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

Find out more about Ciela below:

Ciela on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cielarose/

Ciela on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CHartanov

Humcollective Website: https://www.humcollective.co

Full Transcript Below.

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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.

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.

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.

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

#some audio issues in this show – thanks for your patience.

Find out more about Adrian below:

Adrian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-simpson-b600139/

Adrian on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdieSimpson

Wavelength on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wavelengthleadership/

Wavelength Website: https://www.wavelengthleadership.com

Full Transcript Below

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.

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

Find out more about Pepyn and Richard below:

Website: https://businessleadershipunderfire.com

Pepyn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pepyn-dinandt/

Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-westley-obe-mc-66875216/

Full Transcript Below

----more----

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

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.

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

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: 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

Ryan Gottfredson

You can learn more from Ryan below

Website: https://ryangottfredson.com (you can take the Mindset Assessment here!)

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Book: Success Mindsets

Full Transcript Below  

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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.

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.

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

Plus lots of leadership hacks!

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: 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

Frank Zinghini

You can learn more from Frank below

Applied Visions Inc – www.avi.com

Frank at LinkedIn

 FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

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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.

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.

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
• Three components for strategy =ExMC2
• Why strategy gets lost for some leaders
• Build tall walls and retain your customers

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: 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

Brad Chase

You can learn more from Brad below

Brad on LinkedIn

Brad’s website and Book, “Strategy First” - https://www.bradchase.net

Full Episode Transcript Below

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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.

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.

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.

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
• Collective patterns of relatedness with Culture
• The four elements of the Culture descriptor

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: 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

Siobhan McHale

You can learn more from Siobhan below:

Siobhan on Twitter

Siobhan on LinkedIn

Book: The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change

Find out more from the Barrett Values Centre here: www.valuescentre.com

Full Transcript Below:

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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.

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!

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: 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

Find out more about Dr Oleg Konovalov Below: 

Website: https://www.olegkonovalov.com

Dr Oleg Konovalov on LinkedIn

Oleg on Twitter

The Book - Leaderology

Full Podcast Transcription Below:

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Introduction

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.

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

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: 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

Find out more about Nic Marks Below: 

www.fridaypulse.com

Connect with Nic on LinkedIn

Follow Nic on Twitter

https://nicmarks.org

Full Transcript Below: 

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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.

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.

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.

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:

• The role of Mindset in leading marketing
• How to sell the way your customers want to buy
• The buying process vs. The sales process
• The difference between Brand and Branding
• The benefits of a “No Jerk” policy

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Find out more about Kristin below:

Website: https://zhivagopartners.com

Blog: https://kristinswisdom.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinzhivago/

Book: Roadmap to Revenue

Full Transcript Below:

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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 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.

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.

Ian Mills and Mark Ridley are leadership development experts. They run the international development consultancy firm Transform Performance International and have co-authored several books. Most latterly, The Leaders Secret Code. In this episode learn about:

How Ian and Mark lead in a VUCA world

What can make leaders iconic

Understand destination beliefs and unlock leadership growth

How journey motivators can assist your development

SPECIAL LISTENER OFFER: Listen in to find out how you can get a FREE psychometric test and a copy of The Leaders Secret Code!

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Find out more about Ian and Mark below:

TPI Website: https://www.transformperformance.com

Follow Ian on LinkedIn

Follow Mark on LinkedIn

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TPI_Official

The Leaders Secret Code

The Leaders Secret Code Summary

The Salespersons Secret Code

Full Transcript Below:

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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.

Steve Rush: Delighted to introduce our first duo on The Leadership Hacker Podcast. Ian Mills and Mark Ridley are leadership development experts. They also run the international development consultancy firm. Transform Performance International, and have co-authored several books. Most lastly, The Leader's Secret Code and as an extra special treat, we have a super giveaway today for some lucky listeners so hang around to the end of the show and find out how you can get your hands on our special prize worth over a hundred pounds, so before we get to speak Ian and Mark. It is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: One-mans dream to spend three years sailing solo round a Pacific nearly turned to disaster after borders started closing around the region; leaving him stranded alone at sea for several months. While people around the globe were, panic buying, stocking up, he was running low on food and fuel as he sailed between islands trying to find somewhere to dock. The sailor who only shared his surname, named himself as Mr. Wong set off from his home country of Singapore on the 2nd of February.

It was an adventure that the 59 year old experienced sailor had been meticulously planning for years. Everything from the exact amount of fuel he would need, weather conditions, food and places that he intended to visit. The one thing he had not planned on, of course, was a global pandemic. The plan was to set sail from Singapore to Polynesia, a journey that would take roughly four months in his yacht. Once there, he would spend, time exploring the region by land and by sea but he would soon learn that even his best-laid plans could go awry, especially in the face of a global pandemic. In late February, he left Indonesia on route for his next destination of Papua New Guinea; where he planned to stock up on fuel and food but a few days in Indonesia. While in Indonesia water, his autopilot broke and when he tried to anchor, he was told that the lockdown had already begun, the Pandemic had arrived and he was chased away. He eventually stopped at a remote Island. Where about 20 or 30 families lived there. They had no TV, no telephone and no communication with the outside world and they had not heard of a lockdown or a pandemic. As soon as he shared the news, however, they chased him off the Island and almost every stop off he could find also chased him away.

He kept on sailing by the 21st of April, he reached waters just outside Tuvalu, a tiny Island in the Pacific ocean. He was still about two hours from land when maritime officials who again told him he needed to leave and despite his plea, it fell on deaf ears, but they said no. Thankfully, he soon received word that the Fiji government had agreed to take him in and despite an horrendous experience, Mr. Wong was now safe. If we can consider the leadership and self-leadership parallels here, what might seem really counterintuitive for us all is to plan for what is completely unexpected, the crazy wildcard outcomes, so strategically, if we could be prepared when things go wrong, so as leaders just keep asking. What if? And we can unlock some great strategic thinking. That's been a The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news, insights or interesting stories that you would like listeners to hear, please get in touch.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: Excited to be joined today by Ian Mills and Mark Ridley. They are the co-founders of Transform Performance International and they have co-authored a number of books, the latest being The Leaders Secret Code. Ian, Mark welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Both Speakers: Thank you Steve.

Steve Rush: You are our first duo on the show, so I am really excited that we've got two leaders to hack into and two great brains to hack into some ideas and some thoughts today. But you guys have been a duo for a while, so I know that certainly from business perspective you work together, but how did you both meet and how have you arrived here?

Ian Mills: Mark and I met some 25 years or so ago when Mark was running a team of financial advisors for a retail bank in Exeter, Devon and I was the regional manager for that bank. And I remember very well my first meeting with Mark, I plan to meet this new leader and our organization. I had heard a lot of great things about him. I planned to take him out for lunch and I now know that in hindsight, Mark was imagining now that I was going to take him out for a very nice steak and a glass of red wine. In fact, I took him to McDonald's and I think that tells you a lot about our different perspective on motivation, leadership and the way in which you engage them, build a successful teams.

Mark Ridley: I would say just add to that, I pull Ian’s leg remorselessly over the fact that he took me to McDonald's for my lunch. To our conversation today, Steve, because at the end of the day, at the time, what I witnessed, I did not know it at the time, but what I was witnessing was a belief system from Ian in a style of leadership around focus and a practicality and you know, just getting things done. Whereas I wanted to spend more, time and be more affiliative and get to know this person. So the image of two guys sitting in pinstripe suits somewhere in deepest dark as Devon. Surrounded by kids on half term holiday trying to eat a burger on our first meeting in polite company. You can imagine that for me that was anathema and for Ian it was just business as usual. It is a real interesting way in which we often think about our behaviours and our beliefs. We think they are okay, but others perceive them very differently.

Steve Rush: It just goes to show, doesn't it Mark that people have a different lens from which they look through and as leaders we need to be really aware of that. Now, Transform Performance International. Just give us a little bit of a summary as to what you currently do and how you can really help your clients.

Ian Mills: Transform Performance International is a performance enhancement consultancy; we work with famous name organizations all over the world. In fact, we have worked in some 50 or so countries for organizations like HP, Cisco, Deloitte, American Express and many more to help them. Predominantly through people changing the way they perform. That might mean changing behaviours. It might be changing a culture. It might mean changing the way the organization engages with their customers and it might mean change the way they lead in a VUCA world. A volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

Steve Rush: Having learned from many, many of your clients and indeed working with each other, you have penned a number of books together, the most recent being The Leader's Secret Code. What was the inspiration for the book?

Ian Mills: The inspiration for the book was…The catalyst for the book was the fact that I am a member of a group in London called the entrepreneurs exchange. I meet with small intimate groups of entrepreneurs over dinner and typically, you hear one of them sharing their story. One of the things that I found over a number of years is that whilst this group is not in my target market for my business, I found their stories inspirational, intriguing, and beautifully articulated. On reflection one evening, I thought if only I could bought the magic of the way in which they share their success story that would be worth a lot of money. And I remember phoning Mark and say, Mark, I have the title of the book and the title of the book is The Entrepreneur's Secret Code and we just need to get on and write it.

Well that started a, a dialogue around, well should we really write about entrepreneurs? And in fact, we actually started research into selling and the reason we did that is we believe that everybody sells. Whether you are a leader trying to influence your organization or whether you are a parent trying to influence your children to get a bed on time or frankly. Whether you are a sales person or indeed an entrepreneur seeking to grow a business, so that was our first book. It is almost, I guess an obvious move to then consider how do we then do research into leadership and share the findings in a similar book and that book became The Leaders Secret Code that we're here to share with you.

Steve Rush: And I am guessing that having that foundation in research and academia removed some ambiguity away from where people might apply their own thinking in their own lenses. Is that right?

Mark Ridley: What we have learned about research is really quite fantastic Steve. If anybody out there is thinking about doing this for themselves, I'd really urge them to give it a go but do absolutely take your idea and then work with somebody who's got that experience of doing the research because the whole thing will be enriched. It is really has been excellent.

Steve Rush: And Mark, your book has been described when you read it is a bit like dipping into a box of your favourite chocolates, which sounds absolutely delicious. How does it make it so tactile for readers to dip into understanding how they go about The Secret Code?

Mark Ridley: Well that was a massive compliment. I was really gratified to read it. It is a great question because I think it goes to the heart of the philosophy that whenever we interact with people in business no matter what, project we are on, the metaphor of the chocolates I think is all around the different flavours. Everyone will have their favourite chocolate. You know, I know in the old quality street, I like the heart caramel and they took it out. So all of those kinds of things will resonate the people when they look into a book. We deliberately did not write a book that you could literally open up the first page and feel that you have to work your way through it. I am sort of going to sound like I am a poacher turn gamekeeper but, I have never been a particular fan of business books. I have always used them as a reference point. I have rarely read a book cover to cover and I was acutely aware even when we wrote the Salesperson’s Secret Code that what we wanted was, these different flavours and different chapters, different ideas, you know, to mix our metaphors. Sort of a smorgasbord of different things to tempt you rather than to have to Wade your way through something that was turgid from page one right through to page 155 or whatever.

Steve Rush: And that is the appeal I guess for those people who love to read from cover to cover; They can do that, my learning style is fairly similar Mark and having read your book, what I found myself being able to do is just to dip in and you know, and also re-reference some of those things when I was particularly looking at some of the things I was working on too. So I can, I can resonate with that for sure.

Mark Ridley: Every chapter is written in a particular way that even when you read the body of the chapter, there is hints and tips on the psychology that we have applied. There is little reference points, there is little stories that people can dip into, so we have attempted to address every learning style even in every chapter. You could read each chapter once a month and still get something from it.

Steve Rush: And those iconic leader stories I thought were great by the way and maybe we could just kick around a couple of those, so I read something that you captured from Michael Tobin who was an OBE. Who ended up taking his team Bobsleigh to help them understand their approach tell us a little bit about that?

Ian Mills: Yes, Michael Tobin or Mike Tobin is one of the iconic leaders that we profiled in the book. Anyone who reads the book will find that yes, we have data based on a thousand leaders, but we decided to profile a number of what we call iconic leaders who display many of the attributes that the research suggests sets top performing leaders apart. Mike Tobin is one of them. One of the things that he does that is, particularly impressive is he uses metaphor as a mechanism to convey a message to dealership teams around the change that he desires. So a good example of that is that one of his frustrations when he was running a public company was that his sales organization seemed to have a frenzy around the quarter end and hitting the sales targets, and he wanted to change their mind-set.

So one of the things that he did is he took them to an Olympic bobsled run. This is the sales leadership team and the reason of that is if you push harder at the beginning, you go faster at the end. And what he wanted the leaders to do is to recalibrate the way they lead their teams when he got back to the operations headquartered in the UK and in fact, one of the things that sets him apart, I think is his, creativity, his innovation, his different way of looking at things. I have already shared the bobsled story.

Another example is that he had a, an executive leadership team that in his opinion lacked the bravery to take the business to the, next stage and what he chose to do is to take that executive team swimming with sharks. And the reason he did that is that he believed that they would learn what it is like to face fear and they would be able to translate those behaviours back into the workplace. And of course, as you can probably imagine, there is nothing quite as scary as facing off to real sharks under the water, so it should be relatively easy to face the challenges and the struggles that they may be facing in the business environment.

Steve Rush: And for those leaders have got that cyclical business. For me, when I read that, it was just a great metaphor, but not only is it a metaphor, you can visualize how wonderful would it be to create an experiential metaphor so people can really make that connection. And I think that's the difference between what Mike Tobin did and what others may have said and done. You have a number of iconic leader stories in the Secret Code of your number of stories you have. Do you have a favourite?

Ian Mills: One of the leaders that we profiled that I particularly enjoyed the conversation

With was James Knight. James at the time was a major in the Royal Marines. He has a military cross, which I think says something about his, achievements and James is unlike what many of us might imagine a military leader to be like, which before I met James, you know, I imagined it to be quite a command and control. Quite a structured, dictatorial type approach. Whereas what I find with James is a very sophisticated, very curious, very empathetic, very engaging leader. One of the things that he said to me or one of the quotes that he gave me that I feel says an awful lot about James. Is he said to me Ian be interested, not interesting, and that is a good example of a belief that he holds that causes him to behave in a way that is congruent with that belief.

Steve Rush: And the belief of course that we might have is that people from an autocratic military background come with that set of rules and disciplines. And in my experience of having worked with some military leaders is quite often they're contrarian to what we might perceive. They have got that ability to be different and to be curious and be very entrepreneurial even though they have to follow strict guidelines and rules and routines. Mark, you've managed to pull together your beliefs into what you refer to now as destination beliefs and that helps people kind of focus on the key characteristics and behaviours required in order to tap into The leader's Secret Code. Can you just maybe for the listeners to share a seven destination beliefs are?

Mark Ridley: Sure, okay. Let me just briefly explain what I mean by a destination belief. You will imagine that when we asked, well over a thousand leaders for the research and a lot more since. When we asked leaders about their views of leadership, you will get repeat patterns and they will use maybe different language structure to describe those beliefs. But nevertheless, they will coalesce into, groupings of beliefs. And we bring those together almost into a set, of values if you like but, those are what the seven destination beliefs are. And the reason we gave them the destination epithet Steve, was very simply because what we realized very early on when we were writing the first book. Is that even if they don't realize it though, those core beliefs are guiding them or helping them navigate the way through what is often known as…going back to the military expression as a very VUCA world as we call it.

You know, disruptive, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and so on and so forth and that, is why we decided that we'd use this expression, destination beliefs. Seven core beliefs that we observed and practically every leader that we spoke to, and they are in no particular order. The first one is around control, and the destination belief that we got so often when we spoke to leaders was that, well, control matters as you might expect in a leader, but someone has to be accountable for success. Someone has to be accountable for that success, so that was control.

The next destination belief was resilience and that was really around this idea that I can withstand pressure, but the point that Ian was making a moment ago, I can withstand pressure and I can spring back into, the shape that I want. It may not be the same shape as I was before the pressure, but nevertheless I can do that and that was the sort of overarching resilience view. The next one was about influence. Practically every leader we spoke to talked about the need to be able to influence the right way. Again, you would be surprised if it was not that way, but the way we defined it was how I make things happen through other people and that was important. It is not how I make things happen. It was how I make things happen through others. Then the next belief was around communication. I mean influence in communications almost go hand in hand but, the belief there was quite simple. That every leader we spoke to understood the importance of the way, the manner and style of communication up and down the organization.

Not only with their immediate teams, however, but with wider stakeholders and audiences perhaps that are external to the business. In other words, they were always aware of the way in which they came across to other people, so that was around communication. Then we came on to strategy. Every leader we spoke to talked about the importance of having a big picture view, and we were very interested into how they came about getting that, view and so the belief is very simply. That everybody in an organization has to understand what the organizations goals are, how the organization is positioning itself and how it will best utilize its resources in order to achieve its goals, so that was the fundamental destination belief around strategy.

The next belief was around empowerment and this is often an overused expression. I can hear people sort of hearing the word empowerment and sort of metaphorically rolling of the eyes takes place. But what was really interesting was that of the successful leaders we spoke to and especially the iconic. The concept of empowerment was never far from the conversation and the destination belief there was that my role is to enable my people to feel empowered, to take the right actions and to be the best that they can be.

Fulfilment was the final destination belief, so many of the leaders talked about desire to reflect that. We might come onto that later on, reflect on success or not as the case may be, and we chose a simple mantra that when we are successful, we will probably feel fulfilment may not be everything, but when we are successful, we will probably feel fulfilment. Again, we will probably explore how people get to that feeling of success, but the overarching desire, destination belief was, look, I am here to lead, but I am here to be fulfilled for myself and probably to help others feel fulfilled too. That is a Cook's tour, Steve.

Steve Rush: It is brilliant. Yeah, it is a great lens to look through. I really like that whole kind of principle of those destination beliefs but of course, for the folks listening to this, they will all be at different stages of each of those destinations. And to help kind of with that thinking, you created what you refer to as journey motivators. Just tell us a little bit about how that works alongside the destination beliefs.

Mark Ridley: Well, basically when we were interviewing everybody we've ever spoken to in the project, and indeed, again, going back to the first book we did, we improve this methodology. We adopt and approach of interviewing people, which is a very loose conversation. I often describe it as a fireside chat, but as you will probably be aware, Steve. In our business, we do a lot of coaching and a lot of the techniques we use around coaching is to create an environment where the interviewee or the coachee creates what we call the metaphors for their own experience. When you ask direct questions, which can be very presumptive, have your own bias within them and so on and so forth, you don't always get as much out of it. So by following this semi-structured approach, sometimes it is known as clean questioning. What we discovered was that let's take control for an example.

You know I said a moment ago that the destination belief was all about someone or something being accountable for success.  What we learned is that there is a spectrum of views and as you rightly say, people will be at different points. At some point in your leadership journey, you may be in a situation where that control comes from a place of being quite directive. At other times, you might come at it from a place where you believe that perhaps it is more important to be a little more participative and then allow others to shape that direction of travel. So the idea or the concept of controlling or being participative, directive or participative, it gradually forms into these two, what we call journey motivators. The Secret Code, Steve, is the way in which the top quartile performers appear to balance those often almost opposing views, the sort of the yin and yang, the sort of opposites attract kind of thing.

So you've got in the centre there you've got almost what I'll call this constructive contention between two belief systems, so the leader who is all directive is likely to fail. The leader who is over participative is likely to lose respect. The leader who is participative but also knows how to and when to put their foot on the gas and be a bit more directive is probably the leader who is going to be the most successful and that is the process we went through with all of the seven destination beliefs to arrive at the 14 journey motivators.

Steve Rush: Super helpful to get people into that mind-set to understand you know, what their strengths and development areas are at the same time I guess.

Mark Ridley: Yes, it is and at the end of the day is a very, very brief Cook's tour of that because I know we don't have time to go through every, one of them. With resilience to the idea is that Ian already alluded to the journey motivators were about working hard and working smart. With influence, there is a manner and style, which we came to call transactional style of influence versus transformation. I won't bore you with the detail at the moment, but with communication it was around unemotional and emotional communication. Strategy was very interesting, that was around going with the gut and going, with facts and data. Empowerment was around delegating with the right degree of authority, which we called quite unambiguous empowerment versus a very ambiguous, laissez Faire kind of approach and fulfilment was around achievement for oneself versus achievement with others in an affiliative way.

Steve Rush: So really clear and easy to follow. And Ian, I understand that as a result of the large amount of research you created and your experiences, you've now taken this to another level now by kind of applying some science behind this and you're helping your clients now consider how they're approaching their leadership style using data science, AI using some psychometric testing. How did that come about?

Ian Mills: When we wrote the book. One of the key things that we decided to do from my business point of view is to enhance our value offering for our clients by building a set of tools and instruments that will help leaders become more like the top performing leader. So one of those tools is a psychometric instrument that is an online self-assessment instrument where an individual will go online, they will answer approximately a hundred questions, and as a consequence we will share with them a 20 page report that will map them against the findings of the top performing leaders. It will provide them with suggestions on what they might consider doing that will help them become a higher performing leader. Essentially, it is about self-reflection, and provocation and insight to help any leader that is curious around what they might do in order to improve the way by which they perform.

Steve Rush: Having completed it myself, I found it really helpful. It also comes with suggested development ideas across each of those belief systems as well. Some of the things to help people move beyond having an opportunity to dip into the chocolate box of The Secret Code is that whole principle of reflective learning and then what happens next. In your reports, you have a section that says, I am at score of 80, and it tells me that I am more prepared to do things. How would that be helpful for me?

Mark Ridley: Well, reflective learning and change readiness. I think are really important aspect of this you know, somebody could, you know, read a book, they could read their leader secret code report. They could, could have an experience with, a family member, with a team member. It really does not matter, but that only has meaning. If you actually then go away and reflect and think about. What did I take from that? And even if you decide that you take in a sense nothing from it and don't need to change a mind-set or a behaviour from it. The fact of the matter is you have gone through a process of reflection. I have to say I'm continually surprised by the number of people we work with who will say to us, I am so pleased that the way in which you've engaged with us has given that space to breathe and to think and to reflect.

And I've got to say, I think at the moment, given everything that's going on in everybody's world, I think that's possibly never even been more true. But most people in my experience don't go through this process of reflective learning and it's certainly in our experience, a Mark of a reasonably high level of emotional intelligence. When we do give ourselves that space and have that awareness to go away and reflect. But having reflected, of course then you have to decide if you want to do something different and if you do want to do something different, are you ready for that change? And again, in the work that we've done, Steve in organizations around the world over the last 20 years. I was particularly passionate about getting this concept across because there is no point in throwing stuff at people. Throwing new concepts, throwing ideas or whatever. If the people in the organization are not in that state of readiness to actually make that change happen, and that might be quite a long process, but I think it is important that the climate of any organization include this ability to say, well, we know what we want to do different. Come on, let's have this honest conversation. Are we truly ready to do it?

And what I like about this idea of change readiness is this idea that when you might read your secret code report, for example, you might get a surprise and you might think, you know what? That is a shock to me. I had not even thought about that but that might push you into the reflective mode, but you might not yet be ready to do anything about it. On the other hand, you might read another area of the report and you might say, yeah, you know what, that resonates with what I have already been thinking about my career or my life or my behaviours or whatever it might, be.

And that contemplate of readiness is important too. We are at different points of the cycle and what we try to do with the report is Ian his already said. Is to simply to provide some nudges or some provocations so that if people read that report and it's talking about where they are relative to other leaders, there's just some ideas there for actually taking action, which of course is the next stage of change readiness. You know, am I currently prepared to try on a new behaviour or a mind-set as a consequence of what I'm learning around me. There is a lot to change readiness and reflective learning and I think very often as leaders and organizations themselves. We overlook that we are very good at delivering stuff to people, but the way in which we implement that is very often left behind and I think a lot of programs of change could be a lot more successful if more thought was given to that.

Steve Rush: Awesome. Thank you Mark. Really, appreciate that. Now this is the part of the show where I get to hack into your minds, so I am going to ask you for your top leadership hack that you could share with our listeners. Ian I am going to start with you first. Ian what would be your top leadership hack that you could share?

Ian Mills: Well, my top leadership hack. It is the first time I have been asked a question in quite that way, but I guess if it is my message for leaders, I believe that probably the thing that would be most transformational is to model people or model leaders who do something that you would like to be able to do. So don't do that in the broadest, most general way, but find leaders who are exceptional at something. That might be the way they engage people, it might be the way they present on stage. It might be the way that they empathize, whatever that particular behaviour is that you have observed, go meet them. Go buy them a cup of coffee, go have a conversation with them and find out how they go about doing that. Why they do that? What goes on in their head? Deeply immerse yourself in what it is that they do in order you too can copy and paste that behaviour into your leadership role and I think that's the one thing that I've seen others do that can be truly transformational in that performance.

Steve Rush: Love it. Thank you very much Ian. Mark your top leadership hack, what would that be?

Mark Ridley: Well, it actually builds on what Ian just said. Taking what Ian said. The next thing for me is about being aware of the beliefs that lie behind the outcomes that you are already achieving as a leader. Because you know, we hold a belief that behind the belief will drive a behaviour and out of that behaviour you will become whatever that belief is driving you towards. So you know that mantra of believe, behave, become is very crucial. So that my, my advice would be have the courage to investigate where, your beliefs are coming from and have the courage to try on different beliefs. I often say when I am working with leaders and they say, well we can't do that, and I will turn around and say, well, okay, but what might it be like if you try? Because inviting people to try on different beliefs is so important.

A close friend of mine who has taught me a lot over my career once said to me, Mark changing beliefs is very simple. What happened the day that you first discovered that father Christmas wasn't real? I hope there is no kids listening to this, but I, you know, the world did not fall in. I adapted and I moved on and my behaviours as a consequence became different up to that point. Of course, Father Christmas was it around that Christmas time, so it demonstrates to me that very often beliefs that we hold can be faintly ridiculous and the willingness to take a long, hard look at ourselves and almost laugh at our beliefs and as he Ian said, model the beliefs that others hold, I think is liberating. It is about creating flexibility and leadership style.

Steve Rush: I love the principle of trying on a belief. I can, again, metaphorically, you can almost feel and belief like a jumper or a hat or a label that you might wear.

Mark Ridley: You got it.

Steve Rush: And of course, by doing so you might bump into revelation, which is another form of how we create our belief system in the first place in this. I now know something today that I did not know yesterday and as a result of me trying on my belief, I might find out something new.

Mark Ridley: Like, exactly, yeah. I mean one of the questions I often say to leaders is. What have you learned in the last 24 hours? And that's exactly the point you've just made, Steve and then the next question of course as well. Okay, but what could you have learned if you have chosen to learn it?

Steve Rush: Love it.

Mark Ridley: And that's often a bringing people up short moment because you realized then that, you know, very often, again, we're too busy or we haven't really got that flexibility of belief to actually notice what we could have learned had we been bothered to try on that different belief.

Steve Rush: Sure, I would like to now get into what we call Hack to Attack. So this is where with our guests, we explore something that has gone wrong in your past. Collectively in your case, maybe as a business partners or as friends and colleagues, but now as a result of that going wrong in the past, you know, use that as part of your foundations to help you in what you do for your life and your work. What would be your Hack to Attack?

Ian Mills: You ask me what has gone wrong. Well I can't think of anything of significance, but you know, a bit of course, like any business person, there are many minor things that go wrong. You lose a bid, you lose a client, somebody leaves your organization and my opinion businesses a never-ending learning journey. That does not mean that you can become perfect overnight, but what it does mean is that you can begin to adjust your behaviour as a consequence of your own personal experience of what has worked, what hasn't worked, what have you observed elsewhere and what might you do differently in order to get to your desired destination.

Steve Rush: Sure. Mark, anything else for you?

Mark Ridley: The one that is coming to my mind and as you asked the question Steve, I suppose it has been triggered by the fact that we started this conversation in an area of where Ian and I first met. I am going to spring this one on Ian. We made it a little bit of an error in our career many years ago with rabbits. And the reason we made the error with rabbits was because we use them as a rather clever marketing campaign for financial services products and genuinely we wanted to attract interest in this financial services product. Because there had been a lot of issues around the regulation of this product and it was important that customers came and talked to us about what their options were. The only problem was Steve, but we did not really do enough research into the situation and we ended up being inundated with customers who thought that we were selling fluffy toys. We launched it around March time and it coincided with Easter and people thought we were having egg race in our retail outlets and it was a, shall we say, it did not go quite according to plan, so Ian, I to this day, blame you for signing that one off actually,

Steve Rush: Then it goes back to not working with pets and animals and all the rest of it, I guess.

Mark Ridley: Well, yeah, well it does see the real takeaway was we did that in an atmosphere of speed, haste and we probably did not take enough advice and counsel from wiser Sage heads. I have always carried that lesson with me. Always ask opinions, socialize ideas, Marion Hayes, repentant leisure kind of approach.

Steve Rush: Brilliant story. Thanks for sharing it Mark. Our listeners have got some real value out of listening to our guests on the show. Explore a little bit of time travel and that is exactly what I am going to do with you now, so I am going to ask you to imagine if you would. That you are going to do a bit of time travel and pump into your 21-year-old self and you have a chance to give them that one bit of Sage advice. Ian what would your advice be to your 21 year old self?

Ian Mills: Yeah, maybe the advice as I look back at my 21-year-old self would be to make sure that you get a job with an organization called Google at the earliest possible moment. Open and broaden your lens towards the art of the possible. Be curious, try and learn about the unknown or the unknown unknowns. And that will mean that you are opening yourself up to greater choice,

Steve Rush: Early adoption to new innovation. New companies that are entering the market, Right? Awesome. How about you Mark?

Mark Mills: Yeah, I like that. Mine is a little different if I look back at my 21-year-old self, oh but of a young gun going to set the world on fire, et cetera, et cetera. Hey, we all have those dreams and aspirations and it has been a pretty fantastic life, but looking back, I think I would say to myself four words, be prepared to pause, be prepared to reflect, get better at being open, especially to ideas and thoughts that might come from sources that you would ordinarily dismiss and then be receptive. Yeah, pause, reflect, open, receive.

Steve Rush: Super advice. Thank you so much, so what is next for Transform Performance International?

Ian Mills: What is next? First, Transform Performance International. Well in my opinion, and Mark may differ is I think it is keep doing the same. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is organizations are continuously trying to perform better. The world, as I mentioned earlier, is a VUCA world. It is becoming increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. What that means is that leaders need to think differently about how they act and how they behave and their mind-set and the whole kind of perspective on what a great job looks like. So probably, more than ever, organizations will need support from organizations like ours that can provide research that can provide insight. That can provide coaching. The main thing that I see that will change is that we need to become more digital in the way in which we deliver content. So think about this fashion right now. This is a, a podcast. When I started my career, there was no such thing as a podcast given right now, the COVID-19 situation where we might have been running a conference, a face-to-face event that is now being delivered virtually, so change is a constant a need for behaviour. Change is a constant; the way by which you deliver the change will evolve further as we go forward.

Steve Rush: So exciting times ahead. Well done. Now we are incredibly excited to be able to share The Leader's Secret Code with our listeners and in a very different way. Super grateful for you gentlemen being able to provide this service today. For those listening, here is how you can get yourself a copy of the Leader's Secret Code. Head over to our social media platform on LinkedIn. It is The Leadership Hacker Podcast. You need to shout out Mark Ridley, Ian Mills and that you have listened to the show. The first 10 will receive a free transform performance international psychometric test, which usually costs 100 pounds. So head over there now and the first 50 will be entered into a prize draw to obtain a copy of The Leader Secret Code of which Transformed Performance International are giving away 10; so thank you and providing that to our listeners. So if our listeners wanted to learn more about you both, and indeed the work that you do as Transformed Performance International. Where would you like them to go?

Ian Mills: In order to contact either Mark or myself or my company? Our website address is www.transformperformance.com both of us are active on LinkedIn. So again, my name is Ian Mills. My colleague is Mark Ridley. You can find us on LinkedIn. Please feel free to invite us to connect.

Steve Rush: Brilliant and we will make sure that we put your details; both your LinkedIn profiles and indeed your website will be in our show notes. So as soon as everybody has finished listening to this, they can head onto our website or to the podcasts that they choose. Click on the links and find it straight away, so I would just like to say it has been super talking. It has been really fascinating learning about how the research has pulled together The leader's Secret Code and sharing some of the secrets with us today. So thanks both Ian and Mark for joining us on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Mark Ridley: Thanks for having us.

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.

Dr Simone Ahuja is a global expert on innovation strategy, a HBR columnist, author of Disrupt it Yourself and co-author of the bestselling book Jugaad Innovation. Dr Simone Ahuja will help you:

• Explore how to grow internal innovation even during a crisis
• Understand what Jugaad and Frugal Innovation is
• How to Innovate more with less
• Create Trust and a Permissionless society
• Why compassion in innovation is so key

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Find out more about Dr Simone Ahuja and her work below:

Jugaad Innovation – The Book

Disrupt-It-Yourself – The Book

Blood Orange Website

Simone on LinkedIn

Simone on Twitter

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW ----more----

Introduction

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 the show today, we have Dr. Simone Ahuja. She is the founder of Blood Orange and Innovation and Strategy Consulting Group. She is also a selling author and public speaker but before we get a chance to speak with Simone, it is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: The global pandemic has turned many of us into home teachers, filmmakers, entertainers and inventors. Making use of what we have and being innovative with our time and our resources. The times we now live in has never been more relevant for innovation and creativity. One innovative CEO of an Italian 3D printing start up learn that hospital, nearby the town he lived in. Her suffering dreadfully through the coronavirus outbreak was running short of a small but critical component that connect respirators to oxygen masks. Other supplies just could not keep up with demand, and doctors were in search of a solution. Christian Fracassi, who told Reuters recently when he heard about the shortage, they got in touch with the hospital immediately. They then printed some prototypes. The hospital tested the following day and they worked. They then printed 100 vowels and delivered them personally to the hospital and this is now created a new thriving business for the start up. Similar efforts have popped up around the world where firms are now printing 3D face shields and other items to help with the crisis.

3D printing is relatively new technology that most manufacturers are now aware of, and some indeed are using quite readily and you can build anything from tiny components right the way up to houses. What this does demonstrate, though, is that in a crisis, this disruptive situation we find is in can correct disruptive thinking and innovation in us all. There is a global hackathon-taking place right now online.

A hackathon is where a group of people get together, including developers, subject matter experts, where they come up with quick ideas, build and prototype products super quick. This new global initiative, or hackathon is called CoVent-19, ironically, and it is hosting an online moon-shot competition to develop and deploy a mechanical ventilator. The CoVent-19 challenge is fostering innovation of rapidly deployable minimum viable mechanical ventilators for patients with COVID-19, and the ventilator dependent requirements and injuries. Their goal and mission is to close the gap between the actual resources available and those that are in need around the world and distribute that product as quickly and as efficiently as possible and only four weeks in from start of the competition and the moon-shot thinking. There are already three prototypes that are being tested live with patients around the world. This just goes to show that if we throw away those assumptions, new thinking can flourish and new innovation and new ideas can be born and developed really quickly. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any insights, news or stories you like our listeners to hear, get in touch with us through our social media or our website.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: Dr. Simone Ahuja is a bestselling author, speaker and founder of the innovation strategy firm Blood Orange, is our special guest on The Leadership Hacker Podcast today, Simone. Welcome to the show.

Simone Ahuja: Thanks, Steve. Great to be here.

Steve Rush: So innovation and strategy is not where it all started for you, isn’t it? You start off in dentistry? If I am right.

Simone Ahuja: That is exactly right.

Steve Rush: So how did you end up going into dentistry then pivoting to doing what you are doing now?

Simone Ahuja: Yeah, People often ask me what is the connection between dentistry and innovation strategy, and I will tell you that one of the greatest skills I learned through dental trainings, I didn't practice dentistry for very long, but a long enough to understand how to manage anxiety. You know, there is obviously, there is a lot of that when folks come to the dentist. Ironically and interestingly, there is a ton of anxiety around innovation in some ways, because often when you are going into an organization, you are talking about innovation. It sounds like change and frankly, it is change and that change manifests as anxiety. So I think that, some of that training actually crossed over but it was actually a bout of Typhoid that left me pretty, pretty sick and hospitalized for 10 days. Some hallucinations, and high, high spiky fevers and maybe think that, you know, life is pretty short. This is not my path forward and I started to shift into a few other areas. I had been practicing improvisational comedy. I had been doing some filmmaking in addition to practicing dentistry very early on and I dove into those a little bit deeper. Ultimately, as I was making documentary films about emerging markets like India, I became kind of a market expert. We have a lot of Fortune 500 companies in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the area where I live and this was about the early mid-2000s.

Folks were saying, well, what can you tell us about these emerging economies? What is happening there? And as I became more of that market expert. I ended up making a documentary for PBS that was funded by Best Buy, the consumer electronics company. As they were thinking about not how to enter the market, but how do you look at a mind-set where if you don't have a ton of resources, like in an emerging market, but you still have to solve big problems, there's got to be a way to do that. What can we learn from that? So that really is where I first started diving into innovation, and that's where I realized that I love the anthropological piece of this, where I was diving in the market and talking to people, understanding what makes them tick and kind of putting different ideas together. Then that documentary led to a concept that I learned about called Jugaad. Jugaad Innovation I later called it with my co-authors and Jugaad is this way of doing more with less, so I don't have a ton of resources, but I've got to still solve these problems. How do I do it? And so, you know, we started writing about that in the Harvard Business Review and literary agent then pinged us and said, would you like to write a book about this concept?

And that is it. That is how it all got started. Back when I did this, I think it was probably thought of as a little bit more atypical. I think now we just call it a multidisciplinary background of these experiences in your hat.

Steve Rush: Exactly, right.

Simone Ahuja: But that is how it all started.

Steve Rush: It is a really neat and interesting backstory and often what I find through working with lots of entrepreneurs is there is often a moment in their lives where something has happened. In your case, it was not being very well. Created that inner self-thought of, “I got to do something different” and that's really neat. And you know, I never made the parallel between going to the dentist and innovation but I can see it, I can experience it. I work with a lot of organizations and you go through that same nervous in-trepidation that comes through, of “I don't know if it's going to work and will I be safe?” All of these same emotions really that happen in dentistry. What a neat parallel to have.

Simone Ahuja: It is and sometimes anticipation is the worst of it. Right? So if you can help people navigate that and have some compassion and understanding the why, I think, you know, I would say even younger in my innovation career. Well, I think I understood the anxiety. I probably was not as compassionate about it as I should have been. It is something that I have learned as I have kind of matured in my innovation strategy practice is really understanding the why? Why the fear? Why the anxiety? Why the push back? And helping people work their way through that.

Steve Rush: Jugaad Innovation has often been referred to as frugal innovation and Jugaad is the Indian word for frugality, is that right?

Simone Ahuja: Yeah, Jugaad is a Hindi term. It actually originated in Punjab. A northern state in India, and what it originally was like a jury-rigged farm vehicle. So take any parts that you have available to you. Make a vehicle that will serve multiple purposes. It could be tilling soil. It could be hauling things. It could be transporting people and, you know, these were not always the safest vehicles, but they were vehicles that would get the job done and everybody unfortunately does not have the choice to have the safest, most luxurious vehicle. But the concept was one of taking things that were readily available to use, so not thinking about what I don't have, but rather what do I have that can help me get these jobs done, right. All of us are familiar with that phrase jobs to be done. That vehicle is what the original Jugaad was and it became more of a colloquial term, so if you say I am going to do some Jugaad, it means I am going to fix this in some kind of way. Maybe it is a quick way to do it. Maybe it is an improvised way to do it and a lot of times those solutions are not the end all be all solution but there's something that can get you to the next step.

And there's actually some controversy in India. People who really understand the meaning of this word about, well, is it really valuable or not? And what I will say is when I worked in India for eight months doing my on the ground research for the book Jugaad Innovation. I learned about that practice of leveraging ingenuity and leveraging improvisation and thinking about what you have rather than what you don't have. For me, having been trained as a scientist and the empirical approach, you know, which is actually a kind of a good discovery process, it's still much more linear and so I was managing two teams, one team in India, one team in the United States and it was very interesting. All of them were so bright and putting forward great ideas, but they were different, so we learned a lot from each other. Where in the US the teams were putting forward a great ideas in a more linear fashion that were really valuable. The teams in India were… I will give you an example. We were filming some case studies about what is Jugaad or Jugaad Innovation look like? And we went out to look at some micro small energy like windmills that salt farmers had created in this desert called the Rann of Katch and we were literally in the middle of nowhere.

I mean there was and is still no G.P.S. in that area. And our guide was a man with a very long white beard and if he went down, we may go down with them. There was nothing, nothing really in sight, and we were trying to capture some of this story. The ground became kind of craggy and it was interesting because my team, we didn't have a Steadicam. Right, so we were filming this and we needed a better picture as we were driving along and we could not go and rent something. But my team immediately said, well, we'll do some Jugaad and that's when I remember thinking, like, What is that? Whatever it is, let's do that. Because we are going to run out of time. We are going to run out of water. We are going to run out of fuel and that is it. Shows over and so what they do is they just sort of fashion something out of whatever we had in the van, so we had pillows. We had some pipes. We had some twine and they put something together that allowed us to capture a more steady image that was good enough for us to continue forward and that's when it kind of dawned on me that this is a different approach.

And I think, you know, this is where I started really thinking about striving for perfection, which is really a kind of a myth in many ways. It is not to say you don't want to have excellence or safety and thinking about how do we improvise solutions. And that's the thing that I wanted to really bring back and share here in the United States and Europe and the U.K. What does it look like to have more of that improvised mind-set? And to be sure, you know, we have a ton of that in our entrepreneurial communities and if we look back further, our farmers, if we look at the way that small farms used to operate, those are the ultimate Jugaad innovators.

Steve Rush: It is a super story and if you think about the principles of Jugaad and being frugal, probably the environment that we are in now has never needed Jugaad more. Global pandemic organizations having to be really thoughtful about how they use their money, their resources. How do you think that the environment that we have been forced into now is going to change the lens as to how we might approach innovation in the future?

Simone Ahuja: So I love this question. I have been thinking about this a lot and I think Jugaad Innovation has never been more relevant than it is right now. In the face of a pandemic, in the face of a crisis like the one that we're in and we're seeing this in real time. So the priorities are getting very crystal clear, the simplicity. There is a lot of complexity in terms of things like, well, who is doing what? But in organizations that I am working with right now, everybody's peeling back all the fat. Let's get really focused on what our problem is. Let's identify that and let's address that in the best way possible, so the simplicity is coming forward. The idea of leveraging ingenuity is happening in a way like I've never seen it in a lot of organizations, and you'll see that, too, right? We see that in a lot of digital platforms that are getting quickly created. The way that, you know, there are teams working from home where they did not before. Organizations are starting to have to flex that way.

Steve Rush: Right.

Simone Ahuja: Which is, you know, creating an environment where we need to trust more, which is something we could talk about a little more as well. But ventilators are being created in a way that they weren't before. By organizations who never created them before or maybe, two people have to use two ventilators. Maybe these are things; we have to start thinking about so it is really creating a time when we have to leverage a more flexible mind-set. And this idea, you know, it's interesting. I was working with one organization where, you know, the senior leader came to me and said, look, we want you to help us think about how do we fend off external disruption and when the COVID crisis struck, there was sort of this question mark of should we continue with this? And, you know, the answer is you have to continue with this, because this is the disruption. It is just taking a different shape than we thought it would. It is not a start-up or another large organization. It is taken the shape of a pandemic. This is disrupting your business. This is disrupting the way you work and now you have to respond to it using these different principles. You know, you have to do more with less. You have to leverage ingenuity. You have to make sure you are addressing your customer needs, whoever they are, whether they are internal or external. Now I think is the best time to apply the principles of Jugaad Innovation to fend off this external disrupt.

Steve Rush: Got it and also, I think mindset is something you talked about, quiet a lot and this is something that you write about quite a lot in terms of the mindset around innovation and having a pandemic forces people into doing things. Creates that disruption at discomfort. How much of a mindset though, as to what you then do next plays out here.

Simone Ahuja: This is a really important question, so what I'm observing in real time with clients right now. Is that this pandemic is demonstrating what is possible. You know, there is an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote that says, “A mind once shifted or changed shape, can never return to its original shape.” And I believe that's true, so now what we have to do is make sure that there isn't…you know, there might be another shape shift that occurs in mind-set.

The question I have for the leaders who have seen this shape change is, now that you've seen people operating in a different way, now that you see people, for example, a person in one area going to another area, because that's where they're needed, not because they're worried about their title, because that's how they have to address the problem, the real problem at hand. The question for the leader is now, now what are you going to do? How are you going to make sure the shape is maintained or even accelerated? What are you going to model? What are you going to reward? What are you going to support? What systems will you put in place so we don't go back to the way it was? Nobody wants to stay in a state of heightened fear forever. It is exhausting; people are getting tired at the same time. There is a ton of good that is coming out of this. Leaders have to think about, what are the systems we put in place to support this? And I think what's really interesting about what we're seeing in real time in almost every organization is, you know, it's extracting more value out of organizations, out of people and stretching their limits. Even if they were pushing back against changing, it is showing them what they can do. It is a way that had to happen, so I think that's the piece that's really interesting, is now you're seeing it. It is not that some leader is saying, well, this is part of an innovation initiative. You have to do it, It is actually happening.

Steve Rush: Having a leadership mindset of innovation also is not just about you dictating the pace and creating the environments, set to the strategy. This is about how you unlock the capacity for innovation within the teams you work with, right?

Simone Ahuja: Yeah, that is right.

Steve Rush: Internally, most leaders who have more of an innovative mind-set will start to think about how they develop intrapreneurship in their teams and how do we create that entrepreneurial spirit internally. In your latest book, Disrupt It Yourself. You take that to another level don’t you? You call them DIY wires, disruptive it yourselves. Tell us a little bit about that.

Simone Ahuja: So intrepreneurship is gaining a lot of popularity right now. You know, as we see more and more start-ups that are potentially able to disrupt big established players. As we see that in only 14 percent of new graduates want to work in large organizations, large organizations are saying, well, hey, how can we embody some of that spirit and energy so that we can actually sustain ourselves? We know that the big companies are falling off the map, whether it's S&P 500 or other, you know, other indices, they're just not there as long as they used to be. So intrapreneurs were more higher ranking. They were really thinking more about the kind of existing products or enhancements or kind of related services, they were the lone wolf. They were kind of looking more at the past, whereas the deal DIY wires are more democratic. It is everyone.

You know, one of the first things that we do when we go into organizations is do kind of a check in on who is actually coming up with the ideas and if it's only people who are as senior leaders and corporate, we know that probably they don't have a really complete spectrum of ideas. Right, so it is about being democratized and being more inclusive. It is about altogether new ideas and to be very clear, it is not about chasing shiny objects. I think it is really important for organizations to think about how do we advance our existing business priorities using innovation as a tool, a leveller methodology. All right, so it is not that we are just going off on tangents here. We are still meeting needs. We are just doing it in a completely different way, and I think DIY wires are more collaborative.

You know, if the intrapreneur of, you know, 30 years ago, it's kind of the lone wolf in their garage, the DIY wire rather, is kind of someone who is more collaborative. They are able to enlist people. They understand that, you know, they are not going to have all this problem-solving prowess at their fingertips and not just the problem solving, but also how do you socialize and evangelize ideas? How do you keep ideas going? And then moreover, how do you keep the energy moving through the organization so it doesn't die out early? Those are some of the fundamental differences between an intrapreneur when the term was first coined 30 plus years ago and a DIY wire.

Steve Rush: Given, many folk listening to this will be leading organizations and teams.

They will be used to processes and systems that helped create the outcomes for innovation and thinking, things like Six Sigma and agile transformation. How do you move away from the control as a leader in holding onto these processes and give control to the teams to really kind of allow that flare an innovative flair and entrepreneurship and DIY wire is to come to the fore?

Simone Ahuja: So if we think about what Six Sigma is, it is really all about optimization and that is kind of a code word for sameness. Right, but that is tough, especially in today's environment. Things are changing really fast and we've especially seen that now in the midst of the COVID crisis, and you can't really schedule creativity and ideas and say, well, I'm going to have, you know, eight creative ideas on Wednesday at 3 p.m. So that is a huge challenge of the linearity and the sameness that Six Sigma Drive, so, you know, my sense is that is a discipline of the past, not of the future. Whereas, of course, if we look at, you know, agile, not as a software development approach, but as a management or a business approach, it makes a ton of sense because it really is one that kind of inspires organizational fluidity. All right, so we are thinking about. What are our requirements and how do our solutions evolve over time? You know, through the collaboration that we do, how do we think about not only what we are doing, but what we're not doing? And I think that's the power of agile. Right. You are updating along the way and removing things that are no longer needed.

Now, the thing that is interesting about this from a leadership perspective is this requires rapid change and this requires trust and I think that trust is so fundamental to innovation, and we see this over and over again. You know, we have seen this out of Google when they looked at their teams that were the most effective.

They were not the teams with the best pedigrees or the most experienced. They were the teams that built the most psychological safety and I think we have to hammer that message home. I recently with my team did some deep dive research with a team of leadership about this idea of safety. You know, what is working innovation? What is not? And psychological safety came up as a top barrier. However, out of, you know a handful of leaders; 80-plus percent said that is not true for my team. But we had the data in front of us, so it's a disconnect because nobody wants to feel like they're not fostering that safety and that trust in their teams, but it's happening all the time. And when you don't have the trust, you're not setting up an environment for new ideas. You are setting up an environment that is going to only do something safe. Something that we done before. You know, Adam Grant had a great tweet that he put out recently. You know if you are having issues trusting your folks who are working from home right now. Right. As everyone is shifting to most people working from home, you either should not hire them in the first place. You are not doing a good job motivating them. You are protecting your own core work at home habits or all of the above and I think that is actually quite true. So, you know if we think about is the old management paradigm, the old management paradigm is how do we keep people on the rails? And that's why Six Sigma made a lot of sense. That is exactly what Six Sigma is. How do we keep people on the rails? How do we keep things the same? How do we optimize?

 Today if we think about what the new management paradigm is in the 21st century, it is about creating space. It is about creating a permissionless environment and disrupt it yourself. I talk about the value of .What does it mean to be a permissionless environment? How do we build trust? How do we provide air cover and remove barriers for intrapreneurs rather than trying to keep them really kind of fine? So I think that that concept of trust. What I have realized is sometimes it is about the systems in place. Right, so if people come up with big new ideas or try something different, forget about not even rewards or incentives. They are actually penalties that is actually really true but what I've come to realize as I work with innovation teams, mostly in Fortune 500, is that it also can be a leadership issue. It also comes down to your own ability to lead and trust, which is connected to the broader culture but it's also connected to self. I would encourage any managers and leaders who are listening to podcasts to really look internally about why they may not be as trusting as they want to be.

Steve Rush: And to create a permissionless society you absolutely need trust, so for the folks listening to this, where would they start? What would be the kind of one place you would encourage them to think about or to take some action first to start the journey towards the permission less society?

Simone Ahuja: When we think about being permissionless, there are a couple of things that leaders can do. The first thing we talked about, the most important thing is how do I create air cover for my intrapreneurs? And I do that if I trust them, if I trust that they're working towards the greater good. Let's say we come to an agreement or they've identified a pain point for whoever our end user is and they're trying to solve it in a new way. How do I create space and how do I remove barriers that are coming up for them? And, you know, this is connected to having a more sort of decentralized approach to innovation. This means that even if somebody does not have innovation in their title, you are still supporting them and you are still allowing them and giving them that permission. Right. To be permissionless, and this is something that I see leaders butting up against very often where they, you know, the word permissionless. This is actually a title of one of the principles in my book. Make it permissionless; I got to tell you, if I've ever seen hackles go up. Permissionless is a big one.

Steve Rush: I bet.

Simone Ahuja: You can imagine. You have seen this in so many of the organizations you have worked with. Right, Steve?

Steve Rush: Right, I have for sure. It is a control thing, isn't it, really?

Simone Ahuja: It is.  

Steve Rush: I am now having to give away control to something I had control of when I was a leader. I am now giving it to you and I am saying you have the ability and the permission to go ahead and you do not have to ask.

Simone Ahuja: That is right. That is exactly right and, you know, I think there is so much inside of it. It is about ourselves. It is about trust. It is about our mob. It is about the various metrics that we have. It is about not knowing necessarily what is that path look like? So if we think about, you know, how do we quickly and easily create a more permissionless, environment? There some simple things that you can do. The first thing is you have to start signalling this, so when people act in a permissionless way, you have to hold it up and say, look, this isn't exactly how all always did it. Here is someone who tried a different approach. Here is what we learned from it and I think it is important that it is not always, quote, “success”. Share the learning so that people understand…permissionless environment is also one where learning is valued as a currency. And it's not just the so-called wins are value. Right. By the way, you know, there is so much talk about failure. That is the other problem, so much risk aversion and there is a concern about failure. From childhood, there is a lot of shame around this word of failure and in our practice; we just don't use that word anymore. I know a lot of people like to, and I think it works for some organizations but what we've found is that if we prove a hypothesis out, it's learning and then if we disprove a hypothesis that's also learning and it helps people reframe their path forward.

And if you're experimenting and trying new things, invariably a lot of things aren't going to work out. What leaders can do is talk about it, signal that it is okay. Reward people who are acting in this way. You know, for some organizations, we have had to establish baby steps and that looks exactly like this. Instead of being broadly permissionless, you go to your manager. You agree on the problem that you are going to solve. You agree that there is a need for that. You kind of make your case about here's this pain point. I want to solve this problem. I don't know exactly how I'm going to do it, but I'm going to check in with you every so often. And maybe you establish a cadence of when you check in and hopefully that check in is more about updating idea sharing and barrier removal than it is about you shouldn't do that. You are off the rails and you are not going to hit your mark and, you know, this is going to affect our P&L. Right, so there are two different ways you can go. So the idea is, you know, create that kind of a system between individual contributors and managers, because sometimes you have to get that granular and it has to be a little bit more permission in the permissionless. To be realistic in some organizations.

Steve Rush: And you are so right about the whole principle of failure verse learning, and the reason that is so important for people to get their heads round. Is that failure goes to a different part of the brain than learning does. Failing goes to a part of a brain in the limbic system, and it can create responsiveness that is really unhelpful, whereas learning is a positive outcome and it triggers the right thinking but more importantly, keeps the front of our brain working, which is where we make executive decisions. It is absolutely important that people reframe in that way, isn't it?

Simone Ahuja: That is so true; Steve and I think this kind of winds back to what we were talking about earlier about the psychology and the neuroscience and so in a way, it is sort of like how are we compassionate around this? You know, why are people risk averse? Why is their perfectionism? Why are we not interested in failing? And a feeling is way too hard. Let's just call it learning because it literally….

Steve Rush: Right.

Simone Ahuja: Creates a different chemical response in our bodies.

Steve Rush: So true. If people are thinking now of a permission less society, got people running in different directions or doing crazy things. They have a wrong view wouldn't they?

Simone Ahuja: Right.

Steve Rush: Because that is not really what that means.

Simone Ahuja: That is right. It is not about, you know, I am going to intentionally run into walls over and over again. I have carte blanche to do whatever I think without really being thoughtful about the, best way forward or enlisting others or making sure I stay really connected to my customer or we're mitigating risk by, making the steps that I take or the experiments that I do really small. It is not at all about that. It is very much about, you know, testing your way forward and, and learning and in small steps and frankly, it is actually quite the opposite, right? And you know this from your practice. If we experiment our way forward and we take these tiny little bets over and over again, we'll get to a better outcome than if we make a couple of massive bets and one of them goes wrong or it doesn't work out in the way we want to.

Steve Rush: It de-risks the situation, doesn't it?

Simone Ahuja: It sure does. It de-risks the situation. That is exactly right.

Steve Rush: So if we have created more DIY wires as and they are running around now with this mind-set that says I have permission to be innovative and we're creating more disruption in our organizations. In your experience, is this ultimately going to lead to more disruptive behaviour and a lack of discipline?

Simone Ahuja: No. it isn't, I think what it leads to is it leads to more engagement. Now, while I don't think that, you know, we should hold up innovation only as an engagement tool. I think if that happens, that might be a little dangerous. We know that innovation is really imperative to sustain in today's environment. But what I've seen very clearly is that operating in this way and giving people…Dan Pink, you know, phrases and the research he has done that mastery and giving them the autonomy and often a sense of purpose that comes with, you know, solving problems about something that you care about. You identified that need is you create a tremendous amount of engagement. You provide more creative outlets, you get better ideas and it's not that everybody goes rogue. It is again comes back to this idea of trust.

And so it's about putting those people together in a way that you still have a system. You are still systematically connecting the intrapreneur. The DIY wire with their colleagues and the resources they need internally and externally. You might put formal functions in place, you might have something like a chief innovation officer, you might not, you might have more cells of innovation across your company but what you do have. As you have systems that work hand in hand with these creative outlets, so I would say the biggest thing that this approach leads to and very clearly is engagement. And I think the beauty of this for large corporations is they have a lot of talent in their ranks that's under-utilized. You can bring this out; you can retain the people who have this kind of entrepreneurial sense in them. You can retain them and then they talk to their friends and in a way, they become kind of a recruiting tool and I think that is really crucial as we know that, you know, a lot of Grads don’t want to work with these big organizations.

Steve Rush: I love that principle. I think the whole kind of mindset around it differentiates some organizations in some teams and therefore, you become a walking advert. Because you are allowed to perform. You are allowed to be innovative. You can demonstrate flair and creativity.

Simone Ahuja: That is exactly right and what we know is that a lot of these folks talk to each other, right? It is so easy to do that, you know, nationally and internationally. So it really does become a network. Well, this organization is actually embracing you know, being a DIY wire an intrapreneur. Okay, let me check that out, you know, because I think there is a lot of lip service to this kind of approach, but the companies that are actually enjoying it are attracting some really strong talent from the outside.

Steve Rush: So as a leader, in order to create disruption but also maintain discipline, that is part of the system, isn't it? So how do I go about doing that?

Simone Ahuja: I think that is an important question because we have to understand that creativity and driving disruption and having discipline are not at odds, in fact, that they are complimentary, right. When we put systems in place, systems that have flexibility. Systems that have guardrails and not sharp delineations, they are actually highly, highly complementary. So one of the most important things that people can do. If you want to start off really small, have an ideation session, have something like a hackathon, ask people to add in. That is a very simple starting place, you know, but just make sure you don't have an idea box where nothing gets executed on. That's the probably the biggest thing I would say the biggest don't have innovation. That is all way to create a kind of a structure. You know, companies like Intuit, if you read and, disrupt yourself. Do a great job of, of having things like hackathons and having places for people to add an idea.

But then they also have places for intrapreneur to connect to each other outside of there. They also have coaches, so these are people inside the organization who've been there. They have been the intrapreneur, they understand the passion behind the idea, they understand the challenges and the barriers that might come up. So you have these internal support system and then of course, if you have incentives and other metrics that support entrepreneurship, you have this discipline but you still get the creativity. So I was just talking to someone yesterday, in fact at a manufacturing organization where they have incentives that change every four months because the things that they're doing are changing very quickly and the incentives have to be changed a month in advance. Because if you are having incentives based on what you do over the course of a year, they may not be relevant over the course of year, so rapidly changing metrics I think are a part of that.

And that's where, you know, I think that this is where smaller teams can be really useful or again, that trust of asking a team, well, what do you think your metrics should be? You would help define the new KPIs. You are embedded in this more than we are. How many of these things should bring forward? How many of these ideas are going to come to fruition? How many of them are going to go to market and so on. So let the teams become involved in that and that co-design even of the metrics, KPIs, etc. Is a part of how you fostered the disruptive shifts without disruption in the system, it's a really beautiful marriage of creativity plus some structure because if you don't have any structure, what we find is then things just go off the rails. It is not going to really be effective.

Steve Rush: And it is a myth, isn't it? That, you know if you are creative and innovative, that it is mutually exclusive from execution. And of course it's not and that's where that leadership discipline comes in. Right?

Simone Ahuja: I think that is exactly right. So what I will say is, you know, after writing Jugaad Innovation and bringing these ideas back, what we've seen over the course of the last, let's say 10, 15 years, is that ideation has really changed. There will always be smart people in these organizations. But the ideas are getting broader, you know, these methodologies like lean and design thinking very parallel to Jugaad Innovation. Being divergent before your convergent, that is starting to become much, much more common. What is challenging is to bring the new ideas forward if you have to put them through a sieve of the existing system. Think about it this way, it is sort of like, are you building an executing for your end user or are you not doing that because of your existing business model? Right? So that is the trap that organizations get into and that is why, you know, we write about, you know, organizational agility and fluidity in addition to the mind-set of the innovators. If your organization has no space to shift in its structure, if you have no shift in metrics, you have no shift in the ability of teams to move around to some extent. You know, the ability to drive big innovation starts to become more limited.

