack to Attack. Now, anybody that is evolved in business for as long as you have Frank and has been successful. There has always been times throughout our career where we can look back and think, oops. Well, that did not work out as well as I had expected, or maybe I have screwed up. And we call this section Hack to Attack. And it's where we've taken an experience or a lesson in our careers where it didn't work out. But we've used that as a positive in our work in our life. What would be your Hack to Attack?
Frank Zinghini: Oh boy, there is so many of them. Probably the biggest one and it is interesting because we talked a lot about trust earlier. And you know the biggest lesson I've learned is. I talked about how I built a great team and you have great people and you trust in them and all that, but you have got to be careful not to mistake confidence for competence. I have made that mistake a few times, you know, really understand people's capabilities, get past their own bluster. I have gotten much better at that over the years. You know, I have had situations where I have just put too much faith in people because it seemed like they could do it. And I've learned how to really understand people's capability and kind of related to that. It is probably not a surprise that as a service business, my biggest lessons are all around people. Because technologies come and go as stuff, come and go, but it is really all about the people.
Steve Rush: Right.
Frank Zinghini: So there is that and kind of related, but kind of not. I believe very strongly in compassion, being a compassionate leader, being a compassionate vendor to my customers. I mean the world needs compassion. I think there is a tremendous lack of compassion across all domains. And you can get so much farther if you just really understand what other people's needs are and what motivates them and what drives them and help them achieve their visions of success so that you can achieve your vision. To this day I live by that, but in the earlier years, I was probably too far in that direction. And I tended to put individual people's needs ahead of the needs of the business. And I have learned over the years that business has to come first because actually I had more and more and more people in the business and the needs of any one person as important as those needs are to that person. If there is a conflict between that person's needs and the needs of the business and by extension of the other people in the business. I have to make the call and it was not so good back then, but got better at it
Steve Rush: Awesome and learning and testing and learning, getting it right is all part of evolution of anybody's leadership responsibility.
Frank Zinghini: And that is a very important point. I am glad you said that because I think it is very easy and tempting to just sort of settle into a pattern after a while and think, Oh, I got this, I've done this before. I have seen everything. I know everything. I don't have to grow anymore. I don’t have to learn anymore. I got it done and like, that is never true. You never stop learning. I learned something new every day. I learned several new things every day and you have got to be open to that and you've got to be open to letting go of past assumptions. That is not the right word.
Steve Rush: Assumptions is probably the right word. Right?
Frank Zinghini: Letting go of the things that you thought you knew. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, you got to let go of the things you thought you knew because what you thought you knew and maybe it didn't know it. Maybe it was true, then. It is not true now and you have got to, you have got to be flexible. You got to be fluid.
Steve Rush: And that is a direct parallel between digital and leadership. You know, the level of both continually just evolve.
Frank Zinghini: Exactly.
Steve Rush: And it is being thoughtful about what I need to do to take advantage of how they are evolving.
Frank Zinghini: Exactly.
Steve Rush: The last place we would like to take you Frank is to do a bit of time travel now. I am going to ask you to jump into the time capsule. Bump into Frank at 21, and you have an opportunity to give Frank some advice. What would that be?
Frank Zinghini: Wow, 21. Other than, get a haircut. 21, where was I at 21? I guess just graduating college. Interesting, I guess it relates to what we were saying before. I have no regrets over the path I followed. I would run and follow the same path, so I would probably tell that 21 year old. And it's interesting you say that because the timing is about right. I talked about trust before. I talked about not buying into people's confidence over competence and all that and I don't know if you're old enough to remember Ronald Reagan when he was president, but I am.
Steve Rush: I certainly am.
Frank Zinghini: He famously said in some context, when talking about arms control with Russia, let me see if I can remember. Something like Doveryai, no proveryai. Or something like this. Trust, but verify and I think if I could tell 21 year old Frank, one thing. I would say listen to that. Trust people, but make sure you know what you are trusting in, make sure that trust is deserved.
Steve Rush: That is great advice. Isn't it?
Frank Zinghini: Because everything else flows from that because all of life is trust. People are trusting me I am trusting them. I am trusting the people that work for me. It is all about trust. Even now I am trusting people to wear a bloody mask in public, you know, so it is all about trust, so you've got to make sure that your trust is earned and deserved.
Steve Rush: Cool. Folks are listening to this thinking, how do I get hold of some information about Frank and Applied Visions? Where would we best send them to find out more about you and the work that you do now?
Frank Zinghini: After they have listened to this podcast, of course, because this has been great. I have really enjoyed this and I have said a lot of things. I never thought I would say, so this is terrific. Well we have a website and talking about vision. I was smart enough to register a three-letter URL when I could.
www.avi.com Applied Visions Inc. So it's real easy to find, you will find me there. You will find me on LinkedIn. I love interacting with people on LinkedIn. There is not a lot of Frank Zinghini’s in the world, so I should be pretty easy to find. There is a few, but not a lot. I try to blog regularly so you can subscribe to my blog and heck you can pick up the phone and call me.
Steve Rush: And we still do that, right? We still actually can speak to people, even though the digital world has replaced many mediums of communication. The phone is still a fantastic way to connect, right.
Frank Zinghini: You know it is funny. It is and interestingly enough. Our stay at home life over the last few months, I think has revived some of that. The need to just speak to people on the phone, because you know, you can't just go walk in and chat with them and we're kind of rediscovering how to have conversations like this. But yeah, I'm easy to find. And I love talking about the stuff. I will talk to until I am blue in the face about these things. And you know, I don't need to know that there's anything for me on the other end of it. I just like talking about this stuff.
Steve Rush: We have loved talking to you as well, and we will make sure that in the show notes, your links to both LinkedIn and your website are there for our listeners to click on as soon as they are done.
Frank Zinghini: Terrific.
Steve Rush: So Frank Zinghini. It has been absolutely awesome. Thank you ever so much for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Frank Zinghini: Well, I really appreciate being on your show. Thank you.
Closing
Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.
Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.
Brad Chase our special guest on the show today. He was the mastermind behind Microsoft launch of Windows 95 and internet Explorer. He was also the executive at Microsoft responsible for the successful turnaround of MSN. Since retiring from Microsoft, he has been a philanthropist, board advisor and just released the first book, Strategy First. Before we get a chance to speak with Brad, it is The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: Ever wondered what it takes to become a life master at the card game Bridge? The strategic card game normally takes players decades to accumulate 500 master points by playing at tournament and accredited clubs. An eight-year-old California boy has become the youngest bridge player to ever be awarded the title of life master by the world's largest organization, dedicated to the card game, The American Contract Bridge League said that Andrew Chen of San Jose was granted the title of life master just three days after his eighth birthday.
Andrew had set out the plan at the age of six years old to become a life master, and it has always been his goal. Andrew has been able to earn points in just two years by participating in local games and playing online. His final points towards the life master cycle came in May 27 when an online game hosted at the Palo Alto bridge club called Think Slam. When interviewed Andrew said, “I am totally thrilled, I feel like my hard work and patience and practice has paid off, and I want to thank everyone who helped me getting there”. Sounds just like an eight year old, doesn't it right? - Not.
Andrew’s brother, Charlie has also won rookie of the year. Who is just only 10 and recently just won the Paris event in the San Mateo County sectional tournament. What is it that draws you to the game of bridge so much?
Andrew said. “He just loves the puzzle solving element of the game, he likes to work things out”. And there are parallels here in the leadership world too, aren't there? We are often presented with problems and therefore puzzles and they present themselves with readily, but do we get really excited and motivated in solving them and in turn, turn on those helpful neurotransmitters or do we get frustrated and fearful and therefore unlocked less helpful thinking? And here is the thing. It takes practice just like Andrew would have played hundreds and hundreds of hands of cards to learn patterns and read things and to be aware of how their relatedness are connected. We as leaders also need to do the same thing. Practicing with our communication, our approach, our knowledge, understanding of the people and the businesses that we work with. The more we practice, the more knowledge we develop, and the more knowledge that we practice of what does and what doesn't work. It possesses us to have more effective and adaptive and responsive way to leading and supporting others and of course the more knowledge we have, the easier it is to see patterns in situations, so good luck with your next hand. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news, insights or information that you think our listeners would like to hear, please get in touch.
Guest Introduction and main show
Steve Rush: Our guest on the show today is Brad Chase. He is a strategist, leadership and marketing expert and the author of Strategy First. Brad welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Brad Chase: Hey Steve, great to be here.
Steve Rush: So most people know you as been one of the inspire in inspiration behind some of the biggest and most successful initiatives that Microsoft during your successful executive career there, tell us a bit about your backstory?
Brad Chase: Well, my backstory is I start at Microsoft in 1987, after going to an MBA school here in the States, Northwestern Kellogg; I worked on a number of projects over time. I was the first leader of Microsoft office for example, leading the marketing of it and then I went and launched a MS-DOS 5, led the development and launch of MS-DOS 6 and perhaps got most known for leading the marketing of windows 95, which for your listeners that don't know was sort of the Microsoft product that ushered computers and arguably Microsoft itself and Bill Gates himself.
Steve Rush: For me, it was the inflection point. I remember, you know, when Windows 95 came along, it just completely changed the whole perspective of how people were perceiving and using PCs,
Brad Chase: Right? It was a very crazy time and I am sure we will talk more about it. And then after that, I didn't many initiatives related to the internet, like leading the teams on internet, different versions of internet Explorer, and then finally I was brought into turnaround MSN at the end of my career. And then I retired from Microsoft in 2002 and then for the past year, since then, I've been doing board work, consulting. I have been doing some philanthropy and advisory work and now wrote my first book
Steve Rush: For the most part, you saw enormous transformation and change across the whole of the Microsoft organization through some massive big initiatives. And there's a really interesting story that you share in your book around the whole principle of how you got windows 95 marketing campaign up and running with the backstory of start me up. Tell us a little bit about how that came about?
Brad Chase: Okay, well, I will tell you two pieces. The first piece is about Windows 95 itself. So I was brought in to lead the windows 95 marketing and had to build a marketing strategy for Windows 95 and one of the interesting things about that was that at the time, the strategy was not to tell anybody anything about Windows 95 and one night after putting the kids to bed. I was thinking hard about it and got inspired with what I called the e-strategy. Educate, site and engage. Educate all the different customers about Windows 95, get them excited about it and then engage the industry on Windows 95. And that e-strategy as we called it back then was sort of the foundation of a Windows 95 marketing strategy so we turned it all in a Ted instead of not telling anything about Windows 95, we flipped the marketing strategy and decided to tell everybody everything we could. And that strategy ended up being very successful as it was a way to get people bought into Windows 95, to understand it and not be scared about the change and to get third parties, building products.
Steve Rush: Until that time Brad, Microsoft really had not spent an awful lot of time in the TV and marketing space. What was the reason for that?
Brad Chase: Right. Well, that is a great question, Steve, so as part of this strategy, I set the goal to turn Windows 95 into consumer phenomenon. And part of that was let's do product TV commercials for the first time, which is where the rolling stone story comes in and that was a lot of fun and a crazy time. So in those days, the way we did it is we would have an advertising agency in this case, a firm called Wieden Kennedy, famous in U.S. originating, the Nike just do it ads. And they were very creative firm, but they weren't coming up with the right campaign for Windows 95 and after a few times, they finally came up with this idea of basing some ads on start me up the very famous rolling stone song and I said, wow, this is great. It is right on strategy, way to go and then they said, but we have one problem. We can't get rights to the song.
Steve Rush: Right:
Brad Chase: At first, we had some pretty heated discussions about that because why would you present a concept that we couldn't actually execute on?
Steve Rush: Sure.
Brad Chase: They said the only way the stones would do it is we sponsored their next concert tour for $10 million, which was not in my budget. So they said, well, we hope you will go do the negotiates with the stones, so I flew out to Amsterdam and this was in may I think of 95 and, you know, spent a whole day negotiating with the stones. And we went back and forth at this old ornate hotel and could not really make progress and they tried to convince me to stay the next day, but my schedule that time didn't allow for that, so they said. Well stay the next day and then you could go to the concert. That the stones were playing at the Paradiso. A great old theatre in Amsterdam and I said, well, I really can't stay. So they finally said, well, why don't you come to the dress rehearsal tonight? And so I went to the dress rehearsal, the stones played for two plus hours, they were fantastic. It was amazing and I was one of only two non-stones personnel in the building, in the theatre, so it felt like a private concert, it was just fantastic and at the end they asked me, so do you want to go meet the stones? And they thought about it and I decided that I didn't want anything to ruin the perfection of this private concert.
Steve Rush: It is pretty neat.
Brad Chase: So I decided no, and I was not really that interested in meeting the stones and I figured they weren't that interested in meeting me, but half the people I tell that story to say, Brad, you were an idiot. You should have gone and met the stones. And the other half say, Brad, you were super wise person to decide not to.
Steve Rush: I wonder how much that would have changed your emotional connectivity with that negotiation though Brad. Had you gone to meet with them?
Brad Chase: I guess we will never know.
Steve Rush: Yeah, you would not know, right.
Brad Chase: And then later we negotiated more over the phone, obviously, you know, many, many hours and days trying to work through all the issues about price primarily, but also rights to the music and how long we use it and so on. And eventually I said to the Stones, look, the launch is August 24th, 1995. We have a backup commercial we are going to run with.
Steve Rush: Right.
Brad Chase: So you have to decide. Here is my final offer, you know, basically kind of take it or leave it and they took it and there's more to the story and lots of other pieces, which we can get into, but that's sort of the high level overview of the start me up story. After we launched rumours started circulating that Bill Gates called Mick Jagger and offered him $12 million or $14 million. Sort of depended on the story directly and Jagger was so surprised that he said yes, because it was way more money than he ever expected, but all those rumours were not true arguably or speculation it was maybe Sone started those rumours themselves, but we don't really know.
Steve Rush: Maybe, good PR for them as well at the same time off course.
Brad Chase: Yeah. It was the first time Stones have ever licensed a song to for use in a commercial.
Steve Rush: And of course, it was a really successful campaign. I think it was probably was that inflection point, wasn't it that where people started to realize that yeah. Accessibility to PCs and information has led the way now to us speaking as we are now and having computers in our pocket most of the time, right?
Brad Chase: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel very privileged that I have seen this all happen. When I started Microsoft, the company had a goal of a computer in every home and in every office running Microsoft software. Because back when we started, computers were sort of a hobbyist machine. Well now not only are computers in every home and, you know, sort of every office, but in the traditional sense, but in the broader sense since, you know, phones are more powerful computers by a long shot. Computers that sent people to the moon or whatever that we really, I do have a computer in every home and in every office and in every pocket.
Steve Rush: Right and then following your retirement from Microsoft, you spun into the world of sharing your knowledge and your executive experience through your consulting and board work. During that time, when you start to think about strategy and speaking with the organizations you have worked and consulted with. What would be maybe some of the key themes as to why leaders really can't quite do, or haven't got hold of strategy, as much as you've experienced them, getting hold of other part of their business?
Brad Chase: I think that strategy sort of became lost along the way for many companies. They focused on, you know, sort of their business without thinking about it strategically because strategy is hard for many people and that is part of what I am trying to achieve with the book by the way. Is to make strategy accessible and easy for, senior business leaders, but even aspiring business. When I go around, I think people sort of think of strategic planning as some sort of formal exercise that, you know, only big corporations do and have separate departments for it but indeed strategy is the anatomy of business success and leadership success.
Steve Rush: And in your experience, do you often see organizations get confused with strategy versus planning?
Brad Chase: Yes. Organizations get confused on strategy versus planning. On strategy versus tactics, on strategy versus vision.
Steve Rush: Right.
Brad Chase: You know, and I can go on. There is, I think not a broad understanding of what strategy is and what I call strategy in a simple way is your plan to compete. If you think of building, your strategy is building your plan to compete and achieve your business goals. That is a sort of a simple way and compelling way to understand it.
Steve Rush: I like that. That is neat. So what was it that compelled you to finally put pen to paper?
Brad Chase: What compelled me to put a pen to paper was I was working with a lot of senior executives and CEOs and providing the essence of my strategy first model to them. And then I started getting asked to do some talks and that's something else I've been doing since Microsoft, strategy talks. And when I was doing these talks, people would come up to me afterwards and say, where's your book, where's your book? And so I said, well, okay, I've never done a book before. I will give it a try and I got inspired and I wrote the book.
Steve Rush: Awesome and I have had the opportunity to have a look at some of the key themes behind the book. And I kind of call it almost a bit of a user-friendly strategy toolkit almost. And there's loads of tools in there. There is loads of things in there that can really help people start to think about how they go about strategy from a practical perspective, rather than an academic perspective. Right?
Brad Chase: Yeah, that is right, Steve. It is set up that way on purpose. I very much had a vision for the book. My strategy for the book is that there has not been a strategy book, that lays out strategy in a non-academic non-intellectual way or as you put in a practical way, that gives you tools and stories that help you understand those tools that you could use on a regular basis in your business.
Steve Rush: The one thing that struck me when I first looked at it. Was the play on Einstein theory of relativity that you use, which is E X MC2 squared. Tell us a little bit, about how that came about.
Brad Chase: Yeah, sure. Glad to, so the first part of strategy is to remember the strategy is all about making bets and we make bets all the time in our life and we make bets and businesses as well, just like Microsoft, bet on the personal computer or Apple bet on consumer devices. And when you're trying to figure out what your bets are, I try to tell people there's three key components to strategy and the three key components are customer value, market potential and execution. And to help people remember that I came up with playing off of Einstein's famous equation, E = MC2, and I changed it to strategy equals E x MC2. And it's pneumonic. The E stands for execution. The M stands for market potential, and the C stands for customer value. And the C is squared because customer value can almost call strategies though, not all.
Steve Rush: Got that and to help your readers and the people you work with, get some real clarity over their strategy. You have broken this down into five real steps to help them through that thinking. And I wonder if we could just maybe spin through some of those and just have a think about how they work in principle, the first being seek change. Now, given the uncertainty that we are in at the moment. Do you see this as an opportunity for organizations and people to really seek different in a period of kind of turmoil?
Brad Chase: Yes, I do. But I also want to be realistic about the difficulty that businesses are going through in this COVID tsunami that we're facing today. You know, for a lot of businesses, there's just not a lot of great options, even with the greatest creativity or inspiration. That said, in some cases there are opportunities. You know, for example, if you are a business that has had to move much of what you do online, and you are a local business, now that you are online, you might be able to grow to new customer basis.