Steve Rush: It is fascinating and I could spend all day talking about this with you, but our guests are also going to want to extract some extra top tips and ideas. I would like to ask you what your top leadership or innovation hacks would be?

Simone Ahuja: Yeah, I love giving people a quick starting points because sometimes it is just hard to get started. In terms of seeding an idea, one is just keeping the user at the centre. Who is your end user? And what is their real problem? Are you solving the right problem? And for an innovation crowd, that's old news, but what I'm here to say is it's still a massive problem. I see it every day in almost every organization. The user is not at the centre. We are still operating on a ton of assumptions. You know, another thing that folks can do is if there is pushback, you know, if people are trying to think about new ways to bring ideas forward, there is pushback. Enlist those people, those very people into your process. That is something I learned pretty early on. So, for example, we would often get pushback from legal and we learned as we sort of ate our own cooking and did our research is legal would be irritated and frustrated because they would always be brought in on the back end, not the front end.

And to be clear, it can't be anybody from legal, just anyone. It has to be the right person with the right mind-set but there are folks in legal out there who love helping you navigate the grid and they will finely do it. If you bring them in early, they can become an internal champion and advocate rather than sort of an adversary or someone who is pushing back on you on the backend. I think innovation is happening organically in every organization. Hold it up put it out there. Simple things like a leader, putting out an email saying. I think now's a great time to do this, to start cataloguing the innovation that is happening in your organization right now. Probably directly as a result of the COVID crisis. Sharing that, holding it up. And asking people what else is happening?

What have you seen? Send me a note let me know about it, and then asking the question, well, how do we make sure this really continues? That is really powerful to people, for people to see what's already happening in their organization and understanding shift is occurring, that we can do this here, and then finally I would say do more with less. You know, there is a chapter in my book Disrupt it Yourself that is a nod to Jugaad Innovation. It is called keep it approval, so this is really about how do we deliver high value at low cost? How do we do more with less? So I think that is a part of it is thinking about, well not what don't I have? Like I need a giant room with whiteboards and a lot of posted notes or I can get started right now. If I have a lunch and learn with a couple of people who have some big ideas and we just kick some things around. Doing more with less also means do less talking and get into action.

Steve Rush: Right.

Simone Ahuja: I think I will, end up there. I mean, if there is one thing that people should do is just, get into action, take a tiny little step, something that a third grader could understand. Your phrase starts with a verb; you know, research something for 15 minutes or call this person to ask them about how I might solve this problem. It start very small and get into action.

Steve Rush: I love those and they are super hacks. Thank you for sharing those with us today. Simone.

Simone Ahuja: My pleasure.  

Steve Rush: This part of the show also, we want to think about how you've used something that may not have worked well for you in the past or a time in your work or your life where things have not planned out in any way, shape or form. We call this Hack to Attack. So what would be your Hack to Attack?

Simone Ahuja: I will go back to this piece about compassion. So I've learned that if you try to push innovation on people because it's the right thing to do, even if it really, you know, no matter, what you feel or think, if someone's not ready for it and you use a stick approach, it's not going to work in any meaningful and long-term way. And so I have become much, much more conscious and much more compassionate in my approach to innovation and teaching innovation in guiding leaders to have compassion. So for example, even if we think about the metrics, we might say, you know, it is important for everyone to bring ideas forward. Everybody has to bring five new ideas forward to this meeting. Which is a great way to start some meetings; by the way, that is another hack, but what happens is the people who are introverted. The people who are not comfortable speaking in a group environment get left out, and so an example of that kind of compassion is maybe those people are identified and, you talk to them separately and you make sure that they are not excluded because they don't fit a certain mould of what innovation looks like. So I would say that is one of my biggest learnings of the last several years. Push does not work. It is not effective for anyone. It does not lead to lasting impact. I think a compassionate approach to innovation is the way forward.

Steve Rush: I could not agree with you more, and the last thing I wanted to unpick with you is we do a little bit of time travel. At this part of the show is where we take you back to bump into Simone at 21. Now, if you could speak to Simone when she was 21 and give her some words of wisdom and some advice, what would that be?

Simone Ahuja: Follow your heart. Follow your heart. You know, as you get older, hopefully you come into your own. You start, you know, we talked about trust a lot today, and as you get older, hopefully you trust yourself more and more. You know, there is a kind of a balance in a way of what you learn. You know, there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom and part of that wisdom is understanding what intuition is and why there is intuition. So I would say those feelings that you have where you know something is or isn't the right thing, follow those earlier on and don't worry about what others say is, I think that's a very common thing we hear entrepreneurs say is there are lots of naysayers. That does not mean you don't take anyone else's opinion into consideration, but I would say follow your heart.

Steve Rush: It is clear that over the last 15 years. Having followed your heart, you've now driven not only something that helps others get into the principles of frugal innovation and Jugaad, but actually you can see in everything that you do Simone, and having watched some of your talks and having read Disrupt It Yourself, you know, compassion is a key theme that runs through that. So thank you for sharing that. As folks have been listening to you today, I am pretty certain that they'll want to know a little bit more about you. Where would you like my daily to go to find out a bit more about the work that you do and how they might want to connect with you?

Simone Ahuja: Thanks Steve. I am glad the compassion piece comes through. It is definitely something that is a high priority for me and for Blood Orange right now. If folks want to reach out or learn more about us. They can to blood-orange.com and if they want a tool that they can use, they can go onto contact and just drop in their email and write innovation action plan in the title and we will drop them out. A very simple plan that they can use to get started. We talked about getting into action so we can send them something like that. We've also got an innovations kind of StrengthsFinder assessment that folks can check in about as well.

Steve Rush: Great stuff and really practical help and advice through your website too, and it's just goes without saying Simone. I have really enjoyed chatting with you; I have studied your work for the last few years and had a ball having the opportunity to speak with you today. Thank you ever so much for joining us on The Leadership Hacker Podcast today.

Simone Ahuja: Thanks, Steve. This is a great podcast and I have enjoyed listening and being a part of this. 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.

Greg Orme is an Award winning author and business keynote speaker and is our special guest on Episode 14. Find out why we should stop competing with AI but to instead start to differentiate ourselves. Explore the superpowers you’ll need to future-proof your value in the workplace: Consciousness, Curiosity, Creativity and Collaboration. We talk about Greg’s, “Dance Steps”. You can learn one-step and put them together in any order. You’ll learn:

• How do you create a culture of creativity?
• Consciousness gives us the motivation and the time.
• Curiosity is the fuel for creativity.
• Why having an experimental approach is key!

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Find out more about Greg and his work below:

The Human Edge (Business Book of the Year 2020)

Greg’s website: https://gregorme.org

Greg on Twitter

Greg on LinkedIn

Read the full transcript below: 

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Introduction

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 the show today is Greg Orme. He is the author of the business Book of the Year for 2020, The Human Edge. Before we get a chance to speak with Greg. It is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, we explore what age do we really start to develop entrepreneurial spirit. Our spirit can happen quite early but according to combined studies of the Duke University, the Kauffman Foundation, The Founder Institute and Northwestern; the average age of an entrepreneur is actually 40 years old when launching his or her first start up and the average age of leaders of high growth start-ups is 45. While Tech Media is ripe with stories, a successful 20 somethings founding their first billionaire empire, the truth is that 40 somethings are much more likely to start companies and succeed. Adeo Ressi founder of “The Founder Institute”, developed research that shows that older age is actually a better predictor of entrepreneurial success. The research in question is not small scale either. To get the data The Founder Institute tracked 3000 global applicants, examined in detail thousands of organizations, a thousand enrolled founders and track 350 of their graduates. So do we think the age really helps? According to Ressi, older individuals have generally completed more complex projects from buying houses, raising a family and in addition older people have developed greater vocational skills than the younger counterparts. We theorize that the combination of successful project completion skills with real world experience helps older entrepreneurs identify and address more realistic business outcomes and opportunities.

This is borne out not only by research, which shows, amongst other things, that people over 55 are twice as likely to launch high growth start-ups than those under 35, but by scanning just a quick list of successful entrepreneurs: Ray Kroc was 52 when he shaped McDonald's into the multi-billion global organization that it is. Sam Walton was 44 when he started small little company called Wal-Mart. Lynda Weinman co-founded Lynda.com at 40 and subsequently sold that to Linkedin for $1.5 billion and not a “twentysomething” among them. The fact is innovation culture suggests that it is more trendy and more youth orientated and it is not as cool for older folk. This leadership mind-set can be limiting for all. It can frame older individuals by making them feel useless or expired once if fit certain age, and can also hold back younger people by making them feel that they haven't achieved or they have failed if they haven't found that their next big social media platform by the time they're 21. And of course, young people can become successful entrepreneurs for sure, but it's extremely misleading to believe that this is the norm so if you haven't hit your first million and you're in your 30s and 40s and 50s, there's still hope yet, and our next story shows that entrepreneurial leadership has gotten no age boundaries.

The Utah Highway Patrol said, “a trooper conducting a traffic stop on a suspected impaired driver instead found a five-year-old driver seeking to purchase a Lamborghini”. The highway patrol said in a Twitter post that a trooper conducted a traffic stop in Webber County on what he thought was an impaired driver; but the driver of the vehicle turned out to be a five-year-old boy who had made off with his parents car. The boy who was pulled over at the 25th Street off-ramp of the southbound Interstate 15, told the trooper that he'd taken his parents car after getting into an argument with his mother, who told him she would not buy him a Lamborghini. He decided to take his entrepreneurial spirit to the next level and head off in her car in search of that Lamborghini. The child told the trooper that he did intend indeed driving to California to buy the luxury vehicle for himself and his mom would not get in his way. His only downfall was that he only had three dollars in his wallet. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news, insights or information, please get in touch with us and share your stories.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: Our guest today sparks creativity and business innovation in a fast paced, changing world. Is the author of The Human Edge, which has just been awarded the Business Book of the Year for 2020, is Greg Orme, Greg, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Greg Orme: Well, I am delighted to be here, Steve. Thanks for thanks for inviting me.

Steve Rush: It is absolutely our pleasure, and congratulations, by the way, on winning the Business Book of the Year. Fantastic achievement. I am sure you have been delighted with that.

Greg Orme: It has just been fantastic; really, game changing for the book and something I am really proud of, it's just been wonderful.

Steve Rush: And so you should be, so before becoming an author, you started-off your career in the TV world, right?

Greg Orme: Yes. 

Steve Rush: Tell us a little bit about the journey to here.

Greg Orme: Well, as a journo, I was a young journalist all the way back in the 1990s. My careers adviser at school advised me that it was not a good idea to go into journalism and of course, that is the only thing I wanted to do then. I clambered my way up from local newspapers, The Solihull Times to the Birmingham Evening Mail to the Nationals, down in London and then into television.

Steve Rush: And how did the television bit come about? What did that give you in terms of foundations for what you do now?

Greg Orme: Well, it is really funny, you know, because right now, obviously we're speaking when the world has gone virtual and so I'm doing a lot more webinars and sort of virtual presentations. And so the production of those really goes all the way back to producing television news because I was a young producer on London Tonight, which was the local television news there and then with ITN and ITV, and also along the way with the BBC.

So, you know, taking stories, really boiling them down to what the nuggets are, then deciding what format to use and writing scripts around it. It's all the stuff that you do when you're presenting, you know, virtual webinars and that kind of thing, so I've come full circle. It is really quite strange.

Steve Rush: So fantastic foundations given that when you were starting out your career, you probably had not realized the importance of calling upon them at a later date?

Greg Orme: Well, you never do, do you? You never know where your skills will take you. Actually, as a facilitator of face-to-face workshops and, you know, I facilitated boards of directors as well in my work on organizational change. Straight with organizations and via organizations such as the London Business School and Ducsy and various others. I found that idea of what a journalist does, which is to learn, ask interesting questions and then summarize and kind of guide the conversation. Has helped me all the way through my career. So yes, it has become really pertinent now, but I've always relied on those journalistic skills, actually.

Steve Rush: Communications are at the heart of everything we do, particularly when we are leading businesses, right?

Greg Orme: Yes. I mean, it is really central. I mean, my work now is sort of sits astride organizational change, but it is really working with the leaders that drive that change and catalyse it. And if you think about what leadership is, Steve, leadership is effectively communication and influence, especially in non-hierarchical organizations, which they increasingly are. It is your ability to move people through your communication, so it is separate to management, which is establishing what is going on and making sure there is some kind of consistency. Being a leader is all about communication. So even though I have not been a communication consultant for many, many years. Really, leadership is at the heart of the work I do with organizations and the people that run them.

Steve Rush: Right and given that you started out in journalism, you ended up in a leadership role and several leadership roles yourself and executive roles. How did that transition take place for you?

Greg Orme: Well, that came about because I went back to London Business School. They asked me back after I had done my executive MBA. To go back to be the founding CEO for a thing called the Centre for Creative Business, and that was a joint venture between London Business School and the big art schools, the University Arts London, which I said number of different art schools and fashion houses. The idea was we were exporting kind of MBA thinking from London Business School to creative businesses because the British government wanted more tax revenues from our creative sector and we were part of that, so that's how it started in terms of that was an executive role running and growing that. And then after that came to an end after four years because we had four years of funding. I then was an interim CEO with a large recruiting and HR services business called Randstad and Randstad; they are sort of global businesses, and I was a CEO of one of their businesses in the UK, so, yes, I had some experience at the front line, which is invaluable when I am helping people in similar situations.

Steve Rush: So during that time as CEO of a couple of businesses and getting into the world of creativity and innovation and new thinking. That was when you started your first book Spark, so how did that come about?

Greg Orme: The Spark was…it goes back to that idea of the Centre for Creative Business, and so the question that was often been asked, which is what can creative businesses. If we were sort of exporting, MBA thinking to creative businesses and it struck me that there is an interesting reverse of that question. Reversing the polarity issue to ask what can creative businesses, the likes of advertisers and TV production companies and design houses and architects teach the rest of the world. In terms of how they maintain an atmosphere of creativity in their organisations? I always think if you write a business book, you should have a central question that you are trying to answer, and the question there was, you know, what can creative businesses teach the rest of the world? And so that's what the spark is. It’s how do you create a culture of creativity? How do you have behaviours of leadership? Because in most of the research, that has gone into creativity in organisations and I mean all organisations, not just ones that call themselves creative. The sad thing is that creativity gets killed more often than its encouraged just by the rules and regulations of business, so it's something that you have to protect and nurture.

Steve Rush: In my experience as a coach and leading businesses too; one of the biggest things I find about creativity is often when you are more extroverted and you are able to come and demonstrate and showcase creativity, it's more noticeable. But actually there is an inordinate amount of learning to be had from people who appear less obviously creative, but equally have the same level of thinking and creativity and creative flair, if you like. How do you go about enabling that in people who are maybe more introverted?

Greg Orme: Yeah, absolutely. I am not sure. It is about introversion and extroversion for me. You know, looking at the research, I think introverted people can be just as creative as extroverted people. You probably just won't hear their ideas as readily. What is really interesting for me is that creativity is one of those words that's very exclusive. It is often thought of as for geniuses or for artistic people over a certain type of person, whereas the reality is we are all born creative. And then the culture of our schools, sadly, and also the culture of our businesses, kind of beat out of us. We realize that our creative thinking is not as welcome as we thought it might be. So there's a lot of really interesting research that shows that, you know, if you do creativity tests like the Torrance Test on kids that are five years old, something like 98 percent of them score very highly in their ability to apply divergent thinking, which is a foundational stone of creativity. By the time, we are fifteen that is gone down to 30 percent, and by the time we are in the workplace, it is down to twelve, five, two percent, and so it's our environment that knocks it out of us. In effect, I am on a mission with both my books really to try and help everybody to rediscover their creativity, not just the chosen few.

Steve Rush: That is a really interesting statistics. It is almost we have unlearned how to be creative by the environment through school, education, work and forced parameters around our behaviour.

Greg Orme: Yeah, well, unlearning is a really good word for it. In fact, George Land, who did the original study on this, who came up with these really rather depressing statistics. That was the conclusion of his report after 20 years of studying this cohort of American schoolchildren, that went into the American work environment was that if you are creative thinking is, you know, effectively unlearn it from your environment. Well, anything that can be unlearned can be relearned, so that is the silver lining from this, that actually you can rediscover your creativity as well as been a skill. It is an attitude. You know, you really can step back into your creativity enough, and that, as been a personal journey for me, and also, it's a personal mission for me to help other people do that because it's life changing.

Steve Rush: And it is really reassuring for those people who are listening to this who maybe think I'm not as creative as I'd like to be. We've probably got all of those foundations somewhere tucked away at the back of our brain. We just need to pull them forward, right?

Greg Orme: Absolutely. You know, I like to think of it as this. If creativity I was saying, is this exclusive word there. That, you know, one of those red velvet rope surrounds that say you can't come in. If you actually dig down to sub worlds that support it, like curiosity, questioning, learning, engaging, sparking two ideas together, talking to other people, we can all do these really simple things like questioning and learning. So if you can do that, our human brains are actually programmed to make connections to do what psychologists call general thinking, i.e. connecting things together. You can't help yourself. You just need to put the fuel and the energy into your brain and have the attitude listen for the ideas that come and don't dispel them. We can all do it.

Steve Rush: That is excellent I love that. So moving on to your work now. So global keynote speaker, facilitated hundreds of sessions across the globe for different organizations, and in parallel to that, have written your award-winning book, The Human Edge. What was the inspiration for book number two from where you left off with Spark?

Greg Orme: Yeah, well, you know, I was thinking it came sort of five and a half, six years later. And I'd done a lot of work with a lot of big organizations in automotive and banking and all sorts of different places, and had the benefit of traveling around the world and sort of being a fly on the wall in these offices, and so I started getting really interested in where is the workplace. The future going and what is the role of technology and disruption, particularly because I think we're in a very disrupted environment. Of course, is extremely disruptive. Now with COVID-19, but it was happening before that with artificial intelligence and data vacation and new generations coming into the workplace and new digital tribes online and obviously the environmental crisis that we're all battling with. So we're in a very unstable environment, so I started talking a lot about the technological angle of that, and I actually was making a keynote at London Business School. Had gone back for an alumni event and one of the executives, the lady came up to me after I'd finished my speech and said, that's all very well talking about how technology and machines are changing organizations. But what really occurs to me, you're going on about artificial intelligence and how it's going to change the world. Where does that leave me in terms of the skills that I need to survive and thrive in this in this world? And what about my daughters? You know, what should I be telling them to study and become? I thought it was a really interesting question and I didn't really have the answer, and that was about four years ago. From there, I started exploring what I thought were the answers to that question, that became The Human Edge, which is to me. How do you become more human in a world of machines and disruption in order to make the most of what you've got? So future proof your own career.

Steve Rush: Got it and it is really interesting when I look at how the world has changed over the last 10 or 15 years. There is genuinely a threat or a perceived threat by many people around the world of robotics and AI and how that's impacting, and I think you call that the human challenge in your book, don't you? 

Greg Orme: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that has gone away a little bit now because I think we have all started to…I think it is still there, and that's where the debate was three or four years ago. It was human vs. machine, what is going to happen? And of course, actually in the same way, there's another trend. We have become a lot less trustful of our tech companies, our social media companies. We don't trust the ones on the West Coast, we've got Uber, which had a lot of scandals, and then we've got the Chinese unicorn and tech companies that are sort of veiled in secrecy. So generally, tech is not what it was, and also there is AI, which is, quote/unquote, taking our jobs. I think what I discovered in the book is for most people in the knowledge work industry; AI is not going to take your job, not anytime soon. What will happen is it will cheese slice away the algorithmic routine parts of your job, leaving you a space and this will happen over the next five to 10 years, leaving you a space in which to apply your own humanity. What differentiates you from machines? So that's an opportunity as well as a threat, and so that's what the book is about. It is taking that opportunity and really, really using you’re what I call human superpowers.

Steve Rush: And for me, it really is an opportunity but many people could be in that threat space because there is this. “If I let go of some of the routine tasks, I might be redundant” vs the mind-set that says no - It gives you more space for creativity and new ways of working.

Greg Orme: Yeah, and, you know, just to be clear, and I am sad to say this, I don't relish in bringing this news. That there will be some job types that will go completely. I think, you know, if you are a long distance lorry driver and that's, of course, autonomous driving, but it is really a subset of AI. That will probably go some sometimes or a lot of those jobs will go. Not all of them, because obviously driving in the city centre is far more complex than driving down a motorway, so there will be some types of driving that will go.

Effectively you can write down all the data and the decisions in any job type and then feed it into machine learning AI. It will probably get automated sometime in the next sort of five, six, seven years, but I think that's a small portion of jobs. Most jobs, as I say, will be cheese sliced and really what is left is what we do that machines can't, so, you know, we have a sense of humour. We have empathy; we can think generally. We can collaborate together. We can ask the next question rather than answering the last one, so that is curiosity, so this is why I came up with the idea of these 4 C of superpowers in the same way that I wanted to demystify creativity. I am hoping I can demystify all four of these C's and help people to develop them because they are skills that you can practice and get better at.

Steve Rush: And the book The Human Edge is about how we use our creativity and our curiosity, and you call them superheroes in our digital economy and I really love that kind of principle, and during the reading of the book, you have bunches and bunches of hacks often you refer to them as dance steps, actually. Let's get into the 4 C, I think it would be really helpful to go through how the 4 C’s of The Human Edge work together, so the first of the 4 C is consciousness and you say that's the gateway to the other 4 C. What is the reason that sits as the gateway?

Greg Orme: Well, just to explain the structure of it, there are 4 C and under each of the 4 C, there are two what are called dance steps that you mentioned. I call them dance steps, because you can sort of just like a dance step. You can learn one-step and then kind of do them in any order. They are not really linear. I don't think creative thinking is a particularly linear thing. However, there is an order, which is why I have done it in the order I have of consciousness, curiosity, creativity, collaboration and the order is this. I think that is the order of kind of ideation or allowing yourself to be creative and under consciousness. I have the idea of finding work meaningful, and I also have the idea of focus. Being able to direct your attention and find islands of time in which you can devote to your own curiosity and creativity, so the reason that is first is if you don't have the motivation to step forward and be courageous enough to be creative, you won't do it. Because it is an effort and it also implies for failure. Creativity always has failure as a component of it, and the other part, the other dance step under consciousness is this idea of focus and that is really about organizing your day in order or an average day in order to find time to be curious and creative. And so just to summarize that, my favourite quote on this is. Creative Minds may think like artists, but they were like accountants. What I am getting out there is that you really need to concentrate and focus in order to find the time to do it. Otherwise, you end up just chasing your tail in a very distracted world in which we are in now. 

Steve Rush: That is a great analogy and one I think can resonate with most people as they listening in. Curiosity is the next C and that runs through the other C, and a particular like the reference that you use around questions are the hallmark for leadership in our century. How did that come about? 

Greg Orme: Yes, so if you consciousness effectively gives you the motivation and the time. Curiosity, I think is the fuel for creativity and I think of the 4 C, Steve, as you know, they are all equal apart from their not. Creativity, a bit like the British prime minister. They sometimes say the British prime minister is the first amongst equals, I think, of creativity as the first amongst the C because curiosity and consciousness allow you to be creative.

Collaboration allows you to then take the ideas that come out of creativity and do something with them. So curiosity is really important for me because and the two dance steps are learning and questioning. Learning, because actually you need to keep pushing yourself forward and we know ideas come from when they when notions and concepts jump barriers between two different domains of knowledge, so you need to push yourself to learn outside of your specialisms and then what happens is you get these wonderful, serendipitous connections across boundaries in which ideas happen. So that is really, really important, I mean, you know we can all think of examples of that, so, for example. Ducal brings together the idea of academic citations with what was at the time this new-fangled thing called the World Wide Web, and that is what Google came from, so you need to learn…and the questioning helps you to challenge the world around you constantly, which again leads you to see it and frame it in different ways.

Steve Rush: And when you talk about creativity as part of your forces, you state within the book that, you know, consciousness and curiosity gives you the framework or the set up success or they set up creativity. And what particularly struck me within that is that you talk about luck as being a skill, and I wondered if we think about skills are refined and they are practised and we get better at them or not as the case may be through practice. How do you practice at getting lucky?

Greg Orme: Yeah. Well, I use that because it is a particularly provocative statement, isn't it? How do you practice being lucky? Well, I think the point is that a lot of people, if you ask them where do you have your ideas, they say, well, they sort of come to me, you know, I'm on a bike ride or I'm running or might be in the shower. And they see this as a lucky moment, this moment, this so-called aha moment, and I really find in my research about creativity. Is the aha moment even though it's got a great PR, you know, you could think of a hundred aha moments, the apple drop on someone's head or whatever it might be, what is much more important is the preparation that leads up to that. Aha moment. And that's what I mean about luck is a skill you can actually work on the things that will bring you aha moments, and what I do is put a lot of practical ideas in the book of what you can do to work on that.

Steve Rush: Got it, so the whole consciousness of being creative replays back in there doesn't it. It is taken those unconscious thoughts and thinking, bringing them to the conscious.

Greg Orme: Well, absolutely and one of the things I say is pay attention. Pay attention not only to the world around you. Look for the unexpected things that happen. A lot of the times we can spend our lives on autopilot. You know, we are driving the car. We are even not aware we were driving and we suddenly, 25 minutes later we are somewhere else. You know, it is about consciously from time to time paying attention to the world around you because that is where you get your ideas from and also listening to your own thoughts, being self-aware, because actually your subconscious brain often whispers to your ideas and sometimes you can miss them if your you're not paying attention. And there are 100 different other ways that creative people who make their living from coming up with ideas and in a way, I make my living from coming with ideas and putting them into books. Actually, they practice these habits every day to make sure they've got a store of new ideas coming. I mean, one of them is to literally waste nothing. When you read you look at a painting, have some way of collecting lots of things around you that you can go back to as a store of ideas.

For example, I use Evernote. I don't if you use this online way, so whenever I'm reading something online, I can tag it. It goes into my Evernote store and it is just kind of like having a brainstorm with a former self when I go through the things I have read, so, you know, there are lots of different habits that creative people use to ensure that they get lucky more often than.

Steve Rush: That is some really neat ideas and of course, they're lucky become the more successful you become. 

Greg Orme: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and, you know, as long as you keep practicing these habits, I mean, another one is to understand our brain does not just work on its own. It is part of a system within our body. So if you want to operate at peak performance and be creative, which is one of our higher functions, you have to make sure that you're fit, that you have time off, you have time to play. You get good sleep. Sleep is incredibly important than the research around sleep now and its connections with creativity is absolutely compelling, so in the book, if people come in there, they'll find something they can do every day that will just, you know, incrementally build up those curiosity and creativity muscles.

Steve Rush: It is habit forming, isn't it? It's not one of those things you can just do in isolation. It has to be repeated and repeated and repeated so that you are laying down those neurological pathways to create those tactile foundations.

Greg Orme: Yeah. I mean, fantastic. You have mentioned the brain there and neuroscience because, you know, as someone who has applied psychology in my work for many years, I am so excited now that we can actually have some hard science in there as well. No offense to psychologists, but neuroscientists can show you which part of the brain is lighting up, and what is really interesting to me in terms of creativity and exploration, curiosity. That releases a neuro transmitter called dopamine and dopamine is called the motivation molecule is something that makes you want to get up and go and the light side of dopamine is if you can release it, it makes you want to do something, which releases more dopamine, so as you were saying, Steve, it's a virtuous circle. If you can release this dopamine for me when you are exploring in your curious, you want to do more of it, and as you say, it just gets more and more and more and then you surround yourself with more creative people. You do more creative things and then it becomes not just a choice, it becomes a kind of a lifestyle.

Steve Rush: Almost a factory that refuels itself on that journey, too.

Greg Orme: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you just take one aspect of this, I was talking about how curiosity underpins creativity and I think people should stop aiming at creativity is like aiming at happiness. It is completely pointless. You know, what you have to do is aim at the things that take you there by a circuitous route. Curiosity is the best route. I think that is the motor way to get into creativity and what we know about the curiosity is. It is like a muscle, so if you use your curiosity, if you are asking questions, if you are surrounded by curious people, you will be more curious and if you don't, your muscles won't get bigger and stronger. They will waste away and so be really careful about the people you're hanging out with, the things you're reading, the things you're watching, the podcast you subscribe to. How are you getting your new knowledge? That is what is feeding this desire to find out more.

Steve Rush: and in the spirit of curiosity, your last C is Collaboration. This is about building a network of human collaborators. Now, for most people listening to this they will be going yeah that is pretty obvious. Surround myself with a bunch of people who can help me, but what are the dance steps you've got here for collaboration?

Greg Orme: Yeah, well, collaboration is the umbrella term for use it but I get quite specific with the two dance steps. So the first dance step is this idea of networking. Now it may be sound straightforward, but I find a lot of people don't attend to their network. They see networking, something kind of, you know, like recruiters do.  It is a little bit oily and, you know kind of business like that, really, it is about connecting to like-minded individuals and not just a small group of them. We all have so-called Dunbar's number, which is the amount of people in our sort of close network but really, it is about connecting to a much wider group because there is great research data to show if you have a wide, shallow network as well as some close colleagues. It is in that wide, shallow network of people away from you. That is where you will get your new ideas. In addition to that, you always have someone to take your new ideas too to get feedback, because honestly, most people's ideas are not very good. If you are going to have a large portfolio of ideas and by the way, that is the best way to be creative. Stop working on one idea. Work on quite a few. At the same time, then you want to try and improve them and the best way to improve them is to take them out to other people and get some honest feedback on it, so it's having this and developing and consciously, intentionally developing the network around you. That is incredibly important.

Steve Rush: Getting data for your creative, curious ideas. Is incredibly important because we come with our own biases, don't we? So how do we make sure that is the right data that we've got?

Greg Orme: All you can do, say for example, you know, when I'm writing my books, I have a group of twelve people or so who are really trusted colleagues who know the marketplace I'm writing for, who've written themselves, so I kind of just trust they... I don’t take it as read. I don't take it is like, oh, I must change that because they said this, but I will really, really closely listen to them, so I think it's a matter of understanding who you're going to for what. In terms of getting feedback and then honouring their feedback and just kind of keeping in mind and choosing the stuff that you really need. Because, I think one of the most compelling kind of insights that I actually find in this book and I did not realize before is, we know that creative superstars have something like 80 percent of the really, really good ideas. You know, you've got to ask yourself in all sorts of domains in mathematics and cooking and art and filmmaking, whatever it may be, Why are these people having so many good ideas? And the reality is they're not. What they are having is more ideas, creative people just generally cottoned on that, if you have more ideas, you will then have more to choose from, I think the follow up to that is even more fascinating that even the most creative people have been proven. They don't even know which of their ideas will work in the real world. They have to try them out and get feedback on them, and the trying out is the second dance step I have in collaboration, which is the idea of having an experimental approach. 

Steve Rush: What does that experimental approach entail?

Greg Orme: Being experimental is the idea of saying taking an idea and saying, well, what is the shortest possible route of least investment in time and money and risk to find out if this works in the real world? It is trying things out, but in a much more structured and scientific way. It is actually a concept that is being well promoted and use from the West Coast in the tech industry, because, of course, you can release software with very little risk and see if it works. And so it's bringing that approach into your life and thinking it can be as simple as a behavioural change or a new idea. How can I just get some evidence of whether this works or not? So you set up a hypothesis, you try something that you some what happens and then you pivot and move again. Rather than saying, I love this idea, this is what is going to be the rest of my life investing all your gold and time and fortune into it and then 12 months later, finding out it was not a very good idea at all. It is about really doing things very rapidly.

Steve Rush: The world is moving so quickly, isn't it? By the time we've kind of got our idea implemented, ready to go, we could be late. We could have missed the opportunity entirely.

Greg Orme: Yeah, I mean, that is the other risk. I mean the first risk I was talking exactly. It was the wrong idea. More probably, it is the wrong version of the right idea or it could be that you missed your opportunity because you did not get the first draft in the marketplace. Although I have to say, Steve, I think, you know, if you think about the alternative, which is the more corporate way of doing things, which is say we've got a great idea, we can follow, the motion, we're going to put three million this and we're going to make it happen. And that's the sort of strategic approach that's actually probably faster in the long run but if you think about it, much, much more risky because you've kind of made the assumption something will work and you put a lot of money behind it. I personally, I prefer to not lose money on bad ideas so that is why I think experimentation might be slightly slower, because you are pivoting and moving and learning and pivoting and moving but it's actually is a better way of reaching a really good product or a really good outcome for an idea. 

Steve Rush: I am with you. Now The Human Edge has won the Business Book of the Year for 2020. That is available for everybody to access download paperback, but what is next for you?

Greg Orme: Well, obviously, kind of my life splits into speaking and writing effectively, so on the speaking in the session’s front, you know, obviously, I'm now delivering lots of workshops, both online and off based on the insights in The Human Edge, and that's really exciting. So there is that a sort of kind of applying the knowledge that I have already got in terms of what is next in terms of writing, I don't know. I am looking all sorts of different things. I am very interested in communication, as you are saying, at the start of our discussion. You know, I was a journalist at one point. I have always used communication right at the heart of what I do, so I am kind of mulling ideas about how could I bring a new angle to communication and that is kind of interesting to me, but I'm really looking for questions, you know, coming back to the theme of ask better questions. I am always think, how can I ask a better question? And I'll know when I've got a good question I will start pursuing it with this experimental approach and see what comes from that.

Steve Rush: Perfect opportunity for experiments then.

Greg Orme: Exactly. Steve, I don't really trust the ideas I bring back off bike ride. I ride my bike around the lanes here in in Warwickshire and I get sort of high on endorphins about 45 minutes into the ride and have a load of ideas. Come back and I just think the best things ever and I always write them down and think I'll leave them for a couple of days, because when I come done off my endorphin high. I often find they are not very good at all, and so it is about not investing too early in your ideas and having enough of them and so I guess having enough questions is rather than getting obsessed by one straight away. But then following through and that is the writing process of when you have actually got the question. You have established, it is a good one, then you really need to focus.

Steve Rush: We wish you best with what happens next. Greg, so this part of the show we have become familiar with me hacking into the minds of our guests. And I'd just like to get a sense from yours, if you're able to distil some of your dance steps, some of your experiences as a leader. What would be your top leadership hacks you could share with our listeners?

Greg Orme: Wow that is a good question. The first one would be and I have already said it, but you know, I just re-emphasize it for people. I think it is the heart of good leadership; I think is really the cornerstone of good creativity as well. See if you can ask more and better questions every day. I think that is a great leadership technique because it not only sends a signal that you are curious in the world, it liberates other people to come into the conversation. It is a great way of really energizing a team, so I would say ask better questions.

Secondly, I would say and I have become very interesting and I do write about it in The Human Edge a little bit and I become more interested even since the book has been published in; the science underpins humour and fun. I would say to leaders in organizations, that you should be bringing humour and fun into the dynamic of your team. Because it helps enormously with cutting through in terms of your communication. It supports creativity and of course, it supports cooperation. If you can make someone smile, they trust you and that is what is needed more in companies now than ever. And generally, I would echo that the thrust of The Human Edge and my third one is if you're a leader, don't forget to drop the mask every now and then. Share your authentic self. Show your humanity. Because I think, people need that from their leaders and obviously, you can't keep doing it. Leadership is to some extent a performance art but I think people want to see a theme of humanity and authenticity and what you are doing, so drop the mask, and bring your humanity to work.

Steve Rush: I say great advice, thank you.

Greg Orme: You are welcome.

Steve Rush: Now to get inside and find out what your Hack to Attack is; and what that means is a period in your life or your work where something has not worked out as you had expected. Maybe it is screwed up. Maybe it has failed miserably. But as a result of the experience, we now use that in our life, and our work as something positive. What will be your Hack to Attack?

Greg Orme: Steve, you know, I do a lot of public speaking and keynote speaking. Well in the early part of my career, I was asked to give a speech and it was a kind of a more relaxed, informal kind of after dinner type thing and so I thought, you know, I don't want to ruin my ability to be in the moment and kind of react to it. I won't over prepare. I won't kill the magic, as it were, and I went along to give my speech and of course, as soon as I stood up in front of a couple of hundred people. Your brain works in a very different when you are up there and I could not you know, I did not really have it there at my fingertips. And I kind of realized in that moment, since I've really researched how other people do it and I looked at it and I've realized the actual preparation does not put you in the straitjacket. Being absolutely prepared when you are doing presentations and public speaking. Actually, counterintuitive, it releases you to be in the moment because you've got a very solid structure and so you can only leave a plan if you have a plan in the first place. So I find now when I deliver speeches, I kind of know what I'm saying down to literally 20, 25 second segments. I don't have a script because nobody can remember a script for long periods of time but I really know what I'm going to say, and that allows me to kind of, you know, leave those series of bullet points, because I know it's very solid underneath. So, yeah, I prepare in a really rigorous way for what I'm doing and it really helps.

Steve Rush: Super learning and preparation is foundation. So making sure that what you execute is executed in the way that you intend.

Greg Orme: Absolutely, you know, as I said, it makes me laugh and people still say to me. I am going to do this presentation. I am going to wing it because I wanted to be really fresh and in my view or maybe just me, but, you know, in my view, that's the wrong way to go. You need to be really super prepared and actually people think you are making it up as you go along. You are so well prepared but it is the preparation that allows for that serendipitous moment to happen.

Steve Rush: And then lastly, we would like to explore with you, Greg, is if you are able to do a bit of time travel, bump into the Greg at 21, what would be the best bit of advice that you would give Greg at that time?

Greg Orme: So much, I would like to say to the 21 year old me. Sadly, Steve, a very, very long time ago now. I think I only started writing quite late, really sort of seven, eight years ago. I was not writing back then. I would say to that person, I am sure the 21 year old me would not have had the confidence to think that he would go on to write award winning business books. So I would just say write. Write right every day, don't worry about what it's going to become or what it is, but just make sure every day you get 500 words down on something. Because what I have really discovered. Now, I have written business books and other pieces and magazine articles and created products. Actually, you don't know what it is until you start, so you just got to get going in and end the mess is actually where you discover the good stuff. So I would say just do it, whatever your creative output is and for anybody out there, whether you're a writer or whatever else you do, just do it every day because you'll find your ideas in that mess.

Steve Rush: Awesome advice. Thanks, Greg, so as folks are listening to this, they are probably thinking, I have heard a lot about The Human Edge. We know it's got awards. How do we get hold of a copy?

Greg Orme: Well, you know. Oh, it is on Amazon. It is on…oh crikey. Every online bookseller there is.  It was not until recently in the WH Smith travel stores. I am not sure if it is still there. I have not been out of my house for quite some time but the best place to get it is online. If you put in The Human Edge by Greg Orme, you will find it on Amazon very, very quickly or somewhere else if you prefer to shop with someone else. And of course, if people want to become part of my network, I'm constant releasing videos and snippets and blogs all the time. I am very active on LinkedIn and you can find me at Greg Orme also to a certain extent at Twitter, and I think I am @gregoryorme on there, or you can go to my website, which is gregorme.org.

Steve Rush: We will also make sure, Greg that we put details of how to access your book and all your social media sites in our show notes and on our website too, so as folks have listened to this, they can click and follow you straight away.

Greg Orme: Fantastic. Well, it has just been a fantastic conversation with you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me.

Steve Rush: And thank you for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast, Greg. It has been super and a massive congratulations from us and our team on your superb award. And good luck with whatever the future holds for you now.

Greg Orme: Thank you, Steve and same to you, cheers. 

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.

Matt May is Founder and CEO of Premier Team Building and Interactive experiences, he’s also a speaker and author of the Book, "Take the Fear out of Team Building." In this engaging and fun show, you can learn:

• Why “team building” is not a “bad word.”
• Why grown-ups have developed fear and anxiety around play and team building?
• How do you go about having fun/play yet keeping the learning real and authentic?
• How do you get folks to participate who just don’t want to get involved.

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

Find out more about Matt below:

Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattmayptb/

Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PremierTeamBld

Matt on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/premierteambuilding/

Matt’s Website: https://premierteambuilding.com/

Full Transcript Below

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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

Our special guest on today shows Matt May. He's the founder and CEO of Premier Team Building & Interactive Experiences Company. He's also a speaker, an author of the book, Take The Fear Out Of Team Building. But before we get a chance to speak with Matt, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: The values and culture play a real part in leadership post pandemic. We're going to look at how environments have changed dramatically over the last 10 years and particularly since the pandemic. It's exposed weaknesses and for some businesses strengths and the effectiveness of company values and how they're put into practice. I want to dive in and have a quick look at how leadership drastically changes company culture and how values inform it.

There's a fantastic report from the ILM called leading through values if you get a chance to get your hands on it, which gives you much more context and detail about the things I'm going to talk to you about. And just to throw something else into the mix that helps inform culture and values, right now. I wrote an article in CEOWorld Magazine and on LinkedIn called Mind The Gen Gap. For the first time, we now have four generations in the workforce, Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Zers or Gen Zers if you're in the UK. And the reason this is important is because values is the principles, the rules of the game, and we all have perspectives based on our generations. And whilst these are not scientifically proven, it's a good barometer and we should take it into consideration. The ILM research found that 69% of people will reconsider a job if the company culture seems to be toxic, 77% felt that company culture was incredibly important to them and the values that their boss also brings to the culture and 56% ranked opportunities for growth as more important than their basic salary and package. So, the top values that impact on culture are having a person centered and authentic approach with the core elements, being congruence. In other words, your words and actions make sense to your employees. Being genuine in essence, empathy, having a deep understanding of what it feels like for employees of every grade and every level and an unconditional positive regard for the individual.

And only if there is a genuine approach to demonstrate these values from senior leadership. There can be congruency throughout the organization. You'd expect wellbeing of employees to be up there and of course, it is. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, CIPD. Run a survey of over 3000 individuals in the UK. And the survey consistently found a 38% of workers experience work stress on a weekly basis. The problem in a lot of companies is that there is no clear standalone health and wellbeing strategy. In fact, only 8% of companies had such a strategy And at least 34% of managers expressed a need for independent authority and feel unempowered to really do anything. My observation here is if we have a people centered approach, wellbeing should be part of that, and we don't necessarily need to have a strategy or strategic. We do however need to be more thoughtful and compassionate.

And as a talent management and learning and development, professional. It’s music to my ears, to see self-directed on autonomous learning to sit up here in the top tier, there's been a significant shift away from organizations investing in organization-wide learning programs and much more focused self-directed autonomous learning and it's becoming more prominent in most company’s culture.

And this means that the company values are the basis of helping employees engage when it's meaningful and when it's right for them. But this strategy provides some challenges, too. Some people really struggle to learn on their own. They do need guidance, support, and others to help them on their journey. There are people not able to extract and absorb the information in the same way and still need that for face-to-face facilitator led sessions. And there's such a thing too, to have too much freedom. The number of possibilities can create overwhelm and anxiety. So, we have to sometimes help people direct them to the most appropriate resources.

And their last one on my list today is recognition. Remuneration is important for sure but recognizing staff for good jobs well done is most important and a significant indicator in value-based leadership. Many employees want to feel that their work is being valued and valuing values plays an important role in this because they should stipulate in some way that there is a recognition of the hard work outside of the salary and the direct results as a result of their work. This will also inform great culture and culture can be formed so that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The final thing I want to draw our attention to is your company's purpose is not your purpose and your mission, but finding that connectivity by what you do to why they do what they do will really help you find true purpose in your work, as well as in your life

Values based culture gives you the principles to accelerate progress together and purpose will anchor the activities that bring people together to drive great culture. That's been The Leadership Hacker News, lets dive into the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Joining on the show today is Matt May. He's the founder and CEO of Premiering Building & Interactive Experiences Company. Who's putting the fun and energy back into play. He's also a speaker, an author of the book, Take The Fear Out Of Team Building. Matt, welcome to the show my friend.

Matt May: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Steve Rush: So, I'm really looking forward to our interactive experience today. But before we get into that, maybe you can just give our listeners a little bit of the journey from where it all began in theater to you and how you ended up running in interactive experiences firm.

Matt May: Absolutely. So, I was in music and theater in high school, middle school. I always was creative. Hey, let's put on some sort of a show or a presentation or do something for the family and the parents and the yada, yada in the backyard, in the garage. And when I went to school undergraduate, I went for theater. I earned a dual major in theater and arts administration. So, I got that business side. I also was a camp counselor when I was a teenager. I went through a three-year counselor in training program as a camper. Took some psychology courses in undergrad, as well as a number of leadership courses. And I don't know if they're call all seminars or what but opportunities that were presented through a variety of organizations within the university setting. So that kind of all sorts of came together for me after I graduated school, I went to New York city and did the professional entertainment thing for a while, but I also was always kind of had an education thought in my head. So, I really did a number of different things. I finally left New York after five years. I said, I'm moving to sunnier pastures because I want to be able to have my coffee outside, whether it's January or June.

Steve Rush: That's right, yeah.

Matt May: [Laugh]. I moved to Florida in the states and really haven't looked back. But when I moved there, I started working in administration at a performing arts high school and college and had a number of different opportunities that I embraced and did. And finally sort of fell into team building per say. I happened to be bartending at a comedy show on campus at the Fort Lauderdale Performing Arts Center, the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. And the stage manager happened to be staffing an event, a team building event, just helping the company, which is actually based in Massachusetts. So not even close by. And she said, hey, do you want to do it? And I said, yeah, absolutely. And that was my first official team building as an assistant staff. And I said, oh, huh, there's something about this.

So, jump ahead, several years I was facilitating, I started doing a lot of producing because of my theatre background. I was able to do production and logistics and whatnot, and finally said, you know what? I quite honestly, I'm tired of being on the front lines and not having control and what goes into all of the preparation beforehand and created my own company. And I like to call it a perfect storm because I have my logistics and my business and my entrepreneurship and my sales skills. And by the way, sales is my least favourite thing to do. But I get guess I have some sort of a knack for it. But then I also, when I facilitate jump on stage and I'm able to get people working together and be entertaining and whatnot. So, I'm able to use all of my experiences and all of my different training, whether it be from education or professional or theatre or business, and it kind of a perfect store and collides together. So that's kind of how I got to where I am now. And looking back, of course, hindsight is always 2020, I think. Oh, all right. Well, that's why I did all of those different things and worked in education and professional theatre and, you know, did some temping offices and whatnot so that all of this came together for me to where I am now,

Steve Rush: Steve jobs, I think famously said you can't always connect the dots forward, but you can definitely connect them back. And that's perfect example, right? If you were trying to create the path to where you are now, you'd probably never get there.

Matt May: No. And you just made me think, I don't know if I'm the only one, but I remember as a kid, when we would try to do mazes, you know, the mazes that you draw, the pen or the pencil through it all.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt May: Some reason, they seem to be easier going backwards.

Steve Rush: Oh, that's interesting perspective. I wonder if that's something to do with the way that our brains are wired as well.

Matt May: It must be, I've never really researched it, and until you mention that Steve Jobs quote, I hadn't really thought of it, but I think that's on my to-do list this afternoon.

Steve Rush: Shout out to all amateur neuroscientists, or any professional ones that listen to the show, they can maybe contact us and let us know. That'll be interesting to have a look at.

Matt May: Yes.

Steve Rush: So, the work that you do now, it's very still theatrical, isn't it? So, you get to be that front to stage guy, but also then be that production guy as well. Is there a natural kind of thing that you prefer? Are you more of a front man or more of a production man? Where would you say you’re kind of true passion lie?

Matt May: Geez, that's a tough question to answer. You know, certainly being a performer as I was younger and going to school for it initially, that's instilled in me, but it's funny. I will have clients who are new clients often come up to me after an experience ended and say, where did you come from? And the first few times that happened, I didn't understand it. But now I do, when I walk into a ballroom or whatever, and I'm setting up and managing staff and we're getting ready, it's very organized and logical. And you know, I'm just doing what needs to be done and I'm talking to a client or whatever, and it's very professional, but something happens that when I jump on stage or jump in front of a crowd or grab a mic or whatever, I just inherently turn it on if you will.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt May: And that's what they refer to now. The challenge is, in my line of work is. I'm not there just to entertain, right. And I'm reminded of the late Alex Trebek from Jeopardy. He was never wanted to be introduced as the star of the show Jeopardy. It was always the host of the show because his feeling was that contestants were the stars.

Steve Rush: Yes.

Matt May: And I try to keep that philosophy that the participants in the experience, they are the stars, the light shines on them. When I start a program, I'm doing kind of what I like to think of as audience warm up. And yeah, I do my skit and whatnot, but that gets people going. But then once the experience really gets going and they get hands on, it's all about them.

Steve Rush: Yeah. And of course, the biggest thing, most of all is, you're there to facilitate a learning outcome.

Matt May: Exactly.

Steve Rush: And that's the one thing that is different from a performance, because actually as a performer, you are still having an ambition to want to entertain, but you are not having to be as thoughtful of the specific way that you construct an experience so that somebody takes away a different learning outcome, right?

Matt May: Correct. Correct. And when we're watching as patrons watching entertainment, whether it be on a screen or on a stage. We are there for them to entertain us. Where in my line of work, I'm not here to entertain you. As you said, I'm here to facilitate the experience. So, you put in as much as you're going to get out of it.

Steve Rush: Exactly right. So, when we start to think about the whole concept of team building, when you mention that word to groups of individuals, what's the reason you get a different response. So, some people will love it and some people will running in fear from it. What causes that?

Matt May: The simple answer in my opinion is bad experiences.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt May: They have been thrust into experiences that didn't have positive outcomes for them, for whatever reason. So many people think of team building as trust falls or paintball or zip lining or white-water rafting, you know, extreme sports, if you will, or sitting in a room and being told, this is how you work together as a team, while watching a slideshow, right. I don't do any of those things. And I think it's because people have been thrust into those things, or that's the majority of their experience. They just have a negative connotation in their head that team building is a bad word. Now there's also, as you mentioned, some people are very excited about it. People who are extroverted and tend to be well, extroverts generally like it more because they're excited and their energy is locomotive full speed ahead. Where people who are more introverted and maybe have anxiety, or even if it's not full-blown anxiety just don't like to be in a crowd or don't like to be in a small group because they can't hide as easily. Those people have more apprehension. So, when they hear team building, I think their negative thoughts are even more heightened.

Steve Rush: Of course, in any audience, you are going to have a mix of those types of individuals, because many will be extroverted and thinkers and feelers, and others will be introverted thinkers and feelers. How do you make sure that when you are constructing a session that you are thoughtful of those different types of personalities that might come out?

Matt May: Well, our experiences are designed in such a way that everybody is on an even peel, equal, right. I generally tell clients; I don't want to know who the boss is. The CEO is here, okay great. Don't tell me who he is, or she is. I don't want to know because I want to treat every single person the same. Now Murphy's Law inevitably comes into play nine times out ten, and that's the person I wind up picking on [Laugh] just organically. And then, oh, that's the CEO, well, thanks for playing [laugh]. But generally, most of our experiences, Steve call for teams of ten, and we start off having everybody in the team of ten, doing a group exercise, and they're all doing the exact same thing before they even break out into, quotes, unquote. And I'm using air quotes here, roles and responsibilities that they will be in charge of, if you will, during the experience.

Everybody does the same icebreakers and the same introductory games and challenges and activities. So that everyone is completely even keel. Then a lot of times when you break off into the experience, say it's building bikes for kids. For example, some people are more mechanically inclined, or they're really good with wrenches and they want to put something together great. Somebody else is better with puzzles and mind games and mind solving great. They'll focus more on that. Other people are better at marketing. And so, they'll kind of work on their team presentation more, but by the same token, a lot of times people say, well, you try this. This is not your forte or what you would normally gravitate to, this particular component. Why don't you try this? And that allows people to see their colleagues in a whole different light.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt May: For example, sometimes the CEO or the C levels or the Directors, whatever will be on teams with somebody who's the front desk receptionist. And that person will, for whatever reason, wind up in more of a leadership role or whatnot. And then next thing you know, the boss is saying, you are totally underutilized signing for packages and answering the phone. We need to talk next week. And, you know, ultimately the person becomes an office manager or whatever, because he or she was seen in a different light.

Steve Rush: I suspect that having the opportunity to throw away the natural conventions of the work labels gives everybody the opportunity to see how others behave and perform.

Matt May: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I love that. So as kids, when, you know, you first got up in front of your folks and did your, you know, theatre production and, you know, I probably did the same. What is it that causes some people like you, Matt, to continually have this energy to want to continually innovate and play where others like me will, you know, be a bit stuffy and go, well, I don't do any of that kind of stuff anymore?

Matt May: Well, I don't know. I don't know if there's a certain quote unquote thing that is in me or not in you or whatever. I think some of it is inherent and its personality and as well as likes and desires, you know, what we follow or chase, but I think a big part of it too Steve is that we are conditioned as we grow up. Now I can only speak for the States, right. I can't speak for European school upbringing, but for the States, and this is changing to a degree, but for so long, it was sit at the desk, take the information that's presented to you, go home, do some exercises, commit it to memory, come back and regurgitate, wash, rinse, repeat, right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt May: So, as kids if we look at it, their favourite, well, I'm generalizing. Often the favourite part of the day is recess because they get to go outside and play. But as we get older, recess is removed from the school day. And by the time we're out of primary schools and into middle school, junior high, high school, and then certainly in college, we go, and we ask people to give us information and educate us that we are then going to theoretically use, but the play is gone. So, I think that's a big part of it is, just society. And don't get me wrong. Look, adulting is hard [Laugh] okay.

Steve Rush: That’s true.

Matt May: We all have responsibilities. We can't play on the playground all day. We have to work so that we can survive and support our family or if we don't have a family, at least keep a roof over our head and keep us fed and clothed. But the fun element in our work and our workday seems to have been removed.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt May: And it, takes like going on a boy's weekend to have our fun or the girls. I'm going out with the girls tonight or whatever. That is how we have our fun. Well, why can't we still have fun in the workday? And I know fun is not necessarily something we use to measure success or productivity, but it doesn't mean it can't be prevalent. And it doesn't mean it doesn't help success and productivity.

Steve Rush: I think you actually might be able to measure that. So, when you look at things like employee engagement, you'll see fun represent itself in different ways. So, commitment to the organization, prepared to stay, creativity, innovation, elements of peer group recognition, that kind of stuff. But often we don't apply that three-letter word to it because we feel it's got less relevance in a workplace.

Matt May: Correct.

Steve Rush: Would that be fair selection?

Matt May: Absolutely. I think that's very fair. And I will let you in on, well, I guess it's not going to be a secret because I've already told other people coming out there right now. I am a Hallmark movie junkie. I fully admit it. I'm a sap. I'm a big romantic at heart. I love Hallmark movies. And there was one that I watch about a year ago now. And there was a line that I sort of kind of touched on a moment ago, but the line was, and I know that fun, isn't typical metric in the corporate world, but you know what it's worth because fun allows people to relax and be fully themselves, which makes them productive and more engaged. And that affects the bottom line.

Steve Rush: Right. And is that something also that helps remove some of that fear and anxiety around team building as well?

Matt May: Absolutely. And I've had, I don't want to say arguments. Discussions with people who have said anything competitive is not valuable in team building. Well, hold on, going back to the whole paintball, I will agree with you on that. I don't, for me, that is not exciting. That is not team building. That's just crazy, whatever. However, the majority of our team building experiences are competitive in nature. However, we're not talking about tackling each other and taking each other out with guns. We're talking about light-hearted competition. People are naturally competitive, Steve, right?

Steve Rush: mm-hmm.

Matt May: Again, I'm generalizing.

Steve Rush: That’s a fair generalization, yeah.

Matt May: Yeah. When we start, we go to school, we earn, or we are provide with good grades for positive work and productive work. The mother of all, and I don't know if you have this over in the UK, but at least over here, the mother of all winnings is the lottery. People play, whether it's scratch off or the big one, people go to a casino for a night out, whatever, but they put their coin in the machine, pull that lever and they want to get the pay-out. We are competitively, we like to win things. So, when you tell people, hey, you are doing this for the winning title, and yes, you're going to win a gold medal at the end, whatever. It's just fun. We're just there to have some light-hearted competition, but people inherently enjoy that. Then they start talking smack to their colleagues. You're going down, whatever. Just again, it's all light-hearted fun. Nobody really means any ill will to each other. But doing that in an environment outside of the office allows you to see your colleagues in a different light

Steve Rush: And neurologically, of course. It releases dopamine.

Matt May: Right.

Steve Rush: And that's a rewarding chemical transmitter, neurotransmitter that we thrive on. And you get a hit from that. So not only is it fun, it's also a learning, so you want more of it.

Matt May: Exactly. We crave more of it once we've had the burst of it.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt May: And like I said, the whole medals, I have a discussion and I usually talk about it on when to do team building exercises. I always say, if you have people that don't know each other and coming out of the pandemic, I have hear from more and more people, we're doing the sales meeting and 75% of our team has not met each other, other than on Zoom. Okay, well, then I would recommend doing it at the beginning. Well, we wanted to wrap up the three-day conference with it. Okay, we can do that. But if you're telling me, people don't know each other yet, do it at the beginning, they're automatically going to know nine other people from their direct team. The winning team is going to win gold medals. Maybe they'll wear them at lunch that day. Maybe they'll wear them that night to the cocktail reception. We'll encourage them to wear them the rest of the three days to remind everyone that they were the winners. Good for them. Well, that's a conversation piece right there. Somebody else might come up and say, we were robbed. Yeah, well, sorry. We got the medals, right. So, it automatically creates conversation. And again, it was based on that fun competition factor.

Steve Rush: So, during your experiences as well, one of the things that I've noticed through the work that you do, Matt, is that there is always a purpose behind what you do. So mentioned kids for bikes earlier. So that's something that you use, exercise as a team together, but something that's also serving communities well. Just tell us a little bit about some of the things you do.

Matt May: Well, as far as the philanthropic experiences, yes. Building bikes is for kids is one. We have an experience where we build wheelchairs for veterans, or maybe not even veterans for people who are mobility challenged. Foster care programs, kids entering foster care. Kids that need snacks. They don't get them during the school day when they're on vacation, places that they can go to get the snacks because they're underserved and maybe their parents can't afford to give them a snack every day. So, all of those types of things, many companies have CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives. And if we can align with them, that's great. Because, let's say, let's be honest. If we can get something out of it, i.e., getting our teams to work together, having fun, doing something out of the norm of the workday and give back, well, then it's win-win for everybody.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Ticking all the boxes, right?

Matt May: Exactly. And it doesn't have to be philanthropic. It could be a culinary program and your company, I don't know, maybe your company makes salsa. We could do a salsa margarita challenge. See, oh, wait, maybe that is the next new recipe for your brand, right. Or for an alternate version of your salsa, or maybe you make hospice sauce and, well, great. Let's use your sauce in this culinary team building experience. So, there are ways to incorporate the company as well.

Steve Rush: Yeah, exactly. Love it. So, have you ever had a time where you've just had a participant who's just, you know, folded arms, stuffy, I'm not getting involved in any of this? Have you ever experienced any of that?

Matt May: Yes [laugh].

Steve Rush: How do you deal with that?

Matt May: To be honest with you, I don’t, and I'll tell you why. Usually, well, it's never not happened. So, knock on wood. The person ultimately says, well, I look like a schmuck standing over here, and I'm the one who's not having fun. Who wants to be in the corner? Right. All by him or herself. If your colleagues bring you in and you insist upon being that stuffy jerk. Okay, fine. You're only hurting yourself. So, peer pressure I guess, is the bottom line. And I say that in a positive way, not a negative way. That ultimately your peers are going to say, come on, let's go. You're being a jerk.

Steve Rush: [Laugh].

Matt May: And it happens, right. If somebody doesn't have the realization by themselves, that there are only hurting themselves and look like dunce. Somebody else, or several other members of the team are going to say, come on, let's go. Now, I'll be patting myself on the back. That rarely happens because our experiences are designed in such a way that you really can’t sit out, starting right at the get go. And when I facilitate, and our other facilitators have been trained to really put on the charm immediately, put on the energy immediately. So, we inherently, not we, but the participants inherently say, okay, I'm already in this.

Steve Rush: The one thing I notice in those experiences as well is the other thing of course, is that, that individual's looking at everybody else having loads of fun, thinking. Now I'm losing out.

Matt May: Correct.

Steve Rush: So, I know over the last couple of years, Matt, you've had to really pivot your business model as we were going through the experiences of the pandemic. But I wonder having had the experience of being face to face and virtual, what the pandemics really taught us about how we participate or get involved if the case around things like team building or activities, what's it really highlighted for us?

Matt May: Well, I think that it's proven to us that face to face interaction is necessary. And it's certainly good for us. We learn so much more and we get and give so much more when we're face to face. When you're on a video call, yes, you can see the person, but you may not see the person's hand gestures because the camera is close, right. And you don't get the body language. You don't get the nonverbal cues. You don't get touch, right. Human beings need touch. There's a wonderful book and its old. And it was Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom. And there was a movie made with Jack lemon and Hank Azaria, many, many years ago. And I'm paraphrasing here, but Morrie was diagnosed with ALS, and he basically taught this former student, Mitch Albom life lessons. And one of them was, when we come into this world, we are cradled by our mothers, right. Until we learn to walk. And even then, we are constantly cradled by our parents. Craving human touch. When we die, nobody wants to die alone. I know this is a grim thought. And I apologize for doing that on the podcast, nobody wants to die alone.

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt May: So, we crave it, but why do we push it away for the majority of our lives? Why do we begin and end with it, but not continue to make it so important to us during our adult lives? But again, going back to face-to-face, handshakes. Now, I know people are still, some of them are nervous about that and whatnot, okay. Then do an elbow, bump, whatever. But when you touch someone's hand and you grasp it, you are having a physical connection that you don't get virtually.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt May: Now, team building experiences and other were very valuable. They still are. We do them. I personally prefer face to face, but I know a lot of people are saying, we're just not ready to go back yet or we don't have the ability to bring in everybody just yet. We've got it six months down the line, but we want to do something right now. Great. So, it's still valuable because you're getting people interacting and hopefully having fun. But the face to face in person is just so much more valuable. Yes people were doing virtual events. I get that. But this wasn't even in our brains, right. As a thought, this conversation right now.

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt May: Because of the pandemic is why we're having this discussion. I can't articulate this. I don't know why, but going back, we never would've thought about that before.

Steve Rush: That's true. And it's fair to say I think that people certainly in my experience in the last three to five months, I would say, are really grateful in when people come together as a group, there's definitely much more appreciation for that now.

Matt May: Yes. It's not just, well, we're going to a sales meeting. It's oh my gosh. We're going to a sales meeting live and in person.

Steve Rush: [Laugh] and therefore there's something deeply intrinsic that you refer to as that kind of cradling. That is a, also a very real metaphor for us wanting connection with people, isn't it?

Matt May: Yeah. And when we're in face to face, at least in my experience. Observe people being more organically involved, right. When you have a computer screen behind you, how many times have we seen somebody looking down and we say, oh, well, he or she's checking text messages right now, or, you know, or, oh, oh, he's reading his email, we can tell. You're not as engaged because you have so many more distractions and there's no real accountability either.

Steve Rush: That's right.

Matt May: And I don't use that as a negative term. I use it as a positive term, even to ourselves, we're just not accountable because we have so many other things right in front of us on that fancy screen, that when you take that away and what's in front of you is an actual face. Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm totally engaged with you right now.

Steve Rush: Well, fingers crossed for wherever anybody is listening to us in the world. They're going to get back to some level of connection and normality pretty soon, anyway.

Matt May: Yes, I hope so.

Steve Rush: So, this part of the show, Matt, is where we start to turn the tables, you've learned lots of different teams and had lots of different leadership experiences over your career. And I'm keen to really hack into those now. So, what I'm going to ask you to do, if you can, is try and think of all of those experiences and just distill them down to your top three leadership hacks. What would they be?

Matt May: One is to utilize people's strengths and not only participants, but also staff and facilitators, right. In an office setting, in an assembly line, in a factory, whatever. We hire people based upon their qualifications and skills. So, let's do the same thing in a fun atmosphere. Now, again, this is going back to what I said before. Maybe let people get outside of their comfort zone, but at least for me with staff, I always want to find the right staff person, not only the experience, but the client.

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt May: What's the demographic of the client who is going to work best with that demographic? So that's one. Utilizing people's skills and strengths. My catch phrase is regress to kindergarten. Take off the sport coat, take off the tie, take off the high heels, whatever you're wearing. You're in a safe space. Nobody's judging you, if they are, judge them right back, because they're probably doing the exact same thing. It's not going to go anywhere. It's kind of like what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens in this room stays in this because if you don't have those inhibitions, you're going to organically be in a much better place to give of yourself for your team and the experience.

And the third leadership hack. Geez, I would say. It's really kind of, my new catch phrase is, take the fear out of team building, which is the title of the book. And that is, let's give people experiences where at the end of it, they say, okay, so my goal is, when you see me walk in six months from now, you're not going to go, oh, that team building guy. Hopefully say, Ooh, what are we doing today? Or at the very least say, all right, let's see what he is got out of his sleeve today. Let's see how it compares to last time.

Steve Rush: Mm-Hmm. There must have been some magical experiences you've had over your careers. If you could just maybe call one out. The most fun, extravagant experience that you've had with a group or, an individual in a group, what would that be?

Matt May: It's hard to pinpoint one. And I can't remember the exact number. I facilitated a military care pack program. This is probably seven years ago or more. Those always get me. I'm a big supporter of the U.S. Military. And I know you're over in Europe, but I'm a big supporter of people who put their lives on hold to make our lives better.

Steve Rush: Absolutely.

Matt May: That is very important to me. So military care pack programs always hit me pretty, pretty tough. They hit me hard in a good way. Also, when you see a kid who is part of a boys and girls club or whatever, come into a room and they don't know why they're there. And then all of a sudden there are 12, 24, 50, bikes, and they're then told these are going to your organization. The look of huh, on their face is just amazing. And little ones are just, I don't have kids. I'm too old to start at this point, but boy, some of the things they do and say they just melt my heart and make me just crack up [laugh].

Steve Rush: Makes it all worthwhile, right?

Matt May: Exactly. I'm always appreciative for that.

Steve Rush: Well, the next part of the show we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something hasn't worked out for you. Maybe been pretty catastrophic, could have screwed up, but as a result of it, you've learned, and it's now a force of good in your life or work, what would be your Hack to Attack?

Matt May: [Laugh] be careful what papers you sign to be quite honest.

Steve Rush: [laugh] yeah.

Matt May: Really and be careful with whom you go into business and protect yourself because you're the only anyone that's going to protect yourself. And I don't want to sound cold and snarky, but it's true. You can be a wonderful person and be very giving and loving and generous and still protect yourself.

Steve Rush: Yes, you can.

Matt May: And that's the business side of me, careful what you sign and know who you're getting into bed with proverbially.

Steve Rush: Yeah. You're not the first guest mine you to have said that over the two years or so, we've been running the show. We must have at least half a dozen of our guests have, you know, some really similar circumstances where the greatest trusted relationships have gone wrong because of one piece of paper.

Matt May: Exactly, exactly. And it's bad that happens. But it's the reality of the world we live in.

Steve Rush: Certainly is. Now the last thing we're going to do is you get to go and give yourself some advice at 21. So, if that time travel happened now. You stood right in front of Matt. He's 21, you're in front of him. What's your advice?

Matt May: Probably to embrace the opportunities that you're presented with wholly, don't be fearful of them. Again, hindsight is 2020. The older I get; I do subscribe more to the philosophy of everything happens for a reason. And for whatever reason right now, this is where you're supposed to be. And it may not be the happiest of circumstances, but what do you need to do to not only get through this but thrive beyond it and learn from it.

Steve Rush: Great advice.

Matt May: That would be my two words. It's okay.

Steve Rush: Hmm. Love it. So, what's next for you and the team?

Matt May: Well, we are very excited to be getting back to face-to-face experiences. Really trying to provide those to people who are ready. I hope more and more people continue to be ready and jump on this. My hope is that now, companies who are allowing people or have just made the decision to, we're not going to own real estate or rent real estate anymore, because we know work from home, works for us. Great. That money that you're saving, bring your people together. At least twice a year, quarterly is better. Have an all hands. Even if it's just lunch, an address from the CEO and a team building experience where people get to play and work together, hands on, do it. It's more important now than ever. My dream would be that it becomes instilled in everyone's minds that this is as important as ordering copy paper.

Steve Rush: Right. DNA and the fabric of an organization should have all of those experiences to really exploit some of those unlearned or unobserved behaviors that you talked about earlier, right?

Matt May: Exactly.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, when folks have listened into this Matt, where's the best place for us to send them so they can bump into some of the work and maybe get a copy of the book?

Matt May: The best place is the website, which is premierteambuilding.com. It's premier as in like number one without the E at the end of it. But if you do happen to put it in, it'll direct you to the correct place. There's a contact form there. There's a links to Amazon where the book is. All of our social media links are there. You can follow us there. I love to travel personally. So, we do programs throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico, abroad. I'd love to get over to the UK at some point. So more than happy to do that for anyone who's listening over there.

Steve Rush: Course of action. Yeah, exactly. Well, Matt, listen, I've love chatting to you and you know, there's no surprise that you've been a success in the business that you're in and the energy and focus you bring to it. So, I just want to say thank you and we'll make sure all of those links are in our show notes. So, when folks have listened as well. They can dive straight over, but thanks for being on the show.

Matt May: Thank you, Steve.

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.

Alain Hunkins is a sought-after speaker, consultant, coach and Author of the #1 Amazon best-selling book, Cracking the Leadership Code.  In this episode you will learn about:

• The brain science behind leading people
• Real life leadership stories
• The importance of “empathy:
• How to communicate more effectively than ever before
• The key components to crack the code

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Find out more about Alain and his work below:

Alain’s Website: https://www.alainhunkins.com/

Follow Alain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alainhunkins/

Twitter: @alainhunkins

Cracking The Leadership Code

Full Transcript Below:

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Introduction

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.

Our special guest on today's show is Amazon's number one bestselling author, Alan Hunkins. Before we learn how to Crack The Leadership Code, it is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, research provides evidence that leaders who are more mindful are more prone to forgiveness and that mindfulness exercises can actually facilitate a forgiving attitude and environment in the workplace. While there are so much studies focused on mindfulness is a relatively very little research and a potential impact that mindfulness can have. Author of the report, Johan Karremans, who studied the link between mindfulness and forgiveness, says this is just one of the small steps that we can take, and of course as leaders, forgiving people when they screw up is a really important element of helping people learn too. The difficulty in forgiving another person often lies in the process of immersing oneself in the emotions and thoughts about what's happened; which indeed could add insult to injury. The research was completed over five separate studies with five hundred ninety two (592) people in total. Karremans and the researchers found that the people who agreed with the statement such as, “I perceive my feelings in emotions without having to react to them” and, “I am good at finding words to describe my feelings”, tended also to agree with statements such as, “I tend to get over it quickly when somebody hurts my feelings”. The research also found that listening to guided, mindful attention instructions led to higher levels of forgiveness regarding a past event. Mindfulness might not just be helpful in reducing stress and improving happiness, as often it is seen stereotypically, but it also may be able to foster better interpersonal relationships and one that is a bit more forgiving.

Findings also indicated that mindfulness is positively associated with forgiveness because of his association with empathy. In other words, more mindful people are also more likely to report being better at adopting the psychological point of view of others, which in turn links to height and forgiveness. So as leaders, I'd like to invite you to think about the next time one of your colleagues fails or has not achieved YET what they're trying to achieve. I want you to consider how well equipped you are to deal with that situation and how mindful you are being at that time. Mindfulness is a really key component that should be in all leaders kit bags, being self-aware, being present in the now and focusing on what's present is a key attribute for all great leaders. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news or stories, funny things, anything that is happening in the world of leadership around here, please share it with us through our website or our social media sites.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: I am joined on today show by, Alan Hunkins. He is a TEDx speaker. He is the author of the number one bestselling book on Amazon, Cracking The Leadership Code. He is also the Managing Director of the Hunkins Leadership Group. Alain welcome to our show.

Alain Hunkins: It is a pleasure to be with you today. Thanks so much, Steve, thanks.

Steve Rush: So hitting number one on the business communication sales in Amazon is just amazing. Congratulations, first and foremost.

Alain Hunkins: Thank you, thanks so much.

Steve Rush: So what is the back-story? How did you arrive at number one bestselling author? Share with us your back-story and tell the folks who are listening in, a little bit about what you have been up to.

Alain Hunkins: Yeah, sure. You know, it is funny looking backwards. You know, hindsight makes everything look 20/20 like it was a straight line. But on the journey, I never would have dreamed I would have ended up here, but if I had to look back and I see a common thread throughout my life, ever since I was like five years old. I have always been burning to answer the question, why do people do what they do. I am just fascinated by people, human behaviour and I was as a kid, I then moved into college. I studied some psychology. I also got very involved in theatre and actually went to an acting conservatory for graduate school, worked as a professional actor and as an actor. You're obviously putting yourself under the microscope in terms of behaviour and learning a ton about that, then got involved in teaching in schools and then moving from leadership training with children in schools to doing training, work in organizations, leadership training across the world.

And so it's been 25 years working with over 2000 groups in 25 countries, and so for me, what led to the book was as I continued to work with more and more people. I noticed that there were these patterns of behaviour that were emerging and not just patterns of what successful people did, but also patterns of what mediocre people did, were mediocre leaders doing. And so what I wanted to do was be able to capture those patterns and then categorize them and bring them to life through stories and examples and then look to the research that supported those stories and examples. And that's what led to the book, so I started with a blog post, you know, a couple blogs and just going blog after blog after blog.

I started seeing these patterns in the blogs start to emerge, and those patterns became the chapters and what became the different parts of the book. So that's what has led me on this journey and ultimately, it's all about helping people to become better leaders and from my take, when I say leader, I'm not talking about a job title or position. To me, leadership is very much a state of mind and a state of being. The fact is every single one of us need to influence others in the world to try to get things done, and whenever you are in that role of influence, you are a leader.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I agree and in my experience, I have often been quoted around, “leadership is not a role - It is not a job title”. It is just a set of behaviours that you carry and that of course can be demonstrated at any age, right?

Alain Hunkins: Absolutely and those behaviours can be learned. That is the good news. Right? We can continue to learn those behaviours as we go.

Steve Rush: For sure, yeah. I was intrigued to look at your TED talk and what I noticed about your TED talk which intrigued me the most was the principal about, as a leader you always have a target. Tell us a little bit, about how that came about. 

Alain Hunkins: Yeah, sure. Back and I would say 2002; I had this wonderful mentor I'm still in touch with named Jeff. Jeff and I would meet for lunch every month or so and talk shop about leadership and life and on this particular day back in 2002, we were finishing up lunch and Jeff hands me this gift wrapped box, a little gift. He says congratulations on last weekend. See the weekend before I just gotten certified to lead a very complex training. I had spent years preparing for, so this was just way of thanking me. So I opened up the gift and inside there is this t-shirt and the front of the shirt said leader. I was really touched because I really felt seen and acknowledged by Jeff in that moment because he was a mentor and kind of like a father figure to me. So I said, thanks so much, Jeff and then Jeff, he had this shining baldhead in the light. He got this impish grin on his face. He said now turn the shirt around. On the back of the shirt. Is this large archery target, right? So I'll never forget what Jeff said next. He said, welcome to leadership. He said, as a leader, you are always a target. Now, if you are a great leader, you are the target of people's hopes, their dreams, their aspirations, even their envy. But if you're a lousy leader, you'll be the target of their disappointment and their criticism and their blame. So what type of leader you are going to be? That is up to you, and I think what Jeff captured with his t-shirt is what I have come to understand. As you know, leaders are in the business of managing people's perceptions. In everyone's mind, we want to think that we are the best leader. We are effective. We are well communicating, etc. But that's our own intention. That is not how we are being seen, and so we have to understand, we have to cross the gap between our own intentions and how the people that we choose to lead actually see us, so that's the story of the leader target t- shirt.

Steve Rush: It is a super story and a great metaphor because ultimately, we will attract what we set out to attract and a lot of that, of course is unintentional, isn't it?

Alain Hunkins: Oh, completely. You know, I think it starts unintentional. I think the work and the process of leadership development is learning how to make the unconscious conscious. And you do that in part by doing things and screwing up. Right. You make mistakes and go, oh, let's not do that again. I mean, I can think of lots of mistakes that I have made along the way. I mean, just as a quick example, I just think early in my career I was really keen for a new position. I had been volunteering for an organization and the executive director role opened up, and so I decided I was going to put my hat in the ring and step up to be the new executive director. Except it was through an election process, and I assumed that I voted in because I had the most experience. I was the most qualified. I was the most committed in my mind. I was a shoo in and I had this opponent for the job, a guy named Gary but Gary was new. I thought there is no way he is going to get more votes than me. 

So we show up on Election Day. I make the long story short. Final score was thirty-eight votes to six. I first impulses. Yes, I have crushed it. I have won, and then I realized, no, actually, Gary, the 38 votes and I got six, so I got crushed and so that was a great wakeup call. I mean a horrible mistake and I felt terrible about it at the time, but you know, over time and all these tuitions you pay into the school of life start to pay dividends, and so what I learned from that experience, especially in debriefing with Gary, was Gary actually reached out to people. He built relationships with them. I did not do any of that. I assume that what I believed in and what I deserved would be mine, so I basically came into leadership with a sense of entitlement and I think the sooner that we can lose that or learn that lesson, the better off we're going to be. Because leadership is not about being entitled. It is not about being in charge. It is really about serving the people who are in your charge.

Steve Rush: So you talk about that quite a bit through the themes of your book. So let's get into the Cracking The Leadership Code and unpick some of those themes that kind of reoccur. One of the things that really intrigued me when I read the book was the whole principle about why old school leadership stopped working. Most leaders these days will recognize that we have had to transition. We have new ways of working. There are new ways of helping lead and create followers and indeed create more leaders. What was your experience about how that presented itself for you?

Alain Hunkins: Yes, What is interesting because I think most of us would recognize that we need to shift and there's got to be this new style of leadership. But what I found was not a lot of people are talking about is why. Why do we have to shift and where are we coming from? Where is the shift coming from? So I did some digging into the backstory of where the whole school of command and control leadership came from and it dates all the way back to the beginnings of the industrial age. So what I was fascinated by and I read some biographies of some of the biggest people at the time, one being a man named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who is considered the father of scientific management, which was all about. Okay, we now have factories. They had not existed before the beginning of the industrial revolution. How we are going to manage all the people in the factory. We've got hundreds of people like thousands of labourers. What are we going to do? And so he created this model that was all based on command and control, where literally and this has to do with the fact that 95 percent of the employees at the time were all doing the same repetitive manual labour.

So literally, it was management's job to think and it was labour’s job just to shut up and do what they are told, and that mind-set, that command and control mind-set became the foundation, the template for how we lead. In fact, his book, Taylor's book, The Principles of Scientific Management, became the core curriculum for the founding of Harvard Business School in 1911 and other business schools beyond that. And in fact, that book was voted the most influential management book of the 20th century in the year 2001. So realizing, oh, my gosh, we are all living out Taylor's legacy for better and for worse. I mean, obviously, there were some upsides, but that only worked up to a very specific point. No one is working in that industrial age life anymore, so we obviously need to shift and the challenge is, while we've tried to make the shift, unfortunately, too many leaders are still working from this antiquated playbook that dates from the early to mid-20th century.

Steve Rush: …and what do you think stops people moving away from that old school autocratic style of leadership? What you think the key reasons could be? 

Alain Hunkins: You know if I had to boil it down to one word, and that is tricky, but I would say the word is “ego”. There is something that we all get a little drunk on our own power and when people get into that role of authority, it is so easy to fall into the trap and I am sure we all heard it as kids because I am your dad that is why. I am your mom that is why. We just kind of wield authority because we have it.

Because, let's face it, it takes a lot less effort to tell someone just shut up because I say so than it does to inquire and say, hey, what's going on? I mean, I will give you an example. I remember when my son Alexander, who is now 16, when he was about three or four and we had to get out of the house. We were getting somewhere and as four year olds, want to do. He was having trouble getting his shoes and his pants and everything on to get dressed. Instead of doing the nice thing, I found myself getting a bit testy with him. Come on, we got to go. Come on kind of raising my voice. And he definitely responded to me with a big puddle of tears, and I felt horrible. And I remember debriefing this with my wife afterwards, and she said, yeah, well, in the moment you were trying to kind of move him along, she said, but what were you doing 20 minutes earlier? To make sure that you created an environment where he could succeed, and that lesson really struck with me, so I'd say the number one thing that so many of us default to is just go just do. Short term it is easier but if we continue to go with that power struggle, command and control, it is going to get in our way. So I'd say that's the number one thing that, you know, it's so easy to default to that, you know, they've said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, so we have to be really mindful that we don't get too full of ourselves and our egos don't get too inflated.

Steve Rush: Sure is a really good lesson, and of course it might get stuff done short term, but it's never going to be sustainable and it's certainly not going to create the right habits and the innovation that we need for the future, Right?

Alain Hunkins: Oh, completely. I mean, that is why there is a huge difference between. If your goal as a leader at most compliance. Yeah, go ahead. Command and control all day. You will get compliance to a point. If people are desperate for a paycheck, you will get compliance. Now, granted, if they have alternatives, like many people do today with LinkedIn and Glassdoor, they're going to find the grass greener somewhere else but if you want compliance, command, control, but you're never going to get people's engagement. You are never going to get their commitment. If you operate from that mind-set for sure.

Steve Rush: Another key part of Cracking The Leadership Code for you was empathy, and it's one that really strikes home for me because I've studied this too. 

Alain Hunkins: Yeah.

Steve Rush: …and in fact, a part of my book, Leadership Cake the “E” in the Cake is empathy, and you call this the basis of connection. What is the reason you focus on that as part of cracking the code?

Alain Hunkins: Oh, my gosh. I mean, it is so important. Empathy to me is the basis of connection and by the way, the subtitle of the book are The Three Secrets to Building Strong Leaders. And those three secrets are connection, communication and collaboration. So empathy for me is the basis of connection because at its core, what is leadership? To me, at its core, leadership is a relationship between two human beings and the most human and basic of connections is empathy and briefly defined empathy is showing people you understand them and that you care how they feel. I mean, Theodore Roosevelt said it very well. He said people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And until we feel valued and recognized, it's really hard to do anything else and I think particularly in the middle of this coronavirus pandemic, this need for empathy and human to human connection is more apparent than ever. I mean, everyone is, you know, socially isolating, social distancing. We are hungry for connection, and so to skip through that and think that we can somehow proceed with business as usual is ridiculous. I mean, this is such an opportunity for leaders at all levels to reach out and connect with other people or maybe the most valuable thing you can do right now is to stop and hold space for people and say, how are you feeling right now? What is on your mind? How can I support you? And those three questions with the power of just listening and being able to hold that for people is incredibly, incredibly powerful and helpful.

Steve Rush: That is right, and now more than ever, people are seeking understanding. They are seeking that their view of the world; they want people to understand, what it really feels like for them and of course, that is the core tenants of empathy, isn't it?

Alain Hunkins: Oh, completely and also and I can't remember where I saw this in the last couple of weeks, but I saw this around the pandemic. Is realizing that, yes, we are all having this shared collective experience and that while we are all in the same storm. We're not all in the same boat realizing that different people are dealing with the situation in many different ways, whether that's health wise, whether that's financially wise, whether that's just quality of life and living at home wise. So having some empathy, understanding that, yeah, we are not all the same, though, we can connect and relate to each other. The fact is, I don't need to know every single thing about you and be exactly like you, Steve, to understand and care about your experience. It is the most human of elements for us to be able to have.

Steve Rush: It is so true of course. 

Alain Hunkins: Sure.

Steve Rush: Originally, you know, fifty thousand years ago when we lived in caves and our language was not particularly well informed, it was still having that core understanding of how the people felt and behaved. That created that community that existed even back then.

Alain Hunkins: Oh, yeah, for sure and that is back then, our world was probably limited to about one hundred and fifty other people, and that was about it.

Steve Rush: Sure.

Alain Hunkins: Just think about how we are now connected at this global scale. It is really tremendous.

Steve Rush: So if I have a leader who is listening in to us speak today and they maybe having some challenges in communicating with the people they work with ,or the team, and of course communication, helps build empathy. How do we go about cracking the communications code?

Alain Hunkins: Yeah, so communication is trickier than it looks. You know, the fact is the human default setting, again, because we are all different, is that we all hear things and understand things in our own way, so the first step to becoming a better communicator is to recognize that we don't communicate for communication sake. That the goal of communication is to create shared understanding between all parties involved, and the reason that is so important is because shared understanding becomes the platform from which we take all future action. So if we have 100 percent accurate understanding, we can make better decisions and get better results. If we have poor understanding. We are going to make poor decisions and get poor results, so some things that we want to do. First of all, knowing that misunderstanding just happens. It is like bacteria in the water. It does not mean to harm you. It is just there. You got to filter it out. We have to learn how to filter misunderstandings out of the environment, so in the book I go through six core actions you can take. I will just share a couple with you today, so one action you can take to create understanding is first have a very clear central message and put it out upfront. Be explicit, it should be no more than eight words, tops and it should basically be the summary of exactly what it is you're trying to say.

How many of us get emails, and the subject line doesn't relate at all, to what it says and then you are fishing through and going, what does this all mean? And you read through paragraph. We all know those people. You know some of us try. Some of us just hit delete. Right. We do have time for it. All of which to say is the more that you can clarify your central message, the more people can understand what is even the field that we are playing in. I have read some studies that somewhere between only 10 percent and 20 percent of what we share in terms of content actually gets remembered. So by having a clear central message, we can make sure that people are walking away with the right 10 or 20 percent as opposed to their own version of that 10 or 20 percent, so that's one key thing. Another key aspect to communication is what I call asking for a receipt, and what I mean by that is that communication can never be one way. In fact, it needs to be three ways that we put it out there, so we share what we want to say, and then someone should come back and say, this is my understanding of what you said.

And then the third way is back to that person. Say, yes, you've got a right or no, you don't and here's why. Right, so it is that back and forth. In fact, a great example of asking for a receipt comes from the fast food industry. So back in the 1980s, the fast food industry had some real problems with her whole drive thru process. Was very, very common for customers to drive up to the intercom, place their order, and then they drive up to the window to pick up their food order and to be filled with mistakes, and this went on consistently throughout the industry for years, and then suddenly the mistake rates just started to plummet. You might be wondering, well, what do they do, where they change? What new technology do they introduce? It was actually really simple. What happened was after the customer would place the order; the employees started repeating the order back. So if I get that right. Let me just check this, please. Its two hamburgers, one cheeseburger, two orders of French fries and three Coca-Cola. Is that right? Right, so it is something as simple as that to confirm the understanding. Now, what is amazing is so many of us have meetings on a daily basis with other people, and then the meeting ends like, okay, Is everyone clear what we're doing? Great, and we just go off, but we have never stopped and explicitly and overtly confirmed what it is that we say we are going to do. And look, if a Taco Bell franchise will do this for a ninety nine cent taco. Don't you think that our own decisions, our actions and our own businesses are worth the same level of quality? So asking for a receipt is another very simple, practical thing you can do to improve your level of communication effectiveness.

Steve Rush: Love that, super. Any other nuggets of communication code cracking you can share?

Alain Hunkins: Yeah, another really useful one is the idea of making all of your implicit assumptions explicit. The fact is human beings are good at many things, but mind reading is not one of them, and so if you've ever caught yourself saying something like, well, I sent the email, they should know what to do or doesn't senior management realize what a stupid process this is? That is really clear in your mind, but no one else is living there except you, and so whether it's something like checking in to see, are there questions that people need clarification on? For example, this is a really good time to make your explicit assumptions around. So we are all working remotely now from home. What is our expectations about how often we are going to communicate? And when are we going to communicate and how? So are we going to be doing this all via email? Are we using slack? Are we using text? Are we using WhatsApp or using Zoom? 

This is a great time to step back and be really clear with the people around us. What are the right modes of communication? What is urgent look like? You know, urgent might mean I get back to you within one minute, five minutes, eight hours, and 24 hours. What does that mean? It means different things in different contexts, and so we can't just assume that we're all on the same page. Right, so clearly, when we don't have those things aligned, it creates conflict, creates conflict at work. It creates conflict in marriages and in families, with friends, so the more we can clarify and make our implicit assumptions explicit, the more clear and effective our communication will become.

Steve Rush: Those are super hacks, thank you for sharing those.

Alain Hunkins: Sure.

Steve Rush: My experience also tells me that you have to practice this; this is not something that is going to come natural to you because we all have our own way of communicating. Which is often very different from other people based on their experiences and their belief systems and so on. So it does take practice, right? 

Alain Hunkins: Oh, completely. All of this takes practice. These are all skills, and the way any practice works is you start and then you try it, and then the key to all of it is to be intentional. Right, so if you look at the power of habit formation, you know, there is some mythic studies that say it takes 21 days to create a habit. Actually, it can vary. That is not actually true at all, but if you want to develop a habit, what we do know is that you do need to start somewhere. Right and so today is as good a day as any. So pick whatever you think will give you the biggest bang for your proverbial buck and pick something and then find ways to build some successes into your habit. So don't try to climb Mt. Everest all in one day. Just take one-step at a time. So, for example, if your habit is you want to work on cultivating the habit of appreciating someone, just think, okay, today, can I be intentional? Who is one person that I can appreciate or thank in a very explicit way? And then tomorrow practice it again, and then maybe the day after I'll say I'll do two people and just continue to build that until it feels like it's happening on muscle memory. So if you think about high performance athletes or great musicians, when you see them performing, they're not thinking, they're just responding because they've got so much muscle memory that is built into that, and in some ways, the practices and skills of leadership are no different. We want to be able to make this automatic and intuitive, and so when we are doing it, it looks like it is the easiest thing in the world, but all that easiness comes out of a lot of practice and hard work.

Steve Rush: And repeat and repeat and repeat until we've got that muscle memory, that tactile foundation, that means that you just don't get it wrong anymore.

Alain Hunkins: Exactly, and then also, a great way to check in with that is to ask for feedback from other people. In fact, I would say and you can call this a hack, but the number one thing that I think will help you to accelerate your leadership development is to get honest, constructive feedback from people who will give you the truth about how are you showing up. And so ask for the good, ask for the bad, ask to the ugly, and then when you get that feedback, don't defend it. Don't try to justify or blame or any of that stuff. Just say thank you. Thank you for the feedback, and then as you ask more and more people, you will see some patterns start to emerge. You know, when nine people start telling me, hey, Alain, you know, you can come across kind of rude and directive when you are under stress. It is nine against one, even though I think I am not rude, I am not arrogant. Well, nine people are saying that maybe it is time for me to stop and listen. Right, so being able to get feedback is a great and probably the most useful tool to accelerate your leadership development.

Steve Rush: It sure is, and you don't have to like it, but you do have to listen.

Alain Hunkins: Yeah, I like what you said about it, but you don't have to like it. You know, I think what you are touching on. I like to say that leaders need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable in so many situations like that. You know, it is not going to feel pleasant. It is not nice all the time, but if you are not stretching and growing, you are not learning. And so part of that growth goes out of your comfort zone to the discomfort zone. By its nature, the learning zone is not all comfortable. So go for it and grow. Like you said for sure. 

Steve Rush: In your book Alain you talk about, motivation as being in search for the magic pill. Is it really a magic pill?

Alain Hunkins: Arrrgh… there is a search for the magic pill but the great secret to motivation is there is no magic pill, and so it is interesting how some people tend to have their go to’s to think, oh, this is what motivates people. In fact, I often tell the story about the famous film director Alfred Hitchcock, and a Hitchcock was known for his disdain of actors. In fact, he was quoted as saying all actors are cattle. Right, and then later on in his life, a journalist said to him, is that true? You said all actors are cattle. He said, no, I was misquoted. I never said all actors were cattle. What I said was all actors should be treated like cattle. Right, so it turns out 1965 Hitchcock was working on a movie called Torn Curtain, and the leading actor in the movie, Paul Newman, who at the time had been nominated for two Academy Awards, was already a bona fide Hollywood star, and Hitchcock and Newman were working on this. And Newman was a method actor, and he really like to get into his character very deeply and Hitchcock just wanted him to find his spot and read his lines, and so Newman came to Hitchcock one day and said, But, you know, Mr. Hitchcock, what's my motivation in this scene? And Hitchcock said, Everything you need to know is in the script, and Newman came back, as you know, he's Paul Newman is, you know, pretty defined.

He is going to say what he said, honest mind. No, but really, what is my motivation? And the story goes that Hitchcock turns to Newman and says, you motivation. Mr. Newman is your salary. Right, so the idea there being that Hitchcock is operating from that old school. I am giving you money. Shut up and do your job. Well, money motivates some people in some situations, but it is not a one size fits all solution for motivation.

Steve Rush: All right.

Alain Hunkins: And so in the book I go to through the whole section on motivation is basically humans are all operating with some basic fundamental human needs and there's different models of human needs. But in the book, I go through four broad places of human need, that people have a need for safety. People have a need for energy. People have a need for purpose, and people have a need for ownership. And what I go into depth and we can talk about some of these and you can decide which ones to talk about, Steve, is that there are things that we can do, some hacks as leaders, tips and tools and skills we can have to help people to get those needs met. And while we can't directly motivate anyone else, what we can do is we can create the conditions where motivation is more likely to happen, where people can motivate themselves.

Steve Rush: And there has been lots of studies over the last 10 years about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, but when it comes specifically to ownership, how does that play out?

Alain Hunkins: So if we think about it, ownership. So the idea of ownership. I love to use this example often, which is like if you have ever rented a car, which many people have in some point in their life. When is the last time you took your rental car to a car wash? Right. No one has ever taken there. Right. Why would you. You would never take a rental car because it is not yours. It is somebody else's to take care of, so the sense of ownership is that you want people to be able to own solutions, own their own challenges and if we operate from the idea that as the leader, it's our job to fix things and give advice and jump in and help people to get things done. What is going to do? It's been to create at a certain point a system of learned helplessness, where in some ways it’s like where the parent and they are the child. So one of the things that if you want to build a sense of ownership in people, one thing is ask them to step up.

And I'll give you a classic example of this. Actually, this came up this a couple of weeks ago. So one of my clients is a man named Peter who owns a small business, and Peter was really distraught because through all of what's been going on with the economic downturn, with the coronavirus pandemic, is he's looking at the financials. He is like; there is no way we can move forward with the whole company. I am have to lay off about 50 percent of the company, and he was struggling and struggling with how am I going to do this? How is going to be equitable and fair? And I said to Peter, I said, Peter, you don't have to go with the answers. Do you ever think that maybe you should just be honest and share your challenges with the company? So he did. He actually did a companywide Zoom Call. Explained, was very transparent about the financials, and the amazing thing was. The company just innovated and came up with these solutions that Peter never would have come up with, that involved people doing some job share, some people deciding they were going to take unpaid vacation or time off, and they created a solution where they didn't have to lay anybody off, but again. It is an example of the reason that happened is because Peter asked, and so it is a great example. If you want people to take ownership, create an environment where they're in charge of what they can be in charge of, and then see how you can support them to create their solutions and then to implement them.

Steve Rush: By giving control to those people; it makes it more collaborative and therefore you create more ownership. Right?

Alain Hunkins: Oh, absolutely. Right, because when you create collaboration and ownership, what you give people is a sense of autonomy. I love Daniel Pink in towards the book. He's got this fabulous book. You are pretty familiar with it, it called Drive.

Steve Rush: Sure, yeah.

Alain Hunkins: In Daniel Pink's Drive. Pink talks about the three major drivers of motivation. Right, so there's mastery that people get better at what they're doing, that there's autonomy, there's freedom to do what they want and also purpose that what they do matters. Bigger than themselves, and so this sense of ownership really ties deeply into the sense of both autonomy and mastery, is that when people own what they're doing, they can see how they can make progress towards it as well as they have this freedom to create things as they see fit.

I have yet to meet a single person who has ever said to me, wow, you know, I had this amazing leader and, you know, I loved about the most is the way they would micromanage me. Said no one ever so recognizing. Right, so recognizing that autonomy and mastery are keys to ownership. Yeah.

Steve Rush: So usually this part of the show Alain. We will start to hack into your mind to look for your top three hacks. Now you’ve shared bunches of superb hack, ideas and thoughts that will start to get the grey matter working with our listeners. But if you had to nail your top three leadership hacks, what would they be?

Alain Hunkins: All right. Hack number one, and this has to do with becoming more credible. Simple, simple, simple. Show up on time. Right, does not really get simpler than that. Yet maybe the most important thing, you know, they say that 80 percent of life is showing up because let's face it, timeliness is the easiest thing in the world to measure. You're either there or you're not. So hack number one. Show up on time. 

Hack number two. Listen, so much of everything that we have talked about around communication and around connection and empathy boils down to. Are you listening to understand? Are you listening to tick a box? And the goal of listening should be to truly and deeply try to see the world through somebody else's eyes, to hear things through their ears. To step into their shoes, so hack number two is start cultivating a listening habit. And I'd say hack number three, read, you know, learn something new as much as you can. I have found that all great leaders are great readers. So whether that is audio books or actual books or Kindle books, read and learn, because there so much out there, I feel the more that I learn, the less I know, because the world is a big place, and we live in a time where there is so much information that is accessible to you so easily. And if you're not taking advantage of, somebody else's is, so learn, read and lead. Hack number three. 

Steve Rush: Great stuff, so if we were to now start thinking about what we affectionately call now as The Hack to Attack. This is a time in your life, where maybe things have not worked out well, you may have screwed up, but we are now using that lesson as part of our life's work. What would you hack to attack be, Alain?

Alain Hunkins: Sure, so my hack to attack is recognizing the power of authentic, vulnerable communication. And I'll tell you, when I learned that was when I got curse out in front of a room of 300 flight attendants, so I will tell you the story on this, so I was working with a group of 300 flight attendants in Chicago. It was a two-day customer service training and I was both the master of ceremonies as well as one of the lead designers for the training. And I was getting ready to kick things off on the first morning, and before we were getting started, the audience was filling in. I was just walking around in the crowd getting to know people and found out that people were literally coming from around the world, and so there were some people from the UK, there were some people from the US, there were people from Europe. There was a table that had flown in all the way from Japan. They were up in the front, and one person said to me, oh, look, we literally just flew in from Japan all night. So if we fall asleep in the front, please don't take it personally, because the Asian table up here, we're really tired, so I meet with everybody and then it's time to get started, and so as we start, I welcome everybody to our training. And I'm telling everyone, thank you so much for coming in from around the world, and we have people from the UK, from the US. Up here, we have the Asian table, and so I go on and on with this, and then about five minutes after I am designed to start, I am going to be interrupted by a marching band. Now, this is all pre-planned.

I know this is coming, so five minutes in, the marching band comes in. Boom, they go off, do their thing, so while they're doing their thing, the guy that two tables back in the audience raises his hand and he asked me to come over. I walk over to him while the band is playing. And he says to me, who the F do you think you are? So he does not say f, he actually says the word. Who the F do you think you are? I am like, I am sorry. You call yourself a leader. You are a racist. I am like what, and he starts cursing me. 

Who the f do you think you are? You call that the Asian table. What kind of racist are you? You would not call that the N-word table. Except he did not say the N-word table. He actually said the N-word, and he just coming on and on at me. And at this point, you can imagine my brain has exploded out of my head and I'm just trying to keep my balance, not fall over, because I'm getting curse at in front of this entire room. This is going on.

Steve Rush: Right, yeah.

Alain Hunkins: And I managed to after properly, I have no idea how much….it might have been half a minute or a minute. I managed to extricate myself from this guy, and I go back to the back of the room where my colleague Cynthia's back there, and I said, Cynthia, the band is about to stop playing in about three minutes. I just got totally cursed at. What comes next? Where are we? What are we doing? Like, literally, I had a complete amygdala hijack where my brain was just not functioning, and she said, okay, we are in Chicago. We are with a group of flight attendants. This is a customer service training. Oh, okay. Thank you, so I went back up on stage and I knew I had about 30 seconds left and I did not have a clue as to how I was going to handle this. This was not in my playbook. I was not expecting this at all, and so what I ended up doing was as the band finished, I just turned to the audience and just spoke from my heart, and I said, folks, before we go further, I just need to say I know today and tomorrow is all about customer service. And sometimes in customer service, things get screwed up and you have to make a customer service recovery. Well, this is one of those moments.

Before we go further, I need to apologize. I said some things earlier that some people found really offensive and if that's true, I'm really, really sorry. That was not my intention. That is not what I meant to do. That is not why I am here, and I practically broke down in tears saying all this to them. I was just really horrified that anyone could ever think that of me. I said, so if you want to talk to me off line or during anything, please let me know, so the amazing thing as I finished all that Steve was, you know, I let it go and I thought it was all done, and we continued on with the training, but over the next two days. Out of that three hundred people, literally twenty five, must have come to me and said, I just want to come over and tell you how much I appreciated how real you were with us, because, you know, we go through a lot of these kind of things at work and you being that authentic made such a difference. And it was from all of the consistent feedback. Again, twenty-five people all coming up to me saying some variation of that same thing, so what I learned there was when I let my guard down, I show up in a much more powerful way, because up until that point, I think I still was relying on all of my bells and whistles and shiny. You know, I am a performer. I can make this all happen. I can do a good job, and I was afraid of letting people see kind of what I call the vulnerable, the less than perfect me. And I think, you know, as leaders, if we can let our guard down, if we can take off the superhero cape and let people see that we're human like them, it actually makes us stronger. I know it is a paradox, but it actually takes a lot of courage to be that vulnerable and when you do that, You never know who you're inspiring.

Steve Rush: And what a great lesson, and if it wasn't for that individual being quite foul mouthed and cussing at you, maybe that wouldn't have informed your future operating style in the way it has.

Alain Hunkins: Yeah, absolutely. I guess, and you know, all these things, you never know when the teacher will appear, I look back on that, and I am super grateful for the lesson and like we said earlier, was it comfortable? Absolutely not. It was horrible at the time but there is definitely some gold to be mined from all of that to mine.

Steve Rush: One or two more final nuggets from you Alain. I would like us to think about doing some time travel now; and I’m going to ask you to time travel back to when you were 21 and bump into Alain at 21. What advice would you be giving Alain then?

Alain Hunkins: I love this question. I love, love, love this question. I thought long and hard about this. And for me, when I was 21, I was still so much caught up in the idea that talent and merit will speak for itself, and what I didn't realize is that the world is made up of human beings who seek and crave relationship. But I would have told 21 year old Alain is you need to build and sustain relationships. I look back; I have friends from high school and college who were really close and I did not maintain those friendships. I did not maintain those relationships, and I look back to the beginning of my work career and I thought the work itself would be enough and I had later in life. It was a lesson that I had to learn. I would say in some ways the hard way is that keep building relationships and no go to the people who energize you. And if they energize you, let them know that in whatever way you want and continue to cultivate ways to stay in touch and have those, because I find the older I get, the more important those relationships matter. And if I take that at a really kind of meta level that I think, you know, I'm now 51 and I'm what I consider on the downslope of this journey of my physical being. What am I going to take with me when I am done in this life? It boils down to it is the quality of those relationships, so I would say to the 21 year old, cultivate, sustain, maintain and nurture those relationships because they're the most valuable things in the world.

Steve Rush: That is Super advice and still relevant for most people who are listening today. 

Alain Hunkins: Yeah.

Steve Rush: So let's think about how the folk listening to the show today can get hold of a copy of The Cracking The Leadership Code and more importantly, get to know a little bit more about the work that you're doing Alain. 

Alain Hunkins: Yeah, for sure. So if people want to learn more about me in the book, The Easiest Place, because my name is difficult to spell. I have a different URL for the book, but you can find me from there too, so it is www.crackingtheleadershipcode.com. That will take you right to the book page. While you are there, you can download chapter one of the book to get a little free sample and preview of what it is all about and from there that links right to my webpage, which is alainhunkins.com so you can go there. You are also welcome to link with me on LinkedIn, which is Alain, A-L-A-I-N. Hunkins, H-U-N-K-I-N-S and obviously I do work in the fields of leadership coaching both one on one and group and organizational, as well as leadership development training and speaking. People can find out all about those things and be in touch if they are interested.

Steve Rush: What we will also do is include those links to our show notes and on our Website, so as soon as folks finish listening to this, they can go ahead, click on the links and learn more about you.

Alain Hunkins: Fantastic.

Steve Rush: So only leads me to say a massive thanks Alain. We have had a super time talking and listening to some of the stories. Again, a huge congratulations on the success of Cracking The Leadership Code and I just want to say personally a huge thank you for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Alain Hunkins: Oh, thank you, Steve. It has been an absolute delight being with you here today, really. Really a pleasure, so 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.

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 handle there is @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.

Marc Effron is the author of the Harvard Business Review Publishing books One Page Talent Management and 8 Steps to High Performance. Marc helps the world’s biggest brands and most successful companies elevate the quality and impact of their talent and has been recognized as one of the Top 100 Influencers in HR globally. You can learn so much from Marc including:

• The science behind why people succeed and fail.
• Why big goals drive bigger results.
• How to “maximise your fit” with your company.
• Its ok to “Fake it” and be a success.
• The relationships that you have will either accelerate or decelerate your career.

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Find out more about Marc and his work below:

Marc’s Website: https://www.talentstrategygroup.com

Follow Marc on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/effron/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TalentStrategyG

8 Steps to High Performance https://www.the8steps.com

Full Transcript Below:----more----

Introduction

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, I am excited to be speaking with Marc Effron. He is the president of the Talent Strategy Group. He has co-authored One Page Talent Management and also authored The Eight Steps to High Performance. Before we get to speak to Marc, it is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, many world leaders, politicians and businesses are coming under immense pressure from individuals and business owners who hold power, to relax safe distancing and quarantine measures, even though the signs say it's not quite time yet. How many of us have given permission or been asked to do things differently and then felt that weight of anxiety, nervousness and pressure within us, above us and around us, and particularly when the grounds full of noise is concrete to how we feel as leaders. So what will it take to hold our nerve when there is no roadmap for knowing where we're going or knowing how we're even going to get there? And how can we be sure that doing things differently bring better outcomes when there's no quick fix? The leadership problem here is if we give up too soon under pressure, we are likely to revert to old type, old behaviours and learn less. Of course, we will only know if we did the right thing in the future. So how will we hold our nerve in times like this? There's an old saying, “Aim for the moon and you might land in the stars”, well, that really applies now. We have been dealing with emotion and managing crisis and recognized our world and our businesses has changed. Science, Politics, Business and Economics have given us real guidance as to how we need to run and think about our businesses, and that should have informed and helped design our business plan. Oh, and if you haven't got a plan, but you just riding the waves here - get off your surfboard, look out to sea and see the next wave! Strategic thinking and planning can give us the foundations for success. Your plan should have strong foundations in which to work from to help you hold your nerve about doing the right thing and not necessarily doing things right.

Because we are all learning and new behaviours, new attributes and new ways of working. So pivoting a plan is absolutely okay, but not having a plan, will see you washed out to sea metaphorically. Key here - watch out for a groupthink! This will be a massive distraction for us and a massive, de-railer. We will be faced with things like, “everybody else is doing X we should do X”, “most people doing Y, we should do Y”. Don't do anything that's not right for you and your business, don't be swayed by groupthink. There are three things here that will help you hold enough:

Number one, Communication. Socialize and validate your thinking with the widest and diverse group of people that can help you avoid that groupthink and group action.

Number two, Evaluate daily. Are you on track? Do you need to stop what you are doing? Do you need to pivot?

Number three, Repetition. Repeat, repeat, repeat - creates new habits and new helpful routines in the way that you are working for the future. Whatever happens next, hold your nerve because your Leadership BarometerÔ is on show here. This is guiding the behaviours and actions of your team and your organization, and you may not even be aware that you have a Leadership BarometerÔ , but you do. You are the weather forecast for your business. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have news, insights, ideas you think could be helpful for our listeners. Get in touch with us through our social media sites.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: On today's show, we have Marc Efforn. He is the president of the Talent Strategy Group and that's author of two Harvard Business books. One Page Talent Management and Eight Steps to High Performance. Marc, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Marc Effron: Steve, very happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Steve Rush: So you started out as a Yale graduate and after a number of different roles, ended up becoming the president of one of the world's leading talent strategy firms, tell us a little bit about that journey, Marc? 

Marc Effron: Sure, so I will give you that brief history but let's even start before Yale. I had a very different life before that. I think what influenced a lot of what I do today, I learned there, so before I went to graduate school, I had experience as a congressional staff assistant and a political consultant. And learning a lot about influence and power in those roles was critically important. And I had no concept of big business when I got to business school at Yale, and so I think maybe it was helpful that I went in without any perspective about how companies operated. I got a lot of the raw material when I went to business school and then at business school really found out about this thing called organizational behaviour. And love the science around how people succeed and apply that in both consulting environments and corporate environments over the past 20 plus years and came to the realization that a lot of organizations that didn't manage talent well and that a lot of consulting firms didn't provide great advice about how to manage talent well. And so wrote that first book that you mentioned, One Page Talent Management as a way of saying, I think there is a better way of doing this and decided to put my money where my mouth was and start my firm, The Talent Strategy Group, about 11 years ago. Now, based on that book and luckily, things have grown. The firm has grown well since then, and that brings us to where we are today. A firm that helps some of the world's largest and most complex and successful organizations to manage talent and more effectively. 

Steve Rush: And what do you think it is, sits behind talent? Is there a kind of a golden nugget? What would be the one thing that you would call out that sits at the core of managing talent?

Marc Effron: I don't know if I am smart enough to boil it down to one thing, but I do think we start with the perspective that better quality talent delivers better results. If we can kind of agree on that point. The rest is simply execution and I think that is the challenge that we face in many organizations, is that we in the HR field sometimes grossly overcomplicate what it means to build better quality talent. And if we're going to start at that kind of the pinnacle, the discussion, do we agree? Steve, moreso, do you agree that better quality talent delivers better results? Oh, yeah, of course we do - Great, can we agree on what better quality talent looks like? Not physically, but now what are the capabilities, skills, mind-sets that better quality talent needs to have in our particular organization? So not looking for a universal truth, but at the Steven Mark Company. What are the three things that are going to differentiate better quality talent? And we agree on that. Oh yeah, there are A, B and C. Cool. Well, let's figure out how we can build more talent that demonstrates those three capabilities. So we think about what really differentiates kind of great talent or organizations who build great talent, it is fairly linear. It is that series of steps. Do we agree that better quality talent delivers better results? Yes, we do. Great, do we understand the few things that will differentiate better quality talent? Yes. Great, then how do we get more of that better quality talent into our organization more quickly?

Steve Rush: And of course, each organization will have varying different degrees of different things, and I guess that's what keeps you so busy and so informed because everything is very different in terms of that differential behaviour as well? 

Marc Effron: Yeah, absolutely and I think the key is not necessarily that there are a million different behaviours that will allow people to be successful at work. But in our organization, what are the few things that really matter? Because at the end of the day, organizations are both very similar and very unique. They are very similar in that people in organizations tend to behave like people in organizations so there are some universal truths we know about things like if we set big goals, people will perform better or if we work on engagement, they will stay more connected to the firm. But firms are also very different in that the three things that you need at Steve Co right now to succeed might be very different than the three things we need that Mark Co right now. Can we get clear about what those few most powerful, most differentiating elements are and ensure we are aligning everything we do around having more talent that has more of those few things.

Steve Rush: Got it. It makes loads of sense. No, we share a very simple principle that I saw in your latest book and your principle was, “focus on what you can change and ignore the rest”. I think that is just absolutely brilliant, but what was it that was the trigger point for you to writing your second book. The Eight Steps to High Performance?

Marc Effron: Sure. Well, I was probably two years ago now, maybe even more, my editor came to me and said, Hey, Marc, we think it is time that you wrote another book, and I said, thank you. I don't want to write another book. There are plenty of books out there already. Thanks very much. And she said, well, we actually think that there might be some room for another book on how people can be higher performers at work that takes this science based simplicity approach that you introduced in One Page Talent Management, and of course, appealing to my vanity is always a very good way to get me to do something. And I thought, well, if there is room in the book market place, where is that room found? What can I do differently in a book that others have not done? And I thought to myself, well, a lot of books actually don't focus on what's proven to be true. They are based on opinions or stories. A lot of books are written by very smart people. Professors, consultants, but not necessarily people who have had to manage and lead in the corporate world, and a lot of books are about one topic area, so they will tell you how to be more emotionally intelligent or know how to focus on your strengths but what they don't do is integrate. Well, here is all the advice that you may hear. Here is what has really proven, here are the few things that matter. And I thought, well, there probably is a gap in those three areas. So could I write a book that actually said what really matters? What can you focus on? That is proven to be true.

What should you ignore? Because either not changeable or not easily changeable. Then practically exactly what should you do? And I thought, you know what? One of the things that we don't do with new university grads or anybody entering the workplace is just tell them exactly that. Here are the few things that you can focus on that are going to guaranteed to make you a higher performer at work and that you should simply do as much of as you can, and here are a bunch of things that you just can't do anything about, so don't worry about them. Worry about executing on the few things that are actually proven to make you a higher performer. So the focus on what you can change says there are a lot of things we can change, what the book goes into, what Eight Steps talks about, what are those things? One of the few most powerful things you can do to increase your performance. And then it's very clear about here is the stuff that's going to affect how you perform at work that you probably can't do much about, so stop worrying about that.

Steve Rush: So when we leave university and college, there is no blueprint to becoming a highly successful individual at work and I guess The Eight Steps really gives us the foundations for some of those activities. So let's go ahead and step through those eight steps, starting with Big Goals. What was the reason Big Goals featured number one for you?

Marc Effron: Sure, and Steve, let me even start with a precursor to The Eight Steps, because what I find is, before we even talk about The Eight Steps, one of the things that maybe isn't as clear in the literature, but it's certainly clear from my years of practice is that the foundation of being a high performer is to have a high performers mind-set. And high performers mind-set says that, if I want to be a high performer, I'm going to recognize that I'm probably going to simply put in more time at work than other people put in. Now, sometimes that very innocuous statement leads to a bit of screaming around. Well, it is not about hours, it is about quality, and I work smart, not hard.

Great, but at the end of the day, two equally qualified, equally engaged, equally skilled people are put side by side. One dedicates 40 hours to their task. One dedicates 50 hours to their task. The person who dedicates 50 hours, to their task is likely to either be able to contribute more or learn more, connect more, develop more, do more things in those extra 10 hours a week that are going to quickly add up over the course of a year or two. So high performers mind-set starts with, I recognize all likely need to put in more hours in other people. I recognize that all likely need to sacrifice things that I enjoy because I am going to spend that time on work related activities. Maybe I am not going to go see my favourite sports team as often as I might like to. Maybe in my going to be able to attend to every social event that I would like to attend, there are things that I am going to do that are going to sacrifice, things I might enjoy doing. Spending time with my family because I am going to dedicate some of that time to work and being a higher performer. Finally, third part of that high performer’s mind-set. I recognize that performance is always relative. If I hit one hundred twenty percent of my goals this year but Steve hit one hundred forty percent of his goals, and Susan hit one hundred sixty percent of her goals. I might still have exceeded my goals, but I am the lowest performer in the group.

Performance is always going to be measured against who does the best, so those things really form that high performer’s mind-set that underlies each of these eight steps. Without that mind-set, none of these eight steps are going to work.

Steve Rush: That is really neat.

Marc Effron: Yeah, and to be honest, that eliminates 75 percent of the folks out there, and I think that is fine. You don't need to be a high performer. People live wonderful lives. They contribute to their communities. They are good brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, without having to be a high performer. But if you want to be a high performer, it's likely that your mind-set needs to incorporate those three elements, let's dig into big goals.

Steve Rush: Let's do that.

Marc Effron: I read through about 2000 scientific articles to try to understand when I wrote the book. What is actually conclusively proven to be true about individual high performance at work? What is not? And the one factor that came out loud and clear and it wasn't that much of a surprise, was that one of the most conclusively proven pieces of science around what we can do at work to be a higher performer is to set a few big challenging goals. Now, that sounds pretty obvious, but here is the problem. Our consulting firm works with big global companies every day, really smart managers, great HR Resources available to them, and yet in most of those organizations, goal setting is done very poorly. What does the science say about goal setting, and why we should do it better? What it says is that big goals drive bigger results.

Just flat out conclusive big goals drive bigger results, so if you are setting a few big stretch goals for yourself, it is very likely you're going to respond to those goals with more effort because we're hard wired to be high performers. If Steve says, Marc, jump a foot in the air, I will give you a dollar, I'm going to jump a foot. If you say two feet, two dollars, I will try that. Three feet, three dollars. I will try that. I'm going to keep responding to that additional challenge you give me with more effort up to the point where either I think, there's not a good relationship between the effort, the rewards, or if I say 4ft four dollars and you say no Marc, still three dollars, Then I probably won't do it. Or if I'm too physically exhausted to complete the task, I won't do it, but except for those two things, the bigger challenge that is given to us, the more effort that we'll respond with. And while more effort isn't always guaranteed to yield more performance, in many cases it is, so big goals drive big results but you can't have 20 big goals. You will kill yourself and that goes to how do we focus on the few things that matter most? That is another challenge a lot of us have. We are very busy. We have many tasks, many activities, and we oftentimes confuse tasks and activities with goals. One trick for your listeners is don't think about goals. Think about promises to your organization.

If you had to make your boss or your company three big promises about what you will deliver this year, what would those three big promises be? What are those three big deliverables be? And that might sound like a cute word trick. It has not intended to be it's really intended to shift your mind-set and say we all have goals and we hope we achieve our goals, and sometimes you do. Sometimes we don't, but how many times do you make a promise to someone not intending to fulfil that promise?

Steve Rush: And that is that intention and action gap, isn't it? Where we make lots of intentional statements of doing things, but the actions sometimes fall short. Is that goal based in your experience too?

Marc Effron: Yeah, absolutely and so the question then is. How do we raise the stakes for ourselves? To say it is not just a goal. I have made an emotional commitment to that goal. So I've made you a promise about what I'm going to do during the year. How do we really elevate that? So it's not just. Oh, yeah, it is on my list of stuff to do. Well, that's likely not going to be anywhere near as motivational as here's a big stretch goal that I've set for myself or that my boss has set for me that I know is going to be challenging a little bit scary and I might need to learn something new or behave in a different way to achieve it. But I know I'm going to get bigger results by setting something that is probably just out of my reach.

Steve Rush: That leads us to this second one, which is around behave to perform. What, does that really mean? 

Marc Effron: Sure. I mentioned earlier, it would be really nice if we helped every new university grad to understand the few things that are going to matter most in their career.

And one of the things that my experience shows most leaders don't hear about until they're mid thirty. Is this concept of leadership derailers, many of your leaders may be familiar with those for those who aren't? Think of leadership derailers as your personality turned up too high. Some of the things that might have made you successful earlier in your career but if you keep doing them or you turn the dial ups, you are doing them even more. They are actually going to backfire on you.

Quick example. Let's say that you got early success because you're a brilliant project manager. Everything gets done on time, perfectly executed, no excuses. You pay a lot of attention to the detail. That is great, so you are a successful as a manager. People promote you or you promoted to be a director. You are still focusing on project management. You are really into the details, into the weeds. Stuff needs to get done, needs to get done on time. But you actually have some managers working for you who are supposed to be doing that and they kind of look at you sideways because you're playing around in their area. They kind of wish you would just manage instead, but because you drive good results, company likes that. They make you a vice president, man you are still in the weeds. Dig into those projects and really making sure that everything is perfectly executed. Well, now your peers and your boss are saying, well, I actually need more strategic thinking and more leadership. You need to be actually working with your team on projects and pushing that work down to the appropriate level. That type of factor says things that we do early in career may backfire on us or not be as helpful later in our career. Leadership derailers or exactly that, it might be that there is an element that you are very good at but you do it more frequently than you should, and it becomes something that derails you. Let's take a very practical example.

Let's say that you are someone who is very good at building relationships and calling attention to yourself. You are happy to talk about the quality of your work. You think that is the right thing to do to showcase it. Now, that is very helpful to emerge as a leader, so if you are an unknown leader in your organization, one fast way to emerge is to make sure that people know who you are and they know the quality of the work that you're doing, so we'll call it kind of waving your hand around. I want to be noticed. I want to emerge quickly as a leader. The challenge is that behaviour, when you are 24 looks one way. That behaviour when you are 34 looks completely different. Now, it is well, you seem awfully bold and convinced that your ideas are right. 