Steve Rush: Right.
Brad Chase: So while realistically it is a tough very, very tough for many businesses to manage around all the challenges of COVID. It is also in some cases, an opportunity. And for some lucky few, if you're the Microsoft teams group or you’re Zoom or your Logitech selling headsets. Now there is a whole set of product that, just happened to be in the right place, the right time or set of companies that are in the right place at the right time for them it is a huge opportunity.
Steve Rush: What do you think causes organizations to maybe feel more comfort rather than seek change readily? What causes that in your experience?
Brad Chase: Yeah, that is the same as life, right. Change scares people, and then they get frozen, but change is key to strategic opportunity. When there is change, there is always strategic opportunity. I mean, just look around and see the companies that have responded to the growth of the web and the internet. Those that have responded to that change have done very well generally while those who did not are struggling. And, you know, COVID unfortunately made that even more pronounced, but, you know, the internet was a huge opportunity for so many companies and those that took advantage of the change internet represented we're the most successful company of our era.
Steve Rush: The second step you have is call, mine the gaps. Tell us what you are trying to achieve here.
Brad Chase: Taking a change is sort of the textbook way people talk about strategy. Look for disruption or seek change, but it turns out of course that many times you have a great strategic opportunity just taking advantage of gaps that are out there in the marketplace, because companies are not competing at the top of their game. You know, for example, Google was not the first search company. And there was many search companies before Google, but Google came up with a much better, more compelling search product. And because of that and much more customer value than the other search products on the market. Google was able to build a huge business around search, you know, sort of the same with the iPhone. It was not the first smartphone, but it was so superior in so many ways that Apple like Google was able to mine a gap on customer value and build something that customers just loved a lot more than the competition and therefore build a big business. So there's example, after example of companies who mine gaps, where other companies were not providing enough customer value, or they were executing poorly, and these companies swooped in and built a winning strategy based on those gaps.
Steve Rush: Strategically, it is a winner isn't it? Because you already have evidence and data of other organizations and other businesses who are already operating a certain way. So you've got a lot of almost market research to call on before you enter into that business area, right?
Brad Chase: Yeah, that is right. In a lot of cases, when you're implementing a strategy of innovation, as one of the types of change or other types of change, there's not a lot of data and it's hard. Your instinct is what is driving a lot of the bet you are making. Whereas a lot of times it's something like, you know, let's say the search business, you know everyone was searching on the web, you know, it's a big business and there's a huge opportunity there. And you could easily find out by just your own experience, let alone doing more formal research that in the early days of search customers were not satisfied with the responses and building a better search was the driver for success.
Steve Rush: It is yeah. Excellent. The next part of your five-step process is the adapting to tides or adapted to tides, you call it and that is around kind of external factors and how you can respond to different environments and demographics as they change, Right? What would you say would be the biggest tides right now? Notwithstanding the obvious, it is in front of us. What would be maybe the emerging tides that you could maybe foresee that we should be thoughtful of as leaders of businesses right now?
Brad Chase: Well, wow. I think the tides are shifting and swirling in such ways now that it is hard to ignore COVID and try to guess you know, what is going to happen. We just don't know where the tides are going to go, but I have made some guesses in some blog posts of my own recently. Certainly, I think that automation is going to increase and AI is going to increase. Digital transformation is another tide that I think very important. Obviously, there is going to be more work at home. There is going to be a little bit less working in offices. You are going to have a lot more of folks rethinking sort of the foundations of how they do their business. I think that that is some of the tides that are probably pretty obvious other ones like, you know, more people eating in to eat out, you know, take out or food delivery services are going to grow. I mean, we could go on for quite a long time. But I think it's hard to say, what are the trends independent of COVID because COVID is going to transform how your business survives.
Steve Rush: And of course, to be very different for different economies and different environments of people. You've got to adapt to when opportunities or challenges present themselves so that you can become and become effectively agile and more effective as time goes on.
Brad Chase: That is right. I mean the five key tips to help build winning strategies. You know the one that we are talking about now. Adapt to the tides is often the one forgotten by leaders. The external environment around you, changes everything. Whether it is technology change, whether it is government regulation or institutions, whether its demographic changes and the way a different generation of people or different culture might affect your strategy. Or it might be something like, the way the economy is going or changing, which is obviously something now. Environmental changes like climate change or COVID and just societal change. For example, one could argue now that there is going to be a further trend towards casual clothes. As a result of people have been working from home, they are not dressing up for work and that might just continue even as we go back to the offices,
Steve Rush: The next part of your final step process is the expand universe. And that comes from thinking about rather than chase new and new markets and alluring, tempting business opportunities that it actually expand the universe you've got within your own customer base. Is that based on experience from your Microsoft days where you kind of learn this approach?
Brad Chase: Well, I think it is based on experience from Microsoft and beyond. I don't want to limit expanding the universe to just growing with your current customers. You can expand your universe very successfully by going to new customers or new businesses or through acquisition.
Steve Rush: Right.
Brad Chase: But often as you are implying people forget about the opportunity of expanding their universe via their own customer base, by offering a new ways or remove services whether existing customers. That is a key way to grow the business. You can't just keep selling to the same base the same way and grow your business over time. You do have to think about clever ways to grow your business and there is millions of examples of this because it happens all the time, you know, soda companies offering new sodas or different packaging for the same customers. You know, maybe you are an auto repair shop, like Midas in the United States that started with mufflers and then grew to breaks so they can sell more products to the same company.
Steve Rush: Got it and that last one I really loved by the way. You call this, climb short walls and build tall walls. How did that come about?
Brad Chase: So if you are going into a business, you ideally want to enter a business where the walls are not too tall. You know, you are not going to try to go compete with Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud business because the foundational cloud infrastructure business is so expensive and so difficult and requires all this really specialized expertise and data centres and so forth. On the other hand, you want to go into businesses that have short walls. You want to build tall walls, so if you are in a business, you want to think about how do I create walls around the business and then make it harder for my customers to leave. And there's lots of different ways to build tall walls. So for example, sometimes marketing is tall, you can build marketing tall walls with frequent flyer miles sort of a typical example, you know, that make people loyal to airlines, or at least when they were flying and there is many types of tall walls.
Another type of tall wall could be a brand tall wall. You could build a tall wall by having a brand that people trust and that is a brand that people rely on, another tall walls, what is called a network effect, and there is lots of different types of network effects. But for example, when you use your iPhone, you are more likely to keep using your iPhone because of the apps. And as more people use the iPhone because there's apps, then people build even more apps, so those apps make it harder for you to switch away from your iPhone. Just like other features, that Apple built in like FaceTime or instant messaging, or being able to use your air pods. Those are all things that Apple has done strategically to build tall walls and by the way, expand their universe and get more revenue. And so it's a great strategy on Apple front to do that, to add services and new products around the iPhone that make you more loyal to the iPhone and make it harder for you to switch. Oh, by the way, now people are buying their phones less frequently, buy new phones less frequently. So it used to be people bought a new smartphone every two years now it is more like three years. So as a consequence, these additional services not only are really important to build a tall wall for Apple. They are very important to grow profits.
Steve Rush: Really like that and it is an interesting philosophy, Isn't it? About when we are looking to grow businesses or organizations, what typically happens is we might have big ambitions and those walls just might be way too high, but actually we can start with a bit more pragmatic thinking and then build internally and start developing what we have. Really, like it, really neat, so at this part of the show is where we typically get to hack into the minds of great leaders and this is my chance to hack into your many years of experience. I am going to ask you to share with our listeners, if you could, Brad, what your top leadership hacks would be?
Brad Chase: Oh my pleasure. So the foremost one, the most important one is for your listeners to remember that there is nothing more important to the success of a leader or a business than building a winning strategy. If you think about it, there is lots of important leadership qualities. I could give you a long list and I am sure you have discussed many of them on your podcast, whether it be, you know, compassion or empathy, you know, and I can go on and on and on. Hiring great people, you know, and so forth but none of those things matter if you don't make the right bets and you don't build the right strategy. The first and most important one is that strategy is the most essential ingredient to leadership success. If you don't build a winning strategy, nothing else matters. Another key leadership hack is don't lose focus on your customers. That is one that I find happens a lot in the day to day craziness of running a business. Sometimes people lose sight of what their customers really care about, and if you are not on top of your customers and what their requirements are, what their values are, what interests them, then you are likely to build a strategy that won't be successful, so that's another one. And if you're in a big company, don't get lost in what often is called the ivory tower and all the layers of a big company that keeps you disconnected from your customers stay close and then a third one, I would say for a leader is hire to your weakness. It is really important to understand yourself well and your company well, and find people to round out your skills so that you have, you know, a pot of skills.
Steve Rush: I love, that hire for lack of skill and consciously. I wonder how many of our leaders genuinely, genuinely think I am not as strong here. Therefore, I am going to hire somebody who can really help fill that gap. Really neat, love that.
Brad Chase: By the way, I find lots of leaders hire people that they think aren't a threat to them, which is of course a mistake. So they don't hire to their weakness they hire people that will listen to them and what they want them to do.
Steve Rush: That in itself is a leadership gap, isn’t it? You know, having that lack of self-awareness is only going to seek to hold that individual back longer term.
Brad Chase: Totally agree. Great point.
Steve Rush: The next part of this show, we affectionately call this Hack to Attack. And this is where we look back at your work or your career. And we think about a time where things maybe haven't gone as well and maybe even screwed up, but we've now used that experience, that time in our work as a lesson that we now use positivity in life. So what would be your hat to attack Brad?
Brad Chase: So this requires a little bit of a story.
Steve Rush: Go for it.
Brad Chase: My hack to attack. So in around 1999, I was asked to go run MSN at Microsoft. And MSN was the least successful part of Microsoft at the time. Revenue was non-existent; traffic was low, sort of at the same level as other ineffective websites at the time. And the morale in the MSN group was the lowest of any group in the company and for six months, I really struggled to sort of figured it out. And I finally came up with a strategy, which I was pretty excited about and though we can go back and think about some of the other mistakes I made. The key one here was that I built a strategy around using the high traffic parts of MSN email, which at the time was Hotmail and communications properties such as instant messenger to drive people into the network and then you search to monetise them. And I had a couple other things we use to monetise them on shopping as well. And so I reorganized the entire group around this strategy and we made huge progress and communicating the strategy to the team and having a clear strategy for the team started to really help morale and we started to make huge progress. And within about a year, we went from an also ran to being number one in search worldwide. Number two; in the U.S., we had doubled our revenue and our morale gone from the worst in the company to just above the midpoint all in a year. It was an absolutely spectacular turnaround, but I made a huge mistake, which is I didn't really sell hard enough to my bosses, what the strategy was all about and why I was doing it. I sold it to everybody else.
And I had, you know, a lot of leeway because I'd been successful at Microsoft. But I didn't really get into the sort of you know, getting the senior execs to internalize why I was doing what I was doing. So we had huge success but then after this period of time there was some thinking above me, that search was more of a commodity business and that it wasn't important. The company wanted to reorganize search out of my group and that was not viable if MSN was going to continue to be successful. And upon reflection the lesson I learned the leadership hack was that I didn't work hard enough to persuade my bosses. That search was fundamental to our strategy and to where we were going. I kind of lived on the success I'd had in the past. In the past, I had been very successful in convincing people and executives about what I wanted to do and had been successful at it and I kind of lived on that past success. Instead of putting together very comprehensive presentation, demanding time with my bosses to explain why the strategy was so important. I kind of depended on my past success and as a consequence, they went through with the organizational change, despite my arguing to the contrary. And I ended up leaving Microsoft on good terms. There was lots of reasons I left more than strategic differences that I had. But the lesson from all this is that if you firmly believe in something.
Steve Rush: That is fantastic lesson.
Brad Chase: And you feel strongly about it, you have to fight for it, and you can't stop fighting. Fighting for what you believe in business strategy. And if you feel strongly enough, you know and then pull out all the stops to make sure that you do everything you can convince your leaders, or your boss that your strategies is the best.
Steve Rush: That is awesome. Thank you for that really great story. The last thing I would like to explore with you is to do a bit of time travel. For you to bump back into Brad when you were 21 and if you got a chance to have a conversation or a coffee with Brad.
Brad Chase: Well if you had a picture of me now, you would see a guy who's mostly bald and mostly grey.
Steve Rush: Yeah. I know how that feels by the way.
Brad Chase: So I probably would first tell them, enjoy your hair while you had it. On a more serious note. The lesson I just imparted it would have been one. The importance of strategy I certainly did not understand when I was 21. That was a lesson I learned over the years, and I would have loved to known that earlier. And so I think that would have been a key business lesson, of course, you know, in all these things, you have to understand what's important to you and what your goals are. And I think that the perspective you get with time about what's really important and being thoughtful about that is something else I would have imparted to myself at 21. I guess to summarize, I would have reinforced to myself the importance of strategy. I would have reinforced to myself at 21, the importance of understanding yourself and knowing what is important to you in a sort of a very thoughtful way so that you can go about your business in a self-aware, self-calm.
Steve Rush: Super, Brad thanks for sharing that. Now, folk listening to this, I am sure are going to want to learn a little bit more about the work that you do, and indeed get an opportunity to have a look at Strategy First, which is now available pretty much everywhere. So if you wanted our listeners to bump into you. Find out a little bit about that. Where is the best place they can do that?
Brad Chase: So I would recommend that they follow me on LinkedIn, which is really the only social network that I participate in, or to go to my website, bradchase.net, and follow my blog posts and learn about what we are doing there. And of course, read the book Strategy First you know, has much more detail of course, on the concepts that we've talked about here today.
Steve Rush: Sure and if they also join up through your website, there's some really useful tools they can download isn't there?
Brad Chase: There is. One of the things I recommend all companies do is a strategy offsite. And the strategy offsite starts with a honest self-assessment of the business today and where you're at versus your competition, which by the way, is something I didn't mention, but I should reinforce. Your strategy only matters relative to your competition and so that is really important. That is the way you evaluate it and you know, so you do a self-assessment and then you could have a discussion about where you want your strategy to head over time, and on my website are some worksheets that help you do that assessment.
Steve Rush: Great and we will make sure we put the links to your site and to your LinkedIn profile in our show notes, so as soon as people are finished listening, they can click straight over.
Brad Chase: That is terrific.
Steve Rush: So Brad it is for me to say. I feel more strategic just in having this conversation with you. It has been fantastic being able to hack into your mind. And all of the experience that you bring with it to where you are now I wish you every success with Strategy First, but I also just want to say, thank you so much for being part of our journey on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Brad Chase: Oh, it has been my pleasure, Steve. It is great to meet you as well and I hope people find my book and our discussions today, super helpful.
Closing
Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.
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Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.
On today's show, we have Siobhan McHale. She has written the ground-breaking book, The Insider's Guide to Culture Change. It is a global bestseller. She is also a culture transformer and people expert. But before we get a chance to speak with Siobhan. It is The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: The Barrett Values Centre has completed some extensive research on the impact of culture and values around COVID-19. The Centre sought to answer questions that are useful and helping supporting leaders in their stakeholders address the challenges that they may face in interviewing 2,500, people worldwide, including 300 C-Suite executives. The pandemic has been referred to as the “great pause”, and it appears to have forced individuals and organizations to stop, look internally and consider what they may need to do to operate in the future and how their approach may also need to shift now. There have been global crises before, but never one that has affected so many people, and so directly in all our lifetime. The research compared personal values, pre COVID-19 to that we are experiencing now. And we've seen four new values emerge in the top priority during the pandemic, they are: making a difference, adaptability wellbeing and caring.
The values of continuous learning and family were already present pre COVID, but have since increased in their priority. There has been a real shift in values, moving towards more care and wellbeing amidst the crisis. Some interesting statistics that the report has shared is: wellbeing shifted from its position of 26 to 5, due to the importance placed on people during COVID-19. A traditional process focus has been replaced by focus on people, agility and communication. During COVID-19 results, orientation as an organizational value shifted from its number 2, position down to number 25 and achievement shifted from 6 to 50. Which leaves a question in leaders of how do you then drive results in parallel with wellbeing and people focus to maintain that positive culture? Not surprisingly, values such as agility had moved up from 43 to 8 and Digital connectivity had moved up from 50 to 2 and employee health had moved from 61 to now 5. One stark statement in the research was that employees are placing 15 times more emphasis than their leaders on the need for continued direction and communication going forward.
So as you look to thrive, following this pandemic, first take a look at your current state. Don't make assumptions about the values and culture of your organizations, but really evaluate them and learn from what the real landscape looks and feels like in your organization today. If we fail to really diagnosis the situation effectively now, it could mean that we deploy the wrong strategy, the wrong approach and the wrong energy and our next wave of planning. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any insights, information or stories, please get in touch.
Start of Podcast
Steve Rush: Our special guest on today's show is Siobhan McHale. She is a culture transformer, and selected as a member of Thinkers50 radar for tackling the big issues of our time with rigor and energy, and she's also the author of the bestselling book, The Insider's Guide to Culture Change, Siobhan welcome to the show.
Siobhan McHale: Thank you, Steve. Great to be with you today.
Steve Rush: So before we get into the theme of culture and culture change, it would be really interesting just to explore how you become so fascinated by the theme of culture. Tell us a bit, about how you arrived here.
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I suppose I started off studying psychology and as my classmates were revering down a path to become clinical psychologists, I was really much more interested in the world of work and in particular, what makes people perform at their best and their highest, rather than maybe looking at people who were more struggling with perhaps mental health issues in a clinical setting. I was much more interested in becoming an organizational psychologist, so that really started me on the path to exploring a workplace culture in particular.
Steve Rush: During your time in your management-consulting career, you travelled extensively across the world and you saw lots of different cultures. What was the, maybe the one or two things that you identified at that time, that really kind of drew you into the whole premise of culture and what culture is?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I travelled and worked across four continents, and during that time, I advised hundreds of leaders about how to create more productive and constructive work environments. But I work into some places where there were toxic cultures that really drained the energy from the organization and led to bismel customer service. And then on the other side of the spectrum, I work into some organizations that had amazing cultures that really delighted customers and had very engaged workforces, so I started to over a period of 30 years, started to research what made workplaces deliver, grow and adapt more easily. And really that is the subject of my book. How do you create workplaces that can deliver, grow and adapt?