You are sucking up airtime in meetings when other people might want to talk. You are disempowering your staff because their ideas never come to light. It is always your ideas; so that exact same behaviour has changed from being an asset to a liability and I think the key around behave to perform. Chapter 2 in Eight Steps To High-Performance is. Those derailers that are going to harm our career and that we need to pay attention to earlier than most of us do. Too many of us focus on, well, what is a great leader do? They do A, B and C that will take you so far, but at some point it's those derailers that you need to be aware of and eliminate or also going to hold back how quickly you progressed in your role. 

Steve Rush: Step 3 in your eight steps is growing yourself faster. How do we compete with fast vs. quality? 

Marc Effron: The key message there is that the science is pretty clear that we're going to grow most quickly through the experiences that we have. But far too often what we don't think about is what's the journey that I'm supposed to be going on? Meaning where am I today. So how do I show up today? How would I like to show up in the future? And in the book, I frame this as what we call a from too statement, and my colleague Jim Shanley. Who founded the Talent Management Institute at UNC with me, came up with this concept. It is brilliantly, simple concept that says before I develop my plan around how do I grow myself faster, let's chart out that journey and say, what do I need to move from or where do I need to move from and where do I need to move to? And that statement might sound like I need to move from being seen as a project manager who flawlessly executes and focuses on the smallest detail. To a leader who can bring others along and help them to execute in the same way that I would on large, complex global projects. So from that from too, says let's map the journey first. Where am I going from? And to, and then think about what are the few big experiences I need to get better at that. So grow yourself faster said, let's focus on the one thing that matters most in accelerating my development, which is getting me really high quality experiences. But let's plan those experiences by saying, am I clear about how I am perceived today at work and am I clear about how I want to be perceived at work going forward and then use experiences to fill that gap?

Steve Rush: So I really like that whole using experiences to fill that gap, because actually I don't think many people spend time focusing on the experiences they've had and transferring that to core foundations. And I guess that leads on to your next step, which if ever there was a time for connection and you call your next step “connect”, it is probably now.

Marc Effron: Sure. Connect is one of those steps that, to be honest, I didn't realize was as powerful as it was until I read through all that scientific research about how people connected to workplace and the strength in those relationships. Obviously, I intellectually understood that but when I read through connecting, what I realized is there is incredible power in connecting to help make you a higher performer, but it matters who you connect with and how you connect with them. What does the best science say about who to connect with? Well, it starts with your boss.

That boss relationship is amazingly predictive of how far and how fast you will move up in your organization. Now, here is where things get tricky. Some people are very uncomfortable being nice to their boss. No, not being unnice, but kind of building that personal, warm, friendly relationship is what the science says is. It is that trusting relationship, not the transactional relationship. A boss asked me to do something. I did it for them. But really, that more personal relationship. Do I have a cup of coffee with him? Occasionally. Have I invited the boss and her or his family over for dinner at my house? Do we travel together? Are there ways that I am getting to know that leader in a way that they really trust me and they really value my judgment? And they feel more than that. Some of that transactional connection of this person is an employee and there is obviously a lot of grey in what that relationship looks like. But what the science would say is the stronger that relationship is, the more quickly you're going to move up in an organization and part of that is just the basics, treating your boss that you would treat any other friend. Not every conversation is a work conversation. Maybe you are asking that person out to grab a sandwich or a coffee on a regular basis, but you are working hard to consciously build that relationship. And the science would also say that peer relationships are important, and one of the things I say when I'm working with leaders on this step is map the quality of your relationship with all of your peers.

All of the folks may be on the same team and other important folks who are peers in your organization. Rate those relationships on a basic scale. Let's called it a 5 to 1 scale. 5 is brilliant, 1 is you don't get along very well at all. Any of your peers who you would rate as a 3 or lower. You need to connect within the next two weeks. In this environment virtual coffee or just a check and call to say, hey, how are things going? That is not a transactional or call. And this might even be something that you need to preface with. Hey, Steve, I know we don't actually chat all that much, but I thought, you know, given the current environment, you can't hurt just to kind of have a bit more of a get to know call and understand what's going on with you and learn more about you and, you know, outside of the work environment. It might need to be that practiced of a conversation where you not kind of trying to suddenly say, oh, I am going to ask him a couple of questions about his weekend, but instead say, hey, I'm just trying to build better relationships. And I thought maybe we could just have a conversation. So connecting, doing it in a planned way, what is the quality of my relationship with my boss? What is the quality of the relationship with my peers and actively managing those to help you be a higher performer?

Steve Rush: It is really fascinating, in the research that I've concluded also in a very similar way, I found also that those colleagues who avoid people they’ve connected with less, also trust them less - and they also mirror that same lack of trust because it's a bi-product, isn't of connection?

Marc Effron: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: The next one is around “maximizing your fit” Marc, tell us a little bit about what that refers to?

Marc Effron: Mapping yourself is really understanding that your organization is going to change and evolve and organizations are changing, evolving more quickly than ever. They might get into a new market place. They might have a new strategy, a new way of having work get done, and if you want to stay a high performer, your job is to be looking at the future of your company and saying, given where I think my company is going. What are the few capabilities that are going to be valued in that environment that might be different than what's valued today? And to compare yourself to that future state and say, okay, I'm probably good at two of the four things they're looking for, I'm not really as good at two of the new things they're looking for.

How do I build that capability as quickly as possible? Because High Performers are always thinking about how do I ensure that I fit perfectly with the needs of my organization and not relying on the company to come to them and say, Oh, Marc, we're going to retrain you to fit with the future environment. But being much more proactive if you can't translate yourself your organization's strategy into those capabilities, talking to your boss or your boss's, boss and saying very explicitly, I want to continue to be a strong performer here, what new capabilities do you see our organization needing that I might need to build in the short term? So Maximize Your Fit is saying, the science is very clear that our fit with an organization helps to predict our success. And so our high performers are always going to be looking at themselves and saying, given where our organization is going and the capabilities they need to be successful in the future, it needs to be successful the future. Do my capabilities match kind of well, not very well or very well with that future state and where ever there are gaps that high performers working to build those capabilities and close those gaps as quickly as possible.

Steve Rush: That is great. Thank you Marc. When I read “fake it”, being one of your eight steps, so when we talk about faking it when I read this in your book, it really intrigued me because as I suddenly thought about, how does that square itself with authenticity? But in your book you write, “sometimes it's better than being your genuine you”. What does that mean Marc?

Marc Effron: It is interesting. The chapter six on “fake it” probably yields more screaming than any of the other chapters and it is often misinterpreted. People say, oh, you don't really mean that people should fake a behaviour. You mean that they should just kind of adjust things or adapt. I double down and say, no actually! What we are talking about, it is very likely that you are good at many things at work, that you have a lot of the right behaviours, skills, but it's also very likely going back to the de-railers that we talked about earlier, that there are one or maybe two things that either you do too much of or do too little love and you genuinely feel that those are the right things to do. You generally feel that the level at which you display them is correct, but you know that other people succeed by doing something very different.

So I mentioned earlier some people are very good at emerging as leaders by waving their hand around and calling attention to themselves. You might say, look, I feel that is just the wrong thing to do. Good work should speak for itself. I should not have to do that. You know, I just don't think that's the right thing to do. But the science would say if you do that, you're going to emerge more quickly as a leader. You might need to fake that behaviour. You might need to put on an actor's mask and say, I'm going to show up in this next meeting, not as myself, but as somebody who's more than happy to share what they've been working on and to draw some attention to themselves, because I know that is going to allow me to be a higher performer. And you might say, look, I don't like that behaviour. I don't believe in engaging in that behaviour, but I know it's the right thing to do to advance my career, and so what you might need to do is fundamentally fake that behaviour. Become for that one hour in that meeting a different version of you, and that's not adapting. That is not adjusting. That is saying I am going to be a different person in that meeting than I normally am and I can return to being the genuine or authentic me after that meeting.

The challenges is, if we always want to be our authentic selves. It suggests that we think that our authentic selves are the best possible version of us or the most effective possible version. And the science would suggest that's fundamentally not true. What is this look like in practice? I do this all the time. There is a gentleman, some of your listeners might know of who is a brilliant writer and brilliant speaker and coach named Marshall Goldsmith. And if you've ever seen Marshall Goldsmith on stage, he is one of the most engaging, entertaining individuals that you'll ever come across. I am not naturally like that on stage, even though I do a lot of presenting. And so sometimes if I'm feeling maybe a little bit nervous before a speech or it's a particularly large group I'm talking to. Before I walk onto that stage, I don't think to myself, what would Marshall Goldsmith do? I say to myself, become Marshall Goldsmith and I walk out on that stage far more animated and energetic than I would ever naturally be in my life, because I am wearing that Marshall Goldsmith mask. I am faking being Marshall Goldsmith. Now, when I am off that stage, do I go back to being much more of an introverted and quiet individual? I certainly do, but what I did in that section was I showed up as what that audience needed to see, really forget about the genuine me or the authentic me or the me who I wanted to be at that moment. What I knew was that somebody had paid really good money for me to show up and entertain and engage that crowd. And the right person to do that was Marshall Goldsmith, so it's Marshall Goldsmith's mind-set and my content. I faked it and it delivered far better results.

Steve Rush: I really like that. I think this demonstrates this is about modelling other behaviours to improve your capability, but not mimicking behaviours. And I think when you model and you are you still you, you're authentic. When you mimic, then that is where the intuition kicks in and says, I don't think that is true. 

Marc Efforn: Great point.

Steve Rush: Commit your body is the next one. Now, how do you commit your body to becoming highly successful and improved performance?

Marc Efforn: It was interesting. As I read through all those academic articles, and the search simply started with let's find anything that claims that something improves performance at work. And I started to see all these articles come up that's talked about. Here are things that you could do to manage yourself as an individual to be more effective. Actually what I really thought I would find was a bunch of proof around exercise, that exercise was the key to being a higher performer at work because I could draw all sorts of logical threads and reasons why that was the case. But when all the research actually said was the single most powerful thing you can do to manage yourself is actually to manage your sleep properly. There has been a lot of writing on this recently. The challenges is that writing is oftentimes very confusing and sometimes contradictory. When you read across all the sleep literature. What does it say about how to ensure that you are a higher performer at work? Well, the first thing that your listeners would want to pay attention to is the separation between quality of sleep and quantity of sleep. The science would say quality of sleep matters much more than quantity of sleep. When you get low quality sleep, it affects what are called your executive functions. That does not mean that you function like an executive. It means things like strategic thinking and creativity and working well in groups of others. So low quality sleep actually undercuts the capabilities that are most likely to make you a high performer.

Now, luckily, scientists have dug into how do you increase that quality of sleep. And it might be a lot of things your listeners have heard of before, but the question is, what are we doing about that? Those factors are things like we sleep better in a cool room, in a dark room, in a quiet room. When we have not had caffeine for at least eight hours and we have not had any alcohol for at least four hours, a very monastic type of existence. And since most people don't live that monastic type of existence, the question is, can you improve one of those things? Can you make the room a little darker, a little colder, a little quieter, a little less screen reading beforehand? So this is not the necessarily for most high performers. How can you live a perfectly monastic life to get great sleep? But can you adjust some of those factors because the improved quality of sleep is guaranteed to help with performance. Now, on the quantity side, quantity still matters. The challenge of the quantity side is that the advice is a bit all over the place. The National Science Foundation, or National Sleep Foundation says that the right number of hours of sleep is somewhere between 6 and 10. Well there is a four-hour difference in there and I can do a lot with those four hours. So is it six or is it 10? When you read through all the literature on sleep, it suggests that the sweet spot, if you're getting quality sleep as well as somewhere between six and a half and seven and a half hours.

And if you don't get quantity of sleep, it's not going to affect your executive functions. It is going to actually affect your basic functions. You are going to be forgetful. You might not find your keys on the way out the door. You might stumble over somebody name in a meeting. It is not going to necessarily affect your higher order functions. Now, luckily, scientists have also studied, well, what happens if you can't get the quality or the quantity you want or any sleep hacks available to you? Staying with the theme of our conversation around hacking. Well, the good news is on the quality side, scientists have found that a 10 minute nap, not a five, not a fifteen, not an hour, a ten minute nap is the ideal length to make up for up to an hour of low quality sleep. So a 10 minute nap has amazingly restorative powers from being a high performer, recognizing that not everyone has a nap pod in their office. Science is very clear, 10 minutes of napping is amazingly powerful and for low quantity of sleep. What the science says is it is our old friend, caffeine. That is the best way to wake up some of those more basic functions, so sleep unbelievably strong foundation. The other six steps we have just talked about will not work well if you are not managing your sleep properly.

Steve Rush: And I read some research not so long ago actually around sleep is about four or five times more important to daily routines as nutrition. In other words, if I did not eat for three days, the worst I would be is hungry. If I did not sleep for three days, then I would be starting to really lose my mental cognition.

Marc Effron: I think that is a fantastic parallel. I think that that says a lot.

Steve Rush: And then the last one is avoid distractions. And I think we can all be distracted by things at work and of course, our brain is naturally looking for those distractions as well. How do you reference in your book and maybe share a little bit about what that means for you?

Marc Effron: Avoiding distractions is really all about focusing on what is proven to make you a higher performer, and that is challenging when every day there is a new TED Talks or a blog article or a book or something that says, hey. Look over here, here is a secret, simple, easy way to be a better leader or hear 3 secrets from billionaires or whatever the clickbait is that enters your browser, and we've just talked about seven factors that are absolutely conclusively scientifically proven to make you a higher performer. This step around avoiding distractions really said. Why don't you start with the things that we know are absolutely proven to be true. Instead of responding to whatever hit your inbox or whatever you see in your browser that seems like it is a fast and easy way to be a higher performer. The science is unbelievably crystal clear about what will make us a higher performer. Do those things first, as opposed to whatever seems trendy at the moment. 

Steve Rush: Got it, and I think it is the whole philosophy of procrastination, isn't it?

Marc Effron: Absolutely. 

Steve Rush: At this point in the show, we normally ask our guests to share that top leadership hacks, but you have already shared an abundance of your hacks. What I am keen to learn though Marc is from your experiences. We call this Hack to Attack, where things in the past that you've done maybe not worked as well or you screwed up on. But we now use that information and those lessons as part of our work or life for the future. What would be your Hack to Attack? 

Marc Effron: Sure. This hack comes from early in my career. I was twenty-five years old, working as a political consultant in Southern California in the United States. And we had a small firm, made up of five or six people and our job was to help people in the construction industry to lobby local officials to get big projects approved. So in Southern California, this was many, many years ago. There was lots of open land and builders wanted to buy that land and get approval to build on it as quickly as possible, so we got friendly candidates elected and then we lobbied those candidates to get those projects approved. And this was, I guess, the late 80s and what we found was that business went very well for about two years, and then there was a recession and that recession hit the housing industry hard, and we only had three big clients who we relied on for all of our revenues. And those three clients quickly went bankrupt and we were left with absolutely no income, and that was a very painful thing. As a young individual who was just getting by at the time and the two big lessons that taught me, and certainly how I manage my business today and at times like this have been very helpful. One always structure the business for the worst case scenario, meaning if things shut down and you still need to pay employees, are you going to have enough in that company bank account to weather a six month or 12 month storm? My structure right now is we always want to have a year of payroll in the bank and that might sound extremely conservative, but right now, it seems like a really good way to manage.

So always structure your firm to survive the worst, but then also ensure that you are incredibly well connected across the industry, meaning at times like this when we look at the next year and aren't certain how business will go. I want as many people in our profession as possible to understand who our firm is, what we do, and how we can help them. Because, well, we have always known in the past where business would come from or likely would come from. It might be that all bets are off in the future. So I much rather work with a network of about thirty five thousand contacts. I'd much rather have thirty five thousand contacts and not be sure about which one of them will reach out next week, then rely on two or three companies and hope that they will continue to be the tent poles for the business.

Steve Rush: Super lessons, and now, more than ever, planning for worst case scenario will call out whether or not business has got those foundations and a very good lesson learned. Thanks for sharing. So a final thing that we would like to ask of you today, Marc, is if you were able to do a bit of time travel and go back and bump into Marc at 21, what would be the best bit of advice you'd give him?

Marc Effron: Probably two things and it reflects on what we have already talked about today. One is, recognize that the strength of the relationships that you have will either accelerate or decelerate your career. As an introvert, I am naturally not good at doing that, and it always seemed like a nice to do, not a need to do and it probably was not until the middle of my career when I understood exactly how essential that was. So one piece of advice I would give my younger self is, even if you don't feel comfortable doing it. Build lots of good relationships starting right now.

And the second one and this is a very Marc specific. I can be a bit lazy at times. I’m motivated around things I love and I am pretty lazy around things I don't love to do, and I think my advice to my much younger self would be just work harder. You need to put in more hours if you are at your desk and you think, oh, I can go home now, I have nothing to do. Sit there for another hour and think of something to do. We talked about hard work is part of having a high performers mind-set. I got to business school and I got my butt kicked the first semester on grades. I realized actually Marc, you simply need to work harder and put in more hours, and I have been doing that ever since and I think it pays off well. So build great strong relationships and work really, really hard.

Steve Rush: That is great advice as well, and I think it is that extra effort. The extra yards coupled with that mind-set of high performance will make a difference for people as they progress through their careers. So thank you for sharing. I suspect that colleagues and people have been listening to you talk today. We will be thinking where can I find out more about Marc. How can I get my hands on the eight steps? Where would you like people to go who have been listening in today? 

Marc Effron: Sure. Well, if they want to learn more about the eight steps, I think the easiest way is to pick up the book. It is on Amazon and all the major platforms. If you wanted to just learn more about myself, read a lot more of my articles, then you can go to our corporate site. That is talentstrategygroup.com. There are probably 50 different articles that I have written parallel many of these same topics.

Steve Rush: And we will also make sure they're in the show notes, so after listening to this podcast, folk can go click on it and go straight to find out where and what you're doing right now. So Marc just wanted to finally say it's been super listening to you today and I've learned loads listening to you and I'm grateful for you taking time out of what I know is a pretty busy time for you at The Talent Strategy Group. So thanks for joining us on The Leadership Podcast.

Marc Effron: Thank you, Steve. I enjoyed the conversation and I appreciate your listeners tuning in.

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.

Byron Low is known as the, “technical guy who has the ability to connect”. While he is an introvert and process oriented, he thrives on solving problems with his clients. His entire career has been dedicated to improving the lives of others, now you can listen to Byron and during this episode you can learn:

• How curiosity can be a driver in your life and work
• How introverts can be as creative and entrepreneurial as extroverts
• Career decisions are made from necessity as well as design – and that’s ok
• Being interestING isn’t enough – you need to be interestED.
• How you take your thoughts – and turn them in to tools!

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com

Find out more about about Byron on here Website: https://www.byronlow.com

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Read the full episode Transcript Below:

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Introduction

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 coaching catalyst, the technical guy with the ability to connect. It is Byron Low. Before we have a chance to speak with Byron. It is The Leadership Hacker News

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, wherever you turn to receive your news, you are likely to bump into the phrase “new normal”. What is the new normal? I asked this question to a group of my professional colleagues, network and associates to evaluate what hasn't happened yet - the future, a label of a new normal as to whether that helps us or holds us back? Labels can often be referred to guises, mind-sets and other things that help us frame how we see the world and how we respond; and that's really important if we're trying to make a change or a step change in how we behave in order to change our behaviour.

However, when we start thinking about strategically, giving labels could often send us to thinking back to what normal was vs. new possibilities and new thinking. Overwhelmingly, the research I found through my network suggested that it was unhelpful to give the “new normal” its credence in our current status quo because it was helping us to refer back to biases, and of course, what's happening isn't normal and is unlikely to be normal because normality, as we knew things in the past, is never going to be how things will be in the future. In order to think strategically and thoughtfully, it's high time now to accept things how they are, adjust our approach because life will go on and what is normal tomorrow might not be normal the day after. What is not normal the day after could be completely different. So let's drop the labels of “new normal”, let's just focus on how things are,  be present, be in the moment and control what we can control.

On a lighter note, from the not so normal, Loch Ness Monster watchers around the world are intrigued to find that in this period of lock down that Nessie has made a reappearance. A 55-year-old Irish hospital clerk caught what he believes is the legendary creature. Caught on camera it swam around the Irish loch on Monday. The official Loch Ness monster sightings register. That is right, there is one! confirming the footage, which shows something unexplained emerging from the Urquhart Bay at around 8:11 a.m. It is only the second sighting of the Loch Ness monster this decade. And I wonder, is that normal? Or just the new normal? That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news, insights or information you would like to share with our listeners. Please get in touch through our website or our social media channels. 

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: On today's show, I have got coaching Catalyst, Byron Low. He has been a coach for twenty-five years, been included as part of strategic leadership of twenty two plus start-ups. And he's the technical guy that people connect with. Byron welcome to the show.

Byron Low: Thanks, Steve.

Steve Rush: So twenty-two start-ups. Twenty-five years as a coach. That is an inordinate amount of experience to be able helping you and your clients with, but for you, your first business entrepreneurship, if you like, started when you were in high school. Tell us, a little bit about that?

Byron Low: Yeah. Ever since I was a little kid, I have been one of those people that was curious and interested in a lot of things. Steve, I was the kid that read encyclopaedias and I am sure I know that in Europe you all have encyclopaedias. But in America, that was not a popular thing to do. I read encyclopaedias as a as a child, so that always gave me this…I have and always have had this very voracious appetite for knowledge. I will give an example.

When I was younger, we had a family set of encyclopaedias. But ask him for us a special kind of encyclopaedia called Jane's Encyclopaedia of Aviation. And he said, What is that? I said, well, it is a special encyclopaedia of just airplanes. And he looked at me like, what? Why would you want that? Well, I learned when I was a kid that my dad grew up on the eastern seaboard, of The United States, and when he was a kid. He had these cards and I got to see them. There are these cards that were the silhouettes of all of the German of the axis powered and also the allied powered airplanes, and the silhouette was looking down on it. You could see the actual airplane, and that really led me to this interest in just learning about that. So I learned all about World War 1, World War 2, all the aircraft and I had them all memorized, and I also learned about all manufacturers from, you know, from the very, very beginning. So I learned about all the different kinds of cars. My curiosity was always very, very strong, and that led me to want to start different kinds of businesses and I have always been kind of very kind of entrepreneurial. When I was even younger before high school. I was the one that kind of organize the youth activities and sports in my neighbourhood. I help people kind of get together and do things and even then, I was an introvert and I am still an introvert. But there was something there that was very enterprising.

Steve Rush: And enterprising I guess, comes from those thoughts you are having. So introverted people will take on that information, energy and power from their internal source where extroverted people obviously get their energy from external sources and people and surroundings. But that's not atypical for entrepreneurs to be coaches, is it? How did you wrestle with the internal dialogue that was saying, “I am introverted, but yet I still need to be extroverted and go out and find new things and new ways of working?”

Byron Low: That is a good question! I think even when I was younger; I was drawn to athletics, even though I was kind of a nerd in a sense or even as a boy, a technical person. I very much was drawn to being athletic and being involved in sports. I remember my family originated - you know, they are all in northern U.K. in Scotland. And I remember learning about cricket and even rugby and obviously football, your football and I remember having learning that I had cousins in Scotland, but I wanted to learn about their game. But I didn't really have any context for learning that, but for me, it was about learning the American sports of football, basketball and baseball and tennis, which were all the things that I played. The world of athletics is an external world and you can be an introvert and be an athlete. Absolutely, but that's really kind of how I bridged the gap with my internal world. Because you're right, introverts have this very, very large interior world. Mine as an introvert, It is vast and how I made the connection to the external world was through sports. And I absolutely love sports and I learned how to affiliate with others through sports, and it still is, it is a love of my life. I mean, I am actually very, very much missing that today because there are not any sports right now. I actually have a son who is 16, who is a baseball player and he very much wants to be a competitive baseball player someday. I am actually living through him; I can see in him what I had when I was younger in this intensity of wanting to be a better athlete.

Steve Rush: So your exploration of other people and other activities is your external energy, I guess, right?

Byron Low: That is right. I think my externality came in two places. It came both in academics working either with my classmates, because I remember even when I was in school, I remember a time when I was a freshman, I was taking a class in physics and learning about physics. And there was this one time where I was answering the questions in physics, but I was answering them in Spanish because the class I had before Physics was Spanish, so instead of putting velocity, I answered that the question of physics velocidad. So that became kind of a joke between me and my physics teacher. It was just simply that external world of academics and also the external world of sports in school that was really kind of where I was able to connect with people, so to speak.

Steve Rush: Got it, so then you progressed from high school, interestingly, what was the business you created in high school?

Byron Low: It was real simple. I had a friend in high school, whose family owned land, and they had a lot of trees on their land, and his grandfather actually had a wood splitter, which once you get the tree, you fill the tree and you knock it down and you chop it up with a chainsaw. You put the segments of the tree and a splitter and it literally splits those segments into firewood. It was a firewood making business.

Steve Rush: Brilliant, so from there then the technical side, that technical curiosity that you share earlier, that led you into moving into the field of engineering, right?

Byron Low: Yeah, I worked as an engineer for a few years with a company in Phoenix, Arizona called Garrett Turbin Engine Company. They were private; they were not a defence contractor, they were a private company that made small jet engines for private aircraft. That company eventually was purchased by another company, and I'm not even sure today if those engines are even in existence because our biggest competitor is a massive company out of the East Coast. It was a fun time, one of my most fond memories was… there was a time when we were working together as engineers. I think about, you know your basic cubicle setup and there was this one particular instance where I came across a problem where I thought I had a differential equation, and a differential equation is a specific kind of math problem and I called it out, “I think I've got a differential equation” and everyone around me came over to look at it and right then, because we are going to talk later about how to turn thoughts into tools and this is an example of how to turn thoughts into tools. I had a thought at that time. Oh, everyone is interested because it was kind of rare to run in this differential equation in real life work situation. We are not math class we are bunch of engineers. Every single guy that was on this little problem solving exercise, and again, I'm the youngest guy but I get everyone together, and we were all in this big area and everyone has as a blank piece of paper.

And it was going to be a race. Who is going to solve the problem first? And I happened to be standing behind a guy from Iran and a guy from Bangladesh, and they both started to answer this differential equation, and I knew how to solve the differential equation and I could see my other American colleagues trying to answer the differential equation. But when I looked over the shoulders of these two men who we're doing the same thing, the way they went about it was absolutely bizarre to me, which led to another conversation where these two guys ended up sharing with everyone else there. And no one knew that the way these guys thought of math and numbers was completely different than everyone else. The point is, is that the way that the gentleman from Iran, the way the gentleman from Bangladesh and then there was even another guy from Nepal, another guy from India, they all had very, very similar ways of answering the question. I promise you the answer, they question, they answer, the problem but they almost answer the problem in reverse, and it blew all of the North Americans minds, all of us. And that was an example of taking a thought I had and literally turned into a tool in real time. It was all about discovery. It was all because I was curious, and I was not afraid, even though I was the most junior. I was the least intelligent of that group. I had the least experience but I did not care because I wanted to know. I wanted to know the answer. I wanted to find out something, and it was absolutely fascinating.

Steve Rush: And do you think that is where you got the bug to become a coach? Because all great coaches need the ability to ask those great questions. Those restless questions, the teasing curious “pokey questions” as I call them. Is that where that kind of start for you?

Byron Low: Yeah, I think so. Most children, they identify with one parent. Some of us are blessed to have two, and I had two but with my two sets of parents, I identified with my mom. I long to connect with my dad, which I did not really have a great connection with my dad. But I definitely connect with my mom, and my mom was the was the extrovert. She was relational and I was the introvert but because of her intense curiosity, almost to an annoying level. My mom passed away several years ago. I took her to the grocery store and I had to go run an errand while she was in the grocery store, and when I came back. By this, like seventy-five years old. I come back to pick up my mom. My mom is still on the first aisle of the grocery store, and she is having a conversation with someone. She has been talking to the exact same person for like twenty-five minutes, and I thought she was going to be finished with her grocery shopping. But that's an example of my mom. My mom gave me this ability to connect with people, even though I am technical. So to answer your question, absolutely. It is a combination of having the ability, but also working on the ability to connect with people. Even though I am technically even though I've got this, I've got all these questions. I have to find a way and I try to be as creative as possible. I have to find a way to ask questions that are not offensive. They are not off putting. They are not intimidating because I love working with smart people.

But if you're the smartest person that can be intimidating, I don't mind being smart, but I don't ever have to be the smartest. What I want to be is. I want to be the most interested, not the most interesting, but the most interested. I want them to feel that I genuinely am curious and I want them to think that is almost that in itself is some kind of interesting as well.

Steve Rush: You know, it was that very thing that drew me to you when we first connected was that whole kind of technical-introverted yet coach, because most coaches I speak with and most coaches I work with, generally are more extroverted than introvert. So what was the kind of catalyst for you then to become a full time professional coach to help others? 

Byron Low: You know, I have been doing this work for a long time, but I think it was during the economic contraction we had back in 2008, 2009. I was doing mostly consulting, and I was doing some coaching and it was really out of out of necessity. This is also a lesson, I think that there are times in life we think we have a plan. But life gives us an opportunity that we have to adjust and it really wasn't something I was planning on, Steve. I was not necessarily planning on a career of being a coach. It was during the economic contraction. We as a family went for a significant amount of time without income. I had to cash out all of our savings in order to survive, but then the launching and really, the commitment to coaching as a business. I tell this, even as I am working with clients, if they are willing to make a change in their career, if they are willing to change their career, going into a different kind of industry or wanting to make an adjustment. The way I made this this decision for me and again, this is for me, but this is also the advice I give. And I would love to hear your thoughts. I tell them for me personally, I had to do this because I feel like I had no other choice, and it wasn't like I wanted to do this. I happen to be very good at it, and I really, really love it, but it was never a plan but I also think it is important that there has to be that full commitment. Does that make sense?

Steve Rush: It makes load of sense, and I think anybody who has been brilliant, successful and has longevity in any career, they always truly invested in that career don’t they. They are not distracted, you know, on part time this and part time that, they are all in, and I think that is what makes a difference. And I wholeheartedly agree with that and sometimes that's forced upon us through a situation and other times it's through purpose and drive, right?

Byron Low: That is right.

Steve Rush: When we spoke last, one of things that really intrigued me about our conversation  too was the way that you apply quite scientific approach to some of the activities that sits within a coaching experience. And you describe listening as a science. Tell me, what is the reason that you look at something that will do naturally, quite scientifically?

Byron Low: I think partly is where I am coming from. Coming from that technical perspective, that is my strength. That is where I am going to lean on, and when it comes to listening, listening is an incredibly relational thing to do. I am relational, I think. Because of my relationship with my mom and the examples of people that I had in my life, but I think that the reality is, is that I look at it as something that we all can obviously grow in. I don't care how technical you are and I have had clients who are the most technical people that you can imagine. You know scientists or Medical Doctors or Attorneys or, you know, Accountants, Economists, PhD. I honestly believe all of us, no matter where we are coming from. We can look at listening. Listening is one of the most incredible tools we have in our arsenal. All of us can have a tool kit that is very well equipped and that we can constantly be growing in our capacities, in our abilities to listen. It is very simple. Because I am technical, I don't necessarily think it's scientific, even though I do think that there are parts even how our brain is made that actually can help with that. 

Because the bottom line is, is that ultimately it is a choice. It's like you said earlier, it's a choice. It is commitment, when we are committed to listening, listening first; it goes back to what I said earlier, I had a really good friend who passed away. He actually played music my wife and I, our wedding and he learned from a very young age because his dad kind of called out to him and said, John, do you want to be interested or do you want to be interesting? And I remember hearing that for the first time when I was in my early twenties working with John, and John was the most intelligent human being I've ever met. He was an absolute genius, but he was actually fascinated being interesting but I learned from him that I can listen. I can learn and also, again, I can lead with that curiosity.

Steve Rush: And if there were, people listening to this ironically and thinking how do I practice, better listening. Any tips, techniques that you could share?

Byron Low: First of all, I think you have to be interested. I think you have to be focused. I am not doing it now, but most of the time when I am on a call with a client; I am not sitting in front of my computer. I am now because I am literally hardwired into my computer and this technology is using this over the Internet. Most the time I am on my phone and when I on a call with a client, I am actually walking. I walk up to up to 15 miles a day, and the walking takes me away from my computer and it forces me to hear them.

You literally have to hear people before you can listen to them. So you have to have a good connection and it is absolutely frustrating, frustrating for me. Really been out of shape if I can't hear. I mean, physically hear. So the point is, is that you have to be able to hear them. You have to have a good connection. When I talk with other coaches, most of their coaching practices face to face or I am talking with a prospective client and they want to meet face to face if they are local. I am happy to do that, if it works out for both of our schedules but it really is not necessary to meet face-to-face and today's virtual world with what is going on in the world today where many of us now are at home, I don't think that's necessary. I think as long as we have a good connection. I think we can listen, but it takes a commitment you have to want to listen.

Steve Rush: Sure, and I wonder if your natural introversion plays to that strength actually, doesn't it? Well, you don't need to see an experience other the people. You can internalize that yourself. 

Byron Low: Yeah, it is funny. Whenever I am on a Zoom meeting with clients or company of sorts and they always ask me, why don't you turn on your webcam? I tell them I don't have a webcam, and they don't believe me. I said, no, really, I don't want you to see me. I actually love anonymity. I don't ever want to be famous. Whenever I am on Zoom or another kind of screen share tool, I turn off the ability to see them. I think you are right. I think that really does lend itself really well to the interior world of the introvert.

Steve Rush: So we spoke a little earlier about the whole foundation for coaching for you particularly is around turning thoughts into tools and I know that is really big for you and certainly a big technique that you use with your client. How did that come about? And how do you now help other people turn their thoughts into tools? 

Byron Low: You know, I truly believe that as a practitioner and as a coach, that's one of the things that is a differentiator that sets me apart, is that I have a high level of curiosity which leads itself to I really want to learn a lot, and I tend to read a lot. And because I read a lot, I find tools. I am consistently sending articles to clients that I read, I think that might help them. And it could be as simple as just as an idea or a thought that I get or I want to glean from an article. I learned a long time ago. We are all familiar with the concept of “either/ or” thinking. Right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Byron Low: It is “either this” “or” that and it is very binary, It's either yes or no. It is either black or white. I am really a proponent of not having that kind of thinking, as much as the thinking that is “both/and…” A “both/and”, kind of thinking that is really open more to possibilities, more to the idea can we ask two more questions. And the idea of seeing that as a tool when you look at the things that I read or the things that a client is going through, I really wanted to help them see that it really is going to be up to them and how they want to apply something. They need to have a shift in their thinking that is not binary. It is not about, you know. Can it be this or that? It could be both. It could be both and we can actually use that the word and it can be both/and something. So the possibilities of having of thinking like that versus thinking that is more cut off. It opens up the window of possibility. That is exciting, and I think that ultimately when we think about providing people those kinds of tools and turning thoughts into tools, it really is about and this is really, really critical. It is about the people. It is about all of us. We have to be able to listen to ourselves. Because, Steve, I believe that you have all the tools you need in order for you to become the best version of you. But it's going to be important for you to be able to hear yourself. And that's really what I believe and I convey to my clients. It is my job to set up the relationship and the conversation so that they can hear themselves, because those tools, those thoughts, they are not my thoughts. They are their thoughts; they are the client's thoughts. So it's really critical for them to be able to hear their own thoughts. I would also add it is critical for them to see themselves, because when they hear themselves and they see themselves that is when the beginning of change occurs. It can happen because that is when we be become more self-aware. But the hearing of those thoughts, that's the first step of capturing the thought that can become a tool. If they don't have the ability or capacity to hear themselves to capture that thought, they can never see the thought become a tool. Does that make sense?

Steve Rush: Huge amount of sense and it plays to the whole mind-set Philosophy too doesn't it? So what you described as the “either /or” that very much plays to a fixed mind-set, it looks for evidence you got. Whereas when you ask “both/ and…” that plays to the unconscious part of the mind that has all of those thoughts, deep rooted, that are unconscious that we don't maybe listen to every day that we drag out, and that give us the foundation for the new tools, right?

Byron Low: That is right.

Steve Rush: So once we have done we've got a this thinking going on, how do you then distil all of those huge amounts of thoughts and experiences that people might be having. How do you distilled that into, “right.. here are the tools that are going help you”.

Byron Low: It is going to be different for each client I am working with. But I think the important thing for all of us that when we're having conversations with people be at coaching conversations or just simply personal interactions, it's critical. That all of us that we meet the other where they are. That we don't have expectations, that we don't force people to be something that they're not. So along with this willingness to listen and the willingness to literally physically hear someone. It is also this willingness to be kind of non-judgmental or open or accepting of them. I think that as a coach, I have to and I want to. This has been a hard lesson and I remember learning this was back in about 2009-2010, when I was first starting my coaching practice. I was talking to a psychologist and he was talking about trying to remove the judgmental language from my vocabulary where I was, and again, this is a little hard to conveyances in such a short amount of time. But the idea of, it is actually possible for us to be with another and to switch off this idea of judgment. And it led to a tool that I have, which again, I like tools, I like creating tools.

And the tool is, it's called the “AUAC”. Awareness, Understanding, Acceptance and Commit. Awareness, Understanding, Acceptance and Commitment. The awareness is really the first step. We have to be aware and then understanding is we have to understand ourselves. We also have to be willing to understand the other and understand and the other is not only hearing them, but listening to them but at the same time, which the understanding leads to this idea of acceptance. And if you are ever around our family, because I have you know, I have three children and a wife and a dog and we have a beautiful family.

If we ever had an argument as a family, which we had many arguments, we would slow down the argument a little bit and would say, okay, it is not about agreement. I am not asking you to agree with me. It is about can we understand each other? If we can understand each other and we really can get to a point of acceptance where I accept what you are saying. I accept the situation. I accept, you know, the conditions that we are in, then we can finally get to a commitment and that ultimately is action. But we have to get to a place where we can understand each other and it absolutely is a waste of time when we're trying to get someone to agree with us. And that judge mental language that I had then, the judgment of thinking that I had, it was just ingrained in me even as a child. And it's still there, Steve but when I hear it in myself or when I see it in other people, I'm more sensitive to it now. In the last 10 years of coaching, I have had the privilege of coaching people that have completely, utterly different world views than I have. And that doesn't mean I can't coach them. It just means that I have to suspend that judgment and be able to accept them where they are. That is how I have grown, as I have been able to help others. I have be able to learn how to listen, but also learn how to understand, but ultimately how to accept and it has been a lot of fun.

Steve Rush: That is really neat, and I think understanding each other is so much easier than trying to agree with each other, because we come from our own perspectives and we come with our own biases and our own experiences of the world, where actually if we can just find that common ground, then we move forward quicker, right?

Byron Low: Absolutely, but I think some of our families are kind of rooted in this argumentative, almost pugilistic culture where we like to fight. We like to prove our point, and oftentimes, when we are in a thinking mind-set like that, it is a very fixed mind-set. We are not really even listening to the person. We are listening to our own thoughts about what we are going to say next, because we want to destroy that person. I have watched debate. I have watched different debates on, it could be a political debate or it could be a different kind of debate. But the idea of debate, what if debate was about understanding versus just simply about destroying the other? And I think even within our own political systems, if we all kind of got together to try to solve the problem versus trying to prove that we're better than someone else, I think we could get more done. But I don't know the whole political system and the process. It doesn't seem to be, you know, oriented towards that as much as is oriented, like you said, towards getting people to agree with them and to me, I just find that to be a glorious waste of time.

Steve Rush: I could not agree with you anymore. Well, this part of the show Bryon we ask our guests to share some of their top Hacks. In your case top tools, so what will be some of your top tools that you can share with our listeners?

Bryon Low: You know, I've got three. The first one is knowing yourself. I think its absolute critical that as we grow as leaders, it starts as we grow. The seed starts in our own heart as we learn about ourselves. We have got to learn. You know, ultimately what we believe, who we believe we are, what we stand for. There is a really famous book out right now by a gentleman. His name is Simon Sinek is world famous, Start With Why. I think knowing yourself and starting with why is absolutely critical. Simon also has one of the most watched TED talks ever on how great leaders inspire action, because I think all great leaders and as a leadership hack, all great leaders, they know themselves.

The second leadership hack is really about being honest, and what that means is being honest with what you have and graciously accepting what you have. If we are all honest about what we have, and we are all growing, that is really the point. And it's really about progress equals happiness and that's not something I've coined that actually comes from Tony Robbins, because I believe it's absolutely true. I believe that if we are progressing, no matter what. I even share this with my 16-year-old son because he wants to play, you know, competitive baseball and I would say to him, it is about progressing as long as you are progressing.

We are good. You know, some days we're going to have good days or we can take two steps forward and a step back where we've made progress. Some days it is two steps forward and three steps backward. So we are actually we did not go very far that day, but that is okay. But the point is, is that if we're honest about what we've been given, what we've been entrusted and we do the best and really it's an effort thing. There is a book by Carol Dweck and Carol Dweck, D-W-E-C-K. She is the foremost expert on Mind-set, and in her book Mind-set, she talks about this. It is really about that effort. So my leadership hack is know yourself, and then to be honest.

And lastly, as you can imagine, it's about being curious. I want to lead with that and for some clients; I encourage to do the exact same thing. For others, that is not their thing. But ultimately, it's about looking at the world as a world of possibilities, as a world of wonder. And I do so not only do I want to know myself. I want to be honest with what I have, and I want to work hard. I also want to be curious, because I believe that if we are curious, there is that idea that curiosity can lead to great questions and great questions can lead to other great questions. And to me, that sounds like a fun life. 

Steve Rush: And lifelong learning also means you never get bored and you never get stale, because there's always something new you can go back to and incidentally, Carol Dweck is a bonus hack. Carol Dweck, as part of her famous work around mind-set. One of the things that I often help my kids and my clients with is the whole power of YET. So you can't fail at something but you just haven't been successful “YET”. It create’s just a different mind-set that helps people think about next possibilities vs. closing down actions and activities, so great hacks.

We have also become familiar in asking our guests on the show to share their “hack to attack”. So this is a period in a time where something's gone wrong, where maybe you've screwed up, but it's now become part of their learning. Part of the way that they do things and it is playing part of their future. What will be your hack to attack?

Bryon Low: My hack to attack has to do with connecting with people. I have a tendency like a lot of us do. As a matter of fact, in this last week, I probably have had a half a dozen conversations with folks who have spent their careers committed to the companies that they were working in. And because they were committed to the companies they were working in, they never, ever really worked on themselves. They never really worked on their career and if that sounds like you, I get it. The challenge I had was I suffered from that.

Which is really a form of myopia where you’re so focused and intense on what you're doing, you're not necessarily thinking about yourself or your career, you're thinking about the company you're working for, which has great benefits for the company, not so great benefits for the individual.

But what I also learned when I was just thinking through this process with Steve was not only was that true for me in my career, but it also was true for me in connections and people that I was working with, because whenever there was a change, whenever there was a change of location, a change of job. What I have learned was and I have always known this, but it just kind of. It was stark. I am not very good at keeping up with people. Look, I have no idea who is going to listen to this, but if there are people that are in my past that are listening to this, I am sorry. I understand that I have the capacity to relate. I do and I know that because there is a friend that I reach out to a couple of times a year, and we are always able to kind of pick up where we left off. Always and it is always deep and it is always meaningful. But for some reason, with keeping up with people, and when social media came on board, you know, back in the early 2000s and someone actually talked me into joining Facebook, and the whole idea of Facebook for an introvert is like it's very, very stress inducing. And I only did it because I was talked into it and I hated it from the very, very first time I was on Facebook, but just because I hate Facebook. I remember one time I was actually on Facebook and I have all these people that are connected to me, and while I was on Facebook looking at someone, someone started talking to me and that literally freak me out to have someone talk to me when I was on Facebook. I did not understand it, but the point is. Is that I think I have a lot of room for growth and opportunity to remain and stay connected with people and that takes effort, that takes work, that takes time and ultimately, I want to do that. And I think when I look back, I think people could feel a little confused by my lack of consistency there.

Steve Rush: And I guess this will absolutely play part of education for others listening to this, who are also introverted, who struggle with that. Conversely, of course, if you are extroverted and struggled to relax, struggled to be introspective and reflective. The same is absolutely true, just poles are different, right?

Bryon Low: Right and that really is something I think that with my extroverted friends and family that are almost like because I told you my mom was an extrovert. She had a very large family of sisters and brothers. My mom spoke to almost every single one of her siblings every single week on the phone.

I have two brothers and a sister, and let me just say I don't. I know I am not going to be my mom, but I have to get better in this. And I want to get better but the bottom line is, I really do a very poor job at this.

Steve Rush: Comes back to one of those hacks, know yourself, you know, these things and therefore, part of your not getting it right in the past, you're able to work on it for the future. Right?

Bryon Low: That is right, and I like what you said about what Dweck said yet. And even the utilization of something like Facebook. I have not figured that out and it is an opportunity for me to learn more. And I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter. I don't know what I'm doing. Honestly, Steve, but I am open. I want to learn and I want to build to make those connections. 

Steve Rush: And learning by experience is often the best way.

Bryon Low: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: So if you were able to do bit of time travel, get back and bump into Byron when he was 21, what would be the advice you would give him?

Bryon Low: You know, the first advice is I would say just relax, because I come with this. This supercharged intensity about life, about myself. I even had a professor one time. Tell me, Byron, you practically vibrate. What she meant was that there is a level of intensity that I have it can be off putting. It can be intimidating, but I think what I would tell my younger self, because I have such and again, if you remember what Carol Dweck would talk about with a fixed mind-set person, and I think I was very fixed mind-set when I was younger.

They feel like they have to be the best. They feel like that, there is this like compulsion and it kind of pushes them. I don't necessarily feel that today but I think when I was younger, I would really want to and again I would have a caveat. I can give my advice to my younger self, but the caveat is this, my younger self would accept it.

I would say relax. Number one, relax and just allow your curiosity, your interest, your ability to connect with people. Just lead with that and have fun. I think there were times when I allowed my intensity to kind of rule and situations. Give you a personal example. To this day, I have never consumed alcohol and I remember had a colleague years ago. Say, the epiphany was, wow, you have never actually had any way of having that edge kind of off, of you. Because everyone knows me as intense. And no, I've never had a buzz, ever. And there's a reason for that. I come from a home, a home life where alcohol was abused, so I did not get to see the positive side of alcohol. I am not against alcohol at all, as a matter of fact, I have conversations with my children. I believe I am been very open but the reality is, is that I think that there is an intensity as a young person, there is almost this drivenness were there was not a terrific amount of grace that I was giving myself.

And what I would do is I would just simply say, it's going to be okay. You are going to be okay, just take it easy. And I would not necessarily say for me to drink. That is not the answer; the answer is to be a little more accepting of myself and to be a little more forgiving of myself and to be a little bit more self-compassionate to myself, if that makes any sense.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Lots of lessons there isn't there, and also, interestingly, if you look back on some of those key instrumental activities as part of your life, they're forming your work now and that's fantastic news. So Byron, if folk were listening to this and I wanted to find out a little bit more about your work, maybe connect with you through some social media. Where would you like them to find you?

Bryon Low: I am on Facebook. I am on Instagram and Twitter but I think the probably the best places is to go to Byron Low, B-Y-R-O-N L-O-W, bryonlow.com. You will get to see the kind of work that I do. And if you want to reach me, you can reach me at my phone numbers on the website. You can also reach me through email byron@byronlow.com. I would love to hear from you and but that's probably the best and the most direct and primary ways of getting hold of me.

Steve Rush: I will also make sure that we've got your contact details in our show notes Byron as soon as folks listen to this. They can click on the links and connect with these straightaway.

Bryon Low: Excellent. 

Steve Rush: So finally, it is just for me to say that I have really enjoyed connecting with you. I have really enjoyed you being part of our extended leadership hacker community. And, you know, there's no question that as a technical guy, you absolutely have the ability to connect and I'm sure that's going to be the case through our listenership. Byron, thank you ever so much for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast. It has been a super pleasure to be speaking with you.

Bryon Low: Thank you, Steve. I very much appreciate it, and it was a lot of fun. I appreciate it and I hope the best for you and your listeners and for you and your family.

Steve Rush: Thank you Byron, take care. 

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.

Angela Foster is a nutritionist, health and performance coach who works with athletes, entrepreneurs and CEOs of global organizations. She is also the CEO of My DNA EDGE.

In Hacking Your Leadership Health – You will learn:

• How after fighting for her life she found her life and work passion
• The relationship between sleep and leadership performance
• How our physical and mental performance are integrated
• Not all stress is bad for you and your team
• How physical fitness improves your brain function
• What Biohacking is and how it can enhance your health and your performance.

Follow us and explore our social media tribe from our Website: https://leadership-hacker.com

Find our more about about Angela on here Website: https://angelafosterperformance.com

Angela on Instagram

Download Angelas Short Course on Sleep here

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Read the full episode Transcript Below:

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Introduction

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 the show today, we have Angela Foster. Angela helps global business leaders and their teams transform their mind and body for lifelong high performance. Before we get a chance to speak with Angela, it is The Leadership Hacker News. 

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, Billionaire Paul Singer leads his Elliott Management hedge fund, pre-warned two months ago his employees should start preparing for a month long quarantine, well before any town or city had mandated a lockdown. Mr Singer sent an internal memo on the 1st of February to all his employees in all his firm's offices around the world, saying try and make arrangements that you do not have to leave your home for a month if it becomes necessary. He didn’t have a crystal ball; what was playing out here was strategic thinking. The Elliott Fund Management founder is well known for being really cautious about anything that could affect markets, including crazy things like solar storms. In his memo, he added that his workers should have access to sufficient food, water and medicines and did not start telling his employees to start working from home until local authorities had to. But by then, his employees were well informed, and this memo wasn't focused on investment strategy but employee safety and it didn't address investment decisions. The firm had hedges of course, that naturally helped protect his investments from a downturn but of course, in any business, it's our employee’s well-being, their state of mind and their response to any challenges that are critical helping us move through situations.

Systems thinking is about developing strategies, strategy is about the future. Therefore, strategic thinking is thinking about the future and that includes some crazy stuff that we would have never anticipated could happen. But if it did, “what if” and “how” would we respond to it? In my teaching and coaching around strategic thinking, there are four things that we typically do when faced with thinking strategically.

The first thing we think is we think about the preferable. What are the things we want? And that is formed often by our desires and our worldview - possibly unhelpful. We look at the probabilities of things happening. We manage our risks and our investments and our business decisions, and then what are the plausible things that could go wrong and could go right? But when we talk about the art of the possible, we don’t often talk about the art of the possible. Because to get there we need scenarios, wildcard events and crazy thinking to really unlock future thinking and patterns and this does not mean we change our investment or business decisions. It means that we are thoughtful, that if these events did happen in the future, how would we manage them?

So here's the thing. Right now, in amongst managing a very turbulent and unpredictable business environment, are we strategically thinking today? Are we thinking what if? Are we scenario planning around some crazy ideas that might happen? Possibly could happen even if they are improbable and not that plausible today? If you are not, now is the time to really turn strategic thinking on its head, it could be a lifesaver for you, your well-being along with your staff and your business at some point in the future.

That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news, insights or information you think our listeners would like to hear. Please get in touch through our social media sites.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: I am joined on today's show by nutritionist, health and performance coach who works with athletes, entrepreneurs and CEOs of global organizations. She is also the CEO of My DNA EDGE; we are joined today by Angela Foster. Angela, welcome to the show.

Angela Foster: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me here today. I am pleased to be here.

Steve Rush: So, this is a great opportunity for us to learn from not only a leader of a business, but somebody who works with other leaders, but fundamentally about leadership health and well-being and nutrition, but your career didn't start out that way. So I understand that you started out as a corporate lawyer. So how did the transition take place?

Angela Foster: Yeah. So as you say, initially was a corporate lawyer and I was working very long hours. As you can imagine, in one of the top city firms, putting together international deals, flotations sort of mergers and acquisitions and I think that at that stage, I kind of really undervalued my sleep will be one thing. And I was really that sort of classic type-A personality where I would push myself very hard.

I am pretty competitive, wanted to get the best deal done for the client and kind of neglected things. But I really got away with it and I think that classically, you know, when we're in our late 20s, early 30s, that's pretty easy to do, and then when I started a family, that's when things started to shift a bit because they were competing demands on my time. And also, most importantly, on my energy, and I unfortunately suffered with post-natal depression pretty severely and I think that was actually as a result of the way that I'd kind of push myself so hard and got sort of burnout, and then that eventually culminated in me.

You know, my kids came down with a cough. I sort of caught it and basically that manifested in me in double pneumonia, viral and bacterial. That kind of went the wrong way, it went south very quickly and so as urgently admitted into hospital fighting for my life. And that created a big shift in me and what I wanted to do and kind of, I guess, is kind of a bit of a woo woo moment where you look introspectively and yourself. And was I really living the best life that I wanted to? And when I made a full recovery, fortunately for me. With very little long term damage to my lungs, that really kind of started me off on a quest to see initially, well, how can I actually optimize my health and not just get back on track. But be stronger, fitter and healthier than I was before and got me very much into the performance arm of health, and then helping other people to do the same. And it was really about how can I combine optimized health with high performance? And then I realized that actually sustained high performance, that the optimal health is the very foundation of that. If you want to sustain that over the long term, so that is really how I made the transition.

Steve Rush: It demonstrated that you really have now got a true vocation in life, haven't you, as a result of that experience?

Angela Foster: Yeah, I have and I think that, you know, sometimes-bad things that need to happen in a way for good things to take their place. And that's very much been the case for me. You know, I definitely value, that experience has really taught me to value my life and practice gratitude on a daily basis in the morning. And it's also given me a newfound love of something I love. I was always a pretty kind of fit and healthy person, but this has really enabled me to take it to another level and to help as many people as I can.

Steve Rush: Yeah, for sure and of course, now, given the environment that we're all working in, many people are having to think about their work, their life and the way that they do things. In fact, many people now working from home and the opportunity that has presented itself in amongst this crisis could actually be one of those greatest opportunities for us to look a little bit more introspectively. Our health, our well-being as leaders. And how we might do things. What do you think some of your top thoughts or tips around taking this as an opportunity to really focus on our well-being and health?

Angela Foster: I think as you as you say, this is the perfect opportunity to do that. I think for many people, they know in their kind of their heart of hearts, really, that maybe they have been neglecting not necessarily all areas of health, but one or more. And the ones that come up commonly is people maybe haven't been sleeping enough, whether that's quality sleep or duration of sleep, or maybe they haven't been exercising as much as they should have been, maybe they haven't been getting outdoors and getting much fresh air because they've been stuck in offices or meeting rooms or travelling. Maybe, you know, they are buying food out and they have not really looked at their nutrition and thought much about how that really fuels their body.

And now that we're all in this quarantining phase, we've actually got a bit more time on our hands, and I think it's a real opportunity. With that has come obviously an element of stress and quite a big element of stress for many people, because particularly for leaders, they are managing teams. They've got concerns over what's going on with the economy and their business and whether they can keep those staff on long term. There are many challenges, but again, that in itself as well is an opportunity to think, well, actually, how have I been managing my stress as a whole? And now that I am at home, maybe I've got time to bring in some more stress management practices as well. That will make me a better leader and more resilient and I can also then use and inspire my organization with as well. 

Steve Rush: Often colleagues are looking to their leadership at times like this to role models, and new thinking, behaviour. So this is a great chance to do that, isn't it?

Angela Foster: Yeah, absolutely and I think it is you know, it all comes from the top, as you say and I think that if we can use that extra time, that we have to focus on these practices. And that's really what I'm trying to do and I'm sharing with my clients and with organizations, you know, you can change the way that you do business, so a lot of the talks that I was giving that were live and it is properly the same for you. That were in person original, they can now actually be done online, so we still got that connection but if we can inspire people to really make good things come out of this and to become mentally and physically fitter than we were before, then that can only be a good thing.

Steve Rush: So let's unpick some of those things that you mentioned that could be great aid and assistances for us now. Firstly, let's think about power of sleep. What role does sleep play in high performance as leaders?

Angela Foster: So sleep is super important and as you know from the story, I just shared. You know, it something that I under-valued, partly because it was not valued for me in a corporate law firm, we would often neglect our sleep and actually push through all night on many occasions or with very little sleep.

And actually, the science that's emerging around sleep is stronger and stronger in terms of its support that it does for everything in terms of our mental cognition, our memory, our focus, our immune system. Importantly, that we really need to be bolstering at this point and also our exposure to more kind of long, not just immune system in terms of viruses and bacteria that we might be exposed to, but also our long term immunity from chronic diseases. But if we want to lead effectively, then it's important that we have optimize our physical and mental performance and they're very integrated. And, you know, Mother Nature, if you think about sleep, why has Mother Nature not dispensed with it? You know, all those years ago when we did not live in houses and we felt protected, it actually made us very, very vulnerable to be asleep. But it's so vital for our health and I think that now that we've got artificial light and we stay awake. You know, we can binge watch things like Netflix if we get into them. We maybe don't focus enough on our circadian rhythm and being in alignment with that. And actually the benefits that come from that, so we know that it's not just the length of sleep. Yes, most people need around seven, somewhere between seven to eight hours of sleep per night as an adult. But it's not just that duration. It is actually looking at the quality of the sleep that we are getting, so the sleep architecture is as important, if you like. So making sure that we are getting into that slow wave, deep sleep at certain parts during the night and that we are also getting enough REM sleep.

All of these things and enough light sleep people underestimate that the light sleep, which makes up almost half the night, is also important. But we need the sleep for pruning back memories. We need it for emotional regulation. We need it for that deep repair and we need also to regulate our metabolisms as well. So there's so many things that happen that I think people could really begin to look at that and actually prioritize that, you know, we know that everyone has a slight differences in their circadian rhythms. We kind of fall into one of four key groups, and that is a very genetic thing, but for the most part, we need to be optimizing all clocks, if you like, with the rising and the falling of the sun. And then within that, there's variations of sort of an hour or two in terms of are you more of a night owl? Are you an early morning person? And you can find out this information either by doing something like a DNA test, which would do a lot with my clients or even by taking Dr. Michael Breus questionnaire online, which will actually give you your sleep chronotype. And then people can use that information to start to understand not just how to sleep better, but also the best time to do everything and get their best work done, which we have, more opportunities to do now that we're working from home.

Steve Rush: And the importance of natural light is essential to our well-being, too, isn't it, because we are surrounded by computers, laptops, cell phones, iPods. How does that play into that sleep? Circadian rhythm, you talked about.

Angela Foster: Yeah, that plays a big part. So as you as you rightly mentioned there, we are exposed to a lot of light and unnatural forms of light and we're learning more and more what that light is doing.

You know, time will show the damage that it is doing, but there seems to be some links even with things like macular degeneration in terms of exposure to that artificial light. But it also is disrupting our circadian rhythm by keeping us awake for longer and exposing us to blue light at times of day where we wouldn't have had it before. Now, in terms of your sleep, and how well you are going to sleep actually starts with the way that you start the day. So while being at home in particular. I would encourage people to get outside as much as they can in the early morning. That is really important for resetting the circadian rhythm so that you’re going in line with nature and your natural body clock. You can also use things to actually limit the exposure of blue light inside. So for example, there all daywear glasses that you can use that protect your eyes. You can use red light blocking glasses. They are called blue light looking glasses, but they have like a red tinge. I track my sleep on with something called an Aura Ring, and that is very, very useful. And I can actually see what my deep sleep and REM sleep proportions are and what I found is that if I am blocking out the blue light in the evenings, even whether that's through work or watching television or even just lights that you've got on. Maybe if you are reading that, actually I will get enhanced deep sleep when I have done that and they are really easy to pick up, you can pick them up on Amazon. Swan-x, for example, or a good brand, and that really helps to enhance your deep sleep and that has been a big kind of game changer for many of my clients.

Steve Rush: It is really fascinating stuff. I worked with the investment bank in the Southeast Asia and they had this philosophy of power napping on the job. What is your take on power napping?

Angela Foster: I think power, is brilliant as long as you are not somebody that is having problems with sleeping at night, so I think you need to be careful when you're doing it and it's not too late in the day, but I think it's brilliant. I mean, one technique that works really, really well is to have a power nap after lunch and to have a small amount of caffeine immediately before having that nap. So that by the time that you come out of the nap, you've got the boost of caffeine coming in. Not something, you can do late in the day, but it is really powerful. The thing with napping is making sure that the nap is sub sort of 20 minutes, because once you go over 20, 25 minutes, you're actually going to start going into a deeper sleep and then you need to go through the whole sleep cycle.

Generally, one sleep cycle is about 90 minutes long, so that is why people will find that if they have a nap often and they wake up 40 to 45, 50 minutes later, they feel really groggy. And that's because that's not really a map now that's a sleep cycle, so you want to keep it quite brief, but it's very good in terms of recharging and then powering up for the rest of the day.

Steve Rush: So it is not a replacement for evening sleep. This, is a reboot sleep, yes?

Angela Foster: Yes, it would be and I think if you're somebody who's a good sleeper at night, then you could try that, I think, or if you're somebody who generally sleeps well, but for whatever reason, your sleep has been disrupted one night, then that could work well. But I think that if you are someone who really on a continual basis struggles to sleep at night, then you may find that napping during the day disrupts it further. These things, always trial and error, and what I find is the best thing you can do, like with anything else, is to always be testing it, you know, tracking it and then tweaking it and then looking back and seeing what results you're getting.

Steve Rush: Like anything to get good at it, you need practice and evaluation, right?

Angela Foster: Yeah, absolutely. Becoming a good sleeper sometimes does take a bit of work for some people.

Steve Rush: Another thing you talked about a little earlier, and again, a by-product of most leaders. Is that there is an element of stress, that comes with managing businesses, and teams, and products and so on, so forth. So in your experiences. All, stress a bad thing?

Angela Foster: I don't think all stress is a bad thing. I think that when stress is sustained and continuous, that is when it can become a bad thing. In terms of evolutionary, we were designed to have a short period of stress and then recover. So if we were met with a threat, we would have to kind of fight or flee and then we would have that recovery time. What is happening in modern society is that we are bombarded continuously with so many stimuli in terms of emails coming in and so many platforms as well that we are all communicating now. And then we've got the additional stress, particularly in a leadership role as well, that can combine to increase cortisol levels pretty high, and when we have high cortisol, we end up with other problems that start to come in, so we get increased inflammation in the body. We get higher levels of blood sugar, so going back to that evolutionary model, if stress is designed to get us out of a tricky situation, as soon as cortisol goes up, what happens is the body dumps glucose into the blood. Now, that is fine when you've got to actually physically fight or flee, but if you're just sitting at your desk anxious or maybe awake at night, that glucose isn't required. And so when glucose goes up, then we have another hormone that's triggered. We have insulin that is then triggered in addition to cortisol, which goes up to try and remove the sugar from the blood.

And this causes its own set of problems so it can lead to high blood sugar, insulin resistance, weight gain, in addition to the inflammation that it's causing from the cortisol and also from the release of glucose and insulin. So I think when we have sustained stress is actually causing underlying problems in our body. That is not to say that all stress is bad, so controlled doses of stress can actually make us much more resilient and higher performing. And, you know, there's a few ways that we can actually do that, which I share with you. For example, exercise is the one that people know the most. It is the most accessible, so if we think about when we are doing exercise. Whether it is cardiovascular, or strength work, we are creating microtears in the muscles, you going to make them a stronger over time or we are putting a little bit stress on the heart with cardiovascular work to actually make that heart muscle much, much stronger and perform better. Now, we can use that in other areas as well to help with resilience. So one of the things that I love to do, actually, and I encourage my clients and at first, they are a bit like, oh, no, I don't want to try this, is called showering.

And that, again, is a form of stress. These controlled doses of stress are known as Hormesis. So Hormetic stress is a small amount of stress that's designed to make the body stronger and so cold showering is one example of that because actually if you start the day. I actually love to do a workout, and then take a warm shower, and then finish it with cold. You come out feeling amazing and on top of the world, and actually, that, again, is just stimulating the small amount of stress. It is also mobilizing some of the white fat in the body into brown fat that can be used and burned is energy, so there is other benefits as well but that helps in terms of resilience as well. Is very similar to fasting, for example. Again, that is another form of Hormetic stress, so if we are doing a sort of 12 plus period of fasting, we are putting the body under a bit of stress there is some ketones that are being released, which can actually help to enhance Brain function and mental performance. And we're strengthening the body and the body's allowed to kind of do some cellular clean-up at the same time. So to answer your question is a bit long winded, but not all stress is bad, but controlled doses of stress of certain types of stress can actually be helpful.

Steve Rush: And I guess in your experience working with athletes is those little micro wins almost that gives them the edge and their performance?

Angela Foster: Yes, absolutely and athletes actually push themselves incredibly hard. But if you look at them, we were talking about sleep. They really, really do value their sleep. You know, I think if you look at Roger Federer, he sees for like 12 or 14 hours a day, because I think often the mistake people will make this mistake when they are under stress as well, is they will think, well, I do want to push myself too hard. So maybe if I am working really, really hard, then I shouldn't be exercising that hard and actually exercise again strengthens the immune system. It enhances our production of natural killer cells. But what is a problem is if we're under recovery, so is not so much that people overdo things. It is that they under recover.

Steve Rush: Got it, so if we start to think about some tips, techniques and hacks that the folks listening to this show can take away and practice in their leadership roles. What will be your top leadership, hacks they can apply for their health, their well-being and the way that they lead?

Angela Foster: Yeah, sure. We have spoken a lot about sleep and I would encourage them to definitely focus on sleep and to track it and to start to understand what works for them and to create a very solid evening routine. People often very focused now on their morning routines, which is brilliant. But actually to have that wine down routine so that you are recovering and repairing is really important and it becomes more important as we age as well. So we know that things like Alzheimer's tend to develop decades before we actually begin to see symptoms and some of that is genetic. You can look and check if you have something known as the APOB Gene, which predisposes you to that.

But making sure that you're getting enough sleep is absolutely vital to sustained performance. And to that leadership and the brain kind of washes itself as we're sleeping. So it is really, really important, so I'd say prioritizing sleep at a time like this and making sure that you're having that wine downtime in the evening, that you're limiting blue light, you're having alcohol. It might help you fall asleep, but you are probably going to wake up later and you are not going to be getting the quality of sleep. So keeping alcohol away from bedtime by at least three hours. Eating earlier, now that we are all working from home, we have the opportunity to do that as well. So that enhances the repair work that can go on during the night.

The other one, I would say is in terms of actually come back and thinking, what exercise have you been doing and focus on getting physically fitter. The benefits for that are not just for your body, but also for your brain. So again, we were talking about controlled forms of stress. This helps to release BDNF in the brain, okay, so that’s brain drive nootropic factor and that helps to build neurons and synapses and it also protects existing ones and exercise is a powerful way to help the production of BDNF, so it's also produced during sleep. The biggest inhibitor of BDNF is stress, and so I think building in stress management practices, particularly as people are under an extraordinary amount of stress at the moment, even just turning on the news is highly stressful at the moment in terms of what we're being fed. So making sure that you are taking time to relax and getting the practices like meditation and mindfulness based practices and maybe some yoga in is going to really help as well.

Steve Rush: Clear head equal clear body and a clear mind equal great performance, right?

Angela Foster: Exactly, and I think it is easy to get bogged down otherwise. People often neglect it but actually, it starts with you. So focusing on these things can really, really help.

Steve Rush: Some of the work you have published, and some of your article. You talk about Bio Hacks, just describe for the listening in, what a Bio Hack is, and maybe what one of those could be that we'd implement as part of our leadership routines?

Angela Foster: So biohacking is essentially using hacks, as you say to work with your biology, to enhance your health and your performance. So is basically using things that can unlock the best version of you. So these range from very simple things to using more advanced sort of biohacking technical gear. So some of the biohacking that I use with my clients is, for example, pretty much everyone I work with will do a DNA test so we can understand that their own genetics, so I don't believe there's one size diet, the fits all at all.

Personalized nutrition is the first place to start because we all processed things like carbohydrates and fats, for example, in very different ways, and so what you will see is that some people will say, well, the ketogenic diet has been absolutely amazing for me. Having a high fat diet has improved my mental cognition and they credit a lot of their performance with that. But that could be disastrous in someone else. It could actually cause real problems in terms of their cardiovascular health if they fall into a category and it is a smaller category than we first thought. But around sort of 10 percent of the population will not process saturated fats in as preferable way as maybe the rest of them, and so that predisposes them to things like heart disease.

Similarly, some people will process carbohydrates much, much faster and so they will get this release of sugar into the blood much more quickly. And that predisposes them to things like diabetes and also high levels of inflammation.

So that's just kind of one area with DNA testing, but that is a hack in itself and it's so simple to do. It is like a 60-second mouth swap that you can do at home and you can start to understand. You can understand your sleep, your circadian rhythm. You can understand what the most optimize for fitness is for you, so that is an example of a biohacking. Some of the more sort of advanced ones are, I might use say and you may have heard of the Muse device. It gives you some form of neuro feedback, so it is a meditation device and again, these are all simple things that you can do that don't cost a lot. I think that's two or three hundred pounds to buy and you put it on and essentially, it will take you through a guided meditation in a short space of time. You get actual feedback directly on whether you are in the zone and whether you are getting that kind of more calm, clear state of thinking and the way they do that is you'll have birds come in and sing when you've got into that slow way state, so you can actually track at the end of your meditation. It sounds quite competitive, doesn't it, for meditation? We can actually see, well, how many times was I in the zone? So as you're gently bringing your thoughts back, you will then hear the birds singing, so that's like an example of it. 

Another one would be red light therapy. So, for example, I have really kind of high end red light at home that I'll go and stand in front of first thing in the morning and that simulates the sunrise. In the winter months, it is great or if you have missed it when it is very early in the summer. But also red light enhances the health of all mitochondria, which are these little energy powerhouses in our cells, so it's improving our physical health and these are strong enough to kind of go through into the internal organs. So we know things like the brain, for example, very mitochondrial, dense and so that can help and it can also help with skin health and anti-aging. So there's lots of different ones that I use, and then they're simple ones. You know, like if you want to offset some of the positive charge that we're getting from all these devices and things, then you can go down and just walk outside barefoot and actually do some grounding and earthing. So some are free and some are kind of fun sort of things to play with. They kind of toys, if you like, but they have some pretty significant health and performance benefits. 

Steve Rush: These are some super hacks. Thank you for sharing those, and I am kind of sat here thinking I just need a dash out and get some of these. Where I go and buy these? It is really stimulating from a leadership perspective. It is really stimulating I was thinking me, so I'm grateful for you sharing that.

Angela Foster: Thank you.

Steve Rush: As we get to this stage of the show, also we want to find out from the leaders how they have been able to face into adversity and how they then used that adversity for future learning now, we call this Hack to Attack. Now, you've already shared the biggest hack you're probably likely to face was being faced with a near-death experience and then pivoting your career. But if you were able to kind of go back and reflect around a time where that was relevant or something hadn't worked out, so anything else that you could share. That would be you Hack to Attack. 

Angela Foster: Yeah, I suppose what I do is I think. There is always times and I think now we are going through a pretty revolutionary time where everyone is experiencing a massive shift maybe in the way that they do business. Even for people who maybe already were working a lot from home or had teams that were and maybe already done a lot of stuff online. They probably still need to pivot a bit but it feels scary when you look at it as a big thing like that. What has been most powerful for me is a daily review. So each day I will sit down and ask myself a series of questions of how did everything go? Did I do what I set out to do? So have I shared enough value with people today? Have a major difference in people lives today? And what have I done to do that? And what could I have done better? And actually what I find is that enables me to pivot more often, and I think that's what we all being needed to do, maybe on a bigger scale at the moment but actually looking down and thinking, well, how is this working? And is it working in the way that it should? People often don't do that and then things get left for longer and then you need that big shift, which is obviously what happened with me, right. 

I had neglected it, ignored it, ignored my health, and then it took a big thing for me to get back on track. And so that's taught me now that I guess I have less of those experiences where I need to make a big shift, because it's sort of incited me really to do more daily micro reviews and constantly just make these little small changes so that you can pivot more easily. And so I'd encourage people to do that, because even now, it might seem quite a big thing that's coming at you and there's going to be big changes ahead. But actually you can start to review on a daily basis what's going on, how you done things differently if you've been moving your meetings, for example, online and doing more across zoom. Are you still making those connections in the way you could before? you still connecting with your team? What else could you be doing? Could you be putting more in the diary to be with them? You know, its social connection is so important in organizations, but also for health. And we can see that with the blue zones, which if your audience are not familiar with the blue zones or pockets across the world where we are the longest lived. 

So these are small sections of populations that are very diverse. They are all the way around the world. Things places like Okinawa in Japan. There is one in California, in Sardinia and Dan Butler is the guy that kind of led a lot of the research. Was looking into these places, if they have the highest number of centenarians and the lowest incidence of chronic diseases, how have they got to that stage? And he looked at. Was it diet? Was it lifestyle? What was it? And the common thread that came through was this social connection and cohesiveness, right from kind of Great grandparents right down too babies, there were other things like movement, and the way that they eat, but this was really the common thread. And so it's kind of a long winded answer, but I think it's about looking at how you're doing things on a daily basis, reviewing and then just making those even micro pivots as you need to as you go through and kind of really chunking it down.

Steve Rush: And of course, making those micro pivots will mean that we are less susceptible to that big event or the big stress and therefore it perpetuates almost, doesn't it?

Angela Foster: Exactly, and you're much more dynamic as well in that sense and ready to move and to change because you're more aware you're bringing into your conscious mind much more in terms of what you need to do and as you say, there are smaller steps that you can do. So I haven't had since then as many I wouldn't say there's been huge events. Of course, we have to make changes and even now, like I am making changes to my business every day because the things that I would do in person can't happen at the moment. And so, you know, I'm looking at and thinking, well, actually, how can I distil my knowledge in a different way, you know, when I might have been talking to teams of people in person and making a difference, how can I do that now? Make that information accessible by recording and putting it into membership sites and areas or courses that people can download and actually use to learn. And I think, yeah, that's what we need to be doing. And I think what it's showing us really is it's bringing forward, so if you feel the same but you know, when you go in and you talk, for example, at your children's education and you look at the jobs that they might be coming into, they are actually going to have to change and reinvent themselves. And we knew they were going to have to do this because so many things were going to be potentially replaced by robots that they were going to have to be much more dynamic in their enterprises and in the way they approach things. And I think what this virus has done is actually suddenly just shunt us all through that process all at once, and so it's really going to be doing everything that you can to stay on your A-game and that is basically optimizing your mind and body. And I don't think you can separate the two, they are one and they constantly feedback to each other.

Steve Rush: One hundred percent agree with you, and I think this will also just help create that reflection for leaders as well as to, you know, are they mutually exclusive in people's lives or are they part parcel of their personal well-being and development, too? So brilliant so far. The last thing I would like to ask of you is if we were able to do a bit of time travel, go back to when you were 21 and bump into Angela then. What would be the advice that you would give to her?

Angela Foster: Interesting, so a few things. I think the first one would be, and this definitely where I coach my children is to follow the thing that really lights you up. And for me, I think I wanted to be a lawyer, but I wouldn't say reading long case studies, case notes, sorry and cases from judges was really my passion. So I loved the thrill of closing the deal and certainly as a partner in a law firm at the higher end, you know, you are doing all of that negotiating. And that was a huge amount of fun for me, but the journey to get there was not a passionate one for me. You know, law, was not my love, if you like. Whereas having had the experience that I have had and completely changed direction. I absolutely love what I did. You know, I wake up every day excited to learn more, share more, give more and I think that if I could go back to myself at 21. It would have been to say, follow your passion, find out what that is, because you will always become successful at the thing you love and don't rush it because actually everything takes time and everything takes longer than you expect it to but follow your heart in a way. Because, you know, business is challenging, is extremely rewarding, but it is challenging at times. But I think if you're doing something that you really, really enjoy, then that's going to help you in every respect.

Steve Rush: It is true, isn't it? You don't find anybody who's really successful at something where they're not equally as passionate, you just don't find it. They don't exist, if somebody is successful, it's because they're passionate. It is because they have that investment in what they do. Conversely, if they are not passionate or not interested, then you never see that success.

Angela Foster: No, that is true and I think you live it, don't you? That is the thing.

Steve Rush: Right.

Angela Foster: You know I am passionate about getting people as physically and mentally healthy as they can. And obviously I had to look at both because my physical health had taken a decline alongside my mental health, and that's why I say they're so related. But I live that lifestyle and I love it and I think, yeah. No, you are right. I think that is where success comes from.

Steve Rush: Now, you have already started my thinking today as to what I am going to be doing next. And as soon as you know, we're done today, I'm going to be off doing a few things that I hadn't thought of before we have spoken today. Now there's lots of ways that people listening to this podcast can find out. You also have a very successful podcast called High Performance Health Podcast, and that is available, I guess, pretty much everywhere. That, would be right?

Angela Foster: Yeah, that is available on all the kind of main platforms that you would find. Podcast, yeah.

Steve Rush: And I would encourage our listeners to take a listen to that too, as part of their leadership thinking and behaviours too. And were else can folk find out a little bit more about the work that you're doing at the moment? 

Angela Foster: So they can find me on my Website, which is angelafosterperformance.com, and they can find me on there. If they want to kind of get a bit more kind of tips in terms of how they can sleep better, then I've got a free sleep mini course, which they can just go to bit.ly/smart-sleeper that's there, and also they can follow me on social. So I'm kind of active across the three main platforms, less so on Twitter, but on Facebook, LinkedIn and also on Instagram and that's Angela Foster.

Steve Rush: And we will make sure we put those links in the show notes as well. So people, when they listen to this, can click on those links and go straight to find out a little bit more about what you're doing.

Angela Foster: Brilliant, thank you.

Steve Rush: So finally, just for me to say, I had a really good insight that, you know, there was a science behind leadership and our brains are a powerful tool in the way that we work, but our bodies are equally as important, and I just wanted to say thanks for bringing that science to leadership today, Angela. It has been really super insightful and I know our listeners will love it, and it goes without saying thank you for appearing on The Leadership Hacker Podcast. 

Angela Foster: Thank you so much for having me here today. Steve, I have really enjoyed it, really enjoyed our conversation and I love what you are doing with The Leadership Podcast. I think it is absolutely brilliant, so thanks again. 

Steve Rush: You are very welcome, thanks Angela.

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.

John Spence is recognized as one of the top business thought leaders and leadership development experts in the world.  As a consultant and coach to organizations worldwide, from start-ups to the Fortune 10, John is dedicated to helping people and businesses be more successful by “Making the Very Complex… Awesomely Simple.”

You can learn the following from John in this episode:

• It is not just what did you read and learn, action steps you take as a result
• How to create the reader to leader habit
• The discipline of reading and application of learning
• The four “P” of expertise and expert performance
• AQ - your adaptability or agility quotient
• Knowledge, Network and Love
• Lifelong reading and learning gives you competitive advantage

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Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Find out more from John Spence Below:

https://johnspence.com/

https://blog.johnspence.com

John Spence on Twitter @awesomelysimple

Full Transcript Below 

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Introduction

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 the show today, we have one of the leading business and leadership consultants in the world. He is a multiple author, a TEDx speaker, and he has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. It is John Spence But before we get a chance to speak with John; it is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: The global pandemic is forcing companies to adapt quickly into change, to redesign their products and services or even create completely new propositions to meet the demands of its clients, customers and its workforce and what is apparent is. Organizations are rushing to the needs of their customers and their workforce readily and now is absolutely the time for innovation and new ways of working. We have restaurants and cafes and small shops that are turning to deliveries and providing doorstep delivery services and vital community services. We have vacuum cleaner manufacturers who are now retooled to provide ventilators for people who are suffering ill health. We have alcohol firms and beer manufacturers who have now pivoted, making hand sanitizers. So whilst this is a time of challenge and stress, anxiety for most businesses and I get that part of that journey myself and our business is suffering the same thinking and behaviours, too. It is also the time for innovation and change and by thinking outside the box and thinking differently, we are able to create new and emerging opportunities in amongst this crisis, and here's the thing. If we look at our language over time in Chinese, the word crisis means both danger and opportunity and in India, the word Jugaad, which we may be familiar with around innovation and frugal innovation also means joining or union where from adversity we can find opportunity.

And even in English, the word adversity represents a difficult or tricky situation, but not catastrophic. As leaders, it is our role to lead new thinking and new ways of working. So join with me and congratulate those organizations who are pivoting and showing innovation and join me and congratulate the great work of all those who are working through adversity. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news, insights, information you think would be great to share on the show. Please get in touch on our social media sites.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: Today's guest is recognized as one of the top business consultants and leaders in the world. He was named by American Management Association, one of America's top 50 leaders to watch in that list alongside Larry Page of Google and Jeff Bezos of Amazon to name but a few. He has gone on to write five books and has also featured in TEDx Speaker. I am delighted to welcome to the show, John Spence.

John Spence: It is a pleasure to be with you, my friend. 

Steve Rush: John, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule. Just to give the folks who are listening some backstory, one of things that first intrigued me about you when we met is that you have been in leadership roles and leading teams for a long time. In fact, at age of 26, you were already a CEO of a Rockefeller Foundation. How did that come about?

John Spence: It is a twisted tale, but I will go through it quickly. I grew up in Miami, Florida, and a very wealthy family. My father was an attorney and went to one of the top prep schools in America and when I graduated; I got admitted to several different colleges. And I chose the University of Miami in Miami, Florida, because it was close to my boat and my girlfriend, which is not why you should choose university, which is also why about a year later, I failed out and was kicked out of the university.

I won't go through the whole thing, but I moved to another town where I live now, Gainesville, Florida, where there's another University. The University of Florida and I applied there and they refused to accept me, so I went to a tiny little college, restarted over completely and graduated there, got into the University of Florida and graduated number three in the United States in my major.

That is when I was hired by the Rockefellers. I was twenty-three years old, after about six months or so, the current CEO picked me as his right hand man and I would go into all meetings with him, board meetings, follow me around, do things like that. And a few years later, he faltered pretty dramatically and they put me in place to just sort of hold the place down for a little while, and things went so well that they left me in. I was at twenty-six; I was running a Rockefeller Foundation, International Rockefeller Foundation, with projects going on in 20 countries around the world and I had no idea what I was doing, but it seemed to turn out okay

Steve Rush: And I guess it is not just being in the right place at the right time. That got you noticed. If you maybe single out one or two of those things. What do you think it was that gave you the edge at that time?

John Spence: There were there were three things. Number one is I said yes to pretty much anything. If they needed someone to go to Costa Rica to negotiate a deal. Before I was CEO, I put up my hand, and go. If they needed someone to take on a project that no one else wanted, I would take it. So I pretty much said yes to everything to learn as much as I possibly could.

Number two, I was very, very, very lucky to get a mentor. Charlie Owen, who was Mr. Rockefeller's right hand man, would come into my office every Monday, put a book on my desk, and on Friday he would take me to lunch and I would have to make a book report. And he would not only say, what did you learn? But what will you apply? And I think that was the big differentiator. It is not just what did you read and learn, but what are three specific action steps you are going to take as a result of what you just read? And then he would hold me accountable for doing that in my job.

And then the last one was asking for help. I had a really good team around me. I had some very brilliant board of directors. I had three billionaires on my board. Everybody else was worth one hundred million dollars and I was not afraid to pick up the phone or send them a note and say, I need some help, I need some guidance, because I realized I failed out of the University of Miami because I did not ask for help. I did not go to the other students. I did not have a study group. I did not talk to professors. I tried to do it all by myself and that got me failure. When I got to be CEO. I realized I need all the help I could humanly get from everybody around me.

Steve Rush: Thinking about the discipline of book on your desk, reading that book. In the time that we have known each other, I think I describe your office as a library of leadership. How many books do you reckon you have read over that time?

John Spence: I have read a hundred to one hundred and twenty books every year since nineteen eighty-nine. I've got a little over two thousand books in my office, but I also have a private library at home. My office is just business books and then my home is history and classics and things like that. So yeah, I see that is a big part of my job. How do you read so much? Part of the reason is, this is what I do for a living is taken information to help other people.

Steve Rush: Right and I guess information comes from that whole foundation you created from learning and listening to other people. Right?

John Spence: Well, it comes from a lot of places asking for help, mentors, coaches, colleagues. But for example, when I was at the foundation very, very young before they named me CEO, we would be sitting in a board meeting and one of the billionaires would say, well, anybody have an idea on this? And I raised my hand. I would say, well, I read over here in Tom Peter’s book not this but the other but I think this all starts with Jim Collins book on this, and then I got one more idea I read from Chester Elton, and I think those three things apply and I still remember one of the billionaire, I love John's ideas. He is one smart kid, let's do that stuff. I am thinking none of those were my idea but yeah, so it's personal experience and the reading, study and learning. I am not a genius. I just have more access to ideas and information than most people.

Steve Rush: That is a great question. Do you though, do you have more access or do you have more discipline? What do you think it comes from?

John Spence: I have more discipline. Anybody can buy books, which lots of people have lots of books. It takes the discipline to read them and apply them. I mean, again, there is that step. There is always that second step of not just what did I read and learned, but how will I use it.

Steve Rush: So how do you go about creating that discipline, the time to be able to read hundred books a year?

John Spence: I read a minimum of one hour every morning. That is the way I get my day started. Up until the Corona virus. I would take myself to a local restaurant and sit down and for a minimum of an hour or still to this day, I read Fortune Forbes Inc. Harvard Business Review Strategy in Business and part of a book. Also I usually travel again. We are at an interesting time right now. I usually travel about 200 days a year, so I am very disciplined that the minute I get to the airport, to the minute I get home, I read at every spare moment I have. I don't watch TV, believe it or not, as a professional speaker who has spoken to audiences large as twenty six thousand. I am a very, very introverted, so when I am on the road, I stay in my hotel room and read and study.

And then also when I read a book, there's a couple of things that are important to me and I read a lot on Kindle now but if I can get 50 or 60 pages into the book and I haven't underlined anything. I just closed the book and put it away because I figure if the author can't teach me something in the first twenty/twenty five percent of the book, they're probably not going to teach me anything spectacular in the last hundred and fifty pages. I might have missed an idea but I don't want to waste my time.

Steve Rush: It is a good strategy and a disciplined strategy that makes stuff get done, right?

John Spence: Yeah, and then I also I have all kinds of symbols that if its hardcover book, I put a pound sign for numbers; I put an R circle it, which is reread. I underline it. What I will do is I read all the way through the book. Then I go back and reread just my highlighting, and I make notes off that and then I am sort of a freak. I read, I dictate my highlighting into a word, doc, and then I have all those saved so I can take a book of two hundred and fifty pages and get it down to maybe three pages of notes of the key ideas and I have literally thousands of pages of those.

Steve Rush: Wow, that is amazing, and I think for anybody listening to the show today who does not have this as a foundation in their life, what would be your recommendation? How would you get them to start?

John Spence: Twelve minutes a day during the week. That is an hour a week. To give you an example. The average college graduate in most countries. Yes, average university graduate only read half a book a year. For self-improvement or to get better at their job. What I call a skills based book, a half a book a year. If you were to read one book every other month, six books a year, you would be in the top one percent in your country. If you read twelve books a year, you are in the top 1 percent in the world. Nobody needs to read 100 or 120 books I am a freak. It is my job, it’s part of what I do because I see this foundation for my career. But if you just took twelve minutes a day during the week, that's an hour a week. That probably four or five books a year. If you are a semi-good reader, that just puts you in the top almost in the top 1 percent in your entire country for self-learning. If you're consistent in doing that in three or four years, you've now really piled up some interesting information, ideas, things that when combined with your real life, what I call the adjacent new with your real life experience, what you've been doing in business, everything you've done up to then. You take this interesting new idea you read out of a book, you put the two together and that becomes a new idea. You know, this is a new innovation, a new idea, a new strategy that didn't exist before the book ideas and your personal experience, and if you were to read, you know, 20 minutes a day, you can see the numbers. It is not really that challenging. Again, it just takes discipline.

Steve Rush: I guess ideas breed ideas and innovation breeds innovation, doesn't it? 

John Spence: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Great advice, John.

John Spence: My pleasure.

Steve Rush: One of the things I was really intrigued about when I was to TED talk was around the whole principle of AQ. Our listeners will know the principles of IQ, the intelligent question. They probably be familiar with the emotional quotient. So the EQ and how we can respond and use our behaviours to respond to behaviours. Tell us a little bit about what AQ means and how leaders might apply them.

John Spence: Well, let's look at the other two quickly. IQ is another word that I use for competence. You've got to be good at your job. You don't have to, you know, be a NASA rocket scientists and have 48 advance degrees. You just got to be really competent at your job.

EQ, emotional quotient, which I see as sort of self-awareness and empathy put together. An area I struggle in traumatically is now actually more important than IQ. If you've got a modicum level of competence, your EQ, will be more important. I have done tons of workshops with organizations where it is usually three or five to one EQ over IQ is important to have a leader.

However, AQ, which is your adaptability, or agility quotient I see as the most important one going forward and the amount of turmoil we are facing in the world. Technology, things are moving so fast. Only people who are agile, adaptable, nimble can embrace new ideas. Let go of old ideas that don't work, try new things. Take a prudent business risks and be fast and not just embrace change, but drive change. That is what I believe is going to be the main driver of leadership success. If you are competent and you can get along with other people, but you are not nimble, you are in trouble. If you add the three together. To me, you've got the foundation for being a highly successful leader moving forward. 

Steve Rush: And what do you think are the key components of that? AQ, what will be one of the things that I might want to focus on first?

John Spence: Well, AQ almost all comes down to what we have been talking about is exposing yourself to new and different information and not just business information. Go outside of your normal realm. Like I read physics and astronomy to try to expose myself to ideas that are so big and so challenging that it stretches my mind. I look at art; I do other things, music to try to understand the craft behind those. And all these other ideas and other people, you know, going and meeting people that do things that you don't do and asking about what are their, best ideas, how did they learn what they do. So the more information and ideas you take in. Now, the other thing that is really important and it's one of the foundations of becoming an expert at anything is I'll give you the four piece of expertise. This comes from a book called The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, a one thousand eight hundred-page book written by experts about how to become an expert, and they say there is four Ps.

The first P, Passion, which just stands to reason you're not going to become truly world class if something if you're not passionate about it.

The new the next one is persistence, and we've seen from Malcolm Gladwell's work and others that that's about 10 years or ten thousand hours of being persistent.

The third P, which is practice but it is a special kind of practice called deliberate practice, and what deliver practice said. If you've got a coach, a trainer, a colleague, a friend, someone pushing you to keep practicing and practicing on the hardest stuff. The most challenging stuff, which leads to the fourth and final P.

Which I think is the foundation of AQ, which is pattern recognition. Once you study your subject deeply, you have studied it for years, you have you read, you ask questions, you've got a mentor, a coach, all the sudden it becomes clear to you and you see patterns that other people don't see. Those patterns are what allow you to anticipate things that are coming down the pike. So someone that's nimble, agile, adaptable, part of the reason they can adapt so quick is because they have identified the pattern before it fully unfolds and that time between when they've identified it and other people see it is their competitive advantage.

Steve Rush: I love that John. I think it is a great example of a simple model but actually help us just understand the underlying all of this is the lifelong learning that curiosity, that in order to get that pattern recognition, you've got to have the foundations, right?

John Spence: You said the word, curiosity. You've got to constantly be interested in things, looking at things, learning things, being curious and wanting to understand things deeply. Nailed it. Nailed it.

Steve Rush: Now you have come renowned for making the very complex, awesomely simple. In fact, that was the title of your last book. How did that come about?

John Spence: That is exactly what we were discussing, pattern recognition. I was looking at businesses. I have had the great fortune of working with companies all over the world, from start-ups to Apple and Microsoft and Fortune 500 Companies, and every time I got in a company, I looked for the patterns, the patterns of what they were doing really well that allowed them to be the leader in their industry. Also the patterns of what I saw in companies that were struggling, dysfunctional and failing and after years and years of looking at that. Also while I was doing that, I found this really cool software program called Wordle.

And what Wordle allows you to do is to put the text of a document in there and it finds the pattern, it takes out the ands the does and oh’s and all that stuff, and it looks for the words that appear over and over again and then it creates a word cloud. And that word cloud shows you the pattern of the book, so I loaded my book Awesomely Simple in there to help me understand the draft of it. And then I went to a bunch of my friends who are authors and asked for drafts of their book or a copy of their books. I won’t drag you through it, but I put about two hundred and seventy thousand pages of the top leadership literature, the top articles, everything I could find in there, and it spit out a pattern and that pattern is what became the foundation of not only my book, but what I teach today to companies I worked with.

Steve Rush: What a great idea in using technology as well to help us find the thematic approach to how we lead. So in your book as well, you call on a certain number of characteristics or strategies that will help business leaders.

John Spence: Yes, and there nothing surprisingly new. There again, fundamental, but there is a big thing called the knowing doing gap. A lot of people know these things, but they don't actually do them every day. They don't implement them and take action on them. So part of the book and I'm not plugging the book is I've got lots of questions, workshops, things to think about, because, again, it's not just reading it, it's reading it, learning it and applying it. And these things I teach people, they go, oh, yeah, and I going now. On a scale of one to ten with ten-world class and one being terrible. Where would you currently rate yourself and or your organization? And when they raided a three or a five, they look at me and go, oh, I know this, but I'm just not doing it effectively every day.

Steve Rush: And in order to create some of the activity that expedites actions, one of the things you talk about in your book is that kind of creating urgency and I think most people would recognize the urgency is an incredibly important part of shifting behaviours and creating some shift in status quo. How do you do that without creating panic?

John Spence: Super, super, good question. I looked at a lot of the research and writings on change management and change theory. And then again with what I've seen in companies I've been working with for. Now, I am in my twenty-eighth year. There is three steps to this, two steps and the third one is creating urgency.

Step one is you have to create what I call an irresistible case for change and irresistible is isn't liking chocolate cake. Irresistible is you cannot resist this. It is happening you have no choice. Again, we are recording this during the pandemic. People are being sent home to work for their homes. We are doing social distancing, and by a voluntary isolation, you have no choice. You are not allowed to leave your house. So this is going to break a lot of people's patterns. This is going to make them adopt new ideas, new ways of working, new things happening, whether they wanted to or not. In any organization, to create a sense of urgency, step one is to let people know that change is mandatory you have no choice.

Now, after you have done that, the next thing to do is to immediately tell them about the amazing future that will be there. We are going to do this for the company. This new software is going to allow us to do these things. Being able to serve this customer quickly is going to allow the company to make more profit, but whatever it is, but you need to take that irresistible case for change and balance it with a vivid, compelling, exciting vision of what the change will lead to, we do the change. Here is the new future. Here is the better future, and then quickly, you want to tell people we need to move to the new future, we got to get there. We can't go back and that's what creates a sense of urgency because it takes too long. People sort of say, oh, this too, shall pass and they get resistant and you get a big group of people that just don't want to change, and that will slow everything down.

And one other thing that adds to that, that allows or motivates that sense of urgency is getting what's called a guiding coalition in your organization, and that should be your entire senior team. Whether it is two or three or five or twelve being ten thousand percent committed to the change, and being the leading example of embracing the change, and driving the change, which you also want to look for sort of the influencers in your organization. The people who may not have a fancy title, but they have been there for 5 or 10 or 15 years and everybody looks up to them. Know if Steve thinks it is a good idea, I am on board. You know, if John thinks it is a bad idea, I ain't doing it. You want to get that handful of people also, your change agents, your change cheerleaders to create and let everybody know. We got to go, we got to go right now.

Steve Rush: So I recognize the patterns you just share and very familiar and experienced those in terms of how I help my clients through that change. One of things, I also find John is that when we are creating the urgency with providing that vision for the change in the future. We have the right people around us. We still find that there are natural pockets of resistance. What is the most common thing that you notice as a resistance or a big resistance to change?

John Spence: It is fear. People like stability and safety and when people are faced with what they perceive as negative change, they go through a cycle of fear, denial, anger, begging, trying to negotiate. And they go through all these emotions, and actually they're the same emotions that people feel when someone close to them passes away. To some person, we are changing the software company. Some people you gave me a new desk. You move me to a new desk. You actually as far as you gave me a new chair. I love this chair. I have had this chair for five years. It is in the shape of my butt. I don't want anyone to take my chair away, and you have to, as a leader, understand that change drives lots of emotions, fear, depression, sense of overwhelm, sense of optimism. At first you have uninformed pessimism, people don't know what's going on with a change and they're scared and eventually you start to get informed optimism until finally you get adoption. And that's when people say, okay, the changes, okay, I like it. It is great. Then, of course, right after that, it is time to change again.

Steve Rush: And the one thing that is going to be constant in everybody's world is change and even by sometimes just labelling it change, we create an intentional fear, don't we? Because it is a label, it is a thing versus it is just going to happen. We are always going to evolve, but we may not be able to connect the dots forward, but when we look back, we certainly can do that, can’t we?

John Spence: Yeah, hence the reason that AQ now is so critical and we will become more critical going forward because the pace of change is going to continue to speed up and be dramatic. I think that we're seeing this worldwide right now and it's going to overwhelm a lot of people, but it's also going to give other people's strength and courage to understand that I can do this, that if I stay focused and I stay calm and I'm persistent, that I can handle this level of change. And I believe when we come on the other side of this, other changes up until now would have seemed pretty dramatic, will seem pretty mundane and easy to handle.

Steve Rush: And it will create a new foundation of resilience, I think, for us all, won’t it? As we come through the other side and I think without AQ, we probably won't be the cope.

John Spence: Agreed and I love the word you just use, resilience. We are going to need courage, vulnerability and resilience to get through this. Extremely well said, Steve.

Steve Rush: Thank you, John. This part of the show, we are going to ask all our guests to share their golden nuggets, the secrets. Now, when you have read thousands of books and as you have, I should imagine to narrow that down to three is going to be a massive challenge but I am going to set you the task, so if you could identify. What will be the top three Leadership Hacks? What will they be?

John Spence: Number one, which is the most important thing I have ever learned. I have done two TEDx talks…. is dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. You have seen a theme through all that but if you study successful leaders through time, they were avid learners, not just readers, but they were curious. You use that word earlier, curious. So stay curious, be I like say, addicted to learning. That would be my first nugget.

Number two is ask for help. You can't do this alone, which leads to the third one, which is a combination of the two and the single most important thing I've ever learned in my life. Which is you become what you focus on and like the people you spend time with, whatever your studying, whatever your reading, whatever you're learning, whatever you fill your mind with and whoever you choose to spend your time with will directly determine which your life will look like a decade from now.

Steve Rush: I love those top three hacks. Thank you. I remember when I was in San Francisco, was talking to a seed fund investor, and his little nugget was your net-worth equals your network. 

John Spence: Exactly. There is a good friend of mine, Tim Sanders, wrote a book called Love is The Killer App and he broke it down to these three things, K, N and L. To be successful in your career. You must be bright, sharp, smart and talented is something that is highly valuable in the marketplace that is the K, Knowledge.

Network is the N. A lot of the right people need to know that about you and by right people, that's what I call hubs. People that if they are really impressed with how much you know and how valuable it is, they don't tell two or three people. They will tell 20, or 30 or 200 or 300 or 2000 through their giant networks. As long as you have the last one, the L, which is love. If you are a kind, loving person of integrity, a lot of the right people know that about you. And they also know that you're really good at something that's highly valuable. You have the foundation for a World-Class career.

Steve Rush: We've got a double bubble on our Hacks, thank you so much. The next thing I would really love to explore is that having the extensive career and indeed learning from all of the things you have experienced there bound to a time where things have not worked out so well. Maybe we screwed up. We call this Hack to Attack in The Leadership Hacker Podcast, what would be your Hack to Attack that you could share with our listeners?

John Spence: This is one that took me twenty, twenty-five years to learn. I am a very, very logical, data driven person. I like information, ideas, research numbers, blah, blah, blah. And I was really against the idea of leading with your gut but what I've learned over the years, and it's because I have entered into partnerships or business arrangements are hire people that there were red flags and I felt a little uncomfortable. I felt a little easy but I would be like, I don't feel decisions. I make decisions on facts. I realize now that when I see a couple red flags and I start to feel like something is wrong, that I will listen to that and more often than not, that should be a major determinant in my decision making, which is very hard for me to say. I have made many failures because I did not listen to my emotions, and my feelings and my concerns and my worries.

Steve Rush: It is really fascinating. Thank you, John. I have done lots of research on this, too. And this is comes from a neurological response to the pattern recognition that we unconsciously aware of, so we're scanning thousands and thousands and thousands of situations we may only be present all. Identify with one or two things in front of us but the unconscious mind is scanning millions and millions and millions of experiences for our life and our work, and it's giving that both meaning our brains a little nudge to say, pay attention to this. And of course, while we can't use our gut as the defining, it's definitely true. We should absolutely pay attention to it. 

John Spence: That was a very hard lesson for me to learn.

Steve Rush: But you have learned that and as a result of learning from it, it's now paying dividends for you in your life and your work, so well then thank you. And then the last thing we want to explore with you would be that if you're able to turn the clock back and give it a time travel and you bump into John at 21, what would be the one bit of advice that you would give him?

John Spence: Wow, that is really hard. I think it would be to stay really curious and ask for help. And we've covered those because they've been so fundamental to me building a great career and early in my career, I was very confident I was right. I would argue with people, no, I am right. I got this. I understand it better than you do. I would argue with people 30 years older than me and then one day I woke up and realized, I'm not right. I have an opinion; I have a way that I see things from my perspective. And it's a well-thought out, a well-reasoned opinion, but it's just an opinion, so I would have said to myself, you know, you're not right, stay curious ask for help. Lots of other people have other ways to look at things and they're just as right as you are. So calm down, just calm down, John.

Steve Rush: Thank you John that is super. So as folks listening to us talk today. I am fairly sure that they'd be thinking John mentioned TEDx and also books and information. How can people get to learn a little bit more about what you are doing now and find some of the content that you have been able to create over your career?

John Spence: My Web site is JohnSpence.com but I am going to really encourage folks I've got to sign up for my blog slash newsletter. I've got a newsletter that comes out every two weeks and it is based on all of the stuff I'm reading. When I read a really good article, something fantastic that I am impressed with. I tweet it and my newsletter grabs all those tweets, but here is the cool thing. It is driven by AI, It's got an algorithm there when you open, my newsletter and you start to read stuff that watches what you open, how long you read it and it figures out what you're interested in. And it continues to customize your newsletter more and more and more on the things that are of the most interest to you. So as you as it continues to go, it gets smarter and smarter, and I learned probably 300 articles in a month and it will only pick the top dozen or so that it knows that you're going to be most interested in.

And then I only write a blog when it's something, again, I feel strongly about. I don't put one out every week. I just put one out when there is something that I feel is valuable for folks to read, so if you get to my Website, sign up for the newsletter, just sign up for the blog you get both and that will give you direct access to everything I'm reading and studying right now. 

Steve Rush: And machine learning doing all the hard work for us. What could be better? John, that's kind of bought us to a natural conclusion for us spending some time together today. I just want to say it has been super, super useful. There is some great models, some great thinking in there that are going to help our listeners go away and reflect on their approach to reading and commitment to lifelong learning. And I'm hopeful this podcast will also help create the energy and excitement around the foundations for AQ. John Spence, thank you for joining us on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

John Spence: Absolutely my honour and my pleasure. 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.

Simon Tyler is the author of 'The Impact Book', ‘The Keep It Simple Book’, 'The Impact Code’, 'The Simple Way' and most recently the Business Book Awards finalist, 'The Attitude Book', is one of the world’s leading business coaches, consultants and inspirational speakers. His entertaining and thought provoking work cuts through complication and frustration and liberates individual potential.  A pioneer in Simplicity, Impact and Attitude, Simon has spoken at hundreds of events for all kinds of organisations bringing his unique brand of connectivity and humour to his audience to shift attitudes and create impact.

You can learn the following from Simon in this episode:

• How to use your own CTL-ALT-DELETE button
• Distinction between Complicated and complexed
• The 4 A’s to Action Model
• How attitude defines our outcomes as leaders
• The YOU Board of Directors
• How to keep thinking simple

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Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Find out more from Simon Tyler Below:

www.simontyler.com

Simon's Simple Notes on Soundcloud

Full Transcript Below:

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Introduction 

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.

I am joined on todays, show by Simon Tyler. Simon is an inspirational motivational speaker, author and business coach, but before we get to speak with Simon, it is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: Numerous articles and research papers have been written over the last few years about developing culture in teams and business, where high levels of good culture were observed. There was a common thread across all of these articles and it may be less obvious than other behaviours. Where leaders showed and valued innovation and finding new ways of working this has led to significant higher levels of retention of staff and a higher than average level of engagement. So why is innovation for leadership and leading others so key? Leaders who promote and recognize innovation create and cultivate other visionaries; which, of course, will lead to new ideas and efficiencies but deeper than that, will motivate people around them and turn their ideas into solutions and outcomes. Giving control of innovation is the first step. Leaders don't need all of the answers and ideas, but do need to recognize ideation and innovation in others. It plays to our intrinsic motivation and that is what makes us tick, so creativity in this case is less important than leading innovation through others. Here is an example of two innovations that I found really interesting.

Having recently found our podcast charting on Spotify, I also found that Spotify had been innovative in thinking outside the box when it comes to find new audiences and of course, podcasts are one of them, but a new emerging audience is our four legged friend community. Spotify has now created playlist for dogs and pet owners, their research suggests that approximately 74% of owners of pets play music for them, in particular when they left on their own.

In other innovation news, most leaders can relate to the fact that being healthy in mind and body will help them make better business decisions. Folks at Fittrack.com created the ultimate health measurement tool to assist leaders and others in keeping fit and well. When you stand on a FitTrack scale, a very low safe electrical signal is sent from four metal electrodes through your feet, into your legs and abdomen. The electrical signal passes quickly through the water that is present in our hydrated muscle tissue and then meets resistance when it hits fat. So it can not only measure body fat, but also measures muscle, bone mass, hydration and other things to help us keep track of our vital functions and in turn helps us focus on what areas of our diet, exercise, nutrition we need to focus on. Of course, health and well-being are key components of all great leaders. That has been our Leadership News, if you have any news, insights or information you would like to share with us. Please contact us through our social media sites.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: I am, joined today by Simon Tyler. Simon Tyler is one of the most experienced coaches in the world. He's author of five books and he is now prolific writer and blogger, is the author of the Impact Book, Keep It Simple Book, Impact Code, The Simple Way and the Attitude Book. Simon, welcome to the show.

Simon Tyler: Thank you, Steve. Good to be here.

Steve Rush: Now there are three kind of themes that seem to parallel across your writing, and that is impact, attitude and simplicity. That just happen by chance or is that through experience?  

Simon Tyler: Chance you would say, the whole of my journey practically uncovering some of this conversation is I have allowed my life and my journey to unravel and accept whatever shows up, but it started very much with simplicity being called Simon. Unsurprisingly, to some of the listeners, I was a curse for been simple Simon through most of my life. So people call me “Simple Simon” and I railed against it all the way through our member.

My teens, I was desperately trying to prove to people know I am complicated, I am really complicated and pushback against it, pushback against it and I was working with a coach from the U.S. She was in the New England, and she and I did some work together. Her name was Kate, and we jokingly call ourselves Simple Simon and Complikate, which of course is very funny but it was about me accepting simplicity as perhaps the hill on which I stand, and it wasn't until I was coached by a guy called Drew Zel and that was probably 10 years ago where he simply challenged me. He said why don't you just accept it. I said, what you mean. He said just accept the fact that you are simple, Simon and there was a stony silence in the conversation and I just allowed it to be there for me, oh, maybe you are right.

And from that point on, I was much easier with that moniker and accepted it and out of that, I thought, well, maybe that is what I do. That is the impact I have with people when I rock up. I tend to ask the really simple question. I try and pull my clients or the teams or whoever I'm working with it, just back in a wall, what is really going on? And that's always informed me in the way I go about things, if ever I get stuck. I always go back to simplicity. How can I make this a little bit more simple? And that starts the moment again. It is a huge answer to your question, Steve but simplicity was the start and everything else is sort of spun on from there.

Steve Rush: And simplicity is really complicated to get to. We will kind of unpick some of the reasons why that may be in a moment. You talked a lot about being coached. So how did you end up being a coach yourself?

Simon Tyler: A long time back, I was director of a consulting company and one of the big projects for a client, I members putting together as I put together a team of we called them coaches. This was probably in the mid to late 1990s where really the phrase coach was not something that was common in a business setting. And whilst if we were to look back, they didn't really conduct coaching, as now we would understand it to be, it was more about understanding the skill gap and helping people fix a skill gap. It was quite interesting; coaching then was sticking around me as a word. I left that consulting company in 2000 and in not knowing where to go myself, I engaged the coach again in the U.S. because that is where there were much more supply of coaches and I was coached for a period of time. And once I got over my ridiculous Britishness of not really answering the question that they were asking. I really got so much from it and it was a profound shift. And as we all look back in where the big shift in your life, that was definitely one working with Scott Wintrip and he challenged me or helped me realize that the way in which I dialogue with people, the outcome of the conversations that people have with me, he says, in essence, it's coaching dialogue. Consider building a coaching practice. Okay, I will, so I began in 2000. I set up and I backed out of quite a lot of consulting client work and thought right, I am a coach. Here I am. Come on, everybody, come and be coached, and that was a slow old journey. Try to convince people what a coach was first before they agreed to coach with me. That is the way, my coaching began and it was a slow process picking up a client here and a client there. Not really known what fees to charge, so therefore not really making it a brilliantly viable coaching business. I carried on going and it just opened up more, more dialogues.

Steve Rush: And it is fair to say if you roll the clock forward, you have now coached hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. If there was perhaps… 

Simon Tyler: Indeed.

Steve Rush: …if there was one theme that you can see that is maybe more consistent than not, what would you say that was?

Simon Tyler: Well, it is interesting, what shows up when I thought about, what is it? The dialogues that people have had with me for the bulk of the growth period of me as a coach were around leaders in transition, so they were people who been spotted as talent, as potential for growth in them, in their in organizations. But broadly speaking, the companies didn't know what to do with them other than give them more training and send them on more workshops and so on and so forth. And it was me in conversation saying, well, these people should be coached at the point that client used the phrase coaching to describe. A remedial action for somebody who wasn't performing well in their role. That's really interesting cause that's not who I coach, I coach people who want to grow, who aspire to something bigger, better, to be more themselves and to have more impact and I said, okay. We will do it and in essence. Risked the first pilot wave, which was a group of 12 people. I coached all 12 and all of them, to varying degrees, had a significant change effect as a result of the dialoguing with me, so I would say one of the pieces, therefore, and lots came from that. Was people in transition, people ready to move or not sure of where they are at all. Exploring what is next and it's that sort of dialoguing that perhaps formed the rump of the work I did through the early 2000s.

Steve Rush: And that is great to hear, and in my experience also of coaching people in similar transitioning; these are people who have already been identified as talent. They have the raw capabilities it just needs unlocking and through that dialogue, right? 

Simon Tyler: Yeah, indeed and again, it goes back to my simple question sometimes just tapping, asking the question that people maybe a half asked in their own heads. And I think the questions that you ask yourself. My observation over the years is that you never truly answer it fully yourself. You might reach a difficult point in the thought and stop or you might part answer it and then leave it there, and it is only when you are in dialogue with somebody. One to one, who like me and I like yourself. I am sure and other coaches will just sit in that space and hold you to that question, that your answer gets bigger, deeper, broader and goes to more places and more gets unlocked.

Steve Rush: What do you think? The reason is that we don't take it to the 10 degree or that next set of questions, when we try a bit of self-coaching?

Simon Tyler: Well, life is very busy and my clients, I am sure that similar groups, the people that you work with, there is a lot going on. There is one of things I wrote about I think it is in the keep it Simple Book is Control Alt Delete, which is a function that we are all very familiar with on the computer. You press Control Alt Delete, you have a look at all programs that are running any one particular time on your PC and it is the same in people's heads. I metaphorically try and help people work that through. If we did a Control Alt Delete, there is a lot going on. So thought to try and manage our own thinking. It is a tough ask if we have got a lot on, we are trying to hold ourselves to a particularly deep question.

The brain is going to stop popping around with other stuff and lead us off in another direction. And there are many, I'm so delighted that in years where we've got to today. Mindfulness has been grasped by almost every organization. It is a way that we can improve the way that we connect with ourselves and release creativity and so on. Any step on mindfulness will bear fruit and the mindfulness technique is to just be aware of all the thoughts that are going on and learn. Build the muscle up; just sit with just one thought and it's not standard practice, we human beings tend to take on a lot physically and in our thinking, there's a lot going on, back to my control Alt delete. If you sit in there trying to think about a profound career-changing question and there is someone knocking at your front door, you are not there; your mind is going to drift away and that is a very simple example, but that describes it if it helps.

Steve Rush: And in the workplace, I guess the same plays out, doesn't it? So I wonder, what is the reason that people find it so difficult to keep things simple?

Simon Tyler: Again, it is the volume of stuff. That is going on in the world we are in now. People tend to be responsible for many things and not just many different things. Just the variety of them, that needs to be involved in all of their job agreement, it just varies so much from a quiet conversation to support someone to a bit of deep calculation type thinking. And that could be butting up against each other, and asking yourself to make that mental shift all the way through the day and to sit quietly and take on some of these more challenging. Potential breakthrough questions and breakthrough thinking is often it is in the too difficult box and I notice people push it out or I will do that when? When I get my next clear day, I am going to do that. I will clear all the appointments out on Thursday and I will do on Thursday. No, you won't.

Steve Rush: It is procrastination.

Simon Tyler: Yeah and it is clever procrastination and it is not a bad thing because what is that wonderful expression somebody use many years ago? Which is busy people look more important than important people and there's a an intense busyness, I notice, because there's a lot to be done. There is so much to be done, there is never going to be enough time to do everything you really want to achieve. The outcomes of people working with me is. I will get people to just pair some of that back, sounds obvious, but what is really important? What you really want to achieve here? And this lots of techniques I'd written about those sort of things in a number of different ways in all of the books. Just trying to just shift the way my readers and my clients and the listeners to my podcast. Just slowly pare back the noise that is going on then get to the important stuff. 

Steve Rush: Thank you so much, that is really insightful and I think our listeners will resonate with that. Where they struggle with their own thinking about how simple they are keeping things or indeed how complicated they are making things.

Simon Tyler: You absolutely know. People will know when they reach that point of…there in a complicated zone, and there is a distinction between complicated and complex. Some things are understandably unnecessarily so complex, but complicated causes stuff inside us. When life has become complicated or our thinking has become complicated. That is when we can't think of thought for very long or we start to feel less than great. Our creativity gets stifled, just our mood shifts and all of the stuff I've written about our attitude changes when we're caught in complication and it just changes who we are so my alert to my clients is just notice. Just notice that all, there is a moment, let’s come back. Let's come back, see if I can just introduce a little bit more simplicity and start again. 

Steve Rush: That there is a real hack there, isn't there? The difference between complicated and complex and noticing the difference and being wise enough to act on what's holding you back versus what can empower you.

Simon Tyler: They absolutely feel different. Complex feels different to complicated. If you tune in to how you feel and the thoughts that are triggered in a complex situation compared to a complicated situation, they feel completely different.

Steve Rush: I suspect that's got something to do with how we process information in our brain. We will feel complicated, which will trigger some of those neurological threat responses vs complex, which will keep us engaged and thoughtful and energized and looking for the stimulation, the mental stimulation that comes with problem solving.

Simon Tyler: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: So impact has also been a key theme for you in part of your life's work over the last 10 years. How would you say to leaders that are listening now that are maybe struggling to get the impact that they are intending?

Simon Tyler: Oh, that is a good start. What you have just said there. If they have an intention, that is cool. A lot of people don't have clarity over their intention. They just have this umbrella word…I want to have better impact. What do you mean by that? What sort of impact do you want to have? What is the footprint you want to leave? What is the change you want to cause in a room to a group of people? To the situation? To the strategy? Any thinking to get a little bit more clarity on what your impact is. Your intention is important. Starting there, I notice and perhaps this drove me around my work with writing the Impact Book. Is people then often jump from, okay, I've got the impact I want to cause. Now tell me the actions. What actions do I need to take? And as I unravel in that book, it's a path. Action almost is the fourth part whether you driving, causing, forcing, action for your impact and it is interesting listening to the other shows you had. Different people, different guest you talk about this in different ways, too and for me, it's working through the pathway of causing impact and I use four A's.

The first (A) is Attraction. How you attract people to the way, you think and getting people aligned to the impact you want to cause, more people on board with you, so in essence developing your magnetism as a leader. 

The second (A) is creating appetite. So people find you, your message, what you stand for, your purpose alluring.

The third (A) then is advocacy. That is where you start to create people. Who advocate what you stand for, and you nurture them almost in effect as your cheerleaders, but they start to be part of what you are causing.

And then the final (A) action. That is where you start to create change and almost at that point, the change you want to create, you seek to create. It starts to happen anyway, because the previous steps you have taken.

Steve Rush: I love that Simon. Many of our listeners will be familiar with the good old-fashioned impact to action gap and what you are talking about here is the kind of three elements that sit before action. Which you unlock impact, right?

Simon Tyler: Absolutely. Yeah, and I write this, my notes, little impact notes in there, just hacks, if you like, to help people through each of those previous stages. And when you really become desperate to have impact, you're not going to invest in those earlier phases. Just being more authentic, being more authentic on a daily basis, which is you being you truly, does not feel like powerful enough or fast enough and you won't do it, and if you don't invest in that, the end is not going to happen. The action is not going to happen.

Steve Rush: You also wrote about this in your latest book, The Attitude Book, so, how do you see that attitude defines our outcomes as leaders?

Simon Tyler: Well, attitude. I love it. I did not realize it until I said to my publisher. Yep. Next one is going to be about attitude. They went, great, okay. Here is the deadline. Get it written by then. Oh, okay. Yeah, it is a big thing and a more and more I did my research around attitude and how it plays out and look for examples and stuff that had worked. The bigger and bigger it got, and here's me thinking I've just got to settle on 50 pieces of advice about attitude. It was a really the most difficult writing phase of all of my books was for the Attitude Book because it was just so big. You start to get into such a huge area, but I did obviously successfully managed and I use their deadline to get me to conclude, and I cut out almost as much as has gone into the attitude book. Which therefore leads with Oh, I wish I had. I have written about it subsequently, but attitude is the magic, if you like, or the magnet that makes it happen and attitude get affected all the time by what is going on around us. If we've got no real sense about what we want to have impact on, our attitude is going to just drift.

And it's your attitude that attracts people and situations and occurrences to your path. If you are clear, when you become clear and you can narrow your attitude range and I talk about that when I speak at conferences events. The first step is often to become aware of the breadth of the range of attitude that you carry with you and narrow them. Because if you got from your great day attitude, all the way through to a bad day attitude. That is just too great; people don't know where they stand. You attract a mishmash of stuff that just does not help you. Narrow the range, which takes a little bit of thought to just a little bit more control of your attitude initially, which then allows you to shift your attitude in the direction you want it to, and that, as I say, becomes magnetic and different things happen when your attitude changes. You see things differently, your whole body and mind thought, things you see and feel. The experience is different when your attitude is changed.

Steve Rush: Right - and it might sound a little cliché. But do you think you can choose your attitude?

Simon Tyler: Totally. Totally. At the time when you think, you need to. That is often the time when it is most difficult because you realize my attitude is not helping here. That is a really tough moment to change your attitude. Another lovely expression we would say is the best time to repair a roof is when the sun shining, but most people wait until they realize, ah, it is the winter. Now the time to repair my roof. Not a good time, but you can shift your attitude and it is a choice space thing and it's checking in, maybe when we get to my three hack's, we'll talk about some techniques that just get you back to the middle of you to become more determined and intention full.

And that's when it starts, and then there's some other pieces I wrote about in the Attitude Book, which is about your resilience. So your attitude, resilience so that it can withstand the pushback you will get or the counter attitudes or maybe there's a prevailing attitude in your team or in your company that doesn't fill up the one you want to have as well. And just like groupthink as people describe it, there is this attitude cluster I see in organizations. Be careful, just notice how that attitude attracts to that team or group or company. Certain situations, certain occurrences, synchronicities happen around those attitudes. If you are the leader, you're the one that's going to set the tone, set the attitude and it takes starting with just a few of the people around you who are aligned, That is when you start.

Steve Rush: You referred to in you are Attitude Books as a lot of this attitude starts with self and you have something, in there called the “YOU” BOARD OF DIRECTORS, just tell us a little bit about that.