Steve Rush: And it is really interesting in my experience of culture, you can almost walk into an organization and you might not be able to physically see it, but you can get that vibe. You can feel it very, very quickly, whether it is good or, less good, right?
Siobhan McHale: Absolutely.
Steve Rush: What causes that?
Siobhan McHale: I think culture is, one of those commonly used terms, but it really is the ways of relating. The ways of operating within the organization and it is not so much about, what happens at the individual behavioural level. It is more about how the organization functions at a collective level and sometimes those ways of relating are functional and sometimes they are quite destructive. And as I said, they can leak value, financial value included from the organization dropped by corrosive dropped.
Steve Rush: And I wonder how organizations apply a different lens versus I have a business strategy over here, here is my financials; here is my strategy, lots of hard and fast measures. But as you just rightly said, this could leak huge amounts of financial leakage. Organizations can lose a significant amount of revenue by just having the wrong culture and I wonder what causes organizations to look at culture differently to maybe other parts or tenants of that business?
Siobhan McHale: Yes, a great question. It is one of the big myths about, what is culture? And how we framed culture has been largely in many organizations in terms of employee experience. So we talk about culture as if it's just about employee satisfaction, employee engagement, inclusion, diversity. And of course, they're really important to aspects of culture, but they're not the I aspects. Culture relates to every part of your business, including how you manufacture, how you design, how you manufacture, how you sell, how you serve as your products. And this is the area that I think we've got to look at culture through a much more commercial lens, because you really need to have the right culture in order to deliver on your strategy. I think that is the question for management teams. What culture do we need to enable and fast track our business strategy?
Steve Rush: Is there something there about organizations and indeed leaders within an organization, or having a different perspective of what culture is?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I often say culture is one of the most talked about, but least understood concepts and workplaces today, and you need to have a common frame and a common language. And I think many leaders have been taught that in order to shape the culture, you simply document the values and the behaviours that you want to see, and you roll out those values and behaviour statements, and then you get a change in the culture. Now, we all know that's nonsense, but leaders haven't been given any other tools or many other tools in order to create the right culture that will deliver on their strategic intent and produce the financial results that they're looking for. So we've got to get leaders away from this notion that it's just about values and behaviours, and start to see that culture is about the collective patterns of relatedness that sit at the more systemic or collective level,
Steve Rush: Right, so over the 30 years of research that you have undertaken and extensive study around culture. Is there a simplified way in which you describe what culture is?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I would say, the ways of relating in the organization and it is the distinction I think, between the dancers and the dance. So the dancers are the behaviours but the dance is the ways of operating. The way that the organization functions and often we focusing just on the behaviours, but we don't, you know, the dancers, but we don't necessarily see the dance. And those are the patterns are what I call the agreements between the parts.
Steve Rush: That is a lovely way of describing it. I actually quite like that.
Siobhan McHale I did some work at the ANZ bank, which is one of the big four banks in Australia. And this was in the early two thousands, when the bank was really getting a lot of bad press about how it's customer satisfaction and its closure of rural branches and the CEO at the time, John McFarlane knew he had to turn around the organization and create better returns to shareholders and increase customer satisfaction. But when I walked into the bank, I could see that there was a passion that was very dysfunctional, that was keeping it stuck in the old ways and delivering very poor customer satisfaction. And the head office was taking up the role of order giver and the branches, the 700 branches were taking up the role of order takers, so the head office was giving the orders and saying, do this, do that.
And the branches were just stepping into the role of the order taker and each part both the head office and the branches were blaming each other for the poor customer satisfaction. And this pattern of blame was going around and round and actually leaking energy from the organization. So we had to see that passion first, before we could start to shift the culture and we put in a new operating model, we reframe the role of the head office from order giver to support provider to the branches. And we reframe the role of the 700 branches from order taker to service provider, to the customer and that new operating model and the reframing change the pattern of blame to a different passion between head office and branches, which was, we worked together to meet the needs of our customers.
Steve Rush: And sometimes it is just as simple as reframing, isn't it for people in the mix of that moment, so that they can see things in a different way and get a different behaviour, I guess?
Siobhan McHale: Exactly reframing is a very powerful tool that is often overlooked. Sometimes when we think about change, we think we have to change people's personality, but I often think that is the hard way, you know, personalities very hard wired and what right do we have to ask people to change who they are? And instead we can reframe, reframe people's role, reframe the role of a department, reframe the role of the team. You can even reframe the role of a whole organization, and get it pivoting, get it moving very quickly in a different direction.
Steve Rush: Now I am sure, you won't mind me mentioning this, but your work aim at. Not only was it instrumental in changing the fortunes, a failing Australian bank to becoming a number one performer globally at one stage, but also that John Kotter or Professor John Kotter. Which many of our listeners will be familiar with as one of the four runners in the world of leading change. Actually, contacted you and is using this as part of the Harvard Business MBA work, am I right?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, so yeah, I was sitting at my desk one day when reception patched through a call from Professor John Kotter. And you can imagine I almost fell off my chair because I'd read all of his books and he was still is a guru in the space and he was my idol. And yeah, he was looking for a global case studies for successful transformation and successful culture change. And he selected the one that I'd written up as the case study that he was teaching Harvard MBA students about. So teaching people how you manage change and how you accelerate change more quickly. So, yeah, that was quite a pivotal moment for me because what it taught me was that my work could be beneficial beyond the bounds of the organization that I was working in. And that was one of the key moments when I also had this realization that I could share the findings of my research with a broader audience which also led me to, write the book.
Steve Rush: Awesome, and therefore The Insider's Guide was born?
Siobhan McHale: Yes, yes, indeed. The Insider's Guide to Culture Change.
Steve Rush: So, we are getting to the book in a little bit more detail in the moment, and there is a couple of things in there that when I read that were really insightful. I would love to explore those with you, but before we do, what is the reason that most leaders often struggle to get culture, right?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I think you know, it does relate back to how leaders see their role. And one of the things that I've noticed over the past 30 years is leaders tend to frame their role in terms of their running the business. So their operational role, their role is to run the business, but they don't necessarily see or take up their culture change role or that culture role. They don't necessarily see themselves as the chief culture officer and often in organizations, culture has been delegated to HR to, take up the mantle. And whenever that occurs in my experience, it's problematic because then culture becomes something that HR has to fix, and line managers tend to take a step back in those organizations and then culture doesn't get embedded truly in my experience.
Steve Rush: It is a neat reframe as well. Having that chief culture officer, I wonder how many organizations actually have one of these days? I am not familiar with many, if any.
Siobhan McHale: Yes. Well, I think the chief culture officer needs to be the CEO and HR has to reframe its role to be a critical leader, but in an enabling, function. So providing the tools, the support, the advice, the processes in order to embed the culture that is going to deliver on the organization's strategic imperatives and going to meet the business goals. And I think that's the work that HR has to do to start seeing its role, not just around employee experience, but how can you help managers at all levels to create a culture that might be a growth oriented or performance driven culture or commercial culture, customer driven culture, quality culture, and innovative culture. These are old things that managers are calling out for. How do I have an, a more adaptive culture in these disruptive times? And what I'm saying to HR folk is where is your toolkit for that? How can you walk up to those questions and have solutions for managers and leaders who are looking for that type of help?
Steve Rush: Got it, so your book now, The Insider's Guide to Culture Change is available and it is doing really, really well. and I'm delighted to see that is the case for you, so well done.
Siobhan McHale: Thank you.
Steve Rush: Tell us a little bit about the inspiration for the book and what it was that caused you to finally get all that research together and put pen to paper.
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I really did want to, my parents did teach us their children to keep learning and to make a positive difference in the world. And one of the things I noticed was that there were a lot of people writing about culture, who had a brilliant lens. They were outsiders though, so they were either consultants or academics or journalists, and they were writing about workplace culture, a fantastic lens, but I had a different lens and that was an insider lens. So I had been the executive in charge of transformation in a series of multinational organizations, as well as being an external outsider. I have been a management consultant, but when I became an insider as the executive in charge of change, I just had a different experience, and I started to test and really see what tools can help accelerate culture change and what tools don't and I thought, well, where is that voice? Where is that voice of the insider? And it wasn't really there. And I had to stop asking and start picking up, you know, my responsibility in sharing what I knew rather than looking for somebody else to do that. So I decided, yeah, it needs to be told. These stories, these tools need to be shared and yeah. Decided to step into that role,
Steve Rush: Brilliant stuff. There was one thing that really intrigued me when I read the book, it was around activating the culture disruptor from an inside out perspective. Tell us a little bit about that?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, so the culture disruptor is my four steps solution to creating the right culture for your business and it really is. It starts with step number one, which is you must diagnose what is really going on in your organization and in the external environment, too many people stepping to culture change in the wrong place. They start thinking about what type of culture do we need, and that is the wrong place to start. You need to start back at what is going on in the business environment and what are the external forces? What are the deeply embedded and often hidden patterns that are running us that we really maybe need to say goodbye to in the future. Sometimes the patterns that served you very well in the past and not the same patterns that are going to serve you in the future. So yeah, it is a four-step process to get to and continue to create a culture that is going to meet your business needs, starting with them analysing what is going on for you within your workplace, as well as the external environment.
The second step then is to reframe. Reframing is a very powerful tool, and you can reframe the role of the different parts of your business in order to create faster change with less noise. So it gives a lot of examples of how you do that, reframing in the book. And then the third step is to break the pattern. It sounds easy, but it is much harder than it sounds. And there's different tools to break some patterns that are may no longer be serving you. And then the fourth one is to consolidate your gains and this is where a lot of leadership teams and management teams, they lose puff. They run out of steam on the journey. So how do you keep going? How do you keep your foot on the change accelerator over the longer term?
Steve Rush: And momentum is probably the biggest key here. Isn't it? Because it is like rolling a big Boulder up a Hill.
Siobhan McHale: It is.
Steve Rush: You get so far and so far, and the energy starts to wane. What would be the one thing if I was a leader listening to this, that you'd say that would be helpful for me to maintain that momentum on any culture change?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, I would say your leadership team form a, you know, give them the role of leading the change effort, the culture change effort, and have regular meetings with your management or leadership team. About how is the change going? I talk about seeing yourselves as captains of a ship, and instead of spending all of your time on deck. You need to get back onto the bridge and have a look at what is going on in relation to our change journey. How we tracking? What are some of the things that we are experiencing? We might have put something into the organization. How did that go? Often leaders do interventions, but they don't check how it went. You know, what was the reaction? What was the response? What was the feedback? Do we need to ahead in a different direction? So I would say having that management team and meeting regularly and diagnosing how's the change going and how do we need to move and adjust on the journey?
Steve Rush: It is a constant evaluation as well. Isn't it? It's just not one of those things you can set off and run and then think, right. Okay. We will keep going. It is a constant evaluation to pivot and to change and to modify, right?
Siobhan McHale: Absolutely, many leaders have been taught. You just spend months defining the values of the organization. You produce a glossy document and some posters; you roll out some workshops and that is it, and that isn’t it. As we know, seldom works, so we've got to try a different way. And that's why I think it's important for leaders to understand that they have a culture role and giving them the tools to take up this culture role at all levels. So it is not just senior executives, managers. At all levels need to be able to step into their role, to shape the type of culture that is going to deliver the business results that they need.
Steve Rush: You just spiked a thought in my thinking actually, because you are absolutely right. Culture, is not about a certain level of hierarchy leading this. This is a leadership responsibility for everybody in whatever role they do in the organization. I wonder how many organizations actually feature culture and the role that we have to play in leading culture as part of induction programs.
Siobhan McHale: I think it is really a great point. I think most organizations would talk to their new employees about their organizational values, but I doubt that many would frame people's role as a cultural leader. I think it is becoming more common, but you know, your role is to lead to the culture and bring it to life every single day. That is a very powerful reframe compared to here are the values and here is your mug or mouse pad with the values on it.
Steve Rush: Right.
Siobhan McHale: And that was one of the keys at ANZ bank. Every person was told, and one of our five values was that you will lead and inspire each other. So the reframe there was leadership will not come from the top. Each of you will lead and inspire each other and that was a powerful mobilizer on our change journey. That reframe for the 32,000 employees.
Steve Rush: I love that. I think that is really powerful, really powerful. So in your book, you also talk about there being a number of big myths about workplace culture. What is the biggest myth that you encountered?
Siobhan McHale: I think there are many, many big myths, but I think one of the biggest ones is that culture is somehow fixed and a one size fits all. So there is this myth that, you know, we have to keep the same culture as we have always had. It is like a mountain or a rock, whereas culture needs to adapt, needs to keep on being something that you examine and that you refine as needed. And it's not a one size fits all, you know, there's this thing, Oh, you must, we almost aspire to X culture. Well, you know, what about if you are in a military department, you might want to create a discipline culture to ensure that soldiers and civilians are safe in war torn regions. Whereas if you are a leader in a marketing company, you might want to create an innovative culture. So you can really impress and wow clients with your innovative ideas, so no two organizations will need a want the exact same culture, so it's not a one-size fits all state.
Steve Rush: I think you are right, super stuff. The one thing that intrigued me quite often, when I have conversations with my clients and their teams around culture and setting them up for success is the whole principle about how do we measure it. So there is lots of judicial outcomes that we can look forward in terms of behaviours and results, but how would you suggest is the best or the most effective way of measuring culture change?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah. Culture itself is, you know, I think if you go back to the ANZ example, what you've got to be able to see in your diagnosis of your culture are the passions of relating between the parts. So you've got to be able to see, for example, that the head office is in role of order giver and the branches are enrolled of order taker. And there's a pattern of blame between them. Now, that is not something you can measure. You've got to be able to go in there and diagnose that. If you don't get that diagnostic, right, the risk is that you go in and you say, Oh, we've got for customer satisfaction. Let's put in some training courses so that the branch staff know how to deliver better customer service to our customers. And that intervention could actually fuel the passion of blame in the organization, as you can imagine, because the branch staff might say, well, they don't even trust us to provide service.
Steve Rush: Sure.
Siobhan McHale: And it is not our fault. It is the head office. We don't have the authority to make decisions. So that diagnosis is not something that you can measure, but you can measure the outcomes of seeing the pattern and intervening to shift the pattern by for example, a customer satisfaction survey. So if you're aiming to have a culture of customer centricity, you can measure that by getting feedback from your customers about how they seeing your service, but the diagnostic is different to the outcome of the culture, if you know what I'm saying. The passion you can't measure as easily, you've got to be able to see that and it's not necessarily something that a survey will tell you,
Steve Rush: Of course and if you don't get that diagnostic, right, your outcomes and your measures of any kind will be incorrect in the first place,
Siobhan McHale: Correct, Absolutely and many times leaders rush off and they put in interventions that don't actually create any change. And sometimes it takes them backwards, which was happening at the ANZ. They were doing restructure after restructure, trying to train people and get them to increase the customer satisfaction. And it was having no impact until we went in and did a proper diagnostic.
Steve Rush: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So as part of your journey as well, and becoming renowned now for culture and leading cultural change, you've also been a leader of others. My job, as part, this show is to hack into the minds of great leaders. And I'm really keen to get into your leadership thinking now, and to find out what would be some of your top hacks. So tell us, what your top leadership hacks could be Siobhan?
Siobhan McHale: I would say for me, it is don't try to change somebody as a person. Modify the role, not the person. So for me, I found that that is an amazing way of allowing people to be their true, authentic selves but reframing their role. And I've had so many examples of them, just people seeing their role. In one way, for example, I was coaching somebody who was having real problems with their team, and getting people on board and there was just a lot of noise from her team. She drew a map of her role with seeing herself as an individual achiever and achiever rather than, and she was running up the hill on her own rather than galvanizer or mobilizer of her team. So just that awareness that she was involved with individual achiever and she needed to be enrolled of mobilizer shifted her whole way of interacting with her team. So that would be one of my big ones, reframe the roll rather than trying to modify or change the person.
Steve Rush: Fascinating. I have never thought of it that way before, because most people will try and coach cajole, encourage behavioural shift, where actually it might just be a simple reframe of the role. Right?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah.
Steve Rush: Which is a lot easier to fix of course, than someone's behaviours.
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, absolutely and sometimes we, have lots of…another guy, he came to me and he was looking for a job, but he'd been looking for a job for nine months and had cv, that was seven pages long with lots and lots of detail. And I flicked through it and he said, I just can't get a break Siobhan. And I flipped through it and I said, you know what? You are a problem solver. You are a fixer. He went, yeah, that is everything that I have done in my career. I have fixed problems. I solve problems. Anyway, within three months, he had landed a senior job in a very big organization in Australia. And I didn't even know about this, but my boss met his boss, two CEOs meeting each other. And she talked about the fact that she just hired this guy as the CFO.
And he said, why did you hire him? She said, oh, he is a problem solver. He is a fixer, just that simple reframe of what he actually did and the value that he brought, allowed him to go into the marketplace and sort of frame his role in a very different way. And it landed him a job so the power of reframing. How you and others see you and your role is incredibly powerful. My other leadership hacks and it is something that we help. We have talked about is don't rush too quickly to solutions. You know, I see a lot of leaders under a lot of pressure to deliver the results very quickly, take the time to diagnose the underlying issues and the patterns that are of relatedness between the parts. And the other one I would say is don't delegate your culture to HR to fix. Make sure you and your other leaders are actually leading culture and HR is in its role to enable that to happen with great tools and great solutions, but don't delegate culture.
Steve Rush: Super advice, thank you. We affectionately call this part of the show Hack to Attack. And this is where we explore with our guests times in their career or their lives, where things haven't worked out well, perhaps it's been adversity, but as a result of that, we're now using that experience as a positive in our life and our work. What would be your Hack to Attack?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah. When I was first, hired as a management consultant in London at Coopers and Lybrand, which is now PricewaterhouseCoopers. I took on board two big assignments at the same time. I was very keen I was ambitious, so I took on board. Work for two different partners and they were both full time jobs. And I went to one of the partners at the time and I said, listen, I'm really in a double bind here because I've got two massive assignments. And you know, I don't think I can deliver both of them. And he said, well, you've taken them on board now and you've committed. So you've got to deliver them and I stayed up for three weeks working, you know, burning the candle at both ends, but I did deliver both of them. And it was a big lesson for me about, you know, you make a commitment and you deliver on that commitment and no matter what it takes. So it was a really big lesson. It was hard one, but it stayed with me until this day. Whatever you promise, you deliver on that promise.
Steve Rush: Sets you up for success.
Siobhan McHale: Yeah, absolutely Steve.