Simon Tyler: Yeah, I like that one and that's similar, and again, the people who read all of my work will notice some fairly common threads or clusters around which the notes that I write tend to sit, and this is definitely one the “YOU” BOARD OF DIRECTORS. It is a moment, too, I suppose in any NLP terms they would say you are changing your position to look at same situation from a number of different angles that is all. And this came out of a conversation with a director in a financial company and he was a bit lost and not sure what to do, but stuck. So oftentimes coaches are very useful to help people get going, get momentum again through that stuck period, and the “YOU” BOARD OF DIRECTORS is a board of directors that is you but it needs a Cap change, if you like. I give the example of the chief executive you.

So if you were the chief executive of You PLC, managing you, your brand, what you do, what you're all about. How would the chief executive get involved? What would their role be? How would they in general terms, look at how you are doing? What results would they want to report about you? How would they talk about what lies ahead? They would be more strategically interested in what you are all about, other roles you may have a chief financial you who would look at the performance, the absolute performance, what is the personal finance? What is the financial implications of what you are up to? What are the risks involved right now? Where my investment may needed? And then you might have other roles, Chief Operating Officer, HR You, Chief Marketing You. So if you build that team and it is an opportunity to perhaps take a moment away from your everyday activity on that. Take yourself away for a board meeting for You PLC, and just work through and always invite people. If you have not got a professional conversation dialogue, you've got a range with a coach or a trusted colleague. Then maybe journal this, so put the chief executive You hat on and write as if you were the chief executive of You but just five minutes and it's a really interesting exercise that always bears fruit, and it just helps people shift the way they view themselves. 

Steve Rush: It is really powerful to do that self-exploration thing, isn't it? And see the world from a different perspective.

Simon Tyler: Yeah, I am sure you have this as a frustration with all of my work. Quite a lot of the time people go, oh yeah, I get that. I really like that. I am going to do that and they never do. The difference is the people that make the grab the hack in your world that works for them, do something with it, work with it, sit with it, reflect on it. If you do that, that makes the difference.

Steve Rush: So, Simon, at this point in the show, we are going to go to think about your top hacks. Now ahead of today, you have written in your books over a hundred and fifty. If you include your blog, you probably weigh over 200 hacks and I know that trying to ask you to distil these down to your top few is going to be challenging for you but what would be the kind of two or three that you think would be my nuggets?

Simon Tyler: Well, there is never one. Whatever it needs to be for that person in that situation. It is the one, the one. I wrote a simple note, but you inspire this in me. My simple note that came out in the beginning of March was called The One or The One Thing which is about this to look at what would the one thing be. So thank you very much for inspiration on that, so I am going to give you three. Two from the books, but one is the overarching one, which I will finish on. 

The first one is in the Keep it Simple Book, which is “3-4-3”, which apart from my favourite football formation, is just a very simple way of looking at what you're all about. And broadly speaking, and I found this in every contact with teams and groups of people through my entire career, broadly speaking of the ten things you're up to, three you'll be awesome at. That is the essence of you. Three you will be absolutely painfully detest and not very good at takes too much time and makes you feel bad when you react to those three. And in the middle of the four things that come with the turf of what you're about right now and you don't know whether they're going to be great things or not. The distinction for people that grow the fastest, that have the greatest impact and results, however they measure results, is you spend more time in your top three, the essence of you. Define what they are; make those the priority for your week ahead. Be the best version of you. I know people because their life gets filled. It seems to fill from the bottom end up those bottom three things. If you spend a day working on those three things, you feel rubbish. You don't like yourself or anyone else around you, and your attitude will change. They do not bring the best out of you and it is a conscious effort. Becoming aware of what my 3-4-3 is and spend all the time, I can pushing to make sure I am involved in my top three. Outsource, pay someone, swap or don't do the bottom three things. They are not going to grow you. They are not going to make the difference. They are not going to get you promoted. They are not going to have the impact. It is the top three that does. That is my one big nugget.

Brief one is pause, and that is powerful. If I listened to perhaps how I…one of the most common things perhaps I introduced into conversations with clients is helping them feel more comfortable with pausing and inviting them in their heads to count to three and in that pause, it's almost like an awakening. One, two, three and in that moment, the brain then just starts to relax. You get access to more of your brain's thinking capacity. You hear the question perhaps you just ask. You have a sense for what the right answer might be. You have a sense of what your other answers might be. It just awakens more, so pause and count to three would be my second.

And then my third hack would be what I ended up writing about and talking about in my podcast earlier March is about awareness. To heighten your awareness for what is going on for you right now and more and more of what I read about, and now I am writing about is about this, which is if you are feeling disgruntled, off-beat, It is okay. Notice it maybe even name it. The act of noticing what you are experiencing and naming it instantly alleviates the power and the grip it has over you. Just by doing that. Second step in there in the awareness piece is just to become ease. I am just not allow that to be, I am going to, except the fact that I fill up that right now. Just those two steps and there are more steps in this. But those two steps will liberate people from the tough situations they might find themselves in as opposed to trying to grit and work it through.

Steve Rush: There is some really fantastic hacks there, practical information and insights people into take away, start practicing. So thanks for sharing those. In my experience of working with people like yourself and others who have developed a huge knowledge base and capability over time is that has not always been that way, so we call this section Hack to Attack and this is to explore maybe time in your life for your work where things did not go as well. Maybe it did not pan out as you had expected, but we are now using that as a tool in our work, in our life.

Simon Tyler: Through my life, there has been a number of really challenging situations and I know looking back on them, they have all delivered something for me. And quite often it took a lot longer than just a few days to realize this is going to help the situation but I'm at a point now, fortunately, where I've really simplified my life and I'm fairly chilled about most things and it has come as a result of those situations, and there so many. I could probably talk about this one for the entire podcast in terms of how I've used them, how I resisted things going wrong and didn't want them to be that way, but then just allow them to be. 

But the one I will share was a toughie in my speaking business. All of my speaking has gone really well. I have loved my speaking career, I love the challenge of an audience, and I have become a little bit known for not necessarily having content, there will always be a path I will follow my speaking business, but not having content or being able just to move with what is working in the room. That came about as a result of something that went disastrously wrong in a speaking business where I was speaking at a leadership learning group and it was after dinner. The circumstances were not conspiring very well for me. The food was delayed, the drinking was accelerating and I stood up and I had been asked to do something very inspirational for this group of twenty-five, whatever it was. Leaders on this development program, and it did not go well at all to the point that I just stopped and said this is not going well. I am going to sit down now and enjoy the rest evening, and I just stop.

And I don't know where that voice came from. Some kind of an inner guidance in me, told me to do that and people were shocked. No, no, this is part of your plan. No, it is just not going well. This is not going well at all. Obviously, my drive home, I was there, there was a train I think so, so my drive home then was probably three hours on my own in the car in the early hours of the morning. I scoured myself and I tore myself to pieces like I'm going to sleep when I eventually got home. Thinking, that is it. I am never going to do it anymore.  I am never do this anymore. Why? What am I thinking? Was I even thinking? And there's a whole pieces of dramatic and nasty dark introspection and it took three or four days for me to realize. There is a gift in this somewhere. There is an awesome in this awful as my coach friend Kate would say, and I just sat with it and thought, well, just wait for it to come up.

What is there for me to learn and what it was? It is just confirmed for me that the way I speak events is totally flexible. I am acronym free and arguably I am content ambivalent, and I was trying too hard to push content to a room full of people that was not ready. And that was a great learning for me just to be more fleet of foot and just be me. Just be totally real at speaking events and that served me so well since that time.

Steve Rush: It is a super story and I think many of our lessons can resonate with that moment where it is just not working out. The key, of course, in this is not self-coaching and finding that within most problems there is also a solution. Right? 

Simon Tyler: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: So if you could time travel back to when you were 21 and you know how to meet Simple Simon at 21, what advice would you give him?

Simon Tyler: He was having a tough time at 21 I remember and did not really know who he was. I was in work and I was just plodding along trying to please people, and whilst that is still an important part, I think my advice would be to tune in a bit more with who I am. And I think all of my thinking was out there on other people. What did they think? What did they want? What do they want me to do? Who do they want me to be? It was a tough time; I remember 21 was a tough time, so my invitation perhaps to myself would be go to my edge more often. Tune into who I am. What is it I want? The gift now of what we know about coaching dialogues. I would love to have had that then at twenty-one to have had some kind of a mentor or coaching conversation, go to the edge, wherever my edge is? Go to there. I think I played safe and I played inside as much as my career, travelled in interesting directions, and it was great and served me well, I think more could have happened. I want me to believe a bit more in myself. I can remember how self-doubt was a really tough challenge, and that's sting a little bit, that come up every now and then, even at this late stage in my life I'm at now and perhaps finally just decide, decide what you want and head towards it. Because I don't think I just started decide until probably my late 20s. I could have had a different time, but who knows? I am pleased with who I am today.

Steve Rush: And that is a main thing, right? No regrets.

Simon Tyler: Yes.

Steve Rush: I should imagine our listeners have been stirred by what you have talked about and they are starting to think about some of the tools and techniques you have described. How can they find out a little bit more about your work? And where would they ideally go to find that information?

Simon Tyler: Well, there is lots, as I say, the simple notes that are not in the books. There are many, many of them that I have written. One every two weeks, so simontyler.com, there is a whole library and click through and the funny titles that hopefully will lead you into the ones that work for you. And also the podcast version of All My Simple Notes is available on Soundcloud. Simon Tyler, search that in Soundcloud. You will find me, so that is probably the best place to go, and obviously the books. Grab a book enjoy the book. Whichever one you choose. I would say there is a number out there for you to grab.

Steve Rush: And Simon last thing for me to say is it has been really super talking with you today. There is so much information, and I'm sure that there'll be an opportunity for us to regroup and have another conversation about more things that are simple that are impacting their simplicity in everyday life, so, Simon Tyler, thank you for joining us. 

Simon Tyler: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed the inspiration you gave me, and I hope that happens again too.

Steve Rush: Take care Simon, 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.

Michelle Box is the Chief Executive Officer at Boxxbury Marketing, where she trains entrepreneurs on marketing and business development. She is a columnist, a speaker and known as the Blonde Fixer!

In this episode learn from Michelle:

• Leadership is not about age – it’s about behaviour and opportunity
• Experience is a great learning opportunity – take every one!
• There is no conventional path to CEO
• You don’t need all the answers as CEO
• Don’t restrict your value (price)
• Dive into your teams goals and drive real results
• Watch what you write on Social Media – it’s there for good!

 Join our Leadership Hacker Tribe and connect with us:

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

LinkedIn (Steve)

LinkedIn (The Leadership Hacker)

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Learn more about Michelle’s work:

Michelle Boxx - The Blonde Fixer - Instagram

Michelle Boxx – The Blonde Fixer - Twitter

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Full Transcript 

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 the show today, we have Michelle Boxx also known as the “Blonde Fixer”; before we have the chance to speak to Michelle… It is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: Given the environment that we are in with a global pandemic, many people are coming to terms with the fact that we may need to become more isolated. The irony is no more stark when you look at statistics that lie behind loneliness and isolation. Some research completed by campaigntoendloneliness.com found that loneliness increases the likelihood of mortality by 26 percent and comparable to well-known risk factors such as obesity and has a similar influence a cigarette smoking. And their research also shows that loneliness increases the risk of high blood pressure. So how do we mitigate some of these factors and increase connectivity?

Well, I look to research for those that are most isolated at this time and look to those on the International Space Station with NASA.  In an article, it caught my eye; written by Corey Stieg of CNBC Make it, where she was following up on a tweet by one of the International Space Station retirees. Peggy Whitson, retired astronaut, spent six hundred fifty five days in the International Space Station with NASA and shares her five top tips to mitigate isolation and confinement so that this time could be useful and productive. In Peggy's tweet, she refers to these tips as behaviours or EB standing for “Expeditionary Behaviours”.

They can be applied to any situation involving working remotely as a group. So while we may not have a mission to space, the mission we may have would be just getting used to each other's company, new routines and having to create new routines, so here is Peggy's top tips.

• She says communication is not just about using new mediums, but about being able to share information and feelings freely, that includes talking things through and admitting where there's a misstep or a mistake, as well as debriefing when something goes right. Good communicators are also effective listeners, which often means restating what somebody said to check in what has actually been said.

• Leadership (and followership). Trust and responsibility are the hallmarks of good leadership and followership, according to NASA. Those in leadership positions should lead by example and provide the resources and solutions to tasks and goals. Team members can actively contribute to the leader's plan too.

• Self-Care. NASA's definition of self-care is, “demonstrating your ability to be proactive and stay healthy”. If you get enough sleep, good hygiene, spending time on non-work activities it will make you happy. We should consider this as we are all been drawn to connecting through social media. If that is a good use of our time or not.

• Team Care. Remember that we are all in this together. The best way to support your team is to be patient and respectful, according to NASA. Foster good friendships and relationships with your co-workers during this time offer help to others.

• Group Living. The final expeditionary behavioural or EB is about building a group culture by take into account everyone's different opinions, cultures, perceptions, skills and personalities according to NASA. NASA say respecting roles, responsibilities and workloads will all create a harmonious group living.

But be thoughtful for those that haven't got the capacity to find others and pay attention and just notice those in our communities who may need that phone call or the letter we have yet to pen. That has been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news, insights or stories you would like to share with our listeners. Please contact us through our social media sites.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: Today's guest is Michelle Boxx, who is the Chief Executive Officer at Boxxbury Marketing, where she trains entrepreneurs on marketing and business development. She is a columnist and a speaker. It is the blonde fixer herself, its Michelle Boxx. Welcome to the show Michelle.

Michelle Boxx: Thank you for having me.

Steve Rush: So your journey to CEO is not a conventional one, is it? I was doing a little bit of prep after we spoke and met, and I found a couple of videos on YouTube. One in particular as a 15-year-old high school girl addressing a political rally, tell us a little bit about that?

Michelle Boxx: Yeah, absolutely. I initially started out in policy and politics, and my very first campaign ever was when I was 12 years old, and then I went on to interning in a presidential race here in the states, and then from there, I was given this opportunity. They thought would be really great at this rally to hear from a student speaker, and so they asked me; and I had not given a speech publicly before and I said, yes. Not really knowing totally what I was signing up for and then I went on to speak at this event; ended up having five hundred people at it, which is quite a lot for your first speech at fifteen years old and went on and gave that speech. It was actually kind of the catalyst to my whole political policy career and everything I'm doing now as an entrepreneur. 

Steve Rush: So having so many experiences at such a young age in what most people would call an adult world and adult life, what are some of the lessons that you have learned from that time in your life that you now use in your adult life and your leadership career?

Michelle Boxx: Oh, I have gathered so much. You know, I learned a lot about through policy and politics. I learned a lot about communications, of course, but I also learned a lot about leadership. You know, speaking at that, that one. You know the video you found, which it is so funny that you found it. I have tried to take it down so many times, but I have lost access to the ago. And I've found through that, I ended up launching a website a few months later that was really a policy website geared at covering legislation here in the States and I recruited a whole bunch of my fellow high school friends to help me with it, and so we would literally read legislation, we would post content every day. And so the website got 10000 page views monthly just organically from us posting this information, and so that was really my introduction into marketing, into leading the team and everything that I do now as a CEO.

Steve Rush: And it is a super experience because people get often confused with leadership, has something to do with the job title or a career or a salary, but actually, what you have demonstrated is leadership is about just behaviours and we can have leadership skills and behaviours at any age, right? 

Michelle Boxx: It is so true. A lot of it is really just jumping in and saying, okay, you know what, I am going to do my best here and I am going to figure it out, I mean, so many of us in life do figure things out as we go along. And so it's better to not wait for that moment of coronation, if you will, and instead just jump in and say, okay, I'm going to do my best here. This is the result we are looking to achieve and nurture these people in the process.

Steve Rush: It was an early start in politics. Did that turn into a full-blown career, what happened next?

Michelle Boxx: Yeah, so, you know, obviously starting out at 15. You are still in high school, so I end up graduating early at 16 and continuing in politics, so I was working in political campaigns. I became a radio media political commentator, so I had a weekly radio segment and I was a columnist as well, so I was writing a lot of publications, and so I got to work in campaigns in Nashville. I did some work in D.C., Kansas City, where I grew up and so it was really an interesting time for me because I was pretty much doing it full time but it was a myriad of things and all different aspects of policy, politics and media.

Steve Rush: Given that, you were so busy at such a young age. Any regrets, anything you might look back and think, we should done that differently?

Michelle Boxx: No, actually, I am incredibly proud of everything that I accomplished and showing that initiative so young. I think that is something I am proud of, it really did lay the foundation of everything that I do now. And, you know, I still had my social time with friends. I still, you know, still a very normal in a lot of ways, but at the same time, just very driven, very clear about what I wanted and I felt really blessed every day to have that opportunity. I mean, how many high school students can say that people actually cared at all what they had to say that young? So it was just a really cool experience for me. 

Steve Rush: And of course, the more experiences we have, whatever age they are, that lays down those foundations that we can draw back on later in life. After your career in politics, you then became a really successful real estate agent. Tell us about the transition and the journey.

Michelle Boxx: Right, so it is such an unconventional path that I took, but you know, if you can put yourself in your shoes of a high school student who is getting quite a lot of attention at a very young age, there's definitely pressure associated with it. And I think when I turned 18, 19, I just realized that I needed to maybe take a step back. I think when you are 18 or 19; you don't totally know fully what you believe on the political policy realm just yet, a lot of it has been kind of spoon fed to you, if you will.

And so I took a step back and, you know, especially nowadays, I think it was such a smart move because, you know, Google, obviously, and you know, all the other search engines, they chronicle you forever. As you said, you found that video from when I was 15, and though, you know, if I had continued on down that path, I may not agree with some of the positions or the stances or the things that I had taken, and so I chose to be pretty quiet for a little bit.

I actually moved to a totally different city. I got my real estate license. I had had a subscription to Forbes since really, I was probably about 15 years old, I had always read about how so many CEOs, business executives, and successful entrepreneurs have a real estate background, and so I went ahead and I got my real estate license. And then it was an interesting experience getting your real estate license at city where, you know, no one.

Because real estate is very much a networking and connections kind of industry, and so I had to build everything from the ground up and I had to figure out business really quickly. When I had only been on really the policy and political end, so from there year one I think I sold only like four houses, but year two, I sold 20, and so to have that intense amount of growth obviously is considered pretty good and the industry, especially for a city that you just moved to. So I got to speak at the National Association of Realtors Conference that year, and just to talk about everything that I had accomplished. It was really cool because it's just another experience of realizing there are a lot of grit and determination that you really can succeed in any field.

Steve Rush: That is great, and what you have just described is a lot of internal drive and determination and focus. Of course, we all need that external lens. During that period of growth and development for you, how did you seek and find other ways to grow and become more effective in yourself and more effective as a leader too?

Michelle Boxx: That is great. I read a lot about business models actually, so it was a lot of modelling and seeing what other successful agents and brokerages throughout the United States had done, and to completely make their model my own, of course, with a few tweaks. I think if anything, that is something that has really propelled my successes to my ability to think extremely conceptually and to look at everything and say, okay. How do I break this down into a system? How do I turn this into something where, you know, is implementable for me? What are the step by steps that need to happen? And then from there going on and actually just doing the implementation.

Steve Rush: And all the great leaders I've worked with, coached, supported and worked with, they'll have this philosophy of lifelong learning, don’t they? Where they are able to just copy and paste and take the best bits of all of the people they work with, make it their own, also still of course maintaining that authenticity and it seems to me Michelle that you have managed to create a unique view that is also authentic.

Michelle Boxx: Thank you very much.

Steve Rush: You are welcome. During that period of time, transitioning from politics into real estate, what was maybe the one thing that you learned the most?

Michelle Boxx: I think the realization that you can't do everything alone, that you really do need support, so you need your mentors, you need your team, you need. I think that if you have a lot of internal drive, it is very natural to think, you know what, I can figure this out on my own. I can do all of this on my own. I am independent. It is fine, and then just really putting your ego to the side and saying, you know what? I don't have all the answers. Like you said, you know, copy and paste and really having the network around you to support you along your way up.

Steve Rush: And since leaving the world of real estate behind. You know, run a firm where marketing and business development of pivotal to what you help other clients with. How did that transition come about?

Michelle Boxx: Well, so the way I describe political campaigns or what people should know is throughout my time in real estate, I was in real estate full time for five years. And in addition to that, I was also running political campaigns, and so it's basically like having two full time jobs or some would say that political campaigns and end up itself is two full time job.

And so with real estate, you learn a lot about marketing. Obviously, you learn a lot about sales and you learn a lot about modelling and business. But then on the flip side with political campaigns, I imagine it as a business where you basically have six months to get the entire brand off the ground, to get the entire business off the ground, and you have one day, which is election day, to make all of your sales. And if you don't make all those sales, you're out of business, and so it's an intense amount of pressure. And so I really channelled all of that, and to realizing all of those experiences made me really, really effective in business and I realized that so many small business owners are really great at what they got into business to do, but they're not so great many times at the actual business end. When it comes to sales, marketing, business development, pricing, you know, all of those things.

And I realized with my experience I couldn't really help them. With real estate, I felt like I was looking more for a challenge. It started to be the same thing every single day and I needed to grow, and that has just been a hallmark of who I am. And so I went ahead and started my marketing firm and initially, it was just supposed to be marketing and it moved into Business Development as well as I realized the need of small business owners and we were generating revenue a week from starting. 

Steve Rush: Well that is a massive achievement and so early into new business to be driving revenue, well done you. So you’ve become known as the Blonde Fixer and know if anybody ever met you Michelle or seeing you, they will know the blonde bit, but the fix a bit, not so much. So what is the most common things you often find yourself fixing for others, right now? 

Michelle Boxx: Sure, so the fix or term in and of itself is actually a political term. A fixer basically handles crisis management for political campaigns or candidates and that kind of thing.

But I also shifted over into making it about business as well, so a lot of times for a business…so we worked with about 100 hundred businesses in our first year, whether it was on a retainer basis or just one off consulting calls.

And so a lot of times I would get on these calls and I would quickly realize we're not know anything about their costs and their pricing. And so many times I find that, you know, businesses are so focused on marketing and sales and getting the revenue in. That they don't check to make sure that they're properly structured, and if you're not properly structured in terms of your margins, then unfortunately, you're going to hit a cap eventually and if you don't have the margins built in. You are going to have a lot of difficulty in scaling your business long term, so a lot of times the very first thing we do is work on the pricing, so make sure they really have a real grasp of what their costs are.

And then also a grasp of what their current production limit is, whether it's a product or service, how much they can literally do right now without hiring anybody else, and then from there, we go ahead and make sure those prices are correct. For example, one of my clients we ended up increasing her pricing extremely significantly, and she said, well, no one is going to buy it at this price, and I was like, just try and you will see.

And so through that and then our marketing as well, she not only was able to raise her prices, which of course, increased her margins, but then she was able to actually get more sales and she was getting before, so that's basically what we do on a day to day basis.

Steve Rush: It is really interesting, isn't. What might seem obvious for most people geting that kind of basic foundations, right for their business. People often get distracted when they are running their business; the main reason is for that? 

Michelle Boxx: I think it is overwhelming for a lot of small business owners. You have so many tasks that have to be done, so many hats to wear and it is easy to let things fall to the wayside. I think that sales and marketing does seem obvious when you look at it from a big picture view.

But on a micro view, many times they get focused in on the creativity or the production of the product or the service that they're creating, and everybody has different personality types as well. 

So I think that's why so many small business owners I mean, we really look at how critical that is, though, because the majority of small business owners do fail within five years, which is one of the reasons I started the firm. I think a lot of it is easy to get distracted. It is easy to get overwhelmed, and it is easy to just keep procrastinating and pushing things to the side and hoping they will resolve themselves, but many times, they actually just get worse.

Steve Rush: And I guess just like many start up business owners and indeed most business owners, they arrived at being in their own businesses because they were good at something they were passionate about or had some real desire, but of course, that is not enough? You need people around; you have the right skill sets, the right personalities that can offer you differing views and different behaviours. Right?

Michelle Boxx: Absolutely, and also, just taking a look at, again, what your skill sets are, kind of what you just touched on. And realizing that if you want to be a person that is creative and just focus on the creative end which is what many like you said, many small business owners, that's what they start their businesses is, it is a passion project. That is okay, but you have to find a way to find the right people that will be on that other side for you, and we'll be doing the stuff that you may not want to do, and so that's a lot of where we come in. It is just filling that gap.

Steve Rush: Right and I also wanted to explore with you the whole principle of pricing, because when anybody runs that business and me included, getting the value vs. fee, vs. right proposition is incredibly important, and I think that confidence plays apart in that, doesn't it, particularly if you're new into business? So how do you help people with their confidence about getting the right price for the right value?

Michelle Boxx: I love this topic. I love telling the story about when my first real estate sales, where I was negotiating the commission for myself, so I was talking to a prospective seller and they asked me what my commission was. And I so desperately wanted this listing because I was just starting out, and I think that there is that feeling of desperation that a lot of small business owners find themselves in when making a sale.

And instead dialling into that desperation, I chose self-regulation and I took a step back, took a deep breath and said, you know what, I'm going to charge even more than I think I can get. I am going to charge way more, actually, and so I just leaned into it and said, okay, you know what, I want my permission to be this amount, and it had been about 2 to 3 percent more than a lot of people in my firm were getting.

And he said yes, and that was an incredible lesson for me to realize that so many of us do undervalue ourselves and so many of us, not only we don't see our own value, but we also don't realize that we are the determining factor of our value. We sell yourself short and so really being unapologetic and realizing what is the worst that can happen? You know what they say no, or they needed to negotiate. You can always renegotiate, and that is all it is but to sell yourself short is doing your business a disservice and doing you a disservice. And It feels good internally to be compensated well for your work, and I think it's incredibly important to just always say to yourself, okay, and how much more can I charge here? Just taking that beat, making that moment. How much can I charge? There has been times with that political consulting where I have literally doubled what I thought I could get. Just to see and make it a little bit of a game for yourself, just to see what people perceive your worth to be, and you will be amazed at how little resistance you get when you confidently say it.

Steve Rush: And of course, we all have a different value that we place on people's services, times and expectations but often it's our own internal dialogue that either talks us into something or talks us out of something; and actually confidence can increase value because people feel assured, they feel certain about the services and the products that they're going to get from you, right?

Michelle Boxx: Of course, there are clients for every price point that you want to charge. If you have a dream amount that you want to charge and you feel like you can justify that value, then there are people who out there who are willing to pay that. Your job is just to find them. That is really all it is. It is really all that marketing and sales is.

Steve Rush: So Boxxbury Marketing now in a period of growth. So what is next for you and for Boxxbury?

Michelle Boxx: So what we consistently found in year one was even though we worked with, you know, over 100 businesses, that many small business owners, of course don't have massive access to capital to pay intense monthly retainers over time. And then many of them also really needed a space to learn instead of just us doing the work for them, and so we have actually we're in the process of launching 60 different courses that cover our marketing, business development, sales, pricing, and just everything that you would need to know. So 60 different courses for 60 different industries, and we have also teamed up with other knowledge experts like business accountants and attorneys. So basically, these business owners will be able to purchase something that's specific to their industry to be able to build out this business model, and then from there, they'll be able to watch and have these courses permanently, and as we add to them, they'll get the new editions as well. So we're progressively hiring a sales team that is going to be to be selling these courses out and it's just really an exciting time for growth for our Boxxbury right now.

Steve Rush: Well congratulations on continued growth as well Michelle.

Michelle Boxx: Thank you.

Steve Rush: For all our guest that come on, the show. We ask them to share that top Leadership Hack so we can look into your mind. What is your top Leadership Hack?

Michelle Boxx: Absolutely, so one thing I would say is to facilitate feedback from your team. I found that it is so important to check our egos at the door and to simply not be afraid to get that feedback. You would be amazed at the wealth of knowledge that your team, whether it is your sales team or whoever else has, even if they have not been in executive positions. Many times, they can fill in that missing piece of the puzzle, so many of us as executive type’s area lot in our heads. And it's really important to rely on your team to see where those puzzle pieces are, where they can say, okay, look, actually, maybe this isn't as clear as you thought it was, or maybe we should be doing this so we can all feel a little bit more unified. And so facilitating that feedback from them and making it a two way street has been really critical to me and my staff.

The next would be empathy, compassion, and kindness, putting that all in as one. A good story about this is a sale member of mine on my team. She was recently experiencing trouble with rejection and I guess there had been a couple of people who had rejected her who were not very kind. And she got all the way to the point where she was ready to quit, and she never said anything to me, which is where that facilitating feedback that I already mentioned comes in but then the other thing was she had gotten so in her own head that she felt she wasn't cut out for the role. And so when she finally came to me and she told me that she was ready to quit, I just really instead dug in instead of accepting, you know, the instant quitting and then just tried to get in with her and where she was at, and so I empathize and provided solutions to her concerns.

And she's been a numerous sales positions before, and she told me that she had never had a leader tell her before that they actually cared and to show that they actually cared. And it's startling how many people don't feel like their leaders and the executives truly care about them, so really diving in deep with that and taking that time to slow down and really get into where they're feeling and then we were able to find a creative solution for her. Where she is still able to sell for us, but in a way that she does not hear the rejection in such an intense fashion. So just really customizing that for your team and being empathetic, I think is so critical.

The next would be investment in the individual. It kind of ties into that empathy aspect, but I really like to dive into my team's professional goals. You know, right now we have a really, really large sales team. Over 60 people and I dive into, you know, where do you see yourself going in life? You know, how does this job help you get there? Because I know that if they are happy and satisfied, they will stay longer, but I also know that if they really feel like a job is pushing them towards their best potential and really helping them elevate, then they're going to give the best result. Really just diving into them and investing in them as an individual's critical as well.

Steve Rush: Super hacks, thanks, Michelle, for sharing those. What is really important is recognizing is from a leadership perspective the more that you give and get on the agenda of others, the more that you get in return from working together. So great stuff, this part of the show also, we are going to invite our guests to share what we call the hack to attack. So this is when a situation is going particularly wrong or not worked out well, and we now use it as a tool in our kitbag to lead and support and help others. What will be your hack to attack?

Michelle Boxx: So this is quite the story. When I was about 17 years old, I would say. I tweeted something on Twitter and this was, of course, in my time in politics and policy. And I tweeted something without really thinking about it. I thought it was tongue in cheek, and apparently, people did not feel that way. We ended up getting screenshotted and put on an article that was seen by twenty thousand plus people and I received over a hundred hate messages, death threats, that kind of thing overnight, which is, of course, pretty alarming when you're 17 years older anytime, frankly.

And what I learned from that experience. Is one to first simmer down before you react, it was a pretty alarming time, but then I just really learned the importance of our words, that our words really have power, and it sounds trite to say, but it's so critical in terms of leadership at in terms of leading our team. Words can sting for a really long time, and so for me, it was just that reminder that, you know, to always check how something might be perceived before we choose to say it.

Steve Rush: Wow, it's a massive lesson to learn at such an early age, but one I suspect you use readily when you're coaching and counselling others, right?

Michelle Boxx: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Rush: And of course, communication had changed now; where we could get away with saying it and people would hear things. They can unhear those things, maybe forget it. Whereas now with texts and social media, once we have written those words, they are there forever.

Michelle Boxx: Right. It just it is like a nice big punch, unfortunately, to a lot of people if you don't say things that correct way. And I think that it's just a reminder as well that. You know, when we put things in text, our tone of voice and a lot of the other senses that we use to typically engage with the world as is absent. All you got is the visual, and so to really be mindful of how that is perceived.

Steve Rush: And with social media, being so present in our lives, even more important now. To the final thing I'd like to explore with you today Michelle is, if we were able to do some time-travel, go back to meet that 15 year old Michelle, who was courageous, political activist, ready to take on the world, what advice would you be giving her now?

Michelle Boxx: I think that Michelle at that time was incredibly driven, but also really afraid of not getting to places fast enough, not accomplishing the dreams fast enough, and so I would really advise Michelle at that time to do something called living and day tight compartments. 

And it's a concept that Dale Carnegie wrote about in his book about Stopping Worrying, and it's really to leave the past in the past. To leave mistakes in the past, of course, learn our lessons, but just leave them in the past and then also to not worry about the future and where it's taking us instead to have your plan to focus every day, minute by minute, hour by hour, focusing in on the tasks that need to get done. And once you have that plan in place, not leave it any time to second guess or to overanalyse, just implement, implement, implement, and you'll get to where you want to go.

Steve Rush: That is great advice. I can resonate with that, and of course, the more that we can focus on the now being present, more likely we be in control, rather the stuff that hasn't happened or stuff that's chasing us that really helps us be present in the moment and be more focused.

Michelle Boxx: Absolutely, and I think that it is really easy to not even realize how much we worry and how unproductive that really is for ourselves, as unproductive for our mental wellbeing and done for our performance as well. And so if you really start to be conscious of how much you worry every day and how much you're analyse, overanalysing and just in general getting nervous, you'll start to realize there's a tremendous amount of time every day that you waste, and so alleviating that actually makes you the most.

Steve Rush: So our listeners today, Michelle, may be thinking how to find out a little bit more about the work that you do. Now you've got a strong following on social media, so how would you like our folks listening today to connect with you?

Michelle Boxx: I would love everyone to check me out on both Instagram and Twitter. It is at @blondefixer, and I typically try to post helpful articles and just helpful tips in general, just things that we are implementing within our firm for our clients. I try to give free advice every now and then as well, and if you have any feedback from this episode or have any other questions, I would love for you to reach out to me there.

Steve Rush: So as folks have listened here, they can go to our show notes and click on those links direct to get to your social media pages.

Michelle Box: Perfect. 

Steve Rush: Finally just for me. I just wanted to say a massive thank you, Michelle, for being with us on the show. I know it has been a busy time for you at Boxxbury and I'm super grateful for you sharing your Leadership Hacks. Michelle Boxx, the Blonde Fixer. Thanks for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Michelle Box: Thank you so much, Steve.

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.

Avi Liran is the Chief Delighting Officer at Delivering Delight. He’s an inspirer, writer, humourist and TEDx/IDEASx speaker. Avi believes that everyone is a Chief Delighting Officer. He's an incurable optimist, he’s always been fascinated by the power of positivity, as well as the ability of words and tones to transform people’s lives and experiences.

What you can learn from Today’s show:

• The power of delight.
• Why some people struggle with “delight” and how to overcome it.
• How delightfulness is for introverts as well as extroverts.
• Transform people from a place of helplessness to helpfulness with “contribution”.
• Avi’s top tips to get a VIP treatment by delighting others.
• Avi’s top leadership hacks!

Join our Leadership Hacker Tribe and connect with us:

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

LinkedIn (Steve)

LinkedIn (The Leadership Hacker)

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Learn more about Avi’s work:

https://www.aviliran.com

https://www.deliveringdelight.com

 Click below for the full transcript

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Introduction

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 are joined by, one of the best leadership development coaches in the world who is going to share some delight with us today. Before I introduce you to Avi Liran, here is a Leadership Hacker news.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, it is important to recognize that keeping ourselves upbeat is an essential ingredient to keep us on the straight and narrow as we go through any crisis. Eddy Chapman, Bridlington amusement arcade owner, has started filling his grabber machine with toilet roll instead of soft toys given the global panic to rush to buy them and in doing so created quite a bit of a stir. In fact, one couple had travelled more than 60 miles to play the grabber game and looked incredibly delighted when they won some toilet roll.

In other news, a ban on skywriting - and skywriting is where planes write messages in air using smoke is set to make a comeback after government proposals to rethink and reintroduce ideas of how they can communicate, particularly when less people are visible and social media does not often work. Writing in the sky in the smoke, such as “Wash Your Hands” could make a comeback to our skies soon. It is important to generate new ideas and thinking when we need to. Leading and leadership comes from thinking outside of the box. What is normal? What is not normal? How can we do new things and interesting things to create the right energy and atmosphere? That is a leadership hacker news if you have any ideas, news or insights you would like to share with us. Please share through our social media.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: Today I am joined on the show by a Chief Delighting Officer. What does a chief delighting officer mean? I hear you say. Well, I am delighted to say that on the show today, we have one of the world's best designers and creators of leadership development programs. He is a TEDx speaker. He has spoken in over 18 countries around the world and has helped thousands of leaders and managers in more than a hundred companies please introduce Avi Liran. Avi, welcome to the show.

Avi Liran: Thank you for having me.

Steve Rush: So the whole principle of delighting and delighting people might sound a bit fluffy, but you have been able to save managers and organizations millions of pounds and help generate millions of pounds in revenue. So just tell us a bit, about what does delight mean in this sense?

Avi Liran: Great questions and I would say that one of the case studies that I like most is with Marina Bay Sands. It is an iconic, integrated resort that has I believe it is the most frugal, integrated resort in the world they make a billion dollar a year and when they started, they became the biggest venue in Singapore with two thousand six hundred and fifty six rooms. You can imagine what would be the line for check-in and housekeeping. And they had a lot of teething problems and they had a change of leadership. They got fantastic training for service, which means that they were supposed to be great in service. It is an iconic place, but because of leadership, leadership was transactional and there was one, that was actually toxic and he was a COO the recent one. He would go and tell people you are fired just like Donald Trump. The problem with that was the people that came all the way from Vegas with the families got really, scared so it was a culture of fear and no wonder within just a few months they got to a horrible score on TripAdvisor. It was one hundred and forty. Then they called us and we work for about seven months together with the top 250 leaders. And within seven months, of going and grinding into what does it mean to become a chief delighting officer and making a commitment to be one, they managed to go up all the way to 36 place on TripAdvisor’s.

The commitment that the COO, the new COO that came instead of the gentleman that was there before him. When he started the first workshop with us he say, I took these guys to take you all the way out of your comfort zone. We think that may look fluffy, but if you don't want to be in Marina Bay Sands, a leader that will be delighting his team, if you don't want to have joy and you don't want to take care of your teams as a family please prepare a CV and go to Sentosa, which is the competition. I think that he made the commitment so well that every time that we had the workshop, he would come to say exactly that thing and at the end of the few days’ workshop, he would hand the certificate to each one of the leaders, shake their hands, look in their eyes and say, you are chief delighting officer. I think that was his commitment and the commitment of the leaders afterwards so cascaded. Then it is like they all went on the highway because they had the fantastic framework of service and they are doing extremely well. This is probably the most profitable single resort in the world.

Steve Rush: And that is amazing. Excellent story. Thank you for sharing what delight can mean in real sense. When was it that you stumbled across this principle of delight? How did that come about in your work and your life?

Avi Liran: Well, pretty, early. Everybody stumbles upon delight all the time. The question is all the guides us through.. We are going to see a lot of adversity in the world and lucky for me, I got fantastic parents and they were Holocaust survivors. They have seen the hardship, they escaped and they have seen their family slaughtered all in front of their very eyes and wounded and hungry and running for their life as refugees. And the inspiration came from my mum. I want to tell you a story that is not in my keynote or what you have seen. I remember after my father passed away and my mom as a doctor had two mortgages to pay and people will abuse and use her without paying her and she needed the money and one day in January it was raining cats and dogs and she came back after a home visit. And I asked her mum, so did you earn? And she said, no, and I was angry I say why? And she said, Avi you don't understand. These people are so poor, they don't have even money to go to A&E so I took the medicine because they can’t buy medicine and I gave them what the promotional people, the pharmaceutical company sales guys give to me. You don't understand Avi, I have three ways that they charge people. The poor don’t have to pay. Normal people will pay normal, the rich people will pay double, and I tell them that.

And I think I learned from her so much about how to look at every person as a human, how to have compassion and kindness. She once caught me not giving coins to a person that opened his hand and asked for it and she told me Avi, who are you to judge? Because I say maybe, he has used the money for drugs or liquor, and she say, you know what? You always can give someone from what you have. Then I remember my father they did not have much and, you know, once a month to buy you ice cream. And I want to thank my father and I say thank you, say don't thank me just bless me and bless me that every time I open the wallet, I have what to give to others. I grew up with people that were humble and kind and loving and at the same time did not have much, but they always had love to give and to smile and to help and I was blessed. I believe a lot of us in the world, no matter where we come from. And they're a good example of not complaining about what life did to you and surrender to that but being great contributors and I learned it from them, I'm grateful to them.

Steve Rush: That is a great story. So the whole principle of being delightful. What do you think the reason is that some people would struggle with being able to feel a little freer and be more delightful in the workplace? What you think holds people back?

Avi Liran: I think that some bad experience in the past prevent us and make us more cautious. And it's very interesting cause every time that they work with a group of leaders and they get to the essence of what is the engine of delight, probably we're going to talk about it later. They come to me and say so what if people abuse me? And the fears are really what if I'm going to give too much? What if I'm going to be too friendly? I believe at a certain time, not allowing yourself to delight is like being fearful and deciding after the first time that you had a relationship break to decide I'm going to stay single for the rest of my life. The fact is that the neuroscience of delight teaches us that when you delight somebody else you are immediately delighted back, because what happen is that your brain produces oxytocin and then immediately kick starts the reward circuitry in the hypo-campus. Dopamine is release, serotonin is release, and we become happier. So yeah, there is a lot of bad experience in the past that prevent people from trying. Some people are also introverts and they feel that they don't want to open up too much. Some people are simply not used to it. I would say fear but you know the antidote for fear is love and taking a step forward. My teacher and my mentor Lenny design a very beautiful, funny ritual about that. He asked you to put your hands in palm and say, I am afraid and I am going to do it anyway.

Steve Rush: And did it work?

Avi Liran: I guess so, because we don't want to live in the prison of ourselves, and actually if you think about if you're not delighting, you're sitting in a prison when the door is really open. You just need to go out and you don't have to do it in a rah-rah way. If you are introvert, there is a way to delight without making rah-rah. I don't believe that…actually, I find leaders that are introverts are much more delightful and delighting than the ones that are extrovert.

Steve Rush: Said some really interesting points I want you to explore with the Avi because as a coach, you know, there are those extroverts who you can see physically and non-verbally there delight or not as the case may be. How do you notice that and how do you respond to that with somebody who is introverted?

Avi Liran: Well, I think let's go into the essence of delight. What makes people delighted? And if you get that notion, if you only get this, I'll talk about the engine of delight and I'll make it as a question. What is the one verb, one word that is also an action is also a mind-set, a way of life that if you do it unconditionally, consistently, continuously, it will be the quickest way for you to earn trust, gain influence, feel a sense of belonging even if you are the new kid in the organization and feel happier together? I will repeat. What is the one word, one-way of life, one attitude that is also a verb that if you do that unconditionally, consistently and continuously, it will be the quickest way for you to earn trust?

Steve Rush: I am going to have a guess at something like contribution or making a difference.

Avi Liran: You got it. Contribution and contribution is what you do, and whether you are introverted or extroverted does not really matter but if, you have the mind-set of contribution, because there is a lot of science that say, when we give to other people, we feel happier or because we feel better about ourselves. There is lots of evidence from science that we are much happier when we give to others. We transform from a place of helplessness to helpfulness. Contribution is one level about the giving because giving is I give you what I feel that you need, in delight we call contribution as something that add values that the other person needs and if you seek to do that, whether you are introvert or extrovert, you're going to do well. 

Steve Rush: Thanks Avi, that is really insightful and I think can resonate with people who recognize themselves that they're introverted or indeed extroverted. You have done quite alot of research into the subject of delightfulness and the role that that plays in culture. What kind of cultures do you see in organizations in the role that delight them plays to that?

Avi Liran: I see a culture that is transactional where the leader just care about results and does not care about you. It can vary on part it could be even toxic and I see Cargill Culture, you know, it is nice to work here, but there is not really an attachment. You don't feel like you're working for or feel a sense of belonging. It is nice to work here. People are nice. They give you a nice salary. They develop you quite a bit. It is not really delightful culture and on the other side of the spectrum, I see cultures that try to be too delightful. Pleasing, as you say, and they go Pollyanna, happy fluffy and soon they are not responsible for the cash flow and they go down the drain because they forget that there is a discipline that you need to have all the things, all the results together.

And in the middle, there is a culture of delight where you have both the brain and the results oriented leaders. At the same time, they pay attention to the heart and they pay attention…and they have different kind of mind-set, the leaders, I would say that if you make them go through what will be your retirement party, who's going to be there? Are they going to clap their hands so they are happy that you've just left or are they going to have some tears and they're going to be there hugging you and making a big celebration to stay in touch with you afterwards? And what do you want to see when you retire? Do you want to see people who say, oh, he is so successful because I was developing that person, this kind of culture is where the leaders understand that the way that they're going to develop their leaders, that's going to be working there.

Interestingly enough, we talked about contribution in the last day of the chief delighting officer course; we do an activity that is called the circle of contribution. I am not going to go too much into it because we are not going to have time but in the end, we find the five top contributors in the company. Don't ask me how but we find them? And we make them sit in a panel and we ask them, so why do you contribute? Now, of course, they are going to see a lot of nice things. Oh, it is obvious but here is what is not obvious. I notice that four or three out of the five top contributor in the company are very tired. They work so much to help other people that they are very tired but one or two of them is not and, you know, having this working on the circle of contribution hundreds of times I ask the question. So what do you do differently? And I realized that the these two that are not tired develop the habit that they teach the people that are reporting to them how to become a contributor and that's interesting because they are surrounding themselves with people that have the contribution mind-set and when we interviewed, I have to give credit to my partner, Daniel Lee. He did also the research. We interviewed two hundred and twenty people in thirty-seven countries, six continents, and 50 percent of them are ladies. We got to understand more about delighting and how all of these leaders shied away from being Pollyanna pleasers, and they went immediately to the soft spot, and one of the people that we interviewed was Craig Smith, the President of Marriott in Asia-Pacific. And he said sometimes people will do things for you that they would not do for the organization and this is how friendly you should be with them. So on one hand, don't be fluffy Pollyanna, but at the same time, you have to be friendly and care for the people, for them to follow you.

Steve Rush: So what if I am a leader and I am having a really, bad day. I recognize I need to be the chief delighting officer at the organization. If I am in a bad mood, I just can't shrug it. Tell me, how would you help me get out of that? What could I do that would help me be present and think about that?

Avi Liran: Well, I would like to invite you and the audience to do something with me, so I will answer but first I'm going to ask you, tell me, what do you do on a bad day when people ask you, how are you?

Steve Rush: I guess the internal voice always says, yeah, I am having a great day. I am fine. Often fine is what you hear and when I hear that, I think probably you are not fine.

Avi Liran: And what if you are a salesperson who need to sell something and I am asking you, how are you? And you know, the more you say, oh, I'm great or fantastic and all this your body will say something else. But the problem is also the more you project yourself to be better, you going to feel exhausted after the day where you're actually pretending to be happy and you're not and you're going to be exhausted at the end of the day, you're going to be inauthentic to begin with. What if I'm going to share with you a short exercise that will help you about that? And I invite also your audience to be with me. I would ask you to put your hands on the two sides of your hands as if they were horse blinders and every time you are going to say yes to a question of mine, please put your hands, your palm of your hands out one inch and up one inch, all right. Every time you say yes. Okay?

Steve Rush: Got it.

Avi Liran: So I will start with the first question. Did you wake up on a bed?

Steve Rush: Yes.

Avi Liran: Yes. Okay. Put your hands one inch to the side, one inch up. Do you have the roof above your head?

Steve Rush: Yes.

Avi Liran: Yes. All right, so you know that more than 200 million people don't have it and you have probably 10 million refugees at this point in time. Do you have running water?

Steve Rush: Yes.

Avi Liran: Yes. Well, you know that one billion people need to walk for more than an hour in order to get water. Do you have ability to provide for your family?

Steve Rush: I sure do.

Avi Liran: Yes, say yes. Put your hand one inch to the side and one inch up. Do you live in a free country?

Steve Rush: Yes.

Avi Liran: Yes. Do you have friends?

Steve Rush: Yes.

Avi Liran: Do you have people, that you love and people love you? And the list go on and on and your hands should be by now in the v positions making forty five and ninety degrees and you are in the centre and you look up and you say, I have all this and billions of people don't. And if you have all of this and I'm going to ask you in comparison to those who don't. Are you blessed?

Steve Rush: For sure.

Avi Liran: So you are blessed, and if you are blessed, can you be grateful for this blessing?

Steve Rush: Yeah, really neat.

Avi Liran: So what if you ask me Avi on a bad day. Avi, how do you feel?

Steve Rush: Yes. How do you deal with that when maybe you are feeling less? How do you get into that space?

Avi Liran: So when you ask me how do I feel, I am going to tell you blessed and grateful and sad or blessed and grateful and extremely angry. Whatever the situation would be and because I know that 90 percent of my life is great and the 10 percent when we put the horse blinder we only see in the morning what is not there. The to do list, the things that we need, people that hurt us, the emotions, the negative things that happen and how are we going to resolve all this and we don't see the rest, and what we did we expanded the horizon to see and to recognize the truth. I am not talking about inventing things to make myself feel better. I just acknowledge what I do have at this point of time and the interesting thing when I tell someone let’s say I tell my employee I'm blessed, I'm grateful and very angry. They can connect with me because they see that I am human. I did not pour on them my negativity.

I gave them a way to have the cushion that I am not in a good state of mind but at the same time, I want to be delightful. And when you look at your employees, if you want to give them permission, you create what you call organizational safety, because if they can come to you and say the same thing. If you are running a frontline or a business, you could see, oh, you know what why don’t you go to back office today or take half a day off I'll cover for you, and that is where you can make the delightful connection to understand. That is why I would like to be those first to take the chief delighting officer. By the way, everybody in the world is a chief lighting officer or can be a chief delighting officer. We have eight billions of us. I took it as a gimmick to make me as a chief delighting officer, but I am not the only one. The minute that you step into the mind-set of delighting other people, you are a chief delighting officer.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I like that and often it is sometimes giving ourselves a permission to think differently and behave differently with a different label. And being a chief delighting officer that gives us the capabilities that come along with that, too.

Avi Liran: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Avi, you have also developed a technique and a solution, haven't you? So that wherever you go now, you get treated like a VIP. I would love it if you could share with our listeners how you can end up by going into a bar or a hotel or a coffee shop and get that VIP treatment just by being delightful.

Avi Liran: I will tell you an interesting story. A few years ago, I went to Manila. I usually stay there at the Peninsula Hotel because the general manager at that time was my client. I was in the lobby. I was talking to an H.R. Director of one of the top telecom companies. He had coffee. I could not have another coffee so I got water and, when the waiter came, he gave him a cookie and my water comes without cookie, and I want a cookie. So I stopped the waiter and I saw his name and I pretended that I had a conversation with a cookie and I said, the cookie feels lonely. Would you consider giving me one more cookie so it can get marry? He smiled and within a minute, he brought three cookies to me and that was delightful.

So what I did is I tried to stop the first person that I saw and to say who is the supervisor on the floor. She said I am, and I said, oh, okay, great. I want to tell you that this gentleman did a great job and he delighted me. I did not expect that and he made me smile. It was very fun and I asked her for the email of the hotel manager was my friend and the general manager is above him. I took the email; I sent a thank you letter. Her name was Sonia. What I received back in the email was the picture of the gentleman with three cookies, and that was really delightful. I think that when you have a mind-set of appreciating people, calling them by the name, understanding that sometimes they're pressed, it's understaffed and they're really doing the best. Sometimes, you know, I go and I take the small tissue and I clean the table a little bit because I see they are so engaged and I understand them. I tried to have a conversation, and by the way, I forgot that the name of the gentleman was Millard and Millard is also on my Facebook and he already left the peninsula and we still are in touch, and if you create conversation and make people feel that they're human because they're serving you.

Nobody goes to the F&B industry, hotel or airlines because of the high pay and the short shifts. It is a very demanding job and they are working for such a small pay, your acknowledgement of them as a person means so much to them. If you are kind to them, create a conversation, be thankful and grateful. Guess what happened? A few days later when I came, the hotel was packed. There was not a place to sit, and Millard found me, and found the only chair available and gave me a VIP service. Every place that I go, I make notes to be nice and be kind and not to be bitchy. And by the way, if you are dating someone and that someone is misbehaving to the people, that should be a red alert for you, because the way that they behave to other people is the way that is the real them. Be very careful from people that are not behaving nice to other people. You are defined not where everything is comfortable for you. You are not a big shot if you don't treat other people nice. That is the real person that you are. You are treating them with your pain. You don't need to inflict your pain on other people.

Steve Rush: So what I am hearing is if you are delightful to others, you will get delight in return.

Avi Liran: Most of the time and sometimes you need to enter into doses of compassion. They are three tools that you need to know because some people will be there to abuse you and I call them the black holes of delight. When you see your hand disappear and people try to take a bite of you have a conversation with them about it, and if you see that they insist on being black holes, then just disconnect and move on, because ninety five percent of the people you're going to meet are waiting to be delighted and waiting to reciprocate. Because the nature of delight is, once we are delighted we feel compelled to delight back.

Steve Rush: And Avi if you could give our listeners your top three leadership hacks. What would they be?

Avi Liran: I am not sure that I know how to hack the system for not working hard. Everybody that tells you, it took me about 14 years to become an overnight success. The first thing we talked already about is a mind-set of contribution. I think the second thing, when people don't behave in the way that you would like them to behave you need to set up the role of trying to understand what their pain is. If possible, use compassion. If compassion does not work use pity. If pity does not work, disconnect but don't get sucked to black holes and their negativity. I have four pillars when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do the blessed, grateful exercise because I know that no matter how difficult and problem and you know, we had a coronavirus here in Asia, entire industry is suffering from massive losses.

I guess in Asia, a trillion dollar was shave and we are in the service industry. And, you know, the events were cancelled so if you're not having the ability to be less than grateful on the brink of a day, you're going to suffer. The second pillar of the day have for myself, I would say that I tried to change what I can, but I also understand there's a limit to what I can do and I accept whatever is impossible for me to accept because what you resist persists. The third pillar that I have is love. I learned to love myself at the time, especially after a big problem in my family. I was really, miserable and even depressed. I did not know how to love myself, but I learned how to do it, and I love what I do. I love my team. I love my work. I love my customers. Actually, I don’t have customers only friend, love my girlfriend. I love my kids. I love the world, and the last thing of course is coming back to contribution. People like you are giving fantastic contribution that was one of the reasons that I immediately say yes, with a lot of good tips. I am grateful for you to choose me to be here today to give value to your audience.

Steve Rush: Avi that is awesome. Thank you. We be grateful for you being here too. This part of the show we are going to ask our guest to we…call this effectually Hack to Attack. Time in your past where you screwed up, things haven’t work out as well as a result of that you now have some learning or some foundations that you use positive in your work or your life. Maybe if you need to share with our listeners your hack to attack.

Avi Liran: I think stories. People like stories much more. I called it convert the shit into fertilizer. In the contract of life, it says thy shall have adversity, challenges and issues but in the fine print, it says, thy shall not dwell in the shit, thy shall convert the shit into fertilizer. 

Take one example. When I flew business with Turkish Airlines to Geneva, my suitcase came in shreds, and they would not pay me back and it was a struggle, and then a new GM came to Singapore is name is Genghis. And he was a righteous man and he saw the injustice and immediately arrange everything to be right. Not only that, he invited me for lunch, and immediately after that I invited him for lunch and we became great friends.

And guess what? Turkish Airlines took me to work for them. Actually, I got some of my great paying gig with them travelling the world and going to different places and in the world giving my keynote speeches and getting paid and not only got to one of the best friends in my life. I think everything that happens to you is giving you something. I would say that even a kick in the ass is kind of a push forward, and I learned so much more from my worst bosses than I learned as much from what not to do than my good bosses in life. And if you have this mind-set, you know that almost everything, with the exception of people that are psychopaths, stay away from them, you could turn around situation.

Steve Rush: Some wise words Avi. I am really, grateful for you sharing your hack to attack. If you could time travel back to when you were twenty-one and bump into your twenty-one year old self, what would be the one bit of advice you would give Avi at twenty-one?

Avi Liran: Well, there are several things that I did not get in my life and maybe that what has made me who I am. I would not change a bit because I would not be the person that I am now. Of course, all of us want to see the natural thing is to look at my deficiencies and say, oh, I would give myself a Stephen Covey book so I am going to be more efficient with time. Then I would not be who I am now. I'll be telling him, just be yourself because you developed so many beautiful things and naturally you had the beauty of finding the best in other people and to appreciate them, and if this only one thing I would change is I would be so much kinder to my mom. And if you are a young man today, I would recommend to you that your parents, loving parents just be kind to them. Sometimes we treat people better than the people that we really love because we can have the excuse that we could be ourselves. I would say you have to be the best version of yourself for the people that you love. They are the number one people in your life, and that is maybe the only tip that I would give to make sure you pamper and you carry with pride and great love the people that deserve it the most.

Steve Rush: That is lovely words. Thank you. So Avi I guess folks listen to this and thinking. How do I get to see, hear, or learn a little bit more about Avi work? So how can we connect you and connect them?

Avi Liran: Well, go to aviliran.com. You have a place to just give me a note, and by the way, you know, we are living in a beautiful world in a very tough time. Planets suffers and I see a lot of people share a lot of things about what's happening in the world, but they do nothing. So here is something that I would do to you if you going to connect with me on my website. There is a place there where if you have a new-born I would actually buy a tree for your new-born cause I just bought 500 trees to plant. Why? Because I want my kids to have air. And if you have a new-born, there is a form over there you put also your postal address and we will send you a certificate, of course it's all recycled paper, about the tree that was planted on the honour and hopefully you're going to do the same. I think that delighting can't be done alone, and maybe on the website, if you go to deliveringdelight.com you could even buy the shirt that says let's delight, because I don't believe I can delight alone. This is why if you in the audience become a chief delighting officer that you already are, just claim it spread the news around and if you have an event with your company and you want me to be your guest speaker, I will delight your audience and I make sure that they come with beautiful messages and unforgettable way. And thank you for having me around.

Steve Rush: Avi Liran it's been absolutely delightful having you on our show, too. Thanks Avi.

Closing

Steve Rush: I genuinely want to say a heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listen in too. We do this in the service of helping others in 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.

And finally, if you'd 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 on social media and you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter and Facebook my handle @leadershiphacker. Instagram you can find us there @the_leadership_hacker and at YouTube we are just Leadership Hacker. So that was me signing off. I am Steve Rush and I have been the leadership hacker.

Govert Van Sandwijk is the Managing Partner of Time to Grow Global. He is the Best Selling Author of The Power of Professional Closeness and a Global Leadership Development Coach.

In this episode you will learn from Govert:

• What is Professional Closeness
• How to Listen to your prehistoric radar
• Understanding trigger points and how the different parts of the brain work together
• Why listening to your gut feel is so important.
• Govert’s top leadership hacks

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.

Join our Leadership Hacker Tribe and connect with us:

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

LinkedIn (Steve)

LinkedIn (The Leadership Hacker)

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Find our more from Govert Van Sandwijk

Govert Van Sandwijk – LinkedIn

The Power of Professional Closeness – Book

Time to Grow Global Website

Click below for the full transcript

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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 Govert Van Sandwijk. He is the managing partner of Time to Grow Global. He is also the author of The Power of Professional Closeness, before we get to speak with Govert. It is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: We reported on the last show that folk were using toilet roll to increase the fun factor in the face of adversity. That is no different this week, David Faulkner, who's a florist from Blossom's events in Truman, Arkansas, has created bouquets of loo roll to put a smile on the face of his customers. These arrangements are in response to the limited supply caused by the global pandemic at the moment. David tells us each bouquet comes with a dozen deluxe toilet rolls, fully customizable. David told GMA, We just want to lighten the mood. Well, I say, good on you, David.

In other news, researchers have shown that if we ask ourselves these six questions I am about to share with you, it will improve our self-care and self-care right now is incredibly important not only to us, but to those that we lead to, here is the six questions.

• Number 1. What am I grateful for today?

• Number 2: Whom I am checking on, or connecting with today?

• Number 3: What expectations of normal life, I am letting go today?

• Number 4: Am I getting fresh air today?

• Number 5: How I am moving my body or exercising today?

• Number 6: What contribution am I making to others today?

Six great questions that will improve our self-care and as leader’s resilience and well-being start with us engaging the body and the mind, the first step in clarity for leaders be the fittest leader you can be. That has been the Leadership Hacker News. If you have any news insights, let us know through our social media sites.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: I am joined today. By best-selling author of The Power of Professional Closeness.

Founding Partner of Time To Go Global. Who has had assignments, in over 50 countries already.

So truly is an international leadership development coach, Govert Van Sandwijk. Welcome to the show Govert.

Govert Van Sandwijk: Nice to be here, Steve. It is a pleasure and an honour.

Steve Rush: So you started your journey, not in a traditional business sense, but coming from a neurological background. You started your journey, right. As genius psychologist? So tell us how you ended up from genius psychologist to international leadership development coach.

Govert Van Sandwijk: Okay, I will go further. Let's say the comeback journey and I can talk hours about this now. Actually, when I was just from university, the market for, you know, psychologists or this kind of background was really limited. Basically I found myself at the opportunity to have a job as a junior psychologist with the firm that was doing some work for the judiciary system. And basically, the task was to assess whether or not a suspected criminal was suffering of any kind of ontology, and basically, that was my first job out of the university. And one of the things actually, when I got into it is that I found it was super, super difficult to kind of maintain a more distant position in trying to do an assessment based on objective data and facts while all the time my gut was telling me something else. I kind of just started to become a little bit of a problem back then where I found and I really kind of got the meaning of it much later in my career.

But at that moment I found, hey, there's so much going on emotionally with me when I do this work, but I'm not able to use these emotions and to use these feelings about what I'm seeing, what I'm observing, etc. Because I am always being told, you know, you have to maintain your distance. And this was basically the mantra as well that we learned in a UNI. Created kind of attention and a feeling where I thought I am not doing my job in the best possible way, and that led me to think, okay, then probably this is not for me, you know. I went on to the next job where essentially I stepped into the headhunters game, so to speak, where I could use my psychological knowledge.

But I started to learn more about, let's say, a business context, which was a huge step for me. And also super interesting because as a recruiter or a headhunter back then, you have to learn a lot about a certain organization or a certain business in the shortest possible time. So you get to know a lot of different businesses and maybe on a pretty superficial level, but still you get to see in a lot of different kitchens, and basically that got me hooked, really hooked on, let's say, the organizational life and organizational practice as an area to work in.

Steve Rush: There is a massive shift there isn’t there between being in a psychological role where you're faced with lots of emotions that you haven't express? Conversely, then moving into a role where you reliant on that gut feel and using that intuition and emotion, can you recall a time where that really played out for you?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, to be honest, I remember this very distinct moment and I was sitting in this…I think it was an old nunnery converted into a, you know, a place where they had young criminals, let's say between 18 and 22. It was not a prison, but it was somewhere in between, like a holding, and I was interviewing I was assessing this guy, and he must have been three years or four years younger than I was at back at that moment.

The guy was suspected of pretty heinous things involving kids, and for me, this was kind of a turning point, and I was really young, to have kids myself. I just had father, my first daughter, well, first daughter, my daughter. But that moment for me, that really is the example where I felt I am really not able to do my job without properly listening to my emotions as well, and I felt at that moment, this is not the place for me, so I have to do something. So basically it was a fleeing of a certain situation that kind of let me start to look around me again, and then I ended up into the recruitment classic practice. But I wasn't that aware at that moment kind of the awareness about what was happening, that came much later.

Steve Rush: When was it you found first relying on that kind of professional closeness that you've come to create as almost your own now?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, that is a good question. The emotions, of course, you know, really working with the emotions that came actually in the job right after because, you know, you look at people's resumes. You look at their backgrounds. You talk to them and you know a lot about your client’s context as well. Then there is only so far that you can really kind of tick boxes on. While a lot of it is also relying actually on all your senses in terms of yeah, will this person be a right fit for this context? So then, you need to start to sense and to listen to your emotions, which was completely different I would say from before when the mission was, you know, use all the instruments and then maybe afterwards try to listen to your emotions as well. But the awareness, the real awareness about this, actually I think that started to develop pretty late, actually, after I started my own firm, which was probably five or six years later when I was 32. In the meanwhile, I have progressed from this recruiting firm to a Consulting Company, where I was leading the assessment centre practice, and at some point, they asked me, hey, do you want to become partner with our firm? And that was for me to triggering moment to say, okay, if you guys think I can become a partner in this firm, maybe it's time for me to consider to become partner of my own firm. I am 32, so I am young enough. If it all blows up within a year, I will have a huge experience to learn from, and then I can just pick up where I left off and I will find a job. Basically, that never happens, and now we are, I think what it is, 18 years almost down the line. I am still super happy with that start back then, when I was 32.

Steve Rush: And super busy, of course, if folk were listening around the whole concept of professional closeness, how would you describe that to somebody you would never really experienced? The whole philosophy of professional closeness before.

Govert Van Sandwijk: For me, professional closeness, first of all, it is a sort of a concept, but it's also really a lot like a mind-set. The concept or the mind-set itself in terms of what it really is, for me still maturing, but what I think helps is by looking at the opposites, first of all, and this is a well describes concept, which is called professional distance. You know, doctors, lawyers, a lot of people in professional roles, they get this mantra of you need to stay objective, meaning don't let you let your emotions get the best of you, don't get drawn in.

Don't feel basically I mean, to a certain extent, I can completely understand this, but my learning of these last 20 years is, is that your emotions. What you feel is not only making you able to connect better to the people around you and that you work with, but it also serves as a, let's say, a prehistoric radar for things that might be happening all around, but you're not yet 100 percent aware.

So listening to these emotions, using them, and leveraging them in order for creating better workplace relationships, having a better sense of what is happening in your contexts. Yeah, for me it has become, let's say what I describe, the power of professional closeness and as a leader

this starts with, let's say, really, really daring to start to listen to those emotions, but also start to show those emotions and opening up to the people that is closest around you.

Steve Rush: I love the whole principle of prehistoric radar because we all have the same kind of brain that has evolved over the last fifty thousand years. Some parts of evolved a little more than others, right, but we this tool to use, don’t we. How do you use the kind of psychology background to help you understand how different parts of the brainwork and how the decision-making process is impacted by that with your clients.

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, I love the question and to be honest, when I was studying psychology back, let's say this is over 25 years ago. So back then, when it came to neuroscience, neuroscience was much less evolved than it is right now. We didn't have that much less factual background on how the brain works and how that translates into behaviour and how psychology, which is, you know, the study of studying the mind, but not necessarily from a biological perspective. So how did came together, I think is only something that started to really, evolve over the last 10 years. To be honest, I started to read up on it a lot and started to become fascinated by the fact that now we start to understand our brain. A lot of those old school and old fashion psychological concepts start to make sense. Some others, you know. Absolutely not anymore, but nowadays, the knowledge we have is at the level that we can also use it to monitor our own behaviours, to use it in the boardroom, to use it when leading. I think, you know, having this background or having this knowledge, it is an obligation to spread that knowledge as well from a leadership perspective, when we are doing our type of work.

Steve Rush: In your experience Govert, of working with executives and leaders, how much value would you put on them understanding their own behaviours from a neurological perspective?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, I talk about this in the book quit a lot. I think for me it is a cornerstone that should be, you know, if that would be a university or a school of leadership, like like a proper MBA, something like that. Then I think neuroscience and what it means would be one of the cornerstones, because really understanding trigger points, the unconscious behaviours, the defensiveness, how the different parts of the brain work together and how this translates into your own behaviour. I think that is an invaluable insight for everybody useful to be honest. I think it is one of the most valuable lessons that you can learn and it helps, of course, also to understand what is it that I can actually try to steer and to control and what is it that I need to kind of monitor and to react to.

Steve Rush: If I was a leader of a team or a line manager and I was really struggling to create that professional closeness, the, you know, getting that connectivity and understanding my team at a much deeper level. What, strategies would you share with me, that might be helpful to make that happen?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Well, first of all, I think the first thing is the acknowledgement of saying, okay, if you are leading a team, let’s say as a manager, you always have a responsibility or a mission or an assignment or a task. What I always think is the first thing is understand that your task, your mission or your assignment is not actually the mission itself, but it is making sure you create a team that is able to perform or delivered that mission. That is the first task, so it is all about human interactions and it is all about having everybody be at their best. Also working together towards that same mission.

For you as a manager, your first responsibility should be looking at the people instead of looking at what is my mission. That is the first awareness I think needs to have before you can even start to think about developing anything that comes close to professional closeness. Second of all, I think once you have this awareness you need to start to be able to understand your own behaviour triggers or peculiarities in terms of your reactions. Once you understand that, I think the third thing is show the people around you who you really are. To kind of take off your office face or your mask and show the people around you who you really are, because once they start to see, you know, you as a human being instead of as a manager with an assignment and a role and a status, then you have the right starting point in place. Then afterwards, I think there is a lot of different things that you might be able to do, but that depends also on the context. So there's tons of strategies and tips, so it comes down to daring to be you in front of your team.

Steve Rush: And I guess that also creates the more you give of yourself, the more people are likely to reciprocate, aren’t they?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, and that I think is the most important thing. It is really leading by example, you know, creating these conversations that have a certain depth and openness, which for me does not mean that you have to always be sharing your deepest secrets, but you have to be willing to share your real doubts about the things that you are doing and experiencing. And that can be about the professional context, but, you know, once you're in that place where you can really say, hey, you know, we are coming across this challenge and I've never done it. I am really unsure on how to attack this, so I need the help of all you guys. You know, once you are really, really kind of letting go of this idiotic idea that as a manager, you need to know everything. You need to have all the answers and you can start to work from that place. I think you already have made a big shift.

Steve Rush: That sounds great, thank you Govert and in me, kind of get into a little bit more about you over the past few weeks and months. It is fair to say you have done quite a lot of research around the whole kind of getting smart people together. It is often referred to as collective intelligence, and you did some research that says really just getting smart people together is just not enough. What would be the reason for that?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, this was something kind of struck me while I was doing the research on Book, and I was thinking, of course, you know. You know, what is the point of professional closeness in a business context? It is about creating a better atmosphere and also about creating better results for the company, right. I started to look into this concept of collective intelligence, and basically it says, first of all, if you have a bunch of really, really highly intelligent individuals and you put them into a room and they start to work together, this is not guaranteeing that you will have the most collectively intelligence team. And a collectively intelligent team is a team that is able to respond and react, and let's say be informed of all the challenges that they are facing. It is really the flexibility and the adaptiveness of the team to be functioning on a high performing level all the time, no method to call. What I found out actually is that there is three indicators being described as well in the book by Thomas Malone, which is called Super Minds.

Number one, it is social perceptiveness, basically social perceptiveness and the ability of the members of the team or the members of the group to read the emotions of others that are in that team. So being aware of the emotions of others in the team while you are working and while you are working together, which is the first indicator, and so if that is not there or if that's, let's say not there enough. You will never be able to tap into all those highly intelligence people because it will be still a fragmented bunch of very smart people together.

The second part is the degree of equality in participation, which basically comes down to if you have one or two people hogging the conversation all the time. This means that all the time, other people are basically not contributing to the conversation and not letting their brains work at the same problem as well, that was number two.

Then number three, as I think is the most interesting one, and also from the perspective that we've just had, the International Women's Day, it is actually the number of women in the group.  It has been shown that the higher the number of women in the group, the higher its collective intelligence. To be honest, it is a bit of a combination of the first two factors, because women are a little bit more than men are generally more socially perceptive, and they are also less likely to harbour a conversation because they normally are already a little bit more about having everybody participate. I think it is very interesting if you look to these three points and you look, for instance, at your management team or your board. What is it that you see, how are we doing on those three indicators? Do we really see what is going on the faces of others? Do we monitor and do we see their emotions? Are we making sure that everybody has an equal say and that everybody is contributing? And in the end, are the women in the team, and of course, this is just the basic prerequisites. Well, it is a very, very strong starting point.

Steve Rush: It is really interesting, actually, because in my experience of having led board facilitation exercises and activities and coached executive teams where I see more diverse boards, I, you know, diverse in sexual orientation, in gender, and in thinking actually, the less group think, you also get right.

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, the less group think, the more you need to really join forces and look at the situation at hand and trying to solve it in the optimal way, the best possible way given the circumstances, which is something else than letting your egos prevail, and I think that diversity in any sense will help a lot. Then again, diversity only is not enough, you have to also be willing as a leader to see, okay, are we using that diversity? You know. If it is still, you know, the most diverse group but it is only a couple of people who is doing the talking all the time. Then you are still stuck in not using everybody to their best.

Steve Rush: You are right, and I think it’s incumbent on us all as leaders however large or small our team is, is to just be aware and notice whether or not we have got full participation and unlocking that opportunity to have a broader conversations.

Govert, at this point of the show, we can ask our guests to share some of their top leadership hacks, so what would be your top leadership hacks? You could share with our listeners.

Govert Van Sandwijk: That is actually great timing for the question because the first one connects back to what we have been talking about just now. If you are a leader, a team leader or a CEO, it does not really matter. And you are leading your meeting or your bi weekly meeting and you're looking at the team and you're thinking somewhere in the back of your mind is this voice that is saying, hey, what a passive bunch. Once you hear this thought, you should be aware that probably you are doing too much talking. I have seen this over and over again. If you hear this, what a passive bunch in your minds, you need to sit down, zip it and really create space for others to start participating. That is for sure, my first act.

Steve Rush: What would be your next hack?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, the next one I would say it is actually connected to daring to listen to your gut feeling in a very literal sense. So let's say you're doing something and suddenly you start to get this turning feeling in your stomach and it makes you feel really, really uncomfortable, and your primary impulsive reaction would be I want to get rid of this discomfort. The heck I would say if you start to feel something like this. Train yourself to endure this discomfort, and to use this discomfort as an indicator. Of, hey, what is happening might be something new, so actually, it is super good because we want to innovate, so we are entering into a space that triggers me to become uncomfortable, but this is great because it really is an indicator that we are doing something new? But it can also be an indicator of that you are experiencing something that you don't want to do, but still might be the best thing to do for the company or for a given situation. I think always listen to your gut feeling and to endure it instead of to, you know, get rid of it right away. 

Steve Rush: And I did some research when I concluded my book, actually, and research suggests that your got feelings is about four out of five times, right. Because it scans those unconscious thoughts and memories that we all kind of had for many, many years, right?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, I absolutely agree.

Steve Rush: We ask our guests to think about hacks that they have learned from times in the past where things have not worked out so well. Perhaps what they screwed up or they have been disadvantaged. Have you got anything that you could share with our listeners, which would be your hack to attack?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, so the hack to attack for me is basically be always prepared for the worst and be prepared emotionally. The first time that I kind of really, really experienced this in a bad way. The company was a couple of years old and then we had been working internationally on a huge assignment and we had like I think two and a half or three hundred thousand euros, which was in the pipeline of being paid.

And at some points the company said we have compliance issues and we need to stop every single payment until we have figured it out or if something is wrong, you can forget about the money. This situation really kind of stopped, but what I learned from it is really to prepare yourself when something like that happens that actually you cannot really anticipate.

Make sure that you train yourself to not be blown out of the water emotionally, because if you train yourself to be prepared emotionally and that you can handle, hey, yes, this is bad, but this means that I need to start acting in a different way. And instead of allowing myself to sit in these negative emotion of feeling victim to the situation, that is for me one of the biggest things and whether you are a leader, an entrepreneur or whatever. Make sure you are always prepared emotionally for the worst.

Steve Rush: It sounds academically dead easy, does not it, to get prepared emotionally, but how physically can I do that. What would be the one or two things that would help me train to get myself prepared emotionally?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, I think that is a great question, and it comes back to one of my hacks, actually. It is basically once something small, let's say surprising and not so nice happens, and when you start to have this emotional reaction, really use those moments to feel what is happening inside of your body to make a note of it mentally and really, write it down. So what do I experience? What do I feel? Look at the contexts and see at that exact same moment what helps you to calm down or to mitigate that feeling?

And if you do that quite a lot of times in situations where the stakes are not so high, you basically train yourself to react in a certain way. Then when something happens, when the stakes are really high, you have I would say a coping making mechanism already installed that will prepare you for when that situation really happens.

Steve Rush: Got it, so it is about setting down some tactile foundations, really, that unconsciously you create over time.

Govert Van Sandwijk: Exactly, absolutely.

Steve Rush: Super. Last question for you today is. If you were able to do a bit of time travel, go back to when you were 21 and bump in to your 21-year-old self. What will be the one bit of advice that you would give Govert then?

Govert Van Sandwijk: This is very much about my own journey. So what I would say to my 20-year-old self, I would say, hey Govert, don't rush into responsibilities. Use the time that you have right now to learn about cultures, to learn about social skills, to look around you, to learn about the world, but don't rush into responsibilities, trying to be, let's say, trying to live the adult life. Use this time right now when you actually don't have a lot of things to think about, when your backpack is relatively empty.

Steve Rush: It is great advice, thank you Govert. Folks probably listening to you speak, and we have mentioned your book, The Power of Professional Closeness. How can they find that a little bit more about the work that you are doing at the moment?

Govert Van Sandwijk: Yeah, I would say always good to take a look at our website, which is a timetogrowglobal.com and if you want to check out the book, just hop on over to Amazon - The Power of Professional Closeness - Govert Van Sandwijk and it's available. Read about it in the reviews to see if it is something for you, and of course, I will be happy to help if anybody wants to reach out directly.

Steve Rush: And we will also put a link in our show notes to make sure that people listening to this can go straight away. Click on those links as well Govert. Thank you for spending some time with us today. It has been delightful talking with you.

Govert Van Sandwijk: It was it was a great pleasure, and I am really happy to be part of, you know, your first five or 10 shows and I will be looking forward to have the podcast will evolve over time. 

Steve Rush: Thanks Govert. Thanks for joining us.

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 there @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.

Michael G Rogers is the author of the bestselling teamwork book "You Are the Team" (over 20,000 sold), and has a new book, "Do You Care to Lead." He is also an Inc. Top 100 Leadership Speaker and our special guest on Do you CARE to Lead?

• You can learn from Michael that if you truly serve you unlock magical things with your team Care about your people and they will care about their work.
• How to take “Rocket” rides and not “Subway” rides with your team.
• Learn about the S.O.N.I.C. model and how applying it can truly propel your leadership impact.
• Find out Michael's top leadership hacks!

Join our Leadership Hacker Tribe and connect with us:

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

LinkedIn (Steve)

LinkedIn (The Leadership Hacker)

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes

courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

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TRANSCRIPT

The Leadership Hacker Podcast: Episode 4 Michael G Rogers – Do You Care to lead?

[Start 00:00:00]

[Music Playing]

Introduction

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 are joined by the founder of one of the best blog on leadership in the world, teamworkandleadership.com and best-selling author of two best-selling books. Michael G Rogers. We will get to talk to Michael shortly, but first it is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: It is life Jim, but not as we know it. Now that is a phrase Star Trek fans would know all too well. But it's something we can all now also associate with; given that, COVID-19 pandemic has swept the planet. Depending on your worldview, some would say the reaction to the Coronavirus is an overreaction, others may say the end of the world is near, and whenever your worldview the world and the businesses that we lead has changed forever. If ever there is a need for leadership, that time is now. Here is my top three hacks on how to lead through this crisis.

• Number 1 - Stay steadfast and calm. I coined the phrase the “Leadership Barometer” and we all have one. This is where that metaphorical storm that we have to face in as leaders means others look to us to see how we're reacting so they can judge and how also to react in those situations. It is our responsibility to project a sense of calmness and surety, and that falls very much in the leadership space. Leaders who serve others can help their teams remain focus and productive even in the face of uncertainty. And as a leader, they will be watching you like a hawk to be true to yourself, to acknowledge their concerns and yours and help them assess the threats and emotions so you can guide them logically to effective solutions.

• Number 2 - Communication. In times of crisis - communicate like you've never communicated before. Gossip and rumour will spread like wildfire in your workplace, especially in the absence of any official communication. As soon as you know stuff communicated promptly and factually and if you don’t know, then say so because if you don’t you will have a another virus in your business and it will be the communication virus on top of what you already have to deal with. As the myths and the legends, start to form and misinformation would disseminate through your business and things will be tough to deal with.

• Number 3 - Keep the wheels turning. Do whatever it takes to engage your teams and keep them busy at this time. It is important to take advantage of technology like virtual meeting platforms like Zoom or WebEx or anything else that is a collaboration tool, that will help keep your people connected when they're less connected and isolated. Could also be a time to pivot your proposition and innovate and try new ways of thinking and new emerging technologies in crisis can also bring people together in adversity. So use this time well to forge deeper, more meaningful relationships with colleagues, friends and families. Perfect opportunity to learn about your leadership style and how you have dealt with the situation or not, as the case may be. One thing you do have to avoid, and that's doing nothing. It is now time for us to lead like never before, intentions is not enough. Action is what is required.

That is a leadership hacker news. If you have, any emerging stories or news articles that you think would be useful to share on the show. Please get in touch though our social media sites.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: Our very special guest today is Michael G. Rogers. His first book, “You Are The Team”, sold over 20000 copies and his new book “Do You Care to Lead?” has just been published by Wiley. He is also an avid blogger. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael: Yeah. Thank you, Steve. Glad to be here.

Steve Rush: So I will be useful for our guest to know, Michael that your career actually has been born as a very successful executive, having led some senior roles in Fortune 50 companies. You come from a place of experience rather than theory, too. Tell us a little about how you ended up here?

Michael: Yeah, sure, I started off in the learning. Well, actually, almost all my corporate career was in learning and performance, corporate training that area and I quickly moved it up into leadership positions there and took an interest in leadership. I had a particular leader that was a strong, strong mentor to me, still is actually. An inspiration behind the two books that I have written. He is the one that got me interested in doing leadership workshops and, you know, be a part of learning performance. I had that opportunity to do a little bit of that. And it really just got me super jazzed about leadership. I started reading a lot; I started speaking more and more. I started doing some development with teams on the side while I was working and started getting asked more and more to do deep dive kind of team development with senior leadership teams. I mean, it just was a lot of fun for me. I have been blogging for about 13, 14 years. I believe now. And that was kind of a strong catalyst behind the writing of the two books as well.

Steve Rush: So, Michael, what was it really sparked that interest and desire in you to want to lead and help others?

Michael: Yeah, I mean, that leader I had talked about, his name is David Ferris. He was just such a strong mentor to me and he was like the perfect model of leadership. Again, and so inspiring, and the way that he led me, the way that I watched him lead teams, people were fiercely loyal to this guy and they still love him even, you know, years later. Having the opportunity to have conversations with him about what made a great leader because of our relationship in terms of him mentoring me, it was really what sparked a lot of it for me. I decided to leave corporate about three years ago and do something else. I have always known I wanted to write a book, but it was not something was on my mind when I left corporate to try to do something else. I want to get it a different industry, do something around that. I started writing the first book and it came out really well. When I started promoting it, it started selling really well. I said, I will take this and do this full time. Go around, speak, and write. I love it. I am a passionate, passionate about team development, leadership and speaking and writing. I mean, I really, really, Steve, love what I do.

Steve Rush: Michael, in the time that we got to know and that's incredibly evident, passion and energy comes through rapidly and in the time that you start to write You Are The Team. What was it that cause you to have the team focus around leadership?

Michael: Yeah, so I had been doing some team development on the side. I had read Patrick Lencioni book, ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, and if any of your listeners out there have not read that book, to me it is the Bible on teamwork.

Steve Rush: Right!

Michael: At least in terms of teamwork and relationships, which, you know, that is what teams are. I mean, fundamentally, at their core, they are about relationships. He just does a phenomenal job at talking about relationships, but I decide to focus a little bit differently. The book You Are The Team is about relationships, but it's also about commitment and it's about stepping up and committing to the team. And so a lot of people ask me all, why you title it, You Are The Team. You know, Mike, there is no I in team.

I know that technically, there is no I but figuratively there is, and it always starts with you. Teams don't just magically come together because you create a team and you say, okay, go out and conquer. Teams have to first commit and connect and this book is based on six values of commitment and connection. I had not at the time seen any books out there that had focused just on teammates, the person. There is a lot of books have focused on leaders and how to lead teams, but nobody was focusing just on the teammate. There is an opportunity here. There is a little of a niche here and I really feel that teams are only as successful as every person's commitment on the team and their own success, towards the team. You know, great teams are made up of great teammates, so that was really the reason why I wrote the book.

Steve Rush: Michael, how would you define team? In my work, I find myself often speaking to leaders who are in a team in a board environment, but are also leading teams. How do you square that activity through the team that you serve verses the team that you lead?

Michael: Yeah, well, there is different types of teams, right? There is a lot of different types of teams. I mean, one of the exercise I do quite often is I ask people to talk about the greatest team that they have ever belonged to. That could be a family team. It could have been a team that, you report into, it is a team that reports to you, because even as a leader, you are still lead a team.

You are still a teammate on that team to some degree. You know, there's volunteer teams, athletic teams, lots of different types of teams. To me, the definition of a team is a group of people that come together for a common cause that want to do something extraordinary together. That is how I would define team. I mean, that is like how I define leadership. I mean, to me, leadership is only leadership when people make a choice to follow you. If nobody wants to follow you then you fail to be a leader and a team fails to be a team, if they are not accomplishing extraordinary things. Every team has the potential to do that with the right ingredients.

Steve Rush: So what do you think it is then Michael? Create that connectivity that emotional closeness that brings teams together?

Michael: One of them and this is the same for leaders Steve is service. It is such a simple concept, we think about it and we talk about it, but we really never act upon it. I think there are so many opportunities around us. If we have this mind-set of putting others first to be selfless instead of being selfish, which I think a lot of us naturally that is just kind of how we are wired is to be more about us, but when we're more about them, when we're more about others, when we are putting other people first. We begin to serve others and I know of no faster way to create connection on teams than to have teams begin to serve each other. It is the same of leadership. I know of no other much…faster way to unlock your leadership than to serve the people that you lead. Not just doing your job, not just saying, hey, I have an open door policy. I am going to be with you once a month or whatever. I am talking about above and beyond. I am talking about really thinking and putting others first because it is completely magical on teams and it is completely magical and leadership as well. That is one big part in terms of connection. That is to me the fastest way you can create connection.

Steve Rush: Sure and that also builds trust, doesn't it?

Michael: Oh yeah for sure. Because a couple of things happen when you serve. First of all, it shows that you care and when people know you care, they're more likely to trust you. But when we spend time with people outside of what we normally do and service opportunities allows us to do that, many times we get to know people and the more you get to know people. Well, the more you trust the people, so, yeah, from both of those perspectives. You are absolutely right it does build trust. Trust that is part of the product of a connection, trust is built through action.

Steve Rush: So, Michael, if I am a team leader or a manager. I am struggling with consistent performance, so I have a big differential performance in my team. On the left hand side, I have my high performers on the right hand side over here. I have the people who are just taking up space and a bunch of people in the middle of the steady eddies. So how do you manage to pull that dichotomy together when coming to leading team performance?

Michael: Yes, I love that question, Steve. In my second book, Do You Care to Lead? I talk about five different classifications of employees and I call them all stars. They are all stars because I think all people have the potential to become great, but you as a leader, you need to act, and I think this is where a lot of leaders fail to act with their teams. You have got to either people moving people up, over or off, and the fourth option is never a choice, which is to do nothing.

Unfortunately, that is what a lot of leaders do. They just hope the problems will go away, but I really believe you should be spending ninety nine percent of your time or more on proactively nurturing people and trying to move them up. If you look at these five classifications of employees, I have what I call rock stars and we all know what the rock stars are. These are the folks that just get it done and then some. They are just amazing performers; we wish we had a whole team like them. They are innovative they are creative. They really are truly rock stars, and then you have your rising stars. Your rising stars are rock stars; they just don't have the experience yet and with the experience, they will become rock stars, but they are rock stars in what they do currently. They just don't have the experience yet, and then you have what you referred to steady eddies or I call study stars or middle stars. These are the folks that will meet expectations but not necessarily exceed expectations. Then you have your falling stars and we know who these people are. We wish they would just leave, and we kind of hope that at some point they will. We just fail to act to move them up, and again, leadership is a nurturing process.

And people on your team are watching you. They know who is moving up and who is not. You are going to have trust issues on your team if you are not proactively nurturing people. The fifth star is what I call deceiving stars. Deceiving stars are falling stars in rock star clothing. In other words, they are bringing the morale of your team down. Everybody on your team struggles with these people. They are the people that hoard information. They don't collaborate great, they take the credit for it for everything, but you as a leader, see them as a rock star. Until you do something with these folks, they will continue to drag some of the morale down. I have lots of stories I can share on that that particular area but your role as a leader and your team is watching you is to continually, again, you owe this to your team to, continually nurture it. I said, ninety nine percent or more, your time is spent on finding ways to move these people up. If you can't move them up, then you may have to make the difficult decisions to move them over or move them off. Moving over does not mean that you take your problem and give it to somebody else. You make sure that you find the right seat or the right bus for them to be on, and then of course, moving them office is really difficult. I mean, anytime you have to let somebody go fire somebody that is a hard thing. If you are doing it from a place of your heart, then it is the right thing for you. It is the right thing for that person, the right thing for the organization and your team.

Steve Rush: You are right, and as difficult as that might be. Your new book, Do You Care To Lead? We talked about earlier is now available across the globe. You've created some really practical approaches and focus on the philosophy of care and how transform performance and people, tell us a bit about that?

Michael: I will, and you know, I was thinking this morning it is interesting you asked that question because I was thinking this morning that really the two books are linked in terms of the word care. I really feel if teams will practice what I call my six Be’s of being an effective teammate, they will care more about those on their team. Caring is an important characteristic on teams because as you talked about trust and connection, I mean, caring is a product of that as well. So it is, but yeah in the second book, Do You Care To Lead? I come from a place of putting more caring into leadership. If I ask any leader whether they care about their people, they are going to say, yeah, I definitely care about my people. I had a leader once that if somebody had asked him if he felt I cared about him, I am pretty sure he would have said yes, but the reality is I didn't feel that way. And there was a recent Gallup Survey done where four out of ten people strongly agreed with the statement that no one at work, including their supervisor, cared about them. That means six out of ten people don't feel cared about, which is a startling number if you think about it.

Where leaders feel like people know they care about them. People don't feel, you know, the majority of people don't feel like they're being cared about. I go back to this leader that I had. You know, we would have regular one on ones. And I'm sure he thought by having those one on ones and by telling me that he was grooming me for his position and he was giving me some opportunity, it put me in a new senior kind of role to expose me to more of the business, to give me this opportunity. I am sure he thought from his perspective that he was showing he cared. To a small degree, it did, but here is the thing. He never spent time nurturing me. He did not develop me. He did not spend time helping me understand what his expectations are, what my new role was. Here is a resource. Here is your tools. These are all things that show that you care, let alone the fact that when we did meet, he never asked me about me. He never asked me about my family.

He never showed vulnerability himself. I would ask him, for example, about his family, but he would never ask me about mine. But when I asked about his family, he never opened up. He never opened up about mistakes that he had made or directions we had taken that we should have done differently. He did not feel real human to me, and so all of those types of things I talk about in the book around, you know, do you care to lead? Which is really about two questions. You know, first of all, do you want to lead? Because a lot of people are put in positions of leadership because they're just better technically or because they want to make their parents proud or their wife or their husband proud or power or more money or whatever it might be. But do you really want to lead people? Because if you don't want to lead people, it's going to be pretty difficult for you to care about people, and that really is the main question around the book is do you really, really, truly care about the people you lead? It makes an impact. It makes a difference on loyalty as well as results.

Steve Rush: Sure, in your book to help people come to grips with how to help people on that journey. You come up with five strategies serve, open up, nurture, inspire and commit. And I thought it be useful just to explore with our listeners a little bit about what lies behind each.

Michael: Well, absolutely. And this is what I call to Steve, my sonic approach leadership. It's an acronym that just fits really nicely, truly propels your leadership if you'll do these five things.

So Serve as I talked a little bit about that already. It is the quickest way to unlock your leadership, and there is lots of research that shows that when you serve others. There is scientific things that are happening. You know, there is these great chemicals in our body, neurochemicals in our body that are throwing a party when we serve others. In fact, when not only when we serve others, but when we just watch others serving others or when we anticipate service or we think about the service, these neurochemicals start to get released in our body, they feel really good. One of those neurochemicals is oxytocin, which is the same chemicals it is released when a mother is feeding her baby. It is a connection chemical, and that is why when I talk about service and connection, the quickest way for us to connect with others is to serve others. That is what is happening, and so and there's more I could go into around the magic and the science around it, because it starts with you as a leader and creating a culture of selfless service on your team and your organization starts with you as well. But it starts with you because of this connection chemical and the law of reciprocity in which people want to turn back and give back to you, and the law of multiplicity, which says that if one person is served. Not only do they want to reciprocate that service to you, but they also want to serve up to three to nine more people.

There is a great story in the book that I tell about a CEO and owner I think the business become fairly large. She had made the choice to create a service program and it changed everything. It changed how people feel. It changed the morale of the organization. It changed how their customers looked at them and the referrals they started getting. They started getting bigger and better referrals from customers and clients because of just the way that they treated their clients, which came all from just this idea that this leader had around creating a culture of service. It is just, truly absolutely magical in your leadership, so, yeah, that is the first one service.

Steve Rush: And that is amazing because it then becomes infectious. Not only are we triggering that neurotransmitter and those happy chemicals into a delightful space, but also becomes infectious for those people around us and it creates a self-perpetuation of that energy. We end up with a double bubble of winds.

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, that is a double bubble. I like that. I should have put that in the book.

Steve Rush: When you talk about opening up as leaders. Is this about showing humility, some more of the human us?

Michael: Yes, being invulnerable and really the concept is something called psychological safety. It really is kind of a hot term right now. Vulnerability is a hot term right now in leadership. A lot of people realize now as a leader, it's important for you to come across as human. But a big reason why that's important to open up is so that you create the psychological safety. There was a graduate researcher by the name of Amy Edmondson. I think at Harvard University who had decided she want to study what made teams effective. She studied medical teams, and you would think that the medical teams that were most effective were the ones that have fewer errors. But she found out that it was actually the teams that made the most errors that were the most effective, and it wasn't that they made more errors. It is just that they acknowledged those errors more readily. As a result, she said this team had psychological safety. She is the one that coined it, psychological safety. People felt that they could talk openly about their mistakes. They could learn from their mistakes quicker because they were talking about those mistakes and acknowledging those mistakes. But people only acknowledge admit mistakes when they feel safe in doing so. A lot of people hide their mistakes, so creating psychological safety on teams is about creating an environment where people feel like they can raise their ideas, perspectives. They can disagree with people on the team. They feel like, again, they can humbly say, you know, I made a mistake. Or they can say this is a wrong direction that we are going or hey, you are better at this than I am. As a leader, that is your responsibility to build that on your teams, and I talk more extensively about that, in the book, how you do that.

But it definitely starts with you as a leader. You want to be vulnerable yourself. Sara Blakely is the founder of Spanx Company. She is a wildly successful female entrepreneur. A billion dollar company, and she talks about when she was growing up and this is so interesting, I love this. She said that when she was growing up, her father would ask them at the dinner table what they had failed at that day. And if nobody could come up with something that they had failed at, he would seem almost disappointed. He wanted them to talk about their failures because he knew it was the quickest way for them to become successful, and at her company Spanx, she created what she calls the whoops moment. Where they as a company talk about their mistakes openly as well and how they are learning from their mistakes. She shared hers as well; again, it starts with her. That is how the culture is created. You can't just say as a leader, I want everybody to be open. I want everybody to tell us when you make a mistake, but you are not willing to admit your own. That does not fly because you have not built the trust necessary. And there's some other things you need to put in place that, again, I talk about in the book, but that's a main one is for you personally to be more vulnerable.

Steve Rush: And leading by example is where it starts the whole psychological say because it easily be eroded if people in responsibility and leaders don’t practice that safety themselves, right?

Michael: You are right.

Steve Rush: How do you describe nurture, Michael?

Michael: Nurture is the opportunity for you to realize that people are different, they have different needs, and you have to spend proactively time on moving people up, over and off, and the fourth option, as I said before, never an option, which is to do nothing.

Nurturing is about not being a cookie cutter manager as well. I had a director that reported to me one time who was an absolute cookie cutter manager. She loved performance management. Performance management, to me kind of has a bad connotation. I get it in theory, how it should work and I think it can work as long as you don't cookie, cut it. She was really good at getting people if they did A, B would happen, if they did B, C would happened. She did not take an account individual people; she was really good at firing people. She did that quite a bit more than any other leader I knew. We had a lot of conversations about this. Try to help her to think more about people personally. Is like if I took an avocado tree, for example, and planted that tree in the mounds of Utah and avocado tree would not do well, it would not thrive. It need to be in the climate and the soil of Southern California where I grew up. If I took an apple tree and we have apple trees in my backyard here, I took an apple tree and planted it in the desert of Southern California. It would not do very well there either it would not thrive. And that's because each tree needs different nurturing, different sunlight, different climates, different soil, different care and people do as well. I mean, if you think a tree is complex, think about people. We need to be spending actively, proactively time with people and developing them again, moving them up over or off, never exercising that fourth option, which is to do nothing. We have to proactively be nurturing people.

Steve Rush:  I love that tree metaphor. Thanks for sharing that, Michael. The I, when it comes to inspire. Leaders would with tell us, for sure. It is my responsibility to inspire and motivate my teams. Yet, some people really struggle with that. What do you think the reason is that they do?

Michael: I think many times it is because they forget about what I call the where, why and how. The where is where are you taking people? If I have you, Steve, in a rowboat in the middle of dense, heavy fog on a lake somewhere, and I'm telling you and the team to keep rowing, but you have no idea where you're going. But I just keep shouting, we got to keep rowing, guys. We got to keep rowing, you are saying where are we going? And you don't see land, You don't see any hint of where we're going. How long are you going to continue to roll? You know, you are eventually going to lose your motivation to row. In fact, maybe half of the team will row and half won't and you'll just keep going in circles. So letting people know clearly, where you are taking them is the difference between teams that kind of flounder and teams that are wildly successful.

They know where they are heading. Also important is to know the why. Why are we going there? If you are not clear on the why - people are going to have no desire to get up in the morning and try to go to the where, but if you can put that why in, it becomes more intrinsically motivating. People wake up and they want to come to work or they want to be a part of this team and succeed because you have been very clear on what that “why” is.

Then there is the “how”, and the how is you know, the strategic planning, the goal setting, all that other stuff. One of the things we often forget about in, goal setting or strategic planning is we do a really good job with an organization. We say, okay, here is our strategic plan. I like teams to consider how to create a strategy or having a strategic plan as well. I call these success lines so people have goals. As a leader, you are helping them because you are nurturing them, finding out what goals are best for them this year and having a success line. Being able to clearly demonstrate in your team's strategic plan and your goals and your individual goals, how they line up ultimately to the overall goal of the organization and success. What is the successful impact look like? And we have to talk more about that. The achievement of a goal itself, the completion of goal is not the achievement of a goal. The achievement of a goal is the successful completion of a goal and oftentimes we talk about the goal being completed, but we don't spend much time talking about what success look like for the goal.

Because that is really all to me. What we should be measuring, not just the fact we checked it off and so that where, why and how and I've got a number of other things I talk about in there, like celebration, recognition, rewards, upping your expectations of people. People will perform at the level that you expect and thanking people. I mean, these are telling stories. These are always you can inspire. But first and foremost, foundationally, the where, why and how you've got to be clear on that as a leader.

Steve Rush: It is a really neat principle of the whole “success lines”, I like that. It gives people the opportunity to visualize where they are going and how they going to get. Then, of course, for those people who are less visual. It gives them the context in that journey. So things that they have to do, the activities of all of the journey, and of course if we don’t have that, they start making up their own stories and fill in their own versions of events. Right?

Michael: Right. Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Rush: The fifth one,  “C” for commit. How does that underpinning the other strategy?

Michael: So you as a leader have to be all in. I think what happens a lot of times with leadership is it's like the shoemaker. The shoemaker makes shoes for everybody else except himself. As a leader, I think oftentimes we are really good at giving others development opportunities, but we don't spend much time on our own. You I think, you know, it is important at the end of the book that I talk about your commitment to this process. Your IT listener’s audience out there. Maybe you have heard this story others probably have not. It is like the story of the pig and the chicken. They were walking down Main Street one morning and the chicken and pig had noticed a brand new restaurant that it opened up that was serving breakfast. The chicken turned to the pig and said we ought to open up a restaurant someday that serves breakfast. The pig says that is a great idea. What shall we serve?

And the chicken says, ham and eggs, of course, the pig says, well, that's great, except you're just making a contribution, I am making a full commitment. I like to tell leaders that you have to be the ham and the ham and eggs. And I'm talking about the fact that you have to give your life for it, but you do have to sacrifice a lot, you have to be all in! As the story goes with Cortez, you have to burn the ships. Your people have to know you are all in your committed. You are moving forward. If you don't have the commitment to these things, it becomes like any other book, any other workshop, any other opportunity. It is just spray and pray. You know, a lot of times the books they spray what they have to say and pray that you retain it. But until you commit, until you apply the things that you've learned. It ultimately does not become anything of value. It is just another book. It is just another concept. It is just another workshop. You have to be fully committed. You have to be ham and eggs.

Steve Rush: That is neat, and Michael, I just wanted to say, I think you have definitely been the ham when it comes to helping people on their leadership journey. We come to the part of the show where I am going into your mind Michael, so that you can share your leadership ideas and tips with others. So, were would you like to start?

Michael: Yeah, so I will give you some specifics around three of the ones that I kind of talked about already. The first one by far, I mean, to me, the most important one is to care about your people and really is the basis of what we have talked about, right. Because if you care about your people, they are going to care about their work. They need to know you care, when people know you care. They tend to be more loyal to you. As a result, they are going to want to do anything that you desire of them to do to become phenomenal as an individual, as a team, as an organization. They are going to be willing to take what I call rocket rides with you, not subway rides. Subway riders, same place every single day. You can get from A to B, but you very rarely get from A to Z. Leaders who care about people take their people on rocket rides. They get to Z, they go to places they have never been. They are inspiring. They are not boring like subway rides. Just really, truly show that you care about people.

The second is to be open. People want leaders now more than ever that are human. We talked about this before, how openness leads to trust and creates, you know, lots of benefits to teams.

But your ability to say, hey, you know what? Here is something that happened in my life that was difficult, that was challenging. Is a key to helping you feel like or people to feel like you are more human. Just sharing things and I'm not ask you to share your deepest, darkest secrets, although if it's appropriate, you can't have had leaders that have done that, that have had amazing results. I actually share one story in the book like that about a leader who talked about an alcoholic father and opened up about that, and everybody knew who this guy was. They knew who his father was but that openness did just create miracles on the team. Just be human, open up, and be vulnerable.

Then third is to nurture. And I've got a grid, if you go to doyoucaretolead.com, you can actually download a grid there that you can proactively classify people into those five star categories. That to me is a big hack; you have to be spending time proactively either moving people up over or off, and that tools a great tool. It is a great hack, I believe, anyways, for leaders to use.

Steve Rush: In the spirit of opening up Michael, this part this show is call Hack to Attack. This would be were something's not quite worked out as you planned or it went wrong but know you have used that learning as a useful activity and a useful tool for your work and your life. So what is your hack to attack?

Michael: My hack to attack and something that happened to me early on in my career, I won't give you a specific example, but I will demonstrate something that I learned from this in a way again, it goes back to caring, which is my number one hack.  A big failure that I had as a leader initially was that I was afraid of conflict. I did not want to have difficult conversations with people. I know a lot of your listeners can probably relate to that.

Those are some of the most difficult things we do, as a leader is to tell somebody that, you know, they need to improve or else, but I learned early on that courage is not the absence of fear, but it's caring about something more than what you fear. I learned this from an experience I had when my children were younger.

I have eight children. I know, that is a lot of children. One wife, we have been married 30-plus years, happily married 30-plus years. I have a lot of experiences I can draw on that family, and this is one of them. My four-year-old daughter at the time, my 2-year-old son, Kelly and Jeff, who were playing in our living room. We lived in a fairly small house at the time. So they weren't very far from us, but Jeff had fallen asleep on the couch, and Kelly, our 4 year old, had come in and a bit of a panic telling us that he had fallen asleep and she was really worried about the fact that he was in the dark, because they were afraid of the dark. We, you know, as parents just kind of brush her off a little bit, unfortunately. I will tell you two different lessons I learned from this, but we kind of brushed her off and told her it was okay. Don't worry about it, Kelly he is fine. You know, there is no such things as monsters, and she went on her way and she was just really obedient. She is still like that today; she is just a good kid. After a few minutes, my wife decided, go check on her, and she did. She rounded the corner. She saw Kelly lying over her brother, protecting him from the things that she feared most. She had these tears streaming down her eyes, and I learned a couple things from that.

One is that, you know, people all of us have difficult moments. And it does matter if you’re 4 year old or a 30 year old, 40 year old, 80 year old. I mean, we all have our own challenges. We all have those things that we fear, and so empathy is really important. That is important thing for all leaders, right.

But the second thing I learned, is what I quoted you before, is that courage is not the absence of fear. It is about caring about something more than what you fear. As a leader, what I learned as I continue to grow and develop my own leadership is that the more I cared about those that I lead, the less it became about me and the more it came about them and the more it became about them, the easier it was for me to do those difficult things. Still hard, but I was more willing to do it because just like Kelly, I cared more about them than I cared about the things that I feared.

Steve Rush: And it is a great story and is course, proof that parents can learn from their kids, too.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have learned a lot of lessons through my kids.

Steve Rush: And I am sure many more stories to tell. So finally, I would like to ask you Michael,  if you were able to do a bit of time travel, go back and bump into your 21-year-old self, what would be the one bit of advice you would give Michael at 21?

Michael: Yes, so what I would do it is I would definitely serve more. I would serve; I would be a lot more selfless. I would be less concerned about myself like I was at twenty-one than I was about others. I would be much more concerned with others and what they needed. I would be focused on being a servant. This is something that we are learning more and more about in the leadership world, how to be an effective servant. I think we are far from practicing on a regular basis, but my 21-year-old self-leadership position, instead of I would do less telling, I would do more serving. Definitely, that is what I would do.

Steve Rush: So, folks listening to this Michael who want to get a little bit more closer to the work you do at the moment. Where would you like to send them?

Michael: Thank you for asking, Steve. You can go to my website michaelgrogers.com. Michael G as in Gary, Glenn, Garth. rogers.com, michaelgrogers.com. You can also go to my blog. I have a lot of content out there because like I said; I have been blogging for 13/14 years, something like that. I have multiple interesting articles that might be of interest to your audience. That is teamworkandleadership.com and if you go to doyoucaretolead.com, I have some bonuses out there. If you get the book that, you might be interested in as well.

Steve Rush: Leadership Hackers love a bonus. Thanks for that, Michael it goes without saying you have been a true servant to us today. It has been delightful speaking with you. Super lessons and models for our listeners to take away with. Thanks for being on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Michael: Yeah. Thank you, Steve. I was happy to be here, and it has been a lot of fun.

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 handle 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.

[End 00:43:42]

Care about your people and they will care about their work. Order Michael’s new book, “Do You Care to Lead?” Click Here Also, order Michael’s bestselling book, “You Are the Team” Click Here.

Exclusive BONUSES when you order “Do You Care to Lead?” today! CLICK HERE

http://www.michaelgrogers.com

www.teamworkandleadership.com

Jill McAbe is a bestselling author of “It’s Go Time: Build the Business and Life You Really Want.” Jill’s recently been ranked #1 in Entrepreneur Magazine's inspiring education Entrepreneurs to watch in 2022. We dove into a bunch of topics in this awesome conversation, including:

• Jill’s involuntary life reset and how that shaped her future.
• What is a “hot goal” and how you don’t need willpower to achieve them.
• Learn about the MOMA method.
• What “all-in” really means.

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

Find out more about Jill below:

Jill on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garydfrey/

Jill on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jillmcabe

Jill on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jillmcabe

Jill’s Website: https://www.jillmcabe.com/

Full Transcript Below

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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

Steve Rush: Jill McAbe is a special guest on today's show. Jill is the bestselling author of Its Go Time. She's also a teacher, coach, and a business guru, but before we get a chance to speak with Jill, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: We all know leadership can be tough, right? Despite the success. And sometimes a glory leadership can bring, the lows can be incredibly low. The job can feel quite lonely at times, especially when you have to make unpopular decisions. As leaders, we must all deal with stress, but the very best leaders handle the ups and downs with ease. They let things slide off their backs with resiliency, grace and grit, and it's not easy to do. Leaders can't afford to break down, lose their cool and be oversensitive. Instead, they must be steadfast, tough, no matter the up and downs.

In an article from Entrepreneur Magazine, Kerry Siggins talks about five things that can make a big difference. Be determined. Determination is often overlooked as a leadership attribute but is needed to get through the difficult situations. You must be resolute in your vision, decision making and resiliency. During the early days of the pandemic, the uncertainty was unbearable. Like so many of the leaders many had to make difficult decisions about expenses and staffing. Kerry Siggins planned and kept one thing in the front of her mind, her determination to succeed. And that grew stronger than as she arrived in into the pandemic in the first place, determination helped drive her decision making and kept her focused and resolute. Know when to let things go. The flip side of determination is knowing when to say enough is enough. And when things aren't really working, and resiliency is not about consistently pushing through. Resiliency is also about letting know when to let things go to move on. There are times when you must be tough enough to back down, let go, change your mind, pivot, whatever words you want to use. Just because you think you are right doesn't make it so. So, when people around you and the evidence suggest that you are moving in the wrong direction, make the toughest decision of all and let go.

It's quite natural to get defensive when you receive tough or unpleasant news through feedback, but it doesn't mean you should allow yourself to go there just because it's a natural response. If you want a toughen up as a leader, you must handle yourself with grace and hearing hard things as being part of the way we do things. Kelly's trick for doing this is to look for the truth in the information. She recently hired a consultant to perform a leadership competency assessment for her executive team. When going through the results, she was told. The reasons you haven't got grown the company faster is it takes you too long to assess and tell the people on your team that they haven't got what it takes. You let things is slide for too long. You must give this type of feedback faster and more directly. It's a problem for you. She was hurt by the words. She was inclined to defend herself and going to say that she did give people feedback all of the time and she wasn't afraid of those conversation. But instead of vocalizing those thoughts, she analyzed what was shared by compartmentalizing, the feedback. She could see that the individual consultant was right and gave her an opportunity to reflect and adapt her approach. She looked for the truth in his words, and face to feedback with action,

Find gratitude. When most people think of gratitude, they envision what they're grateful for in life, such as family, health, and possessions. A more profound gratitude practice considers being thankful for the hard things in life as well. So, if you want to be stronger leader, you must look for the good that comes out of difficult situations. What are the hardships you're grateful for? What are the challenges that you've been faced with that you've now are faced and overcome? In her article Kerry talks about the overcoming addiction has been something she's really grateful for. And even though it causes pain is suffering for her life. She wouldn't change anything. And she's grateful for the lessons it taught her.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself. It's harsh but true. Exceptionally leaders require us to stop feeling self-centered and sorry for ourselves. Being a leader is difficult at times and can be really thankless, but that's what you've signed up for. We can't allow ourselves to take things personally. We need to let things slide off our backs. We need to make sure that we face into every opportunity. That situation with passion and energy, our job is to make good decisions for our team and our company. Not necessarily to manage people's opinions. Our job is to lead, so lead with confidence. With leadership comes great responsibility, responsibility to make good decisions, be transparent, give good feedback, with standard our setbacks and to be a great leader we must toughen up. So, the leadership hack here is finding the sweet spot between awareness, compassion, and self-care. Getting that right means you can focus on the things that matter. Thanks Kerry, for sharing the article. Thanks all for listening to our Leadership Hacker News. Let's dive into the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: My special guest on today's show is Jill McAbe. She's a bestselling author, teacher and coaching the business success and finding one's purpose, particularly around the science of high performance and change. Her bestselling book. It's Go Time. Build the Business and Life You Really Want. Teaches the order of operations for building expertise-based businesses. Jill's also been recently ranked in entrepreneur as magazine as top 10 inspiring education entrepreneurs to watch in 2022. Jill, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Jill McAbe: Thank you very much, Steve. I'm really happy to be here.

Steve Rush: Jill. What's really great about your backstory is it's not followed traditional path to get you to where you got to. In fact, there's lots of bumps and twists and turns along the way. And we'd love for you to maybe just share a little bit about the backstory that led you here?

Jill McAbe: Oh, wow. Alright. The super quick backstory that led me here, I would have to say as most stories do started when I was young, probably trying to figure out what I was going to be or do when I grew up, but that was a really difficult decision for me because I was very unsuccessful in school. I struggle with fairly significant dyslexia and what was called ADD now often termed a ADHD growing up. And so, I really struggled in school and my grades were poor, which made me realize that a lot of my options were limited at that time. It just felt like I wasn't going along a traditional track. And I very exceptional siblings. I like ridiculously exceptional siblings, you know, one scouted for professional sports, I'm Canadian. My older brother was invited to be a U.S. citizen upon the submission of his masters because it was so brilliant. And I had a sister who excelled in the arts and sports and academics and looked a little bit like Marilyn Monroe. So, it was really tough growing up. And my goal was simply to learn how to be successful because my mother used to, you know, worry about me and she'd say to me, Jill, some people are good at school. Others are good at life, and you'll be good at life. You're wise.

Steve Rush: That's a great lesson. Isn't it? Wise words though seriously. At such a young age, because it would be really difficult to disassociate that, you know, some people just aren't academically gifted and others are, right?

Jill McAbe: Yeah. It's interesting because when I ended up going back and doing my masters, I got (A) plus pluses across the board. So, the academics, it was really about not fitting into the way of learning that the schools liked to taught and my brain needing to comprehend information differently.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jill McAbe: And I think that led me. So, what got me here was frankly, a very bumpy road of trial and error. Sometimes I'd hit and I'd, you know, and I'd get a home run and I'd do really well. And other times there was a lot of hit and misses and I have spent a lifetime really studying and understanding and creating tools that help me be smarter than I am [laugh]. So, I love creating like tools to make decisions or tools to make things happen. And I love taking all this research and turning them into practical tools. Had a scientist tell me once, he's like, you're like a translator, you take our work, you make it very easy to apply.

Steve Rush: Nice. And the tools that you created along the way, is that also a bit of a coping mechanism to help you with your dyslexia?

Jill McAbe: Yeah, I'm sure it is. You know, what I understand. So, I was very fortunate, much more than many people who might have been in that situation because my mother actually is at the forefront of research at that time for how to rehabilitate people such as myself. So, I had a great deal of support and rehabilitation that a lot of people might not have access to that kind of help, but what I come to understand about people like me, and I'm sure there's some listeners who are going to relate is that I like to dive deep into things and the tools are actually a result of that. So, you know, I'm the person in class who sometimes annoying asks a hundred questions. So, if the teacher says something I say, but I read this other thing and no that's not consistent with.

And if you look at this person's information, so I've always been someone who will find the question in something and dive deeper and explore it rather than accepting. Instantly what's been said, if it goes up against something I've heard that that doesn't fit with, but it's also allowed me to find consistencies from very diverse places. So, I found consistencies from leadership research you know, Neuroscience, Daoism, Christianity, you know, any of the religions really with, you know, business teachings. Like I will actually spot the through line and go how fascinating. And that's when I create the tool, when I see it come from all sorts of different directions.

Steve Rush: Nice. What a gift too.

Jill McAbe: Yeah. Yeah. You see, there you go. It's one of the things, it didn't feel like a gift growing up.

Steve Rush: Right.

Jill McAbe: But it can be used as a gift.

Steve Rush: Definitely so, yeah. Now you had a moment in your life, which in your book, you actually called it, your involuntary life reset. Tell us a little bit about what happened? That was so significant and how would that then set you on a different path?

Jill McAbe: Yeah, I was 40 and I thought my life was humming along really. In my early thirties, I found my first sort of calling, which was a restaurateur, and I opened a restaurant with my brother in Toronto and we actually became internationally successful, which was, you know, really, we just had a lot of passion. He was the chef. I was very good at operations, management, and leadership. And those two things together really brought together an incredible business and ended up selling that. Because this is a leadership podcast, I'm actually going to veer off a little Steve and just going to share something really fun.

Steve Rush: Go for you.

Jill McAbe: So, restaurants are known for having a lot of turnovers because they're known for having very transient workforce, but we had sort of high-end food and, you know, the sommelier where our servers. So, we had sort of a more educated staff and we were known for being, you know, a group where people didn't leave. When we sold it after seven years, the average person was with us for six years.

Steve Rush: Wow. That's quite unusual in catering and hospitality, isn't it? Yeah.

Jill McAbe: Yeah. And at the four-year mark I got, you know, I had these new ideas and so I started saying to the team, hey, you know, hey, let's try this, let's try this. And I thought I was this great leader, you know, because we were so successful, and my team was so happy, and they really resisted. And that Steve, I understood that there is a different kind of leadership to forged straight ahead than one who wants to turn a corner. In fact, that became, I didn't talk about this in my book. Because it wasn't, you know, necessarily just a leadership book, but that became my lifelong quest to really understand what does it take to turn a corner? How do we make a change? And my team would say to me, we're so successful. Why do we need to change? And I'd say, because we're successful because we forged ahead four years ago.

Now everyone's copying us. It's time to be fresh again. And I started going to all sorts of courses and studying leadership. And I went to act my team who didn't want to, you know, try anything. And I said, listen, guys, I'm bored, I'm bored. And I need to be able to try this. So please will you please try these things for 30 days? And if you nix them, they're next. But if we like them and we enjoy how things are running, then we move forward. And I basically made this bargain with my team. We had about 30 staff just to give you a sense of the size of the business. It was small and that became my leadership lab. And then I'll fast forward. So, we sell the business and I really want to move off in this like leadership growth direction. And I got pretty good at understanding what motivated individuals and people and off I was going to go into this consulting direction, and I'd sold the business and clients were coming to me from all sorts of industries.

And I'd say, what do I know about your industry? I'm a restaurant person. And they said, Jill, you know, we watched your operations for years as clients, they were tight. We'd like you to work for us, for sure you can help. And that's how my career started. But the involuntary life reset, I was hit by a car. The driver was talking on his cell. It was a very serious accident, both on his side and mine because he critically injured a couple of his children because they were not in seat belts and me. When the ambulance drivers came to my car, you know, one of them remarked they didn't think they were going to find a live body inside. So, it was 18 months of recovery. The life reset was that prior to that accident, I was pretty excited about being good at leadership and good at operations and good at cleaning up businesses. But after that accident, and it probably was relevant that the client that I had at the time was really horrible to his people. And so, he was sort of truly one of those people who was making money on the backs of others, there was thousands of people in his organization and the way he treated people was terrible. And so those two things at the same time really, really got me thinking about, am I just going to help people like that make money?

Steve Rush: Right.

Jill McAbe: I have to do something more meaningful.

Steve Rush: And from the first time that you and I met, one thing that really struck me is you have a laser focus to serve others and it's unwavering. And I wonder how that moment shaped how you think about things now?

Jill McAbe: Wow. yeah, I think, that's a great question. I think I was ashamed to be helping this man make money. There were people in his employee for 10 years making minimum wage.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jill McAbe: And he was so happy with the operational you know, one thing I have with this, I'm really good at mathematical. Like figuring things out. I have a real creativity to see solutions. I'm exceptional at it. And I was with his company for months and he offered me a lot of money to stay. And when I saw people who had worked in his employee for 10 years, it was a food manufacturing facility, and they were making minimum wage, which you can't live on in Toronto. And at the end of every day, if there was any, you know, food or any waste or whatever, all went in the garbage, he wouldn't let them take it. I was so sickened. So, I think growing up sort of sitting on the outside, not fitting in, made me someone who just watched people and cared about people. And I just realized I couldn't do that.

Steve Rush: Yeah, yeah. And then fast forward to all of the experiences you've had, you managed to kind of collect them together and you created a real system now that helps people achieve high levels of motivation productivity within their work and their lives. At what point did you recognize that, you know, what you had was a thing?

Steve Rush: Yeah. I created a tool called mind code, and I think that's the thing, you know, when I think about what the thing was that really changed the game because there was a lot of, I did all this research. I mean, for over a decade on, you know, goal setting or planning. And then I ended up getting certified in changed leadership. And then I did my master's in leadership. And I looked at all these different things. The behavioral science aspects really became powerful. A lot of us are looking at goal setting, planning, and implementation as different skill sets. And I realized, well, any project needs all of that. I'd studied project management but that was often overly complex for the needs of a small department or team.

And I think I realized when it was a thing. First of all, when I would apply change leadership in organizations, and despite the fact that the organizations would look at me and say, this is not going to work, like point blank. I've had that said to me so many times.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jill McAbe: And we have succeeded anyway. And it's like, you're powerful to stop this? Or you're beyond saving. But the truth is, you're powerless to stop us when we understand change leadership. And Steve, I know you get that.