Steve Rush: So Siobhan, if we were able to do a bit of time travel now and you were able to bump into yourself at 21, what would be the best bit of advice you would give Siobhan Then?
Siobhan McHale: At 21, I was still a student in Galway on the West coast of Ireland studying psychology. And I suppose I was wondering at that stage, what would my future look like? And I probably tell myself, don't be fried, follow your passions, travel the world, and yeah. Pursue your dreams and don't be afraid of being your true, authentic self in that as well. Just be who you are and follow your passions, follow your dreams. And that's sort of what I did, but looking back on it, it was probably with some trepidation, I was wondering what's going to emerge in the future. So don't be afraid to be your true self and follow your dreams.
Steve Rush: Awesome and of course it's not time bound to age, is it? And that's still probably holds true today, right?
Siobhan McHale: Absolutely, same lesson. True, Steve.
Steve Rush: So what is next for you then Siobhan?
Siobhan McHale: And in terms of what is next for me, I mean, I love my job. I'm the head of HR at DuluxGroup and I love my job and I'm also in my role as an educator. So I love being the head of HR at DuluxGroup and I also love being an educator and which is one of the reasons I wrote the book. So I'm leaning into both of those roles and really loving it, Steve,
Steve Rush: And more education and more supporting and helping other people's thinking, which today has definitely been part of too.
Siobhan McHale: Oh, thank you. I hope that it will help people to create better workplaces, which is always been my passion.
Steve Rush: So from my perspective, I just want to say, I am delighted that you are on the show and thanks ever so much for sharing some of your great insights. If folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about your work. Where is the best place they could find out a bit more?
Siobhan McHale: Yeah I would say LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me. And yeah, Siobhan McHale. It is S-I-O-B-H-A-N, Siobhan a very unusual Gaelic name, but yeah, that is the best place to define me, Steve.
Steve Rush: Brilliant and we will make sure we put your LinkedIn profile in our show notes, and we will also put a copy of the link into your book as well. So folks can find it when they've listened to you today.
Siobhan McHale: Great, thanks you Steve.
Steve Rush: Siobhan thanks ever so much for taking time out of your busy schedule and speaking to us from the other side of the planet. So our first Australian connection on our show. So thanks ever so much for being part of The Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Siobhan McHale: It has been a pleasure.
Closing
Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.
Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.
Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.
Joining me on the show today is one of the world's leading and recognized thought leaders. He is a business educator, bestselling author, and a speaker is Dr. Oleg Konovalov. Before we get an opportunity to speak with Oleg, it is The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: What makes someone a great leader? Is it having knowledge? Good genes? Vision? Courage? Well, many of us will have our very own variation based on our experiences and what we believe to be great in leaders. There is one commonality though that we are likely to share. What really distinguishes the world's most successful leaders is emotional intelligence or the ability to identify and monitor emotions of not only ourselves, but others around us. Organizations, they are increasingly looking through the lens of emotional intelligence when hiring, promoting, and developing their employees. And years of study have shown that more emotional intelligence somebody has the better, their chances of success and the better their performance. What most people fail to recognize though, is mastering emotion intelligence. Is actually a skill and it takes practice and let's not confuse emotional intelligence with all that ambiguous and pink and fluffy stuff that is perceived that only people with right-hand creative brains have. Daniel Goldman professor at Harvard University, who has also been renowned for his work and research on emotional Intelligence, has broken this down into four areas. Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management and here is our brief 101 on emotional intelligence.
Self-Awareness well, this is the capacity to tune into our own emotions. It allows us to know when we are feeling the way we are, but also the reasons why we feel that way, as well as the people around us. It is about tuning into the feelings that help us, or hold us back about what we are trying to do. By understanding our own strengths and limitations, we can operate from a position of competence and clarity, knowing when we can also rely on other people.
Self-Management, this is the ability to keep disruptive emotions and impulses under control. This is a powerful skill for leaders, especially during a crisis because people will look to us to make sure that we can provide reassurance. And if we're calm as leaders, they can become too, I coined the phrase, your leadership barometer, because you're almost the weather forecast emotionally for people. This is about playing for the logical part of our brain, not the emotional part of our brain and the core competencies here are having that awareness of self-emotional control, adaptability being agile in the face of changing uncertainty, achievement orientation, striving to meet or exceed those standards. We set for ourselves and having a positive outlook so that we see the good in people, situations and events. This can really unlock creativity and opportunity.
Social-Awareness, social-awareness indicates the accuracy in reading and interpreting other people's emotions. Often through nonverbal communication first. Socially aware leaders are really able to relate to many different people in different ways. We are able to listen attentively and communicate effectively, even by observing what has not been spoken. Their core competencies here are empathy, always putting yourself in the shoes of other people, but in a meaningful way, an organizational awareness. Can you read the emotional changes and currents and undertones and dynamics within the people you work with, but also in the organization?
And the last is Relationship Management, and this is an interpersonal skill that really allows us to act in a way to motivate, inspire others while maintaining focus on important relationships. And the core competence is here are influence, gathering support from others, creating an engaging group of people, coaching and mentoring, dedicating your lives to work to giving feedback and supporting and coaching others, conflict management, being comfortable with uncomfortable disagreements in teams and sides so that you're able to help people find a win, win outcome. Teamwork, you are the team. Share those responsibilities and rewards contribute to the capability of your team as a whole; and lastly, Inspirational Leadership by inspiring and guiding others towards their overall vision. You will always get the job done, and you will always bring the team with you the best qualities along the way. So my final thought of the day, when was the last time you practiced your emotional intelligence? This is not about doing it, testing it, scenario playing. This is about practicing some of these key capabilities, competencies so that you can really fine-tune your capabilities. The more you practice, the more of an emotional intelligent leader you will become. That has been our brief 101 of emotional intelligence, and that has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any insights, information or things you would like to share with our listeners, please get in touch.
Start of Podcast
Steve Rush: I am joined on today show by Dr Oleg Konovalov. He is one of the world's top global thought leaders. He is an author of four bestselling books, keynote speaker, and a coach. Dr. Oleg Konovalov, welcome to the show.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Steve, thank you very much for inviting and having me on the show. Thank you.
Steve Rush: It is incredibly our pleasure. Now you have had really interesting upbringing story journey to becoming one of the world's global thought leaders around subjects, such as vision, culture, and leadership. But tell us a little bit about your journey from life as a child to Russia, to where you are now.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Actually, I'm looking back at my life and I just I'm amazed myself because you know, being grown in a small town, which is part of this school Gulagstag left after the Stalin Heritage. It was not the best experience, but probably it has made me stronger. And I'm grateful for this because if you live too much comfortable life or, you're not building something big because you already have everything and you are not worried. You learn that something should be bigger than you and your ego to make your life meaningful. This is where I learned why I should make my life meaningful, and this was important. And you see at a certain point I was almost salty, I decided to move to the UK where I could learn much more than I know I could work in a different environment. It was a biggest reason why I have moved to UK on this. I am really grateful for that chance because it moved me much further than I was initially singing about it. It was…
Steve Rush: That moved you further academically, physically, mentally. How did that move you?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Mentally. I would tell you mentally, because physically you still remain strong, Ox at least in one great pace. Academia, academia is more or less a similar everywhere in the world. Was this a little bit up and down, but it is more or less similar, but it was mental challenge because you should learn everything from you, the way how people work, the way, how people interact, how socialize, everything. You learned everything from you, so you are born from you; it is another life in this term.
Steve Rush: That is a really nice way of looking at actually being reborn from you, I quite like that, yeah.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: You know, you should not have drag your old habits into your new life, because then the reason why did you change something? If you are still using the same old habits or way of thinking, you know, it would not put you far, whatever you would move. If you take, everything old was used, you moving into a new house or you taking old stuff with you? No. You are buying new furniture, new carpets, everything that you need from you to make it fresh and nice and this is important. And I think I'm very lucky and I love this industry. I have worked for many years in the fishing industry, which you know, is quite tough, but it is great in terms of interacting daily with incredible people, you facing a lot of challenges, but you are learning from them, and it was a tremendous experience. Allow it; a few of my projects actually in the fishing industry were highlighted in the times in the fishing news information in the fishing news UK. But then at certain point I realized, I want to know more. I want to learn more and I go on again for my diploma in management then for master's degrees and doctoral degree, and I probably those days was only the one in the fishing industry had a doctoral degree in business across the globe.
Steve Rush: And I guess that is your curiosity, your passion for learning that thought. How can I take some additional learning and transfer that to an industry, which historically hasn't got a lot of academic background to it, right?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Absolutely, because this is curiosity to learn. What is over there? What is beyond my conventional thinking? You know, our daily questions, you know, it's something beyond, yes, it's curiosity, but you know, we know curiosity kills the cat, but such a cat, which is not afraid to be killed in this sense, because curiosity, it's a great trigger to go further. And the same case, if you want to make something more important than your daily routine, you must learn how to make it great because we have all chances and opportunities to make our life meaningful. Our achieved goals impactful for many in positively, but he must be capable of handling something big and so you must learn, that is a necessity.
Steve Rush: Following the successful career, you had in the fishing industry where you led some really large businesses. Was it then that your curiosity that led you into the world of consulting?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Knowledge is a sexist thinking of all. Knowledge is their most demanded product in the world. Knowledge is what shifts us into the future. Knowledge is always in demand. And it's always respectful and always well paid, but it's most rewarding thing when you see people succeeding because of you helping them. This is far beyond our instant necessities, like food and shelter, because it is impact on the next generation, it is everything. You see, when we talk as a digital era being now, we should assume that it is a knowledge era triggered by people who changed the things in management that allowed to change technologies and so allowed to make this digital era coming, so it is knowledge
Steve Rush: And I guess knowledge was what led you to put pen to paper and your first bestselling book was the Corporate Superpower. And that was around, you know, taking some theory if you like, but giving it some structure. I have read it myself, It is around that whole theory of how do we give structure to culture? Tell us a little bit about that.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: It started from very, very curious point. We love talking about positive culture and how culture is important. Then I looked at, hold on why are we not talking about negative culture because the majority of companies, these days. They are still have negative culture and what I have found. Right about 450,000 articles, you could find only from academia on positive culture and only about 72 articles on negative culture. Whereas reality is completely opposite, and I said, hold on, what is the algorithm? Because whatever we are reading in the books or listening to the conferences. All discussion is wrapped around how to have a good culture, but how to have a clear, simple and effective algorithm was still remaining as a gap. And so, I decided to cover this gap and created corporate super power as an algorithm, as a response for everyday needs. Where every leader, every manager could open it and see how to create culture. What stance on it, you know, how to create values or defined values was the properties of engagement, everything, so to find the code, therefore I called at the end of the book. I called defined making a checklist because it is like winery; you are taking care of it. You growing, you cultivating it, and then you get a great result. And therefore it was important to give people really practical solutions instead of general chit chat and that's a good point of being an efficient industry. You must come with a result.
Steve Rush: Right.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Because you can't sell the fish that you don't have. People need exact instruction. Simple, because we don't have much time for philosophical conversations about something being good or not.
Steve Rush: You either caught fish or you haven't caught fish. Right?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Absolutely. I love catching big fish and so big results.
Steve Rush: But laying behind that, I guess, would still be all of that foundation of disciplined structure. The people you work with that does not change does it?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: No, because I would call myself lucky, blessed, whatever, because I have worked with incredible professionals. I learn and study from incredible people from academia. You know, I am really grateful because it's a matter of who teaches you and not just a personality, not just a professional, but a whole person from whom you really learn how to be a whole person yourself and that is incredible. For instance, if we look at a simple point, which we often neglect, and outlook is one thing, but how you could connect dots, which seems like very non-relevant is a mastery itself. So you must know how to make so nice pictures, really vivid pictures that could give you the right answers or most effective answers.
Steve Rush: Now your next book was a Leaderology and Forbes is quoted as being one of the top leadership books of the last year. What was the inspiration for Leaderology?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: I really proud of this book because first of all, we were so thrown into the quoting leadership, leadership, leadership every day that we'll look at it a bit as function or one of the functions we diluting the meaning of leadership. We are taking many things for granted and so not realizing what is going on behind. So we're looking at leaders and declaring something, but leadership is a system. Is a system of growing people, is a system to be of master of everything you manage in terms of leading in terms of a context in which you and your people exist. And that stands not just as a system, as a whole, but its ability to create other productive systems in terms of what kind of organizations you create, what kind of people you grow to achieve those incredible results, how you make people stronger. Because one, I believe, if you help your people grow, people will help you to become a better leader. They will make you a better leader. It is a journey, if I work as a leader myself and take care of people, they will take care of me.
Steve Rush: Right.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: If I work as a good consultant for a company, whatever I do in the best way to help the company. They are bouncing, back with a feedback that makes me stronger as a consultant, as a coach. Well, I am a bit picky; I'm always trying to choose good clients. Those who are really willing to make a difference because they make me better coach and that's it absolutely because I'm learning from them probably even more than they've learned from me. I am just from different angle, but I am still gaining. So all of us, we are multiplying each other.
Steve Rush: They test and challenge your capabilities your worldview as well. Right?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: It is a matter how to reveal the people greatness to make them strong, whether it would be company or culture was in the company, or even every personality, which comes back home after office hours and it makes his family happy.
Steve Rush: Yeah, I see that. Now I love the start of Leaderology, because your first chapter is almost a letter to yourself when you were 30 and I think that is a really great idea, and I love reading it, but what was the inspiration for that?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: This was a reflection. What I have missed at those days, what I was really short, I wish I would have somebody in those days who would be telling me this is wrong, or this is right. Aside from this or do that, and it was critical to, make own mistakes, but it was important to reflect in which direction to go. What is important to see, because we have been emphasizing and enhance to repeat the same old bothering mistakes, old people like me? What have they been doing? Everything that had been taught by books or by senior managers. So more or less without thinking in which direction to go. And so repeating old mistakes again, and again, its draining your energy is draining, it is draining your time. It is not moving you far and the problem is I am 56, but as we're still dragging this old mistakes into the future, and therefore it was important to reflect where we should stop it and how to make this new house really fresh and new, and how to reinvent ourselves and get rid of old mistakes. And therefore it was an actual message to myself.
Steve Rush: Yeah, so it was almost a bit of a let's wave goodbye to some of that past and recognize that, you know, everything's going to be okay almost right.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Yes, because if you would not have bought it clearly structured on a paper, or you would not tell it to yourself, you still would be repeating it. But as soon as you go, okay, we shouldn't have been doing this and this, as soon as you said this, clearly you're easy. You are free; you are free from it, getting rid of it.
Steve Rush: So I love that. Yeah, if anybody gets a chance to read Leaderology, it is a really insightful start to what you go on to talk about, which is almost the anatomy of how we as leaders operate and that's your systems and stuff. But a lot of the work that you have done recently has been focused very much around the whole principle of vision. Now, as a leadership coach, I spend a lot of time actually coaching leaders around clarity of vision, but for some people, their view of the world is very different than one person's vision is very different from another. You even managed through your research and your work to distil this down into almost a subject matter and some themes. Just tell us a little bit about how that came about?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: First of all I will tell you why vision? My friends often ask me. Why did you didn't start your journey straight from Vision? And I said, because it was important to build up a platform for me to get down to vision, because it's still a bit of a miracle in it, but people are seeing what vision is. Is it a gift, or is it something different? And what I have found vision is not a gift. It is a hard work. Vision comes when you have conscious awareness of the problem reaches it’s peak and it must be well supported by learning, listening, diminished ego, full grasp of environment, your intuition. It is something that you really came to solve for others, so it is not a gift. It is a hard work to find it and define it, so it is a moment of creation that magical aha moment. When you, you have a vision and you must structure it clearly, and that consists of six elements, which is stimulus. So what kind of value I create for people? And they respond to it. It reflects scale because vision does not leave in the dead end. It's always has a potential for extension in depths, in breasts, geographically in quality, in everything. Assumes spotlight, because being increasingly leader is like being on a Broadway for 24-seven. You know, you are always responsible.
It is simplicity because if vision is not simple, it would not attract anyone. It must be understood, it defines very interesting point scanning because it must be relevant to the world, which will leave. If we are not scanning the world around us, we are missing can alignment with the world. So it does not become necessary or interesting for people and of course, excitement and passion, because vision is a strong emotion itself. And when you have passion for your vision, you bouncing it to people and they bounce it back and multiplying this passion. So it becomes a strong emotional force, which pushes people for something great, but then vision must be well communicated because here comes a difference. What is the difference between communicating and sharing vision? We communicate fast, but we share stories and emotions. So we need both to communicate strong vision and then it goes to execution where it's, you know, to handle something huge as vision, you must be a strong leader.
And so you must have a strong team and so it stands on a focus on a will to achieve it. It stands on a strong culture. It starts on a clear understanding of your capacities on an enabled and hazed and enabled decision making from all that of the team members on the influence of the expecting. So more or less, it is a six-step process. But what is important? Vision is an uncertainty; our whole life is uncertainty, but what happen? We grow, when we go through uncertainty, to reach a point of certainty, also comfort zone, but it all depends how quickly we would leave that comfort zone. If we will stay in it, we will be drawn into the swamp of comfort. We would not grow anymore and vision dies, but must keep going all the time and the process is quite simple. It is a business till now, which is a six steps process, which is teachable, manageable, very effective. The only thing in case we must consider as a moment, what I have found. Only 0.1% of modern leaders have vision, so it is important for many, but how many people would be willing to take this hard work and do it properly for other people is also critical.
Steve Rush: What do you think the reason is that most leaders really struggle with that concept, that vision is not binging fluffy, but it is really hard work. What do you think causes that in your experience?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Because vision is something big. People were really afraid to approach it. If you would hardly find many books on it, a couple of books, yes, but hardly find many. There is one thing is big, is quite mystical. So we would not touch it, it’s one thing. Point B you must be strong for yourself to accept this and grow as visionary leader, which is a bit different because you must develop courageous thinking. You must be confident and credible. You must develop all the time in Excellency. You must create a knowledge bank around you, not just followers, but a knowledge bank, so it's a hard walk in this sense. And courage to stand firm on your point is critical because what happens is this? We have too many leaders trying to please everyone, which would not have lead anyone far. We have too many leaders who are driven by their personal ambitious, so they will drive people off the cliff just to satisfy himself. So they are not bothered about vision at all and again, vision is needed for people who really generate something scalable. Yeah, it is not much needed for somebody, for instance, for a worker.
Steve Rush: I also wonder because when you create a vision, there is no immediate return. It is a little bit further away and therefore, if we are drawn into delivery of results and ambitions today, then sometimes the vision gets left behind.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Absolutely, What we prefer to manage we are keen and prefer to manage something, which is we could touch, or which is very visible. Go to the bottom line, quarterly report. Oh, we could manage them. We could see them, but vision is a bit greater, so it is not easy to stay in aligned with something, which is five or ten years ahead of you. And it is also moving because as vision progresses, it grows, so your goals are getting bigger and they move
Steve Rush: Never stops.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: No, never.
Steve Rush: And that is also in my experience, an element of a lack of awareness is that, you know, you set a vision and we leave it and we run away and we don't come back to on a regular basis to refresh it and rethink it. Right?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: You see, for instance, can you make your family life happier than today? Yes, you just need to find new meanings of every day, every time. It is the same in business, it pushes you far and far and far away, you know, from you being initially from that boy, you mentioned, can I say that I had a vision at myself? No, no. It came much later when I start really deeply thinking what I want to make different in my life, so it is a journey itself.
Steve Rush: Got it, so within your book Leaderology. You've got loads of other tips around the anatomy of leadership. At this part of the show, we are going to try and distil your 30 lessons that you have Leaderology in your years and years of experience of learning and culture and knowledge and trying to distil it into your top three leadership hacks, what would they be like Oleg?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: The first one would be don't rush to call yourself a leader. The most important and simple, but important question. You should understand. You could call yourself a leader. If people under your leadership achieved something serious, so the question would be what people achieved under my leadership, where I could call myself a leader. I never saw a wise leader, not being humble. Humility is critical. You should learn every day and you should have a strong backbone to admit that you don't know something and you could learn or take it from somebody from your team. The thing is, if you want to be good. Get coach, get mentor because you need that expertise to become stronger. Otherwise, you are sentenced to learn, simple basic things all your life. Don't waste it, take it from somebody who knows it already. You are saving life and you are saving your people effort to make this more effective now, today.
Steve Rush: There's no world champion sports person out there is there that have done it on their own. They have a team of people have helped them with their training and their thinking, and they all have a coach to unlock what they can't see for themselves. Right?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: No chance, because we are all in the one boat, right? And who could tell me who is rowing better? Who is a champion? We are all together.
Steve Rush: And at this part of the show also, we've really started to enjoy listening to leadership lessons from our guests where things haven't particularly gone well. So we call it Hack to Attack. Has there been a time in your career or your life where things did not work out for you or went wrong, but that is now become a learn for you, and you use that as a positive in your life?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Oh yeah. I don't know anyone who reached something serious in his life resolved being through the really tough life situations.
Steve Rush: What would be the one thing that is probably the biggest Hack to Attack for you?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: First, I got alone. Stay yourself. Whatever happens? Don't lose yourself. You could lose everything. You could lose money. You could lose house. You could lose everything. Be yourself, because if you lose yourself, you lose everything. Then no money could cover it. Nothing would cover it, and another thing, your goals must be much greater than your problems. If your goals are little, then problems are great. You are done your dead, and every lesson is a lesson. You are learning to be better and stronger because it is a moment of reinventing and it is always painful.
Steve Rush: Right? And learning can be tough.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: And nothing wrong with that. Just be proud of it.
Steve Rush: But it is those lessons and what you do with the learning. That makes a difference, right?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: It is a huge difference because again, what we will learn is important because if it is like something immediate or we are saying one thing, but if you are reflecting those lessons was in the time. You get getting much deeper meanings out of it and there are more, even more valuable because at the first point when you're losing something, you experiencing too much pain and pain is not the best teacher because it's often misleading you. You just need to overcome pain and then you learn even more than you have learned before supervise.
Steve Rush: Super advice. We are going to ask you to do a bit of time travel now Oleg. We are going to take you back to bump into Oleg at 21, and it is your chance to give him a bit of advice. So what would your advice be?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Learn. Learn deeply. I will tell you why. We all learning something at 21, but it is more like a shallow knowledge of everything. At 21, we are more jumping around. We are not learning deep. We start realizing the value of learning at a much later stage and being at 21 was much fresher mind. It would be more productive. It would be more effective and so learning is critical. It defines your life.
Steve Rush: It does, doesn't it? Yeah.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: It really does.
Steve Rush: The more you learn, the more, you know, the more, you know, the more you can respond, the more you respond, the more able you are to deal with situations.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: I could give you another perspective.
Steve Rush: Please do, yeah.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: I am one of the Marshall Goldsmith's hundred coaches and talking with him regularly and learning a ton from him. He's number one in the world on leadership and he is number one executive coach in the world. He's a father of executive coaching and he is a great model is learn as much as you can, help as much as you can and allow this because it is critical. The more you learn, the more you could give. Why their leaders should learn more? because I learn to help my people in the greatest sense. If I know nothing or no little. How I could help my people grow? No chance. I lean to be a better servant of my people. This is critical…
Steve Rush: It is.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: If I had known this at 21, my life would be much different, but not as colourful.
Steve Rush: And learning is what people listening today will be getting to, so learning about you and learning about some of your thoughts and some of your thinking, and particularly how by applying some real thought and structure around vision that can really change the dynamics. So thank you for sharing some learnings.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Thank you Steve, thank you. It was a great honour I love our conversation, thank you.
Steve Rush: I am pretty sure that people listening today will want to get a hands on a copy of Leaderology, or find out a little bit about the work you're doing at the moment. If we were to connect you with our listeners, how best could we do that?
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: They could go to my website olegkonovalov.com or legkonovalov.com or they could find me on LinkedIn. I am always happy to chat or respond, share what I know. Thank you.
Steve Rush: Awesome and we will make sure that we put links to your books and your website in our show notes as well Oleg. So folks can head over there as soon as they finished listening.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Wow, thank you.
Steve Rush: And I just wanted to say, you know, we have spoken a few times and I find that the work you have done really thoughtful and really helpful, and it's inspired me. And I'm just delighted that we've had the opportunity for you to join us on The Leadership Hacker Podcast, so Oleg, thank you ever so much from me.
Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Thank you very much. Thank you.
Closing
Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.
Finally, if you would like me to work with your senior team, your leadership community, keynote an event, or you would like to sponsor an episode. Please connect with us, by our social media. And you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook our handler their @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube, we are just Leadership Hacker, so that is me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.
Steve Rush: Some call me Steve, dad, husband or friend. Others might call me boss, coach or mentor. Today you can call me The Leadership Hacker.
Thanks for listening in. I really appreciate it. My job as the leadership hacker is to hack into the minds, experiences, habits and learning of great leaders, C-Suite executives, authors and development experts so that I can assist you developing your understanding and awareness of leadership. I am Steve Rush and I am your host today. I am the author of Leadership Cake. I am a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I cannot wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.
Joining me on today's show is CEO and founder of Friday Pulse. Statistician, happiness expert, and Ted speaker, its Nic Marks. Before we get to speak with Nic, It is The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: In our role as leaders, we have likely to have made some significant decisions of late. Our approach to making decisions will vary from individual to individual and while some considered and thoughtful strategic decisions would have absolutely been a must at work, recent research has found using a coin toss to decide major life decisions may ultimately make you happier. The new study has found overall happiness increased after a six-month period. The study titled, The Review of Economic Studies published in the Oxford University press also found that people that rely on a coin toss to make a decision are more likely to follow through with their choice and be more satisfied as a result. To find out the impact of using a coin toss economist Professor Steven Levitt from the university of Chicago, asked people to make important decisions such as whether to quit a job, move home, end a relationship or quit smoking using affirmative and negative assigned to either heads or tails of a coin.
Users were also asked to include their own questions such as, Should I get a tattoo? And prior to the coin toss, volunteers were also instructed to help identify third party judicators to verify the outcomes and assessed independently the results. After two months participants and their third party judicators were asked to conduct a survey; which found that participants favoured the status quo, making a change less frequently than they would predicted they would before the coin toss, according to phys.org. However, a further study conducted after six months found that this bias towards the status quo had gone, according to the six month survey. Those who were interested to make certain changes regarding major decisions were more likely to do so, and be happier as a result. Participants also said that they were more likely to make the same decision if they were to choose again.
According to the researchers, the findings were inconsistent with the conventional theory of choice, which states that people who are on the margins should on average report equal happiness, regardless of where they made the decisions. Professor Levitt said, society teaches us quitters, never win and winners never quit. But in reality, the data from his experiment suggests we would all be better off if we did more quitting. He went on to say, “a good rule of thumb in decision making is whenever you cannot decide what you should do choose the action that represents change rather than continue with the status quo”. The leadership lesson here is, we often get stuck in change and we're not sure on which direction to take, and whilst tossing a coin might give us a yes or a no to a certain direction. Does that change really bring something new? So that's been The Leadership Hacker News. We would really encourage you to share with us your insights, ideas, and funny stories around leadership, leaders around the world. Please get in touch.
Start of Podcast
Steve Rush: I am joined on today's show with Nic Marks. He is the CEO and creator of Friday Pulse. He is an author, Ted speaker and a statistician. Nic, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Nic Marks: Thank you very much, Steve.
Steve Rush: So statistician, numbers, I guess that must have started at an early age for it to become such a big feature in your life? Tell us a little bit about that.
Nic Marks: Yeah, there is a lot of syllables in that word as well isn't there statistician? I just was, I was good at maths and was not very interested in much else at school. I mean, I did my A- levels with double mass Physics and half of Physics is mass as well. It was sort of I could do, and therefore, you know, I was top, of the year at school, pretty much all the way through and pretty much ended up at Cambridge reading mass before I made a decision about anything and actually ended up not liking maths at Cambridge. Because it is very, very pure and therefore discovering, I was really an applied statistician. I liked using numbers to solve problems rather than the sort of abstractness of mathematics, which is what you get into in that space. So yeah, was kind of, what I was good at.
Steve Rush: So the fascination really was not just about the patterns and the numbers, but actually how can you use these numbers in a positive way and how can I apply them in doing something that is relevant for people?
Nic Marks: Yeah, that was the big eye-opener. When I started sort of solving things, particularly on health statistics, you know, they start setting you problems to solve maybe in A-level and anything that sort of had a bit more human side to it. I got quite, I enjoyed those questions more and that is what I was actually able to do at Cambridge. I was able to switch into an applied statistics course and you know we did sort of industrial psychology and Queuing Theory. I accused even now if I get in a queue and I can see it is badly organized. That put me in a rage and it is partly my Queuing Theory sort of ideas, but yeah, so anything, it was very practical I got interested in.
Steve Rushs: And even more so, during lockdown where there are queue everywhere, I should imagine for you particularly that is really challenging, Right?
Nic Marks: Well actually, what I don't like about queue is when they're not fair, I don't mind a fair queue, and actually the lockdown queue are very fair, aren't they, you know, you're standing there in order and you let older people pass if you're a certain time or key workers and that all seems very fair. What I really hate is like when you come into an airport and you're queuing up and there's a big queue at the, you know, the passport control and you know, one, they haven't put enough people on, but then you can't see if the front of your queue has got one or two people on it. And so the queue go at different rates and you always end up in this lower queue. In fact, you are statistically more likely to end up in this lower queue anyway, and then it feels unfair. And I once actually had an argument with passport control guy, not an argument as a discussion. I said to him, you know, why don't you queue up in a snake? And he said, Oh, actually it makes the average queuing time go up, which is a very fair thing. And I said to him, well, the problem is the experience of queuing is related to the standard deviation, not the mean and he looked at me and went…
Steve Rush: I should imagine that when down well?
Nic Marks: …Can you put that in writing please? My kids were very embarrassed.
Steve Rush: And who would have known that queues have so much applied maths behind it; Which I guess if you look around society that we are in, there are maths and numbers behind everything.
Nic Marks: I mean, totally. I mean, if you do marketing these days, digital marketing, you've got a lot of queuing theory and mathematics in there and about friction and flow and the way you model it. There is so many ways that at least a sort of A-level understanding of mass can really, really help you. I don't think you need to go much beyond that, but well obviously some people do, but it is very interesting to me anyway.
Steve Rush: So beyond University, then you started applying your learned mathematics, what happened next?
Nic Marks: I did a Masters and then I joined a consultancy. Anderson consulting who sort of now called Accenture and did programming and things like that. I quit really, when I realized they were going to sort of move me around the country to wherever they wanted me to work. And I just got engaged and was in London and didn't really want to move around. And I also started to make more choices in my life. I mean I think some people, this comes earlier, but I started thinking actually, what do I really want to work on? And I went to work for sustainability, environmental investment company, and I started getting more interested in things which were sort of, as I say, sort of more socially useful statistics. Yeah, and I did that for a bit, but I also had a slightly kooky side, but slightly different side. I got very into sort of personal development and I used to go to sort of men's encounter groups. Cause I did not really quite understand how to be a man in the world. I found slightly misogynists, and so I just started exploring all that. And the reason for that really was my mum was a therapist and in the end I trained as a therapist as well as do math statistics, which sort of makes for, I think, a very creative mix, but then unusual mix anyway,
Steve Rush: So that creative mixture you now have, has smudged that psychotherapy and your statistician background together to create what you do now. The last 12-15 years of your life. You have been really focusing on the whole principle of happiness and how we can be more focused and understand some of the metrics and numbers that sit behind happiness. Tell us a little bit. About how that came about?
Nic Marks: Yeah, it started in about 2001. I was doing some other work with a think tank in London called New Economics Foundation. And the director then director said to me, Nic, there is this word called wellbeing coming into public policy and no one knows what it means. And can you help us, he said drive some meaning under the word? And I being a statistician, I said, well, I'd like to know how we could measure it because then, you know, policy makers might take it seriously. So we started a project which eventually became my whole work, and it became something called a centre for wellbeing, but we even started to create metrics around wellbeing that was useful for local, national, and international agencies about people's experiences with life effectively. And some people in the field were already calling that happiness and I shy away from that for a while because it sounded a bit light for the government policy.
But I started to realize that it was a much more attractive word than wellbeing and also more relatable. Ultimately, you know, whether we enjoy our lives or not in whatever basis we want to do, there is kind of, what it is about, so you know, and you can talk to anyone about whether they're happy or not. We can then discuss what that means and we can discuss, you know, whether we mean the same thing, but it makes a much more fruitful discussion, so that is kind of how I got into it. Yeah.
Steve Rush: It is really neat principle. The whole happiness thing that I have explored and there are a number of great authors that have written around the similar subject over the last sort of 10 or 15 years. It almost feels a little bit pink and fluffy and subjective, and I guess what you are seeking to do is to create some more objectivity so that leaders can be a bit more thoughtful of their personal impact around that. Would that be a kind of fair assumption?
Nic Marks: It is kind of fair, but I don't like… it is not you, but I don't like this sort of split between objective and subjective because our experience of life is sort of necessarily subjective. You know, we are the subject of that experience and actually, what a lot of statistics and data does is it objectifies things, so it will say we can measure your standard of life because we can see that and touch that. So we can touch your housing, your income, your whatever, we can measure that, but we don't know what you're feeling, so we can't measure that and actually that's not true. It is just a different type of measurement, and then you have to be careful about how you do it, but you can put numbers on it, and so there is a way we use the word subjective. Which makes it feel like it’s very loose and it would change for everybody, but actually, whether people enjoy their lives or not is sort of gradable.
Steve Rush: Yeah, that makes those a sense actually. If somebody was to ask you, what does happiness mean? How would you describe it?
Nic Marks: Yeah, I have had various descriptions over the years, but so I often say its feeling good and doing well. And by that, I mean that it got a feeling element, but it's got a functional element to it and we use the word happiness very broadly in English language. So we use it as a sort of momentary feeling. I feel happy, but we also use it as what's tends to be called a cognitive assessment. You know, I feel happy with, or I am happy with, so we are sort of reflecting on a sort of judgment about something. And then there's a school of thought that thinks that happiness is a sort of capability that it's, you know, that knowing or feeding that I can deal with, anything is a feeling of happiness. It is sort of like a perceived resilience going forward that, you know, I can cope with things. So in that sense, I think that there is a functional element to an actually purely from a psychological perspective or a nuisance perspective than our feelings and emotions actually help us acts in the world. So there is a sort of, they are not just there as sort of a nice sensation actually motivate us to behave in certain ways. So that is how I tend to think of it as a, you know, feeling good and doing well.
But then there's another nuance, which I quite like, which goes actually right back to ancient Greek Philosophy, which is whether it's about pleasure and meaning. And the hedonist talk about pleasure and Aristotle and people had talked about, eudemonia thought about it as sort of meaning and virtue. Justified this idea that you can only know if you're happy when you're at the end of your life and you're looking back, which is quite harsh, but in a way I think it's both in the sense that if we have a life which is meaningful, but no fun, then we run out of energy quite quickly. And if it's all fun and pleasure and there's no meaning, then we sort of lose our way and we kind of need both of those parts and, they work in different timeframes and so there's a nice tension between them and a nice synergy between them. And obviously there are times when it get you in life, which, you know, you feel you've got lots of meaning, but no pleasure. And you can get yourself into a crisis about that. I mean, I been divorced and I have actually gotten a situation where my marriage was hugely meaningful to me, but I really did not enjoy it and that created a sort of crack in my life that I had to resolve. I think that way as well, so that's sort of two different ways of feeling good and doing well and pleasure and meaning.
Steve Rush: I quite like the whole principle of it is quite an emotional response as well isn't it. It is a personal response to what is going on around us, I guess.
Nic Mark: Yeah, Our feelings are very much about what is going on around us. They are sort of us, and our environment. In fact, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio don't know, if you've ever read him. Have you read him?
Steve Rush: I have, I have.
Nic Marks: Have you read his most recent one? The strange order of things.
Steve Rush: Maybe give us a snippet from that.
Nic Marks: It is a funny title of a book, but basically he's talking about feelings and emotions come before cognition come before central nervous systems in our evolutionary history.
Steve Rush: Right.
Nic Markss: And, that they actually help us do three things, feelings. They help us monitor our environments. They help motivate us to act and they help us adjust those actions over time. And that first one of monitoring is sort of, you know, our feelings are actually, I have to say our feelings are data that they actually give us information about what's going on around us. And that's not just our feelings become emotions, but, you know, do we feel hot or cold? Do we feel hungry? Do we feel thirsty? It's basically telling us about, and it's motivating us to act in some sort of ways, but you know, our feeling of feeling frightened is that it feels like there's a danger out there and that we need to help avoid or get ourselves out of that threat. And we often have the feeling well before we have the cognition and that's really his argument is that the feeding comes first. Then we apply our intelligence to that feeling and deciding how we are going to act.
Steve Rush: And the cognition of course prevents us from doing crazy things, which is why the executive part of our brain slows down and stops in some cases what we will deal with those emotional reactions, of course.
Nic Marks: Yeah, I am not a total expert on the absolute specifics in it, but they absolutely are interconnected. Actually, even if you think about something positive, like happiness, which is a little bit of a sort of gateway word to a whole range of positive emotions. We can use the word very broadly, but then actually gets specifics. You know, some people would say, even if I say what happiness, mean to you? They will say contentment and other people will say joy. Contentment and joy quite different. Yeah, one is very high energy and one's quite low energy, and of course, there is actually a whole range of things in there. Like, you know, joy and enjoyment are different and amusement. And, you know, things like enjoyment, amusement, laughter are sort of very social and they are very about bonding with other people.
So when you're having a laugh with people or mucking around, you actually slow down…you shut down your executive decision making and your full intelligence because you're trying to bond, but it doesn't pay you to be your brightest, most sort of challenging self at that moment. You better to conform, so, you know, so actually, there are times when we are happy when, we are probably less intelligent, but there are other times, you know if we think about other forms of happiness, such as curiosity or interest, which are very engaging parts, that sort of positive emotion when we are absolutely fully using our intelligence. And I think it's sometimes why in business and organizations, people get worried about happiness. They try to think people be happy, clappy and not very bright. Well, there is certain forms of it, which that is true for, so they can point to it. But actually what they really want is people to be positive and safe, enthusiastic, and sometimes to have a laugh, but just maybe 5-10% of the time and other times we are doing other bits, so there's really this whole myriad of different positive emotions and we want to be agile and moving around between them.
Steve Rush: Sure. Now society also plays a massive part in this doesn't it? So over the last 10 or 15 years, if you think about it, societies describe happiness with good economies, wealth, good social wellbeing and obedience, having researched just that, all over the planet, what's your take on how that plays out?
Nic Marks: Well, it is for certain that nations have different levels of average happiness and actually different distributions of happiness in them and some that both the averages and the distribution can be explained by economic and societal factors. And, and then there's stuff more below that but you know, if we look at rank orders of nations on happiness, then Scandinavian countries tend to come top, and that's a lot to do with their social safety net. Which is, it's not really to do with the fact that that's the sort of…I was going to say the average, but by the average, I mean the media and the person in the middle is not particularly happy and Scandinavia and say in the UK or the U.S. but where they are, they do much, much better. Is that the bottom half of the distribution or the lowest 25% in terms of income are match less unhappy in Scandinavia than they are in the UK, the U.S. and places like that, so it is more that they don't have the tail of the distribution pulling the mean down. They have more equal distribution of happiness within it, and that's kind of interesting if you, you know, because people often go, oh, well, you know, you could say the Swedes are happier, but, you know, don't, they have high suicide rates, don't they have this. And, you know, I don't find the fins very extrovert, but, and that's probably all true. I mean, but there are other factors also, which is if you live in a broadly happy society and you are unhappy, you probably take it more personally, and so actually countries with a higher happiness rate may possibly have a highest suicide rate. Whereas if you live in a country such as India or Pakistan, or somewhere where there is much lower levels, you know, suicide rates are probably lower because people feel more normalized about their happiness.
Steve Rush: Less highs and lows, is that how I am reading it?
Nic Marks: Yeah, sort of. You feel less personal; you know if everyone around you is happy and you are miserable, you feel it is very much your fault. And so therefore, you know, I'm a burden on other people. Then you get into this very difficult logic where you start thinking it is actually better for you to take your own life, which is tragically, how some people get. Whereas if everybody is, you just feel like, what does that mean to all of us? Which you know, which in the current situation with the anxiety around looked down and COVID because everybody feels in the same boat, we are not sort of; we are feeling more open about our anxiety because we kind of know it's not about us feeling bad. It is about the environment, so that makes it easy to talk about.
Steve Rush: You also spent a significant amount of time pulling together, enormous research to create the Happy Planet Index. Just tell the listeners a little bit about what the Happy Planet Index is?
Nic Marks: Yeah, the Happy Planet Index is sort of a proposed alternative to GDP as a way of measuring the progress of nations. And I've always felt that GDP was a really bad measure of welfare, of the wellbeing of a nation. In fact, one of my first published bits of work is from 94 and it was an alternative to GDP, but it was very complicated. It was very objective. It was basically a huge cost benefit analysis of the economy and had a lot of assumptions in it. And I knew it was very complicated, but when I used to go talk to talks about it, rightly or wrongly, but it did show was that about the mid-seventies was about the highest in this index and it trading often. People go to me, that is how it feels to me, particularly older people would do.
Steve Rush: Right.
Nic Marks: And I always thought that is interesting. It does not say anything about what you feel. It is just a whole lot of economic data put together. That started me perhaps thinking about how you measure what you feel, but when it came to the Happy Planet Index, which was released in 2006, so like 12 years after that first bit of work, I want to do something very simple and easier to agree with. I sort of learned that complexity and indicators tends to put people off, or if they get interested, they then start looking at all the assumptions and the debate gets about the detail and not the bigger picture. And so what I did with the HPI was I said, well, you know, what's the outcome you really want from a country, and I said, it's to produce good lives that don't cost the earth and the planet, but in there is the sustainability element of it.
And so I went, well, you could measure good lives by asking, by looking at the data on happiness, across nations, say the quality of people's lives, you can then adjust that for the length of our life, so life expectancy, which is a very good, reliable piece of health statistics. You've got data on from around the world, but you've also got to think about the efficiency as a nation. Like how much resources does it use to get there? So the Happy Planet Index became a, you know, environmental efficiency of delivering wellbeing, a sort of bang for your buck indicator and that is what it is. It rank ordered nations across the world and basically you have some countries which have got high wellbeing, but high environmental impact and that will be typically Western rich countries. You've got countries which have got low wellbeing, but low environmental impact, so those are sub Saharan Africa and other nations, which are really struggling. Then you've got countries which are interesting, which I've got pretty good levels of wellbeing and much lower resource use and typically they were central Latin America and, some of the islands of the world, or some of the Asian countries, which were doing well. And that became interesting to think, you know, okay, how can we create a sustainable future, which is also a good future. Because the problem with the environmental movement, which, you know, I certainly have been a part of and absolutely bought into. I think they sell very negative visions of the future with the idea that you can scare people into changing their behaviour and I think we can all see over the last 25 years that has not worked.
So, you know, how do we do it in a way which we actually say to people, actually, this could be a better future. And in some ways, some of that is going on right now with COVID in that people are thinking about, oh, I'm staying at home, I'm traveling much less. It is actually less stressful for me, and it is about identifying those positives, you know, as we come out of COVID. It would be a shame if we don't take some benefits in reducing carbon emissions and other things. I mean, that would be disappointing having had this forced on us to not, gets some positives out and not everyone welcomes COVID; we could still get some positives out of it.
Steve Rush: Almost the planet's opportunity, if you just start giving back, isn't it at this time?
Nic Marks: Yeah, I mean, there are people that go all that way and say it's in a guy's feedback and I don't go quite to that level, but it's an opportunity, isn't it? I think like any setback is an opportunity to learn, even if you didn't want to get into it.
Steve Rush: We are going to start to talk a little bit about what you're doing at the moment with Friday Pulse, but just before we do, what is the happiest place statistically on earth?
Nic Marks: Well, last year's data showed Finland as the happiest nation. Then I, the only within country data that I know very well is the UK. And the regions of the UK, and I think it always surprises people, but actually London is the least happy region because it's urban because inequalities are high there and things of that, and people are very close together. Whereas the happiest region of the UK is Northern Ireland, which is much more rural and of course, recent memories of troubles, so they've actually got sort of point to go back to.
So there's sort of different things, but at the national level, it's Finland at the moment, but it has been Norway previously and Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark have done well. Costa Rica is a very surprising one that comes through that is particularly happy compared to its GDP. So yeah, that is the way it is sort of is.
Steve Rush: Cool, and what would be the kind of one or two things that are consistent across those higher ranking, happier places?
Nic Marks: So there is income distribution, which they basically tend to be more equal countries which is what Scandinavia is, and actually even Costa Rica is more equal than such of neighbours around it, you know, Nicaragua, Guatemala and all those other places around there. So it does very well in that and there's also high levels of literacy. Gender equality in Costa Rico, which of course are things that Scandinavia is particularly good at, so equality tends to come out stronger than people think, but of course, you know, richer countries are happier. That is sort of undeniable. They are just not becoming any happier with the extra amounts of wealth we have. We are not seeing those countries on a trajectory to become happier. The countries that are on a trajectory to become happier are some of the developing countries because they are reducing poverty. They are reducing, you know, early deaths, so you know that obviously is a positive.
Steve Rush: And I wonder, is it more visible to them at the same time?
Nic Marks: Yes, it probably is. I mean, there are differences between them, like South Korea has been studied quite a lot because they have obviously been one of the Asian tigers and, you know, their happiness levels have gone up, but they are very, very materialistic there. And they haven't gone up as much as say a country like Vietnam or something like that who is slightly less so, so there were interesting differences between them. And some of them have to do with density of population as well, but there's not just sort of one straight pathway, there are differences.
Steve Rush: Makes lots of sense. Thank you very much, Nic. So the organization you lead now, Friday Pulse. Seeks to take that distillation of happiness data, but from the colleagues and customers of the organizations that you work with. To create something that leadership and other colleagues can actually use as a lens to get a sense check of how their workforce feels, how happy they are almost. Tell us a little bit, about how Friday Pulse was created?
Nic Marks: Yeah, I did my Ted talk on the Happy Planet Index and other work I have done in 2010. And obviously that's quite an honour, and I sort of came out of it, thinking it sort of allowed an opportunity to sort of bookend that part of my work and I accidentally got into policy and I done it for 10-12 years then. When you are working on something like climate change, it is quite slow moving and, you know, I thought when I have got something in and maybe do something and I was always interested in business, my dad was a businessman. He led an organization and I thought, well, this is very applicable there. You know, if leaders knew how happy you are not, teams were, that would get them useful information. So I started creating a happiness at work survey, which was a one off survey to begin with and learned a lot about how the data worked in organizations started to get my own opinion about what I thought the drivers of happiness at work were and how we could measure them. But actually hadn't created a tool that was exceptionally responsive. You know, it's like a one off survey, like most other surveys are, but started to think, well actually, what really an organization needs to know is how it's moving through time.
And so start thinking, there is a way of measurement of happiness we call. There is three ways of measuring happiness really, We can do, what is called a cognitive assessment, which is what most surveys are, which is we ask people to look overall and reflect on it. You can do something which is called experience sampling, where you basically bleed people during the day or text them or whatever. Say, how do you feel right now? It gives really nice data, but it's really annoying. So the one in between is called episodal, measurements and you get to the end of an episode, you ask people to reflect back on it. And I decided to go for that way of measuring it and started off asking people various cadences, so a month, how has the last month been. A day, how has your day been? and settled on a week because daily was a little bit too annoying.
And also you could only just ask people how happy were you or not, and nothing more. If you ask them monthly, it was not very responsive. You so much can happen in a month. As we have learned recently and weekly is the sort of sprint of work. We go; we tend to work too, so we ask people on a Friday that is why we called Friday Pulse. You know, how was your week? How did you feel this week? And that creates a very responsive, we call it happiness KPI, but a very responsive metric, which when you group at a team level, there's effectively a measure of team morale. When you group at an organizational level, it is people's experience of the culture of the organization, experience of work right now. And so you can look at that, and I mean, the good thing about a question like that is you can ask, you know, truck driver, that question, you can ask a CEO with that question and they can give you an answer to it.
Whereas if you ask people how engaged were you this week, most people don't even know how to answer that question. They have an idea of what the top of the scale is particularly. They know if they are disengaged, they know where the top of the scale is. So when you ask people how you felt and were you happy or not? They can give you an answer that is very good, reliable data in that way.
Steve Rush: And what do you notice the themes are that contribute to a happy culture at work for leaders listening to this podcast?
Nic Marks: There are some general themes across an organization, and there are ways that you can articulate it. So the way that we do is we say there were five ways to happiness at work and, and they are connect, which is relationships are the most important. They are the cornerstone of creating good experiences or undermining experience for that case, for that matter.
The second one is to be fair, which is if people feel they are treated fairly, respectfully, then they can bring themselves to work much more. The third is to empower them sort of their autonomy delegating yet and use their strengths. The fourth is to challenge them, so this is sort of misunderstanding of happiness that people are happy doing nothing. It is actually not true they board and actually, people would like it when there is a bit of stretch. Not, if you stretch them too much, challenge them too much, they go and stress. If you under challenge them, they are going into apathy and boredom. You've got to get the right sweet spot, which has always tends to be the way anyway, and then the fifth one is to inspire, which is about meaning purpose, where they feel it doing is worthwhile.
So those five things connect be fair, impact, challenge, inspire are the big drivers, but then there is specific things that go on, which has really to do with the environment and what is going on around them very locally. Which is that some people, some teams will find them in a very stressful situation or their work environments are stressful. So with people moving remote at the moment and very quickly moved remote a few weeks ago, you know, that some people were happier working at home than others and lots to do their environments, whether they got children, whether they have the right equipment at home, where they had a quiet space, you know, whatever it was. So some of those things are very, very local and some of those bigger, broader cultural things. So yeah, those two effects really.
Steve Rush: And like any business and any part of any business it is feedback, data that I am getting an also alien to that is that leadership choices to what I do with that information as I receive it. Right?
Nic Marks: Totally and in fact, the whole of Friday Pulse is really a feedback loop. And actually it's very similar to therapy in some ways, which is that in therapy. Therapist listens to their client, and they reflect back to them and then they work with them about the challenges that they are facing. And we listened to the population, the employees by asking them every Friday, how do they feel? We feed that back to them and the team leaders, and then senior leaders, you stack the data up in nice reporting, and that enables people to then work together to make better experiences. So one of the things I am very keen on this, people don't just focus on the negatives. Don't just focus on the deficits. They actually appreciate the assets and the positives going on, and so on a Friday, we don't only ask people how they felt. We also asked them, what was success for you this week? Have you got anyone you want to thank because appreciating each other, is really important for both sides of that equation. Then we give people the opportunity to share a frustration or an idea to make things better. But actually most of our clients really, really work on accentuating the positive because in lots of ways, businesses tend to focus on how do you solve problems? What comes up? And actually probably often don't take the time to go, yes, good job, and to actually get that human appreciation, which actually we all really respond well to.
Steve Rush: And hitting back to the neuroscience we talked on a little bit earlier; of course, it will release different neurotransmitters that create that self-fulfilling prophecy of getting additional positive outcomes from our thinking and our behaviours, which helps improve happiness of course.
Nic Marks: It certainly does. And I mean, all of this works together, you know, physically, but I always think about it as like, you know, if someone compliments you and your sort of head goes up and your shoulders go back and you sort of feel bigger because you're feeling confident. Whereas when someone criticizes you, you can tend to sort of hunch up and pull your shell in, you know, and protect yourself. And we're much better when we're expensive and shoulders back, and actually other people like working with us more like that as well. So there is so much to be gained from being positive, but of course you have to be realistic. You know, it does not mean to say you let people travel down into a sort of fantasy world where everyone is doing a good job. No, it was a point is, you know, really differentiating and really understanding and helping people build on their positives.
Steve Rush: So this part of the show, we are going to turn away from you being a statistician, but look at you through your leadership lens of running an organization. And at this part of the show, we like to ask our guests to share their top leadership hacks or ideas. So if you could share based on your experience as a leader, your top leadership hacks, what would they be? Nic.
Nic Marks: I think that the big thing is listening to people, you know, I don't employ people to tell them what to do. I employ people to work with them and, get the best out of them and actually learning to bring the best out of them. The main way is listening to them even when they disagree with you, so I think listening is probably the first one.
Second one is I think little and often, I think I've tried to where I've gone wrong previously would be when I've tried to do big interventions. And actually I think doing smaller ones, checking is a much better way. But consistently I definitely have had to learn that, you know, leadership is a, weekly process, maybe even a daily process, but a weekly one, you know, where you're asking questions every week and you're listening every week rather than just sort of going, right. These are our goals for the next quarter. Then checking in 2-3 months later, realizing people have gone down a different tangent or, something has emerged, maybe for good reasons, but you don't know about them so I think little and often is probably.
The next one for me, definitely, I think inspiring people, which is that I hold the vision for the company. I don't necessarily hold the solutions, but I hold the vision for where we're going and why we're doing it. And remembering to remind people about that, so reminding them of the why, but it's actually, you know, bringing that into, your weekly work. I mean, particularly with all the adjustments we have made just recently and COVID and everyone going remote, you know, I sort of had to remind myself to remind everybody why we're doing this. If that makes sense.
Steve Rush: It makes sense. One of those things that you set up a vision to start with and other things get in the way. And we, as leaders also need reminding that is our job to remind people and to make sure that, we continually talking about the journey and how are we going to get there and what's going to get in the way and remove barriers. It's part and parcel of that. Isn't it?
Nic Marks: Yeah, it definitely is and it is actually a bit of the job I really like. Some of the detail bits, I am less good at it. I mean, it is funny; I am very good at details and stats. But I can sometimes of like, you know, I probably like many people not got the longest attention span and I sometimes sort of get stopped and I have to beat myself up for it, but the inspiring bit and the listening to how they feel and what they're doing. I mean, I can do that for ages because I really liked people and I really believe in what we are doing. So those are the bits I find easier. It is keeping people on track and the detail that is always my learning edge.
Steve Rush: Thanks for being so honest and great hacks also. So when we start to think that this partnership we've really enjoyed getting into the heads of our leaders and our guests where they've maybe screwed up in the past or something's gone catastrophic wrong, and indeed they are now using that experience as a positive in their life. We call this Hack to Attack. What would yours be?
Nic Marks: Hack to Attack? Well, I mean, in some ways I've sort of pointed to it with a little bit of those last bits, but I think that I have definitely been guilty of letting things run for too long cause I wasn't confident enough to challenge people. And, and so, you know, previously had someone in the business and you know, she has some really strong qualities, but just sort of always going pear shapes. And, and I, kept on coming back to every three or four months, but really we should have partied companies at least a year before we eventually did. And that cost us a lot, and she wasn't happy. She was not doing quite what she wanted. I was trying to, I guess, force her, so there was a role that needed doing and I was wanting her to do that role and she was not quite wanting to do it and she was definitely capable of it. But it just sort of ran on far too long, and in the end it all became very messy and angry. If I dealt with it much earlier. We would have had a lot less problems and it's the same problem I had with my marriage actually, which was that, you know, I let things run too long and I should have been challenging about that earlier. I think that is my weaknesses tending to gloss over some of the negatives, my positivity overrides listening to negative feedback or negative signals. And I think that's actually really important leadership is to be able to one, hear the negative signal and two, deal with it because it doesn't go away.
Steve Rush: It is great learning, Nic and also think about the themes that you are now encouraging other leaders to talk about through Friday Pulse. There is a lot of synergies there in terms of what your learned behaviour. What you are encouraging others to learn from now, so that is super stuff. The last thing I wanted to talk to you about, and this is where we are going to ask you to do some time travel. I want you to think about if you were able to bump into Nic at 21; you are able to give him one bit of advice that would make the difference. What would it be?
Nic Marks: I quite like my life, even my mistakes. So, you know, that is not like something I would massively want to change. I mean, I think I was a little uptight as a 21. I was a little serious and I had the future weighed on me quite a lot. I sort of kind of had this feeling. I wanted to do something and I probably wanted to do it quicker than was possible. And you know, and I mean, I have actually done things which are interesting. I think I would just say, you know, relax. It will be okay. Follow what you are interested in, I mean, in some ways I have done that actually. So, but when I was 21, I was a little bit; I was a little bit still uptight, yeah.
Steve Rush: If only Nic would know the 21-year-old, Nic who might have been a little bit uptight. Still found is way to be where you are now, which is, you know, impacting the lives of many of the people, so that's great advice.
Nic Marks: It is nice to think that. The 21-year-old Nic would be horrified at the thought that that 55-year-old Nic got divorced. He would not like that at all, but apart from that, he pretty much take the rest.
Steve Rush: Good stuff. Okay, as people have been listening to you, Nic. We will make sure that we encourage him to get over to Ted and have a look at the Happy Planet Index talk, which I think is really inspiring and I love that, but where else can they find out about the work that you do with Friday Pulse and indeed some of the things that you do now?
Nic Marks: Yeah. Friday Pulse is the name of the company, so it is fridaypulse.com and it is actually, we are offering it free for organizations up to a thousand people at the moment. So they can try it for three months and see how they go with it and see how they like the data and how they can work with it. I create blog articles and posts on LinkedIn most week. Connect with me on LinkedIn; I always like meeting new people there and I have a personal website, which is more my sort of speaking musing, which is nicmark.org. Nic is no K a in that, so those are the main ways to find me.
Steve Rush: We will make sure there in the show notes to accompany this podcast as well Nic. So as people are finished listening, they can literally just click into those links and then hop over to find you.
Nic Marks: Fabulous, thank you.
Steve Rush: Nic, I just wanted to say I am incredibly happy that you have chosen to be with The Leadership Hacker Podcast. I have spoken to you a few times now and I have loved the conversations that we have had and as a result, I know we're going to get a lot of happy hackers listening to you too. So thanks for being on, The Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Nic Marks: Thank so much for having me.
Closing
Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.
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On today’s show, we have Kristen Zhivago. She is the president of Zhivago Partners. She is a revenue coach and a digital marketing expert. Before we get a chance to speak with Kristen, it is The Leadership Hacker News.
The Leadership Hacker News
Steve Rush: South Korean baseball fans may not be allowed to watch their favourite teams live at stadiums due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but NC Dino stands where not empty, thanks to life-size cardboard cut-outs of portraits sent in by their fans. The Korean baseball organization league season kicked off this month after a five-week delay due to the coronavirus; all games were played however, without any fans in attendance. No fans were allowed in, even though the league reopened. Dino marketing manager Parc Jung-Un said, we thought about ways of giving enjoyment to fans and motivations to players, but keeping everybody safe, the club had more than 60 fans participating by sending their own pitches in, along with their favourite players and even their pets. Han Dong-Su a 38-year-old baseball fan said outside the stadium. I can't go in, but my avatar is cheering the team on instead of me and it just feels like I'm in the stadium. The club also set out cardboard, cut-outs of characters of other fans, of other teams and declared it support for them on Twitter. The South Korean team are getting support from baseball teams across the United States and across the world and more and more fans are set to send their cardboard cut-outs in to support the teams virtually. It was a major marketing hit, it is allowing a connectivity to the club while at the same time, promoting a togetherness, which of course connect fans loyalty and is demonstrating some great marketing leadership. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news insights or crazy stories that we could share with our listeners, please get in touch with us.
The Interview
Steve Rush: I am joined on today show by Kristin Zhivago. She is the president of Zhivago Partners. She is a revenue coach, digital marketing expert and author. Kristen, welcome to the Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Kristin Zhivago: Thank you very much, nice to be here.
Steve Rush: Keen to get inside the mind of what a revenue coach is but before we get into that, just tell us a little bit about your backstory. So you've been a leader of Zhivago Partners for a number of years, and you've worked through Silicon Valley for a while. Just tell us a little bit; about what you have done and tell, us maybe a little bit, about how you've arrived, where you've arrived?
Kristin Zhivago: So I started selling when I was really young and discovered really early on through some painful experiences that you need to know what you're talking about before you can sell it. And that painful experience was in a technical environment and I just was so embarrassed that I didn't know what I was talking about, that I decided to devote the rest of my career to selling and learning everything I could about tech, and I've been doing that ever since. It never stopped.
Steve Rush: Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, I was the first woman to sell machine shop tools in the U.S. as far as I know; the Pratt & Whitney Distributor told me that was the deal. He gave me a catalogue and you know, I was back in the days of miniskirts and I just went out and sold. Called on companies back then I was in San Diego. There was a small Silicon Valley growing and in San Diego and there was one machine shop foreman who kind of called me out. You know, everybody came out to see who was there and why she was in the machine shop. This was back a while ago and he asked me, you know, why is your drill bit better than the one I am using now? And I didn't have an answer, and he said, honey, you better learn this stuff before you go out and sell.
So that was my big fat, embarrassing moment, you know, as a senior in high school and I thought, you know, when you're senior in high school, you think you're hot stuff. And man, I just slunk back to the car and that's when I made that life changing decision, and been following that ever since, been a really great thing. Anyway, so started an agency in Silicon Valley, did that with my husband for a long time. Then the Macintosh came along and I said. Why don't you retire? I am going to go out and help people market in house because they were all using the Mac to do stuff in house and I ended up inventing myself as a revenue coach and I basically taught CEOs and entrepreneurs how to sell more by understanding what their customers really wanted to buy and how they wanted to buy.
It did a lot of marketing and sales turnarounds for companies of all sizes, including Dow Jones and did a lot of work for IBM for a number of years, writing instructions for their marketing people, so it was fun. But as I got older, I started realizing that the digital marketing stuff was really confusing business owners, especially those that weren't digitally astute themselves. Decided to help them and opened up a Zhivago Partners, which is a digital agency in 2017. That is where I am now, have a wonderful worldwide virtual staff and specialists, and core infrastructure people and we are just having a wonderful time.
Steve Rush: That is awesome and it is really interesting to notice that in many successful entrepreneurs like yourself, there's seems to be that epiphany moment, that moment where something's happened in their life, where they go, Grrrrrr, this is it. I'm going to head in this direction. Great it was so early for you in your career.
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah.
Steve Rush: You talk about a revenue coach. What is the role of a revenue coach?
Kristin Zhivago: Well, as I said, I did a lot of marketing and sales turnarounds, so I'd go into a failing marketing department or failing sales department and I always thought I could do it in two or three months. And it always took eight, I mean, it was just the reality and after a while I knew that, of course but it takes time to get the current team where they're at. Fire the jerk if there is a jerk, you got to get rid of them because he's dragging everybody else down. He or she and put the right people in the right jobs and get the processes fixed. 9 times out of 10, the biggest problems were always processes and I found that in all of my revenue coaching work, so I had literally have interviewed thousands of customers and worked with hundreds of CEOs and entrepreneurs and that is the biggest problem. They think they know what the customer is thinking and they don’t. So there is just a lot of stuff that you have to work on to turn things around and, make it a profitable exercise and make sure that you are marketing to the customer and doing the right thing.
Steve Rush: Often businesses, I think, tend to market with their own lens don't they? Their own perception of, what their customers want and how does that kind of play out in the work that you do, changing that perception?
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, that ended up being the main job of my career. In the sense that every time I went to work for a company, I would ask them what was important to their customers. And they had a list of, you know, 5 or 10 things that they really believed were important to their customers. Then I go out and interview their customers and their customers had a completely different list, so I knew that they were off the Mark. They just were not hitting the customer where the customer lived.
Steve Rush: Right.
Kristin Zhivago: And going back to processes, I realized that I had this sort of this famous quote now attributed to me, which is that branding is the promise that you make, but your brand is the promise that you keep and they are not the same quite often. The tools that people have to keep their promises so that their brand actually matches their branding are the people, the processes, the policies, and the passion of the leader. And there's one other, I can't remember at the moment, it's a lot of P’s. Anyway, the biggest one that was always a problem was the processes. They usually had pretty good people, if the guy wasn't a jerk, they had good policies, made good decisions, but the processes were terrible and people suffered under that, and even in the age of apps that we're living in now. Where you are only as good as your apps, processes are a big deal, which is why when I started this company. The first person I hired was an app whisperer and infrastructure assistant kind of person who helped me build the systems, which is basically what Amazon did. You know, Jeff Bezos. It was a process centric company and he just plugged in all these other products into the processes that he built.
Steve Rush: It is really neat and I particularly liked that quote by the way, branding versus brand. Branding is what you send out isn't it but brand is where you make that emotional connection with your customers.
Kristian Zhivago: Well, it is keeping your promises is whether you do what you say. If you say, we care about you and you leave them on hold for 15 minutes, when they first call, or they go through voicemail help. Well guess what. Your actions say, just the opposite, which is why people get angry at big corporations, because they make all these glowing promises in their ads and everything. We care about you and all that, and then you try to interact with the company and it is not like that at all. They are like your worst enemy kind of thing. They are stopping you from trying to achieve your goals. They don't understand you. They don't understand your mind-set
Steve Rush: And mind-set plays a big part and I guess we will come to pick some of that in a moment. I am keen to explore with you. We had a great conversation the last time we spoke where we share some similar views around the whole buying and selling principle. In my coaching and consulting career. Not once if I found anybody who likes to be sold to, but they still have sales driven teams. What is your experience about the kind of the dichotomy of buying versus selling?
Kristian Zhivago: Well, you bring up a really good point. Every CEO I have ever talked to, doesn't like to be sold to, and yet they hire salespeople and they go out and they hunt and they make a hundred cold calls and gets through to one person. That system is very broken; it is almost as broken as you can get in a business system. It just does not work and customers have gotten so good with caller ID and everything. They don't even pick up their phone. They just wait to see who it was and if, they think they really wanted to talk to them, they are going to leave a voicemail. I have probably bought something off a cold call, maybe once out of every three years or something like that. Maybe it is once out of every year. I don't know, but it feels like more and every CEO is the same way, but they don't treat their customers that way. They assume that these, you know, marketing has a lot of language about targets and a shotgun approach and, you know, rifle. We treat these folks like they're animals that we're hunting down and it doesn't, really work. It is kind of insulting and just calling someone out of the blue and thinking, or assuming that they are going to be in the market for your product at that moment, we're kind of forgetting that there's a moment in time when somebody wants to buy what you're selling. And that moment is very urgent and that moment drives all of the marketing things people do. Search engine optimization and they go out and they search, they talk to their friends, they read reviews, all of the things that you need to do to be there when they're ready are so much more important than just sending a guy out.
I have nothing against sales. I have been in sales half of all my life. In my own company, I have always had like an 80 or 90% closing rate. I know how to sell, but selling is not really selling anymore. Selling is being there when the customer has a need for what you sell. It is showing up when they go looking and then answering their questions, the buyer's journey is nothing more than a series of questions that need to be answered to this buyer satisfaction. And the minute you answer in a way that turns them off or something, they're not going to tell you, we all play poker when we're being sold to we're negotiating. We don't say, Oh man, you just blew it. I am probably one of the few people in the world that actually does stop the sales guy and say, you just blew it because I can't help myself. You know, I feel sorry for him, but I will say, you know, what you just said is an absolute turnoff and I will not buy from you. We are done and he would be just like….
Steve Rush: Good feedback!
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah.
Steve Rush: And I guess the sales, person's just going to get lucky if the customer is in that buying space, unless you really understand that customer need. And you understand the journey that they're about to take in that buying process, right?
Kristin Zhivago: Yes, but again, there is a timing problem. I mean, it is like going after somebody who is married and just, you know, trying to get them to love you. And it's like, no, excuse me, I'm married. It is kind of like that. I mean, if you are happy, where you are, nothing they say is going to make you change your mind. If you are unhappy and you are looking for a solution. Well, then you're going to be going out and looking for a solution and your mind-set will be, I have to solve this problem and you leave breadcrumbs all over the place, looking for a solution and the trick is people have to be there when they go looking in that specific mind-set. And that's how we get leads for our clients, we figure out what that specific mind-set is and it's very specific. Then we advertise to that, so to speak, we put the message out. We say those words, that appeal to them in that mind-set, so we are basically hunting for mind-sets and they come looking for us. It is a matchmaking thing.
Steve Rush: Got it, and your whole approach now is driven through that whole mind-set driven marketing approach, isn't it? Tell us a little bit more, about how that came about.
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, I am actually going full scale on that. I am just about to launch it, so you are getting a preview, but is the idea that if you understand very specifically what their mind-set is, and the way you do that is as I pointed out in my book. Roadmap To Revenue, How To Sell The Way Your Customers Want To Buy. In chapter three, I explained exactly how to go out and find the information among your current customer, so you can basically reverse engineer a successful sale and create new sales in quantity because you will understand their exact mind-set and once you have that, then you want to make an offer that appeals to that specific mind-set. And that leads to an outcome that both of you are happy with. Customer gets what they want and you get what you want. You get a sale. It is a formula is very simple and the reason it is so hard is because people…I know that, you know, in my book, I talk about discovery debate and deploy, so you discover you debate and you deploy, which is how marketing should work, but people always miss the first part. They don't discover, they assume and that assumption is very dangerous and very expensive.
Steve Rush: I have experience that as a buyer too, having then ended up with perhaps the wrong solution as a result.
Kristin Zhivago: Oh yeah. That is really sad. I mean, regrets are in…especially when you are buying a B2B, but even in B2C, I mean, buying regrets are very sad because you have spent the money. You have gone through all that trouble to get the right thing up and in the case of say enterprise software; you have trained all your people. Then you discover we have all had this experience now because we have all had software long enough where you get the whole thing set up and then you discover there is a got you, that's a deal killer. It is a showstopper. It is like, wait, I remember I have one of my clients before I showed up who had a group working for him. They had this great software program and he started to put his whole business on it. He spent a hundred thousand dollars and then they discovered that it did not interact with their mail program. Now you roll your eyes and say, well, excuse me, but it was some interaction thing where when the lead came in, you know, they would be alerted and this was a little while ago. Now everybody assumes that is going to happen, but he had to stop the whole thing. He wasted a hundred thousand dollars, and all that effort and all that excitement and training and everything for something that did not work, so buyers are sceptical. I mean, I used to say we are selling software and a scepticism swamp because people have been burned so often.
Software has been around a long time now, and people have been disappointed and I don't know how many project management systems I've gone through myself. Probably 35 or 40 of them really, truly testing and trying to figure it out, making it work until you find the right one, and when it's good, it's really good, but getting there is hard and everybody promises that, Oh yeah, no problem. It is all good. You know, it all worked, we can make it work and then it does not work, and you are out all that time and money, it is very frustrating.
Steve Rush: Given that, we have so much more data, in our hands now and marketing can be more scientific. What do you think the reason is that organizations spend a disproportionate amount of time getting their marketing right? Versus getting their sales channels right.
Kristin Zhivago: Well selling is very understandable, so somebody who is a finance guy or an engineer or something, it seems very black and white. You know, you send a guy out there, you make a hundred calls and every day or every couple of days, and you know, you'll see results. I mean, it just seems like arithmetic. If you beat enough bushes, you are going to shake something out of the tree or whatever, I am using for my analogies. So it makes sense and it ignores the customer's mind-set completely. I mean, it even ignores the fact that they hate cold calls and they don't like being approached by salespeople and they do everything they can to avoid them in their own life, but they think it’s okay to do that to their customers, search for their prospects.
Steve Rush: Very true.
Kristin Zhivago: And another thing they do is they think that the salespeople are bringing back market data. And the way I get around that is I look at the CEO and I say, okay, your salespeople are going out there talking to customers and they're coming back with valid customer data, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, we hear from them and they call us after the call and blah, blah. Okay, so when was the last time you told a salesperson, what you were really thinking while you were being sold to? Crickets, because they never say, like I said, they're playing poker, they're negotiating. They don't want to tell the guy what they're really thinking. Unlike me, where I actually stopped the thing and tell the guy that he's got a real problem here. Because I feel sorry for him, CEOs won't do that. They are just going to let you be stupid, and you go through the whole thing and they shake your hand at the end of the call. Then the CEO goes right back to his computer and starts Googling the solution again, because he knows he is not going to hire that guy or that company, so they will not tell you what they're really thinking while you are selling to them. However, the secret, the big thing that I learned was that there are more than happy to talk after you have sold to them and they are happy.
They have invested in you and they want you to succeed, so they don't mind. People are basically unless, they're jerks. They are basically helpful and they'll spend 30 minutes on the phone with you. You ask open-ended questions, so you would get what they are really thinking. Not what you think, they are thinking with a survey or something where you are making them do multiple choice or whatever. But you really just doing that discovery and finding out what they really think about that subject, and getting the truth out of them. And then turning that into report that's anonymized and categorized by question and answer so that the executives in the company finally get to see what people are really thinking, why they bought from this company, not the other company, what the competitors did, what they think about, what their concerns were, what their biggest problem is. And that gives you a map, I mean, every single time we're talking hundreds of times that I came back in with this information and the CEO and the other executives were in the room. They were having that V8 moment. You know, where you slap your forehead, I could have had a V8.
Steve Rush: Right.
Kristin Zhivago: It was like, oh geez. I had no idea that people were feeling this way about us or gee, did they know that we made that mistake? Hmm, that is bad. You find the good stuff in the bad, and you actually understand who you're selling to for the first time and you respect them and you know, they're smart. Cause that is the other thing. Sometimes people think their customers are not that smart. Customers are pretty smart, people buy things from the time they're five years old and probably sooner now because of iPads and you know, Amazon and stuff. So we are experienced buyers and we know what we want and we know when we get it and when we're getting it from somebody and when we're not, it's very black and white. So they finally see the picture and then they start making good decisions, decisions that make sense and decisions that lead to more revenue and grow the company. That is what a revenue coach really does.
Steve Rush: That makes loads of sense, for me. Your book Roadmap To Revenue was named by Forbes as being one of the top marketing and sales books written and love to get a little bit of insight as to the key principles that you mentioned earlier. So in your book, you've got those three stages of discovered, debate and deploying. We covered off the discover bit, a little earlier on. In the debate stage, that is really, what you focus on the round that buying process. Tell us a little about that.
Kristin Zhivago: Well, during the debate stage, I then want to educate them to the type of buying journey that we are talking about and one of the biggest contributions I think I make in the book besides teaching people, how to discover. Is that there are basically four types of products and services in the world based on the amount of scrutiny that the customer applies to the purchase. So there's light scrutiny, medium scrutiny, heavy scrutiny, and intense scrutiny. Light scrutiny is impulse, cheap purchases, the candy bar at the checkout counter, you know, the tabloid magazine, whatever. Just one or two questions. Can I afford this? Can my waistline afford this? Should I buy this or not? That is light scrutiny. Medium scrutiny are products and services are things like clothing, where it's still pretty much one person making the decision and there's maybe 10 or 15 questions will this fit? Do I like the colour? You know, maybe you are, worried about your significant other liking it or not but it's a pretty simple buying process.
Heavy scrutiny is when you really are making a big purchase in the B2C side, its cars and houses and things like that. There is a contract; there is a sales person of some sort and I always think of these salespeople really should be sales guides or buying guides. They help you make the buying decision in an honest, straight forward, you know, what are your trade your way? So it is like the trade-offs, the things you need. What is your main concern? Okay, well this will work or maybe it won't, that's really what we need now rather than people who are out hunting. That is heavy scrutiny, then the B2B side. Those are big enterprise software programs or programs. You are going to run your business on. Something you make a deep commitment to, that is a big deal, and it costs a lot of money and then intense scrutiny, products and services are those where it's everything that the heavy scrutiny is, but you get married. It is a long-term contract. It is like two or three years and maybe it is a big consulting thing. That is where they are making airplanes, you know. Boeing or something, so the reason that I came up with this is because of the gap that I kept finding between the company mind-set and the customer mind-set, and I had to close that gap somehow. And I kept seeing people who were selling light scrutiny, products and services as if they were heavy scrutiny, products and services. Like you don't need a newsletter to learn how to chew gum kind of thing. It just was silly.
Steve Rush: Right.
Kristin Zhivago: And the same thing with the high scrutiny products and services, where they were treating it as a branding exercise, where all we have to do is just get the word out to everybody. And we're a great, and we can do this for you and make this big promise, but they weren't able to answer the very specific questions that the buyers had. Again, the buyer journey, which I was one of the first people to talk about selling as a buying journey is again, a series of very specific questions that need to be answered to the buyer satisfaction in order for the sale to be made. That is basically it, they weren't answering those questions. They did not equip their salespeople to answer those questions and these are end of the funnel questions. We talk about the funnel where they are really close to buying, and now they just want to have three questions answered.
Steve Rush: The big thing here is getting on the agenda of that customer and consulting almost with that customer in that buying process, right?
Kristin Zhivargo: Yeah, you are their advocate. You are on their side. You are trying to figure out what you can give them will actually satisfy those requirements. In an honest, no BS kind of way. That is really what buyers want.
Steve Rush: Right.
Kristin Zhivargo: And nobody gives it to them.
Steve Rush: And there is a lot of psychology involved here too, isn't there, so the whole principle around calling somebody a salesperson versus a buying person, like a buy an advocate or buying a system.
Kristin Zhivargo: Or buying guide or yeah, whatever the word is.
Steve Rush: Yeah, companies still have not quite caught on to that, have they?
Kristin Zhivargo: No, because again, it is so easy to just put a guy on the phone, you know, it just makes so much sense. You go out and you hunt and when you think about it, it's pretty crazy the states that we're in right now, because the buyers have completely rejected that approach. Yet we have a whole industry. I mean, there are millions of sales consultants and you know people out there who are continuing to help people get on that phone and make those calls and, you know, go for dialling for dollars. We are still doing that and the customer has left us in the dust. I mean, we are selling buggy whips in time when people are driving cars. It is that bad.
Steve Rush: Right and I think also my experience of sales people is the agenda shift from; I need to make a sale versus I need to help you buy is also the biggest thing that as consumers we are now really attuned to aren't we?
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, you are so right. You know, the salesman's agenda, the minute he opens his mouth, I mean, it's just, okay. I understand you are trying to make a quota. That is all you care about is closing the sale. Well, I don't want to be closed. Nobody wants to be closed, it is like, okay, okay, okay, make a decision quick, quick, quick. Okay, it is going to all going to be fine. No problem, just sign here quick, quick, quick. And people know, like I said, this is scepticism swamp. They have grown up buying things and regretting those purchases and dealing with the, you know, one of the things that people totally ignore when you are selling B2B is the, reputation whiteboard. When I was doing marketing and sales turnarounds, I would be an entrepreneur working in a very big corporation and the first thing I learned was when you start that job, you get your own little personal whiteboard.
It’s like hung around your neck. It is just a small letter size thing. I mean, it is just, you know, my imagination of what this thing is, every time you make a mistake, there is a black mark on that whiteboard. And it there's no eraser, nobody ever forgets that you were the one that put in that enterprise program and the whole thing failed, or that you didn't make your quota or whatever it was or you said the stupid thing to one of the top executives on a bad day. You know, whatever it is, every time you screw up, there is a black mark on your whiteboard, and so one of the mind-sets of the corporate buyer is keeping those black marks off that whiteboard, avoiding corporate embarrassment. It is like one of the main drivers, the bigger the company, the bigger the issue. Because if you get too many black marks on your whiteboard, nobody will even pay any attention to you anymore in a meeting, they will just roll their eyes.
Oh yeah, there is Bob again, you know, well, don't pay any attention to him because he did that terrible thing back in 1979, we're never going to forget it. And the only way to get out of that in many cases is to just people that have that problem, they have to leave the company because nobody's going to respect them anymore. Nobody is going to take their advice. They are not part of the team they have been rejected. So that's, what is driving. That is the biggest driver is the embarrassment factor, and yet we don't address that at all when we're selling. People will just, you know, act like, Oh, well, you know, you just go out there and you are going to get all this and you will be a hero and the guy's like, yeah right, I'm going to be a hero. If this thing fails, I am going to be toast.
Steve Rush: My favourite sales person's line is when they call you up. And the first line is, don't worry. I am not trying to sell you anything.
Kristin Zhivago: So guess what, you have just started the relationship with a lie.
Steve Rush: Exactly, right.
Kristin Zhivago: I mean it is terrible. It is terrible, the way we treat people, when we are selling to them. It is really rotten. It is like bait and switch and you lie to them. When people say that to me, I say, oh, okay, well, gee, it is 7:30. I am trying to eat dinner and I don't know you, I've never heard from you before. Tell me really, why you are calling. If you are not trying to sell me something, do we know each other? You know, have we met before? I mean, people really should not call me because I am terrible about that stuff, I am so sick of it.
Steve Rush: We have a bit of fun with it in our family too, which we should not do, right?
Kristin Zhivago: No
Steve Rush: Because people are trying to make a living and we get it. But equally, if we've also been consumers of selling, we recognize those patterns in people's tonality, In particular when somebody says I am going to sell it, I am not trying to sell you something and we know they are and our hackles go up as consumers don't they? So heading over to your “Deploy” stage, what transpires here?
Kristin Zhivago: Well, This is just classic, you know, carrying out projects. I mean, truthfully, once you understand the mind-set of the customer and you have made a proper offer to that mind-set, then you have to say, okay, where are they looking for us? That is the biggest thing. Are they in social where they actually go to social to buy from us? Or are they just going to social to see what we're tweeting about? And they would only do that as part of their buying process, but they have to find us when they go looking and you know, Google still owns 95% of the search market, so guess what? That is one of the places you go and search engine optimization. Where you are using your content and you are getting out there. There is, some ways to get on the first page of Google. I am not going to say what they are right now, because I don't want to give it away.
Totally honest, a good content driven kind of way, but there's also advertising and advertising does work these days. That is where we are getting the most far leads for our clients. That fast stuff, there is sort of two things that happen. There is the quick get leads as fast as you can stuff. Then there is sort of the back end. You need to be there as they're looking around, especially if you're selling a heavier intense scrutiny product or service, they are going to check you out before they talk to a salesperson and another famous quote, which nobody attributes to me. But I really was the first person, as far as I can tell, to say in the stage of the web, by the time a person talks to a salesperson, they've already gotten 60 to 80% of their questions, 60 to 80% of their questions answered before they get a salesperson on the phone.
So they just want answers to those remaining very specific questions. They have already checked your site. They have checked your reviews. They have gone and talked to other people they have, you know, gone through Google and looked around. They have done a lot of homework and got 80% of their questions answered. Now they come to the sales person who by the way, is not trained to answer those very specific remaining questions and instead he wants to start his PowerPoint at, we were founded in 2001 and everybody's in the room. Oh God, do we have to sit through this now and go through the whole thing. They have two or three questions. If your marketing is really working, which by the way mine does which better do or I shouldn't be talking to you. By the time they get to me, they have two question and I sell a very intense product or service I sell, you know, we are getting married.
I am going to make sure that your company grows. That is my responsibility. That is big, intense kind of thing, so they have done all their homework. They have decided they want to do business with me already. And they just want to know, am I interested in taking them on? When can I start? How much is it? They have three questions. So one of the whole philosophies behind this heavy, medium light scrutiny thing is that if you can get through your marketing to the point with a heavier or intense scrutiny product or service, to the point where by the time they come to you, they have two or three questions. If it is a light scrutiny thing, man, you have done your job. That is the goal.
Steve Rush: That is really clever, I am really focused. I love it, so as a leader of marketing agencies, too, you have led people and this part of the show. We already want to tap into your leadership thinking if you had to distil your years of leadership into, let's say your top three leadership hacks, what would they be? Kristin.
Kristin Zhivago: I think the first one is don't assume. Never assume because when we assume we think we know it all. We think we know the answer, so you really have to always be curious, keep asking, keep trying to figure out, keep being humble, not only with your customers, but your partners, your staff just assume that you don't know at all. And by the way, I didn't get to this point until, you know, after my fifties, because you have to get over yourself. In order to get past that point of thinking, you know, at all, or wanting to know it all or needing to know it all, you really have to get over that and just keep being humble that you might in fact, learn something today from somebody else.
Steve Rush: Right?
Kristin Zhivago: And that is the key, because if you do that, then you are going to understand the customer's mind-set. You are going to understand your staff and what they want. What makes them happy and try to give it to them and the second one is, make it a nice place for nice people to work. I have a no jerk policy, clients, vendors, our staff, absolutely. The minute anybody puts their hands on their hips, that is it we are done because we don't do that around here, including me. I am not allowed to put my hands on my hips either by the way and that makes it a, culture where it is a nice place, a happy place. It is a safe place for good people to work and they love it. They love it. It is just so wonderful. You are not being stopped and by the way, the definition of a jerk is somebody who makes it harder for other people to do their work. Nice people try to make it easier for you to do your job. They try to help; they try to give you what you need and a jerk does just the opposite. Everything is a struggle. You never get a good decision. They love everybody paying attention to them because they don't know the answer. It is a power trip, so we have a jerk free environment and it is a wonderful place to work.
Steve Rush: I think I am going to be sharing that with my clients and colleagues. Hey, do you have a no jerk policy?
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah, exactly.
Steve Rush: Because ultimately we put up with a lot of BS from people.
Kristian Zhivago: Yeah.
Steve Rush: Unnecessarily, but if it's, you know, right from the outset, people understand, this is the way we do things. This is the environment we've got, just creates the right tone from the start. Isn't it?
Kristian Zhivago: Yeah and it helps you help your customers too, because one of the reasons it is hard for employees to help customers is because their boss is a jerk. So they have to work around that somehow. And if your boss a nice person who wants to help the customer. Oh gee, guess what, you know, you are all on the same page. Customers happy, you are happy. The boss is happy, so it is really a wonderful way to go.
And the third thing I would say that I've learned is never give up, never give up. I mean, no matter what is happening. I mean, I learned that in Silicon Valley, we had many recessions in Silicon Valley where people would think the Valley was dead, so when my husband and I were running an ad agency, we made this poster to call the Valley lives, and we sent it around. People put it up in their conference rooms.
And it was just about the fact that there's always money flowing somewhere. And there's trillions of dollars that change hands every single day in the banking system. Used to be 3 trillion, I think it is up to 5 now or something, but it's a lot of money. Somebody is always buying something somewhere and you just have to figure out who is it? What do they want? How can I help? What is their mind-set? How can I address it? Make an offer that will appeal to them in that mind-set. There is always a way to make money. If you are humble and you go after just that one thought that you are trying to help somebody achieve something. How can I take what I do and apply it to that? And by the way, that's a big deal right now with COVID and all this stuff's going on with this virus, same thing.
Steve Rush: Sure is.
Kristin Zhivago: What do people need? How can we help?
Steve Rush: If not even more so now just understanding their lens at a different level. Right?
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Things are different. This thing has radically shifted us. All of us, the whole world has shifted. It is a big deal, and so people are going to approach things differently and prioritize things differently and need different things. And we have to understand quickly what those mind-sets are.
Steve Rush: So we affectionately called this part of the show Hack to Attack, and it is where we learn from our guest’s. Period in their life or their career where things have not gone well, or they may have screwed up, but they have used that lesson. That is something that is now positive in their life. What will be your hack to attack?
Kristin Zhivago: You talked about it, that humility experience when I was a senior in high school, and I went out to my car with my tail between my legs. I remember distinctly standing in that parking lot. You know, I had a 52 Chevy. I did not even go into my car right away. I just stood there in the parking lot, feeling the full-scale humiliation and saying to myself, man, I just screwed up. I mean, you know, I had the whole thing ready. They would have bought from me. I saw the sale, you know, when you are a sales person, it is like, I tell people, I am a recovering salesperson. You saw it, you know, that he could have bought, but he did not, and it was because me.
Steve Rush: It is such a vivid emotion for you still isn't it?
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah. I knew right then, you know, and I was a singer. I was in show business. My whole family was in show business. I could hold an audience in the Palm of my hand while I was singing. You know, it was a big ego boost. And that's the other thing. I mean, you really do have to get over yourself to succeed in business. That was that moment where I knew there was something more than just holding an audience, just being good at performing. It was something way bigger and way deeper, and I've just devoted my life to it. That is really the main thing, you know, and every time you go through a recession or something and you have to learn, but the other big thing for me was that, that realization, that the difference between the gap between the customer's mind-set and the company mind-set is always amazingly large and they don't even know it. They don't even know how far off they are, so those two things were things that have just driven me and driven me and driven me,
Steve Rush: Brilliant stuff and the last thing we want to explore with you is to do a little bit of time travel now. And if you're able to bump into Kristen at 21, what would be the one bit of advice you would give her?
Kristin Zhivago: Kind of the same thing, like get over yourself, you know, calm down, watch more than you talk, look around. It is hard to figure this out. You know, I mean, I am not stupid. So I knew I had smarts and when you're smart enough to kind of get by in life. You have a tendency to think that, you know, you are pretty good. It was not that I was conceited, I was never conceited, but I had sort of a confidence in my own mental abilities and the problem with that is then you kind of like being right. And that's a big mistake. It is a big mistake because honestly, I mean, I have people working for me now that every single day somebody says something that makes me slap my head and go, yes. Golly. That is a great idea. That is such a great idea. We are going to do that. You know, and I have gotten more satisfaction in my older times now. My advanced age, I am much happier with those moments than I am with me being the one that knew the answer. To me, that is just, okay, I got a lot of experience. I know what to do in certain situations. I usually have an answer, but I am very calm about it. It is not a big deal to me. What is really exciting is when one of our staff comes up with a great idea that I hadn't even thought about. That is fun. It is really turned into a big high for me. I am so proud of them. I am so excited.
Steve Rush: Right.
Kristin Zhivago: So, that is the big thing.
Steve Rush: And it is also great leadership.
Kristin Zhivago: Yeah.
Steve Rush: Finally, we want to make sure that our listeners can get in touch with you and continue the dialogue where we leave off. Where would be the place that you would like them to go?
Kristin Zhivago: Best thing is just go to zhivagopartners.com I mean, everything's there, my blog articles, my podcasts, my book and as we roll out this mind-set driven marketing, we are going to have a guide for that. That is coming out over the next month or so, so everything that I do is pretty much in that. I also write a blog for the up and comers. It is kind of a labour of love. It is called kristinswisdom.com and that is just for people getting out into business who really went through the school system and did not learn anything about business. And of course, you're going to spend the rest of your life in business, so I'm just trying to help them understand what's really going on and what really works and hopefully avoid some of the mistakes that we all make when we're younger and full of our self.
Steve Rush: That is lovely and we will make sure that all of those links are in our show notes as well, so as folks are finished listen to this. They can actually just click into the show notes and go take a look. So Kristin it is just for me to say. It has been really lovely talking to you. There is some super hints and tips, and idea to help people think about the way that they approach marketing and certainly mind-set driven marketing for me I think where the future lays of organization and for business. So Kristin thank you so much for being on the Leadership Hacker Podcast.
Kristin Zhivago: I love it. You are great. I really enjoyed it, thank you so much.
Closing
Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others, and spreading the word of leadership. Without you listening in, there would be no show. So please subscribe now if you have not done so already. Share this podcast with your communities, network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.
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