Steve Rush: Mm-Hmm.

Jill McAbe: It's like, no, you don't understand. I can rearrange your environment. I can add people and subtract people and you'll change and not even know you did. Steve, you know what I'm talking about, right? With change leadership.

Steve Rush: I totally do, yeah.

Jill McAbe: Yeah. Change is a equation. And once its supplied, change happens.

Steve Rush: Right.

Jill McAbe: So, I became sort of amazed at the power of this tool. When people would say, Jill, this will not work, and I will not do it. And I’m like, it will work anyway. One of my clients was like, oh my goodness, you can move mountains. And I'm like, it's not me. It's this tool. It's amazing [Laugh], you know, what's good about me is I'm willing to follow it. I'm willing to go through the steps. So really the system is not mine, you know, it's what I've learned. And my willingness to apply it, one of my clients and their organization did about 40 million and we're having a chat one day and I'm feeling pretty chuffed, you know, look at the great job I've helped you guys do this year.

And he was not happy. Like he was visibly not happy. And I'm thinking what is going on? And he just said, yeah, yeah, no, no, no, it's good. I'm really happy with the organization, but I'm personally not happy. And I said, well, look, you know, we just use this tool that got an entire, and this was about 300 people that just got a, you know, a massive shift occur in your organization. What do you say we rework this and make it a personal transformation tool? And I later found out Steve, that the reason a lot of people don't create these tools for personal transformation is because there's no money in it.

Steve Rush: Of course, yeah.

Jill McAbe: Organizations simply pay more for that. And I've learned that the hard way because I tried to sell it. And I went from doing very well to not doing very well. So, I did learn the hard way. There's some truth in that, but yeah, I reworked it for a tool that individuals or teams can use. And that's a tool I called mind code and I share aspects of it in my book. And I think that's the moment when I realized when I reworked it, we used it on him first, it worked, then I used it on me. And now I've worked with dozens of people. I sell it as a standalone tool. I work closely with clients and use it and time and again, I mean, people have breakthroughs in their performance, and they have it fast.

Steve Rush: Yeah. And a lot of breaking through performance is about decoding, almost our neurological pathways and our thinking that causes to get where we need to get to. And you have spent an enormous amount of time, energy, studying and focusing around behavioral science and neuroscience. And how has that really shifted your perspectives on the art of the possible?

Jill McAbe: Wow. You know, what comes to mind? So, I'll say it is, my research started with behavioral science, which is, you know, really for the listeners, it's really thinking about what are the aspects in our environment that lead us to behave the way we do. And behavioral science would look at, you know, our social influences, our influence, our beliefs from growing up, our abilities, our personal abilities and our environment. And that was the first really profound. That was very profound research for me. I guess it goes back to this nurture versus nature question.

Steve Rush: Right.

Jill McAbe: And really understanding just how much in our environments, socially and physically were really causing us to be the person that we are. Like I used to think I was this autonomous thinking in control person of my life. And when I studied behavioral science, I understood, I was like a pinball in a pinball machine.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jill McAbe: I went wherever the people who had control of certain social and physical aspects of my reality wanted me to go. And we've seen that, you know, we've seen that in social media, like, come on, we've seen it over and over how fake news and environments and people can pull some levers and absolutely change.

Steve Rush: Totally

Jill McAbe: Yeah, absolutely change belief systems.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jill McAbe: So, I think that was when I realized, that's what got me interested there, but then there was this problem and this problem was, I couldn't seem to do it for me [Laugh].

Steve Rush: Right. Expert for everybody else, yeah.

Jill McAbe: [Laughing] Like why isn't my life going the way I want to? You know, and when I got really honest with myself, there were some big things that I didn't seem to be able to do for myself. And honestly it was a fluke. My dyslexic brain wanted to, why, why, why, why, why does everybody talk about goals? Why does everybody talk about vision? And I decided to study the neuroscience underpinnings, and I'm fortunate to have a good friend who's a leading international academic, which means I have access to leading international academics, which means that somebody who had not normally give the time of day to someone like me, actually, you know, would sit down and have several conversations and guide me to cutting edge research that was, you know, just being published. And hadn't gotten down to the levels of press yet and consultants. I wanted to understand what was it about a goal that would make it work?

Because if a goal worked, then all goals should work. So why were only some goals working? And that's when you know, I used to have the popular neuroscience of, you know, reticular activating system that almost infuriating neuroscientist, who's one of, you know, William Cunningham. Who's a leading neuroscientist in the area of goal cognition and the brain. And he just, please, don't talk about that. And, you know, because they really care about specifics and accuracy. And for some reason, it just really helped me to understand what created the kind of goal that was likely to be achieved? And then I was able to modify. And as I talk about in the book, I describe there's a popular system of goal setting called smart goals, which is you know, specific, measurable, attainable. I think realistic and timebound, and or something like that. Sometimes people change the acronym.

Steve Rush: You're absolutely spot on. But it's commonly taught, isn't it? When you hear goals, they have to be smart.

Jill McAbe: They have to be smart and smart goals have a critical flaw in that.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jill McAbe: They're not often meaningful and gives to the willpower of peace, but they're actually good for strategy. They're actually good for developing strategy, interestingly, strategy, fancy word for plan, right. But they're not a good tool for developing goal or outcome statements. And what do we want to be true at a later date? And that was really a flaw. And I ended up getting to speak to, I actually ended up getting to speak to, you know, one of the foremost goal researchers in the world as well and look at his, you know, 2000-page book on goals, like no joke. I've really got into studying this. I was so fascinated and really started to understand how we need to change the way we think about the outcome slash goal development piece to make our brains naturally want to work. And so, one of the things that's made mind code such a powerful tool. Mind code is an acronym that stands for eight steps of goal setting, planning, and execution. And one of the main things that makes it powerful is the act of doing it helps whoever uses it to automatically program their brain to want to work on it, which of course is very important for any goal is the application of your energy behind it.

Steve Rush: Yeah. And you call these hot goals in your book, right?

Jill McAbe: I use a term that I learned from a neuroscientist. So that's a term from a group of neuroscientists actually, oh, gee. I want to say his name was O'Reilly, but it's not, it might not be fresh at the moment, but it is a group of neuroscientists who studied the kind of goals that are the ones that determine how you behave. And so, it's a term from neuroscience that describes the trigger of action. And so, if you're hungry, for instance. The hot goal might be, you know, life, right? Like I want to keep living, so I need to eat. So, it's sort of the top goal. And if you're making a decision between two things, it's, you know, whatever it is that you're spending your time on or moving yourself toward, that's currently the hottest goal. So, it's a neuroscience-based term for what it is that's actually leading your behavior or triggering your behavior.

Steve Rush: And what I particularly like about this focus, and certainly the focus you put on this is, it's actually directly correlated to mindset as well. So, you talk about having prevention and promotion goals. Well, I have often referred to mindset as being a prevention and promotion mindset, which I direct behaviors away from risk averse to protection. That's a prevention to promotion, which is, you know, what can I do next? What can I explore? What can I find new? what's alluring? How does that correlate to helping people get that depth of clarity in their goals?

Jill McAbe: Absolutely. I think mindset is, this is sort of the prevention and promotion is really what I was looking at there, which fits beautifully with what you were saying is the biological push/pull

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jill McAbe: Of why we do what we do. So biologically we are really moving ourselves. There's a part of our brain that we don't have cognitive access to. That's making decisions about our behavior. And that part of the brain is making decisions about, what we see, say, and do. Millisecond, up to ten seconds in advance of us even becoming aware of what we're going to see, say, or do, which is incredible. And it's basing those decisions about action on prevention goals, which is preventing us from harm. So, and that could be emotional or physical threat. And so that tends to be automatic.

Our responses tend to be very automatic that prevent us from harm. And I actually share one with your listeners in a second, that I think will really help them understand an aspect of their lives of something that they might feel held back in at the moment, whatever it is. And then there's promotion goals that the brain is using, are to move us towards more life. And the promotion goals, the big one is to have babies, right? And so, it's like more life. Preserve humanity. And so, the problem with promotion goals is that more money, more happiness, a lot of the things that we strive for just aren't biologically understood as necessary to live. And so that's why we have to put a little more effort into forming our goals and outcomes and objectives so that they are understood biologically sort of by this part of the brain, the amygdala.

So that the action center of our brain is actually going to automatically take action. And so, I really used it from this level of, so if I was going to link it to the mindset of the promotion things and what we want, what would be important is taking those things that we want and really deepening our clarity about what they are, so that this part of the brain that you can't. I talk about these two parts of the brain, having two different languages, one's using ideas and thoughts and concepts, and the part that we need to program, if you will, hot goals with promotion things, what we want, it doesn't understand words. So, we need to give it images. We need to give it emotions. We need to give it feelings, which is why we really need to create clarity around our future desire state in terms of visuals and emotions.

Steve Rush: And of course, the bigger and deeper that emotional connection is the more likely of achievement of those goals, right?

Jill McAbe: Yeah. Because the part of the brain that's determining our actions, milliseconds up to ten seconds in advance of the action being taken is the part of our brain that's connected to our emotional center. So, it's like a way of translating because if it can't understand ideas and concepts like success, what's that, right? Oh, you want a blue, two-story house, three blocks from the ocean. I can get that. So there needs to be a concreteness to what we want in a way that we can see it in another little hack is to see how it's good for others.

Steve Rush: Hmm. Yeah.

Jill McAbe: So, a lot of times we look at, you know, in my case where I'm helping individuals build businesses. But even when I was working with leaders and their team is to really take the time to explore the benefits to the group is actually very motivating for this part of the brain, because social, you know, being a safe part of a social circle is critical. And so when we understand something we want to achieve is going to be good for the collective that makes it more motivating. And what I see happening, or, you know, what I know when happens with groups and leaders is that we think that that's just a given, we have an objective and we're like, well, it's just a given that that will be really good. But unfortunately, that would be like saying, you know, going to a country where you don't speak a language and saying, it's just a given that they understand everything that you want. No, it's not just a given. We have to really make an effort to translate our concepts into the kind of images and emotions that the parts of our brain who will decide if we do this or not [Laugh].

Steve Rush: It's great perspective.

Jill McAbe: So, we have to take a minute and onboard that part of the brain

Steve Rush: Love it. It's a really interesting perspective. So, if we get our goals, we're really methodical about this. I'll say that again. Does willpower play into this?

Jill McAbe: Yeah. So, I have a cheeky chapter in my book, you know, who needs willpower? So, no, right. It's just an easy home test. Everybody can do this. If you have a stated goal and you're working toward it, then you know, it's a hot goal. It's something that you're automatically working on and you're good. You're just going to keep moving in that direction. However, if you have a stated goal for yourself or your organization, and there is not regular progress being made on that goal, then you know, it's not hot and you know, you're not going to, which is a problem. So, willpower is not needed once you've properly established a goal.

Steve Rush: That's fascinating. I think it's a common misconception that people think you must have to have willpower, but to your point, if you've articulated it so well, and it's got all of the right drivers that are neurologically linked to you, then it's just going to happen.

Jill McAbe: You can't stop yourself, Steve.

Steve Rush: Right.

Jill McAbe: You actually cannot stop yourself once you have properly established a goal. I work with some organizations, one of my passions is helping companies develop vision and strategy. That's my strength, who I use sort of a bigger version of mind code for that. And we'll do their strategy for the next three years or five years. And when we’re revisioning, that's why it's so important to be careful about the goals so that because when they're set properly, you actually can't stop yourself from working. You physiologically impossible to stop yourself from working on them because you've literally coded yourself. Because again, I think it's more than 90% of our action is triggered milliseconds up to ten seconds in advance. So, like that was the moment Steve, when I realized we have to stop focusing on the actions we're taking and start focusing on programming, the part of our brain that's taking action.

It's like, we were looking at the wrong thing all this time. No wonder there are so many frustrated initiatives in the world. And so that's like one of my, you know, I get really excited. And then that's when I say, hey, be very careful what you decide to program in your subconscious, because not only do you not need willpower, you'll have to use willpower to stop working on it. Just so I'm accurate, because like my brain needs to be sort of accurate. Sometimes you need willpower to program the goal. So, you don't need willpower [laugh].

Steve Rush: Yeah, I get it.

Jill McAbe: That's where you can use some willpower.

Steve Rush: So, willpower becomes part of the goal setting process.

Jill McAbe: Yes. It's part of the goal setting process.

Steve Rush: Once it's set up.

Jill McAbe: Yeah.

Steve Rush: You're off.

Jill McAbe: Yeah, exactly.

Steve Rush: Got it.

Jill McAbe: You're off. You're done.

Steve Rush: Excellent. I love that. And I've never really, until I've read it in your book, I've never really had that aha moment that actually if you program your behaviors and you’re thinking right at the outset and they're strongly aligned and they're hot goals, it just takes care of itself.

Jill McAbe: Yeah. And it's not so instant to do that, but it is so worthwhile.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, you often hear people saying, you know, unless you're all in, it's not going to happen. So, when you hear somebody articulate the words, you have to be all in, what does that really mean for you?

Jill McAbe: I personally use the term all in for my book. Probably what it means to me is faith. I mean, that's what it means to me. There was a point at which I was wondering, you know, am I going to be successful in developing my own education company? Or am I going to have to work as a consultant, some nice clients, some less nice clients, you know, what's my future look like? And there was a moment at which I really needed to make a decision if I was going to follow my heart and really try to make a go of my company, or go back to a world that I knew I could succeed in. And I guess having the life reset of the car accident, the stakes were a little higher because my life felt very empty after that car accident, I really felt like I lost it all. And I wondered what I had lost. I'd really gone into this 18-month rehabilitation but also significant depression and real questioning of what was the point of life. And all in for me was, like, well, I had to give it all.

I had to try my very best. I couldn't go back to just tolerating things and it meant going all in on my dreams and that's what it meant to me. And then it was also having the faith because I noticed that I was very good at helping organizations make striking advancements and teams make striking advancements when we'd work together. I'm very good at bringing forth the power of the individuals in the room. And then I thought, what is going on with me? Why have I been so successful at their businesses? And then in my own been, you know, lackluster result. Because after that crummy client, after my car accident, I only accepted clients who I really, really, really believed in. And I realized, yeah, I get results for people because I'm all in for them. And I have a hundred percent belief in them, and I was not taking action as though I knew I would succeed, but yet when working for my clients, I would take action with a singular focus that we would succeed.

Steve Rush: Yeah, that's great. And now you're all in for you. How's that changed?

Jill McAbe: [Laugh] most days. It's still harder. It's still harder when it's me!

Steve Rush: Uh huh.

Jill McAbe: But how has that changed? No, it's changed a lot. I've had, you know, is really, every day could be a slightly different answer. Some days I'm definitely feel like, you know, I can achieve anything and other days it's still running your own business is so challenging and there's lots of ups and downs. I think what's changed for me overall. Oh, well, I mean, the big picture is, when I really went after my dream. I mean, now I haven't established business. Back then I was not paying my way, you know, I'd gone from a fancy consultant to, you know, not being able to buy cereal and having my partner supporting me and you know, it was very humiliating for me. And now, I do, I mean, I have a business that, Entrepreneur Magazine is recognized as number one.

Steve Rush: Exactly.

Jill McAbe: You know, to watch in 2022. Like pretty important, actually. I'm pretty excited about that, but it's the people I also get to call, you know, it's the relationships that I've built along the way. There are so many extraordinary people who I call up and say, hey, you know, would you teach, you know, my people in BOOMU, would you teach them the stuff that know and they're like, sure. And that gets me every time, how many people I've reached out to and wanted to speak to or asked for them to do something for my community. An they say, yeah, and honestly, that's been one of the most exciting things is that I've been building something somewhat secretly. And even just now were sort of forming the outer view of the world. A lot of people who are only in our, like clients and students only see this because we are in a building phase, but it's truly a collection of incredible people sharing their gifts. And it's a dream. It's a dream come true. And I guess, because I almost got taken out of life with that car accident and I think COVID has helped us all see the need to maybe seize the moment. I'm really working towards building something that outlives me.

Steve Rush: Awesome. I love it. So, this is a part of the show where we are going to turn the tables a little bit. We all know that you can't hack leadership, but I can hack your mind. And the objective of the next part of the show is, I want you to share with us your top tips, tools, ideas around leadership. So, what would be your top three leadership hacks, Jill?

Jill McAbe: My top three leadership hacks. I'd say, this is just so small, but I think one of my favorite things. I teach, but I have a teach a collaborations course, and I think leaders listen first. And I think we know that leaders listen first, and you know, listening is power. Because understanding someone else's point of view before inserting your own is how to truly guide someone as opposed to speaking first. So that can be as simple as I have a very rigorous rule to always socialize for a moment before jumping into work. And in fact, it got me a quarter million-dollar contract once because I was representing a client and a possible investor came along and he was jumping in, you know, and he was like, all right, let's go. Let's talk business. And I looked at him and I held up my finger.

This is the person with all the money. And I held up my finger and I said, just a moment. It's Monday morning, we socialize before we jump into work, how was your weekend? And he just looked at me like, who are you? We went to lunch, and I did a big project for his organization. And I do think that just taking a moment to be with people is critical. I'm going to say a leadership hack is definitely vision and having a clear vision. When I did my master’s in leadership, I was amazed, you know, I thought I was going to go find the unequivocal way forward in leadership and discovered there are as many leadership theories as there are theorists. So, I realized, oh, there isn't one rule. And of course, my dyslexic brain wanted it to be easy, but it wasn't. But then there was the power of vision, which for over a century, nobody had been able to disprove could actually help you know, leaders outperform their competition by two to twelve times, which is staggering. And it got so boring to researchers. They couldn't disprove it. And vision, by the way, fancy word for big goal, right?

Steve Rush: Big goal, yeah. Yeah.

Jill McAbe: And so, these visions are really critical that they be underscored by purpose and long term and not all visions have that. I do have an article on LinkedIn about the kind of vision that has that. So, I'd say that's a hack because once you do that and get your organization on board, they're automatically working to worry about willpower. I mean, you don't have to worry about procrastination and willpower and people not working.

Steve Rush: Totally.

Jill McAbe: It's such false economy not to take that week and bring in a facilitator and get that vision done because it's such false economy just going to work. So that's a hack. And then the third one I'm going to say is, I have a tool for decision making. ABC decision. I'm pretty sure there's an article about that somewhere. I teach these courses as well through my website, but that one really helps us go back and it helps remind us where we are. (A) is aligned to your long- and short-term goals. (B) is broaden your options, always choose from at least three. (C) is compare contenders and do not use pro and cons, those are really bad. And then (D), detach before you decide so that you don't make emotionally biased decisions. And I think that once you have that vision, you have the ability to use something like A, B, C, D decisions to navigate and stay on course, those are my three hacks.

Steve Rush: Brilliant. I love that last one, particularly because it's one of the things that we often are knee jerk about making decisions and just being ordered and considered gives you the space to think.

Jill McAbe: Yeah.

Steve Rush: Love it. Next part of the show we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something has not gone well in your life or work. Now you've already shared a couple of hacks to attacks already, but was there maybe something else in your work or your life that was maybe an aha moment that you've learned from that's now serving you well?

Jill McAbe: A mistake that I seem to make regularly [laugh], which is embarrassing. In light of the show is, that I think I can outsmart my tools because I created them.

Steve Rush: [Laugh].

Jill McAbe: [Laugh], you know what I'm talking about?

Steve Rush: I totally understand that, yeah.

Jill McAbe: So, I don't sometimes use them and then my projects don't go well, it's totally embarrassing. But I would say going back to really setting, I mean, for me, the tools, mind code and ABC decisions, I use the two of them in conjunction, but for me, it's going back and creating that second half. For me, it's that I stop using particularly my goal setting and planning tools, my execution, I'm pre-programmed on execution. I'm excellent execution because I program myself to be, so it's going back. Yeah, I have big fails or projects that are super lackluster, and then I realized I didn't start them the way I teach other people to start.

Steve Rush: It's ironic. I, however

Jill McAbe: [laugh]

Steve Rush: It's reality. The reason that those tools were created in the first place, because it gave you results, it gave you processes, it gave you a methodology and you know what, we're human, aren't we? At the end of the day. And it's easy sometimes just to leave out some of those foundations, but the fact that, you know, that is a really powerful thing.

Jill McAbe: Yeah. Like they bring out my smarts, right. I think I'm so smart. But the point is, they actually draw forth my smarts.

Steve Rush: Yes. got it. So last part of the show, you get to do some time travel, bump into Jill at 21 and give us some advice. What would your words of wisdom be?

Jill McAbe: So, this one is not leadership related at all.

Steve Rush: Cool.

Jill McAbe: Or business related. When I think about this question, I think about what would 21-year-old me actually listen to? And that's key, right. Because I might say a lot of things to 21-year-old me, but I have to go back and ask myself, what would 21-year-old me actually take action on? And so, with that in mind, I would tell 21-year-old me to go find the course in miracles.

Steve Rush: Mm-Hmm.

Jill McAbe: And I think 21-year-old me who was, you know, not into anything around faith and prayer or meditation or anything like that, I think almost really anti all those things because of how I had grown up. Would've been fascinated by a concept that there would be such a thing as a course in miracles. And I think that that would have helped 21-year-old me accelerate my career dramatically faster.

Steve Rush: If only I could have bumped into a course of miracles at 21, in fact, I probably wouldn't have even listened to anything. I'd have said to me at 21, if I'm being brutally honest, but hey, that's another show.

Jill McAbe: [laugh].

Steve Rush: So, I've absolutely loved talking with you. You are an incredible example of learning by doing and turning it into something powerful that's a force of good. And just delighted that we have the opportunity to share your story and some of your models and tools with our audience. If our listeners wanted to get hold of a bit more of your insights, how to access a copy of the book, It's Go Time, find out a little bit about BoomU, you where's the best place for us to send them?

Jill McAbe: Come on over to my website would be a great start, jillmcabe.com with just one C a atypical spelling and or boom-u.com. And that's where free copy of my book can be found or link to my brand-new podcast, Thinking Vitamins, where I am sharing actionable ideas and practices that boost abundance and anyone interested in learning about MindCode would be able to learn all about that there and my other sweet of performance skills for leaders and entrepreneurs. So, I think that would be the place to send them.

Steve Rush: And the good news is, is that if they're listening to this right now, they'll also find them in our show notes so they can head straight over as soon as they're done listening. Jill, I just want to say thank you for being part of our community. I've loved to chatting with you. And it's no surprised that, you know, Entrepreneur Magazine have recognized you as someone to watch this year. So, thanks for being part of our community.

Jill McAbe: I'm grateful for the opportunity to be on the show. I've really enjoyed speaking with you.

Steve Rush: Thank you, Jill.

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.

Global Thought-Leader, Andrew Bryant, has been transforming individuals and organisations with his Self-Leadership Methodology through coaching, speaking and facilitation for over 20-years.

He is on a mission to 'Wake People Up' to live and work with intention and influence so that they create an impact. Learn how self-leadership is not selfish and how by tapping into personal mastery, we can create greatness.

What is self-leadership? Andrew describes "Self-leadership is the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling and actions towards your objective/s". Listen now to explore some more.

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Visit the Self Leadership website.

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Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes

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Click below for the full transcript

The Leadership Hacker Podcast – Episode 3 Andrew Bryan – Self Leadership

[Start 00:00:00]

Introduction

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.

Welcome to another episode of The Leadership Hacker Podcast. I am delighted to go explore self-leadership today with global bestselling author Andrew Bryant, but before we do that. It is The Leadership Hacker news.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: And it is almost sadness today that I am sharing, and whilst it is sad, we can also celebrate the life of Jack Welsh, who died recently at the age of 84. Jack Welsh was a Titan American businessman who transformed General Electric from an average performer into America's most valuable company. At one point, he ran the U.S. conglomerate from 1981 until 2001 and was once named manager of the century for its achievements by Fortune magazine. He was nickname Neutron Jack for his cost cutting, ruthless approach to efficiency and later became a bestselling author and a confident to many US presidents. For some, Jack Walsh was not a leader or perceived to be leader at all and didn't exude leadership behaviours. I would however, encourage our listeners to consider the backdrop to our working lives and culture when Jack started out his leadership journey. Our world has changed greatly since the late 1970s and 80s when Jack started his revolution at GE. Some of the behaviours may not be appropriate today that he displayed back in 1970/80, but we're still cutting edge and shaped and changed the way that people did things, what we can recognize and for. Was his famous brand of energy and leadership that created his legendary status, he had a four E's and a P for philosophy, which really shot him to fame on the global leadership arena, and for those of you less familiar with Jack's four E's and a P, let me just explain.

• Energy Jack said. Energy is the ability to thrive and action and relish change. People with a positive energy. A generally extroverted and optimistic, they make a contribution and friends easy. They are people who don't complain about working hard. They love to work, they also love to play and have an overall lust for life. So ask yourself this question. Do you bring energy as a leader to your team? Every day? All day.

• The next is energize. He was quoted as saying. “This is the ability to get others revved up.” People and energy ideas can inspire their team to take on the impossible and enjoy doing it. The ability to energize is apparent in some with an in-depth knowledge of their business, who sets a powerful and personal example with strong persuasion skills. So again, let us consider do you energize the people that work with you. To a point that they want to work with you?

• The next was Edge. Edge to Jack meant having the courage to make tough yes or no decisions. Smart people can assess the situation from every angle, but smart people with Edge know when to stop assessing. Make a tough call even without information, and I think what Jack was talking to then was gut feel or intuition, and as a leader is essential for us to pay attention to that intuition, but do we?

• The last E was execute. Being able to execute meant having the ability to get the job done and Jack would say people could have energy, energize everyone around them and make tough calls, but still not get over the finishing line. Being able to execute is a unique and distinct skill, and he would describe as a person knowing how to put decisions into action, pushing them forward to completion through resistance, chaos or any unexpected obstacles. People who execute well know that execution in business is about getting results for everybody. I wondered do we really drive for the execution of business results with clarity and thought.

• And Jack would wrap it up with the letter P, which stood for passion. People with passion have heartfelt, deep, authentic excitement about work, Jack would say. I really care to bare bones about their colleagues, their employees and their friends, and they love to learn and grow and they get a huge kicker of people around them in doing the same.

So I would like to encourage you with a final reflection, thinking about Jack's four E's and a P. Do I bring an intense enthusiasm to all the aspects in my life? That is a leadership hacker news. Rest in peace, Jack Welsh, and thank you for the inspiration.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: Today's guest is bestselling author of two books on self-leadership. He is a TED speaker and an international coach on self-leadership, Andrew Bryant. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Bryant: Thank you. Nice to be here.

Steve Rush: So folks might know you as the author of Self-Leadership, but they may not know much about the man behind the story. So tell us a bit about you and how you have arrived at where you've arrived at.

Andrew Bryant: I am English by birth. I am Australian by passport. I am Singaporean by residents, and I am Brazilian by wife.

Steve Rush: Wow.

Andrew Bryant: That explains a little bit of my so multicultural outlook. Growing up in England, I went to an English grammar school. I was a pretty good science student. I was destined to do medicine, but the government decided grammar schools were elitist and we got combined with the girls high school just before my A-levels and somehow I got distracted and I didn't get the grades for medicine. My first degree is in physiotherapy and I graduated way back in 1982, I worked a couple of years in hospitals.

I worked at University College Hospital, London, and then I did what most males physio do. I got involved in sport. I was on the medical team of the First Division Soccer Club. I worked with [Inaudible 00:6:20] I worked with Olympic athletes, and this was the mid-1980s before positive psychology, sports psychology, any of this stuff had been invented or discovered. Those of us who were curious about what makes the difference in performance and started to study things like linguistic programming and hypnosis, visualization and goal setting. I am sort of one of the grandfathers of slap movement in to how that became coaching as we know it today.

Steve Rush: And that is part of a lot of our work today. In helping other people as we kind of fall back on some of those tactile foundations that probably born in that sports, physiotherapy, psychology genre, right?

Andrew Bryant: I was going to transfer from physio to medicine, but I am glad it did not. Because physiotherapy is very pragmatic science and it teaches you the art of observation. You spend hours looking at people's running gait or how they throw a ball, and it is based on biomechanics, which is very science based. That skill in observation and listening is caught coaching, and I think it is caught a leadership as well, I think it is a very good discipline.

Then I studied traditional Chinese medicine, which is a systems based process and the distinction between Chinese and Western medicine. Western medicine is very, Aristotle Li and with a cause and there is an effect. In Chinese medicine, there is often multiple causes, so there is a confluence of situations, the results. In Chinese medicine, you don't get sick because it's hot. You get sick because hot and damp. You don't get sick because it's cold. You get sick because it is cold and windy. Now, anybody living in England understands exactly what that means. It gives you a systems thinking. Then when Peter Singer came out with the discipline, I went; this makes sense because looking at the interrelationship between forces was very much my training. The observation that I think gave me a good grounding to make me an effective leadership coach.

Steve Rush: Getting up to the stage of you, writing your book on Self-Leadership. What was it that created the energy and the focus to help you put pen to paper?

Andrew Bryant: Simple answer failure. I moved to Australia with my physiotherapy and my acupuncture ideas and I set up a chain of clinics. I was a successful entrepreneur. I focused my energy on a holistic wellness centre and invested huge amount of money. I had this great idea that, you know gyms and should actually be for people that need it as opposed to those guys that have kind of been lifting too many weights. Kind of wanted to go out to those really beefcake guys and say, hey, you're cooked, you can leave. But see, that would be a dangerous thing to do anyway. I had this vision that, you know, the health centres should be for people that need to be every, you know, ordinary people who want to get fit and healthy, and we need to create an environment where they felt comfortable. But I was years ahead of my time, and then the fitness craze hit Australia in around about to 1999, 2000. You buy a membership, but there is no servicing. They took off and I was charging forty-nine dollars a month. Sorry, yeah forty-nine dollars a month and they were charging forty-nine dollars a year. I went out of business in 2000 and then up three hundred thousand dollars in debt with no assets. Literally living in a backpacker's hostel, you know, paying the rent, day by day.

Steve Rush: Focuses the mind

Andrew Bryant: It really does focus. Now obviously I went through a period of self-criticism and self-doubt, self-judgment, all of the above. But when I kind of came out of the self-pity party, I was set up on the Blue Mountains and I thought, well, if I'm going to rebuild my life, what do I want to do that's important and significant? I don’t want to do what I have already done. I was offered a job setting up a physio clinic; I want to do something different, and what do I love to do? And I love the coaching, I loved opening people's minds up. I went okay, how can I go about that? And, you know, what's the methodology I'm going to use? That is where the research started. Then I got a client, I got my first big client that enabled me to go in and work with his management team. He said, you know, you helped my sports team improve. Now come work with my management team. I did not have a system. I just did the observation thing and went, Okay. What do they need to do to improve? I got results and that was great. Then I had that chip on my shoulder. I thought, well, not chips along with the insecurity. Well, I need the degree to back this up. I went off to do an MBA and I remember arguing with the lecturer on organizational behaviour. He said, well, you know, you have some good ideas. Why don’t you go write your own book? The rest they say is…

Steve Rush: History.

Andrew Bryant: Yeah.

Steve Rush: In the book Self-Leadership. You define self-leadership as the practice of intentionally influencing, thinking, feeling and actions towards your objectives. That is quite a strong statement. Tell us a little bit, about how that came about.

Andrew Bryant: Well, that is the shortest version. The thing about self-leadership is I am not the person that invented the term. In fact, the very, very first researcher was a guy called Charles Mantz who coined the term self-leadership. The concept of self-leadership goes back to the Roman Stoics. It goes back to the Greek philosophers. It goes back to louts. Influencing others is strength, but influencing self is true power. The concept itself is not original. It is human reality around that, you know, we have some sense of personal power. If we take ownership and so it is very much the ownership of, what can you take ownership of?

And you can actually take ownership of your thinking. We all have thoughts, but do the thoughts have our thought or do we have the thoughts? We all have emotions. But are we having the emotions or the emotions having us? Now, if you have ever been in a fury about something, you know that the emotions had you if you have ever been really sad about something, you've been gripped by the emotion, you were not in control, but when we go, I'm angry about this. Why am I angry about this? What is driving that anger?

What is that really about, then, we take that step back into the observer place, and that gives us choice. You know, that is the heart of Stephen Covey work. You know The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Was that proactivity between idea and action, that there is a choice point that we have as human beings.

Steve Rush: And in my experience as a coach, Andrew, and I am sure you see this a lot with your clients too. Is most of my work is in a bit in the middle, the gap between the idea and the action and the evaluation of how you get people to move forward. How has that been part of what you do right now?

Andrew Bryant: Just before I came on this, I was talking to a CEO pharmaceutical company who wanted me to coach one of his executives; I have been interviewed by his head of HR. Before, I spoke to him, she was obviously playing Buffa, I didn't waste his time. Then his opening statement was, tell me about yourself, because I have not had time to read the briefing material. I kind of wanted to do…in a groan, because that means I've got to tell my entire life story, which I'm doing again. It is a long life story and I have to edit it, and I just I want to come across as like, why are you a different coach? How do I go about that? I really took this point that, you know, the classic coach comes from the inner game and the outer game, and you will be familiar with a book called The Inner Game of Tennis.

Steve Rush: Sure I am.

Andrew Bryant: And that is coaching is about inner landscape. Outer coaching is how you hold tennis racket, how you serve the ball. The inner coaching is how you think about yourself as a tennis player and with leadership coaches. How do I think about myself as leader? I mean, just this week as coaching the CEO of an organization, it is very successful CEO. I have coached him in other organizations. He has been parachuted into this company, Joint Venture Capital Support, and he his stressing himself out because he built this runway and he has attached his ego. When I say build the runway, build the runway to profitability in a certain amount of time and a curtain number, and he's attached his ego to that. And if it doesn't work, he's feeling like a failure, and so the way he's created a mental schematic of that is his inner world is driving his outer communication. And he's actually, you know, the coaching was to help him not spread doubt amongst his troops, because he's having these doubts. But as the leader there, his doubts, they're not their doubts and their only doubts because he's made such a big deal out of this. Now, if the company burned to the ground, he would rise from the ashes and he would lead another organization. Is very successful, very competent, very intelligent individual. But the countries around that gap between his inner thinking and his execution in this case, his speaking was not as aligned and motivational inspirational as it could have been.

Steve Rush: Some folks, when they hear talk about focus on self, focus on me, some people might actually see that rather than being self-leadership as almost being a little selfish.

Andrew Bryant: Before I go there. Let me go somewhere else, right. Here is something I did with people, as I say, look, you know, if somebody drive outside the restaurant of the hotel in the Maserati or a Lamborghini, the Ferrari gets out, you know, after having rev the engine so that everybody's paid attention to, and then throws the keys to the valet. Do they have a big ego or a small ego?

They don't answer. Most people listening will say big ego. Actually, from a psychological perspective, there ego is fragile. Because they are engaging in egocentric behaviours, right. Look at me look at me, right. So egomaniacal egocentric behaviours are based on a need to feed an ego. When somebody has a healthy ego, a healthy sense of self. They don't need the attention. They don't need to throw the keys at the valet. They could turn up on a bicycle and they would be fine because they know who they are, right. So actually, when you do the work on yourself, you are a better human being to be in relationship with others, right.

Steve Rush: I like that.

Andrew Bryant: Ego. Yeah, actually. Collins talked about ego means just sense of self. Egocentricity is a fragile ego. Look at me. Look at me. I am not Okay. You know, a relationship should always be a good start where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. If two broken people are trying to get together and say, you complete me as the line from the movie go. Yeah, if two broken people meet each other trying to make one complete person, they are co-dependent. When two people have got their stuff together, meet. They create a relationship that has things over and above themselves. Self-leadership is not selfish because when we have taken care of ourselves, we have all the energy to focus on other people. We can listen. We can help and the simplest one is a metaphor that precedes me, but I use it as well. Is if you are on the airplane and the oxygen mask does fall from the ceiling. You are supposed to put it over your nose and mouth first before assisting others, because if you don't look after yourself, you're useless to anybody else.

Steve Rush: I like that metaphor. It is incumbent of all leaders to be mentally and physically fit as well as, you know, emotionally fit to help other people, right?

Andrew Bryant: Absolutely. Again, I was talking to somebody this morning, different person was saying earlier, and he was saying, you know, I have invested in myself and I am doing this and I am being more recognized at work. Wherever I go, there I am, right. Personal development is going to make you a better leader. Personal development is going to make you a better worker, co-worker, husband, or wife. Again, we are back to this. Working on yourself is not selfish because everybody else benefits. The biggest compliment you can do for somebody is to turn up and authentically be yourself. If you are hiding behind some mask or you are playing some game and then manipulating them into whatever bizarre reality you have, then we are not doing anybody a favour.

Steve Rush: And of course, people could spot when people are not being authentic. We get that gut feel that way, don’t we? We would not show where it comes from, but we just know it is not real.

Andrew Bryant: Well we are very good, at picking up congruency and incongruence. If there is an incongruence, that is what we pick up and it gives us that that squirmy feeling, as you say, in the gut. Being authentic is a conversation in itself. Right. How authentic are you allowed to be? You know, certain world leaders today, you would say they are very authentic, but they are rubbing a lot of people up the wrong way.

Steve Rush: Yeah, quite right.

Andrew Bryant: To your point about selfishness is. The human condition is, yes, we need to develop ourselves, but we always operate in some kind of tribe or group because the human being is a social animal. Just because I have my stuff together and I dont have it every day, but most days at least I have the tools and the strategies to lead myself. I cannot assume that the person I am talking to has got their stuff together. They may be operating from a strange mental model or mental schema. They may be having some insecurities. They may be dealing with some trauma; I don't know what's going on in their life, so I can turn up and authentically be me, but sometimes I might have to dial it down a little bit because, you know, I don't know the environment I am in. I don't have a relationship with this individual.

Steve Rush: In your book, Self-Leadership, you talk about a couple of characters in there to help people get through some metaphorical thinking. Drivers and passengers. Tell us a little bit, about how that comes about.

Andrew Bryant: Yeah sure. It is a very simple metaphor. I think most people who can drive like to drive, particularly if you have an open road and a nice car. I think that sometimes it is nice to be a passenger and sit in the back. When I fly into a foreign city to speak and I am picked up by a car and driven to the hotel. Both are appropriate in the right context, but if you are being a passenger in parts of your life, where you need to take control, then that is a problem. And so it's the awareness of do I need to take ownership and responsibility of this or am I just going to sit in the back and let somebody else drive? And a lot of the times people are going along in life waiting for instructions. You know, for me, I remember the C colon backslash prompt on a DOS computer, you know, is waiting for input, and a lot of people are like that. They are waiting for instructions. We live in a work environment where we want people taking ownership, who are agile, thinking for themselves, because frankly, if people are not thinking for themselves, they are going to be replaced by AI algorithm or some machine learning very quickly.

You need to look at your life and look at where I am being the passenger and where I am being the driver. Which brings us to a movie that I do remember, the very first Spider-Man where Uncle Ben says to Peter Parker, you know, with great power comes great responsibility.

Steve Rush: Great responsibility.

Andrew Bryant: Yeah. However, with great responsibility, stroke ownership comes great power. When we take ownership for thinking, feeling and actions, we start to influence our immediate environment and maybe the environment at large. We don't influence everything. Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people that is life. However, the attitude, the mind-set of what can I take of. Can I be proactive? Can I offer a solution rather than sit there waiting for somebody else to fix it? And that's a huge difference in, you know, anybody who runs a company or leads a team knows that they have drivers and they have some passengers and they know what they rather have more of.

Steve Rush: And course, becoming a driver takes practice and persistence, and one of the subsets you talk about in the book in order to kind of unlock some of that is personal mastery.

From my experience around personal mastery. This is one of those things that just never stops. It is kind of like a symphony. It carries on it gathers momentum. What role do you see personal mastery playing in people's self-leadership?

Andrew Bryant: Well, in the self-leadership construct that I use for research so that my research or my talking is linked to other people. Is I think in self-leadership? The three elements, which is self-awareness. Do I know what I am thinking, what I am feeling? Self-regulation, which are our habits, and I think really personal mastery comes in the area of habits and then self-learning how we are doing. However when people don't understand what self-leadership is, they extend the definition of personal mastery to include self-learning. Peter Singer said that people with personal mastery are in a constant state of learning, which is great. So personal mastery is about living life on purpose. The self-regulation is doing things in alignment with your vision and your values, and if you continue to do those things, then you will be successful. If you value health, then you are going to exercise and eat correctly. If you value in relationship, you are going to invest in this relationship and you will have habits and strategies around that.

I recently wrote a blog where I added the vision, the values and perspectives, and I think that covers the learning. This was about our mental models and schemers that we talked about earlier. If you can have personal mastery, particularly in this very interesting world hashtag post truth is that you need to recognize your own perspective so that you are aware of your biases and be very tolerant I think of other people's perspectives.

Steve Rush: Yeah, that is important, too.

Andrew Bryant: Yeah, so there is a huge overlap between personal mastery and self-leadership. You can use the terms interchangeably or if you are specifically looking at researching the constructs, then personal mastery comes in the self-regulation piece of self-leadership.

Steve Rush: And in coaching of the people, I often have to delve deep into people's inner thoughts to get them to share their thinking and their learnings of what is taking place. In the workplace today, it is fair to say that diversity of thought is not really as common as it could be. What is your take on diversity of thinking and diversity of thought?

Andrew Bryant: Very good. Well, I think we Segway nicely from my previous statements, didn't we? Around perspectives. I am a great fan of diversity and inclusion of thought. In terms of diversity, inclusion, I am on the Faculty of Women in Leadership at Singapore Management University. But here were only looking at gender. Right, we are not looking at orientation or we looking at age or disability, etc. Whereas I think if we took a higher frame and said that diversity and inclusion of thinking gives us better results, and I think most people would agree with that. If you have ever worked on. You know, had a really good brainstorming session or you got a partner that, you know, you can you can bounce ideas off. You always end up with a better idea. I have co-authored two of the books I've written and having a co-author looks at something and they challenge you and you go, ah, yeah, I could see it a different way. Every time you have different thought processes, I think you…depending on where you are going you raise the standard. I remember when I did my MBA, learning about groupthink. Where everybody has the same idea and does the same thing, and like the metaphor of lemon running off the cliff. I think if we welcome diversity of thought, I was talking to somebody at a party at the weekend. I was bemoaning the fact that I think they stopped teaching, debating in schools because nobody can actually have a discussion about anything anymore or everybody jumps into strawman arguments or what about isms. Nobody can say, oh, that is an interesting point. You know, could you expand on that? And is there another way of looking at this? And, you know, where's your evidence for that? The ability to actually have dialogue without making it personal seems to have evaporate.

Steve Rush: And what do you think causes that emotional response?

Andrew Bryant: The emotional response to people is people attach their ego to their ideas and their perspectives. Remember I said we own our thoughts our thoughts are not us. We own our feelings our feelings are not us. Now because human beings are so tribal, we identify. A Manchester United supporter is a Manchester United supporter through and through. It is an identity; it may even be a generational identity from grandfather to father to son. If I meet a Liverpool supporter, there's a problem. Right. They are both members of a tribe, but they are members of a larger tribe if they are both English. Anybody who was not English, they would hate the Germans or the Brazilians or whatever. We have this tribal identity and the inability to have discussions with them. In England, you have Brexiteers and Romanians and Americans have got there Democrats and the Republicans. Is people very closely identified with tribes and are failing to step back from that and actually look at the arguments. Right, that there is good and bad on both sides, but are we talking about those things and leaders in particular need to be able to have the intelligence to hold contradictory thoughts at the same time. One of the coaching things I do with senior leaders is to get them to argue against, you know, they say, hey, I am going to do this, and I said, no, I want you to argue against it. Then I want you to argue for it again, and when they argued against it and then they argued for it. There for is much better because they argued against.

Steve Rush: It is a great technique of self-coaching to at the time, isn't it? As self-reflecting?

Andrew Bryant: Yeah, I think those mental disciplines and maybe it is because I am fifty-eight years old. Maybe, it is there. My son who is 12 is actually very good at art making an argument, and I really love. He has some self-leadership and that is great, so maybe I am just sounding like an old fogey, but it seems to be maybe it is the rise of social media. There is a whole bunch of reasons why, but it does seem to be that the ability to be aware of your own position and be okay to look at that without feeling like that's an attack on your ego.

Steve Rush: And I guess a lot of the behaviours that we carry through high school, university and then onto workers leaders is merely a learned behaviour. If we keep reinforcing those learned behaviours, we are reinforcing bad habits or we are creating new habits. Of course, kids and children are in the early stages of learning about leadership, and I observe leadership in my son's basketball court on a Saturday morning.

And for me, leadership is not an age thing or a role thing, it is a behaviour. What do you think we can learn from children when it comes to leadership?

Andrew Bryant: Like you, I learned from my kids, and I watch them learning and I watch them taking leadership positions in various things. The first thing you notice, of course, is kids are brilliant models, and as we are growing up, it is a survival mechanism to mimic and model behaviour. I remember driving along when my daughter was very small, and somebody pulled out in front of me and she goes. Is he a stupid idiot, daddy? I did not actually say it, like, obviously, I had probably said it at a previous time and she had led that. She has connected the behaviour to the phrase, and she was tiny when she said this. I think we can learn a great deal.

One of the strategies I teach in leadership and in coaching courses is feedback. There is a model I don't know whether I came up with it, but the acronym, I find this very sticky and that is fact impact on future. The fact is the observation of the reality, the impact is what that behaviour is doing, both good and bad and obviously, the future is the future behaviour. Managers and leaders learned this very quickly and I talk about when Tasha, my daughter, was about four. Coming down the stairs off the house that we had recently moved into, it had lot stares. As we moved into it, I had said to her, look, if you are coming down the stairs, hold onto the handrail. I was terrified. At about four, she would fall and I am walking past the bottom of the stairs. Tasha is coming down and she is not holding onto the handrail. I said, Tasha, she said daddy; I said what are you doing? She pauses and says, Well, I am coming down the stairs. I said what, are you not doing? And she does that cute little the four year olds do…oh, I'm not holding onto the handrail, so we establish the facts.

She was aware undeniably, of what her behaviour was at that point. So then, I asked the impact question, what might happen if you don't hold onto the handrail? And she thought for a moment and she said in her beautiful 4 year old language fall, ouch, blood. I said that is right. Fall ouch bloody, do you want fall ouch blood? But she said, no, I don't want fall ouch blood. I said what, are you going to do in the future? And she said, Hold onto the handrail. Now from that moment on, I never had to remind her until she was old enough. It did not matter and what I say to manage is if I could change the behaviour of my four year old and if my four year old could understand the current situation, the impact of her behaviour and the future behaviour, and tell me what she was going to do, what is the problem with your people? And the problem is that you're not doing this. You are expecting your people to know exactly what you are thinking and you are not really giving them effective feedback.

Steve Rush: It is great little model, love it. I think I will be using that next time myself too, thank you for sharing. This part of the show we are going to kind of delve into your top leadership hacks. If you could just share with the folks listening today. What would be your top three leadership hacks and nudges, tips, ideas?

Andrew Bryant: Well, I think obviously I'm going to start with number one, which is to practice self-leadership, which is intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling and actions towards your objectives, and as you do that, developing your personal mastery and therefore become more effective. Because let's face it, if you're going to be a leader, you have to be affect, so that will be no one.

Number two would be, listen for what is important now. When you really listen to people talk. They tell you what they value. It is as if they are broadcasting the P.I.N to their A.T.M. The secret code, people talk about what they value, and as a leader, you need to frame all communication in terms of what is important to your listeners. Only then can you influence them to move towards the objectives that you see as leaders. That would be number two.

My third leadership hack is to give up on perfection in favour of progress. As you take actions, they won't be perfect, but you're making progress as you take action and then you can use the feedback as I just shared fact impact feature to make it better. Because perfection will paralyze you through procrastination, so that is my tip.

Steve Rush: Want to kind of cast it back to…we going to call this hack to attack. There are times all of us could be familiar with in our lives where we have screwed up, we have got things wrong. Can you share with us maybe the one thing you can recall where it has gone wrong, but, you know, using that, learning to help you in your forward thinking and your future.

Andrew Bryant: Yeah and I would say that in one word, and that is disruption. I already shared with you the story that in 2000, the business model I have was disrupted as low cost health and wellness centres came into Australia. That disrupted me, and I went through a period of discomfort, obviously financial ruin and self-seeking, but I disrupted that. Then I decided what was important to me, my leadership hacks and that pivoted me into speaking, coaching, training. I ended up moving to Singapore because I had some big clients here, one of which was Singapore Airlines, and I built a big training business. I had trainers and I had staff and an office. Then we had the global financial crisis, and suddenly nobody was spending any money on training and development. Then I had to disrupt myself again. I realised I was working for everybody else. I was not doing the thing that I loved, and so I disrupted myself again. I got rid of the office, I got rid of the staff, and I streamlined it so that it was business that I wanted to do because I liked what's important to me was being front of people and making the change.

Having had those two in 2017, I saw that in moving to a very ME centric business model that also was massively vulnerable. I look forward and I could see that online learning was the future, and I did my first foray into that in 2017. Did not do very much of it in 2018, 2019 I absolutely put a huge amount of energy into that. I could coach globally; I recorded group-coaching programs and turned those into products like my executive presence accelerator, my C suite accelerator programs, so my hack to attack is always be disrupting yourself.

Steve Rush: And it is also interesting because if you're not disrupting yourself, you're creating comfort. Comfort is not helpful when we are looking to progress.

Andrew Bryant: No, it is not. I will agree with you there.

Steve Rush: Okay. So my final ask of you today, Andrew, is if you could turn back the clock, do a bit of time travel and bump into your 21-year-old self, what would be the one between advice you would give them?

Andrew Bryant: You know, I think my greatest lesson over the last few years is to really understand what is meant by the word humility. I did not need to like the word because I am a great believer that we need to be confident and particularly here, in Asia people mistake confidence for arrogance. I was always very anti the sort of fake humility that people have, but what I realized is that humility comes from the Latin humilitas, which gives us the word grounded. It means grounded, and I talked earlier about authentically turning up in relationships. I think what's made me happier, more effective in my life is getting grounded, is realizing who I am, what I'm good at, what I'm not good at, and operating from that grounded-ness and not needing to live my life for the acceptance of appreciation of everybody else, whether that's externally or mentally in a psychodrama. Often we live our lives for the appreciation of our parents, alive or dead. I know I did in my youngest 21 year old self was always thinking, well, you know, would my dad be proud of me? Then a few years ago, I was in a hospice holding my father's hands as he left this world, and he did say to me, I am proud of you, son. Although it was a beautiful moment, I did not no longer needed it because many, many years before I had learnt that I needed to be proud of myself, with or without my father or with or without anybody else.

Now, as you say, what I would said to my 21 year old self, I mean, between twenty one and forty one, I spent a lot of time and energy trying to impress people that didn't need to be impressed. I think that would be from the heart sharing to you.

Steve Rush: Thank you for sharing, really appreciate that. So folks are probably wondering, Andrew, how they can get to learn a little bit more about your C-suite accelerator, how they can find about your blog and your book. Where would you like them to go?

Andrew Bryant: That is very simple. We have been talking about self-leadership and so go to selfleadership.com on the home page they is obviously at the top navigation bar linked to blog. There are four buttons. One, if you are interested in personal coaching. One, if you are an organization and you want a self-leadership culture of your organization, one for the C-suite accelerator, and I can't remember what the fourth one for, but you go there selfleadership.com and all the things that we have talked about, the links all just flow off that home page.

Steve Rush: Well, Andrew Bryant, thank you ever so much for joining us on The Leadership Hacker podcast today.

Andrew Bryant: It is absolutely my pleasure, and it has been very enjoyable. Thank you, Steve.

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 handle there: @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.

Learn from L. David Marquet, a retired U.S. Navy Captain.  He served in the U.S. for 28 years and shared his leadership lessons in his first book Turn the ship around.  Stephen R. Covey said it was the most empowering organisation he’d ever seen and wrote about Captain Marquet’s leadership practices in his book, The 8th Habit.

In his latest book, Leadership is Language, David focuses on giving control to the doers, to allow them decide. David tells me,  it’s time to ditch the industrial age playbook of leadership. In Leadership is Language, you’ll learn how choosing your words can dramatically improve decision-making and execution on your team. Marquet outlines six plays for all leaders, anchored in how you use language:   •  Control the clock, don’t obey the clock: Pre-plan decision points and give your people the tools they need to hit pause on a plan of action if they notice something wrong.   •  Collaborate, don’t coerce: As the leader, you should be the last one to offer your opinion. Rather than locking your team into binary responses (“Is this a good plan?”), allow them to answer on a scale (“How confident are you about this plan?”)   •  Commit, don’t comply: Rather than expect your team to comply with specific directions, explain your overall goals, and get their commitment to achieving it one piece at a time.   •  Complete, not continue: If every day feels like a repetition of the last, you’re doing something wrong. Articulate concrete plans with a start and end date to align your team.   •  Improve, don’t prove: Ask your people to improve on plans and processes, rather than prove that they can meet fixed goals or deadlines. You’ll face fewer cut corners and better long-term results.   •  Connect, don’t conform: Flatten hierarchies in your organization and connect with your people to encourage them to contribute to decision-making.

David Marquet – www.davidmarquet.com

Read Leadership is Language

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Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes

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Click below for the Transcript 

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Introduction

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. 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.

So join me on location today in London with bestselling author of two books. Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language. David Marquet, we are looking forward to speaking to David today, but before we do that, it is The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: This year, 50 years ago, in 1970, an on-board explosion crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft. The surface module was damaged, forcing the ground crew and astronauts to abandon their original mission of landing on the moon. Now, most of you will be familiar with the story portrayed in 1995 movie with Tom Hanks, but less of you will know the leadership activity.

That has really stood this mission, aside from others, then that is a run.

The debriefing sheet cited the successful return of the crew down to the importance of organization, leadership and innovation as part of NASA's operations and remains one of the best examples of that trade to this day. On April 11, 1970, the Apollo 13 mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral, headed towards the from morrow formation, which has a number of major craters. Not long after lift-off, the mission suffered its first problem, a shutdown of one of the main engines with four main engines still working and firing. The spaceship was able to make its way into space. Two hundred thousand miles and two days later was getting ready for their moon-shot short in a wire between the auction hydrogen tanks on board the ship caused the explosion to the service module. With oxygen running out fast, the crew had to shut down a few cells to save power and used the lunar module to survive it. They then used this as a vessel to get them home as directed and coached from mission control on earth. The crew used the pull of the moon's gravity to break back into the atmosphere and get back to earth safely, despite observers watching the inferno engulf craft plunge into the sea.

Mission Control was led by flight director Gene Kranz. He coined the phrase failure is not an option. And when interviewed, he said the rescue was executed calmly and deftly without any doubts that it would succeed. However, the mission control logs say something else. When the Apollo 13 crew got into difficulty, the 20 plus mission control team had no idea what happened. Was a meteorite blast? Was it an explosion? And in their panic, they looked to Kranz for orders who, whilst under fire of questions and pressure, remained calm.

When those about him start to lose structure and discipline. Gene Kranz kept his head, Krantz was ahead of his time as a leader, but few at that time in the military would have recognized that calm, lack of instant order would have been leadership. Kranz calmness was a barometer for others, which steadied the mission control room much quicker than it would have done had he added loads more commands on top. During an hour of asking questions and evaluating the situation. Kranz was running low on energy and ideas, he recognized that he did not have all the answers and needed to unlock that from those who did. So what did he do? He gave control to the incoming team. He knew they had the information and therefore merely moved the authority to where the information was. He empowered junior officers to take control. He empowered others in his mission control room to think differently, great leaders create more leaders. They give control to others who are better placed and I have often said that if you are a leader, you should only control only what you can control. And someone who's epitomized this through their work and know that life as a leadership coach is David Marquet.

David Marquet was the commander of the nuclear submarine Santa Fe and realized during a simple drill, having one point of command was not only limiting to the efficiency of the operations of the submarine was downright dangerous. David's go on to write bestselling book, Turn the Ship Around and he's also now the bestselling author of Leadership is Language and know David also the president of the Intent Based Leadership Institute.

Start of Interview

Steve Rush: David, welcome to the show.

David Marquet: Thank you, Steve, for having me on your show.

Steve Rush: It is absolutely my pleasure. I have been a fan of your work for some time, so I appreciate you taking some time out in your busy schedule to be with us, too. So, David, I know that he spent 28 years in the U.S. Navy and that's obviously where you developed your leadership theories and you your thinking. But a started much younger for you, didn't it, when you were spending some time with your grandparents back in Pittsburgh?

David Marquet: Well, I was sort of this library kid. I was an introvert and my parents shipped me off to my grandparents in the summer. And Pittsburgh, which was this industrial town. It was a steel making town, and it really was not a lot of fun. They lived in sort of this urban area, but there was a library nearby, so I would kind of scoot out and go hide in the library and do all this reading.

I like history books. I would read all these history books. I read about submarines and the role that they play World War 2 and at the same time, the country was going through…this was the 70s. So the country was going through this sort of malaise and depression of…It doesn't seem like things are going right. Inflation was bad, oil shocks were there, Iranians taken Americans hostage. You could not get it back, blah, blah, blah. We are in the Cold War and all these things kind of gelled together for me, and even though I was probably an unlikely candidate to join, the military. I was born in Berkeley, California, a hotbed of radicalisms.

I called my parents. That is what I was going to do and of course, they tried to hide their… well, they were worried for me, I think a little bit, because I was kind of a sensitive, introverted.

But submarine force worked out well because you hide from people there, so it's a natural fit for introverts.

Steve Rush:  So how do you go from being introverted to then being a US captain of a nuclear submarine?

David Marquet: Oh, you got me an introvert on base. In fact, I think it is a benefit because some of the extroverts I knew they sort of got away with just the sort of grand personality and I was forced to really be thoughtful about what I said. I did not like to speak, so I would say as few words as possible, but I felt there were quality words and the idea is, but my burden was I thought I was really smart, because everyone was telling me that at every step.

I was on the math team when I was in high school, and so there was this sense that I knew the answer and it fed this structure of leadership where a leader as decision maker and it got me promoted, and it probably is the right place to be when I was starting out. But a submarine commander, the complexity of the ship foiled that aspect of what I wanted to be. It is psychologically very seductive. You make decisions, people line up outside your door all day long. It feels good, but it is really depleting. It is very short term is a short-term win. It is like eating cotton candy. It is a high and then it just feels bad after that.

And that was the change I had to go through.

Steve Rush:  And would you say that your introversion was almost a propeller to start giving control to other leaders to slow?

David Marquet: It was an enabler, but it was not the catalyst. The catalyst was I screwed up. I gave an order that could not be done on my ship. The story is I was trained for 12 months to go to one submarine at the very last minute. I should have said, no, you got to go to this other one Santa Fe because it was the worst performing ship in the fleet. The captain has quit and so we need someone over there in two weeks. It is you and I was just unbelievably despondent over this news because the Santa Fe was had this reputation of being the clown ship. It was terrible and it was a different kind of submarine. That was the kicker.

The patterns. Captains give orders, crew follow them is what we fell into, but immediately broke apart. It fell apart because you cannot orders, you don't know the details of the ship. It did not work, but I tried. Kind of candle light and sort of this very stark event, and where I embarrass myself by giving an order that could be done and I got the team together.

Two things, number one is in the past. I said, you know, I have to get better orders. But now it's like, no. I got to stop giving orders. It is me giving orders is the problem. Not the fact it was bad. Then the second thing was. I wanted to tell the team. Oh, you guy’s be proactive. You guy’s take initiative, but it's really you. You can only change your own behaviour.

Steve Rush:  And what was the other moment for you when you realized you needed to change that behaviour?

David Marquet: When I gave this order and I suggested to the officer, hey, let's go and speed up on them back up…we were running on backup because we had shut down a reactor for an exercise on ourselves. And I said, let's speed up and he orders at second gear, and the sailor just kind of turns around in his chair and he looks at this quizzical eye, You guys are idiots look and I said, what?

On the Santa Fe, It is a one-speed motor, no second gear, I look at the officer, and it said, did you notice that? Yes, sir. And he give me this, like, really annoying smile and I'm like, why did you? But we all know it's because we do what we are told. That is how it is. Yeah, we did the same thing everyone else does, which I called sprinkling the fairy dust of empowerment. But we don't really mean it because structurally embedded in the organization, I'm going to tell you what you do, but fairy dust…speak up if you think it's wrong. This makes it hard to speak up.

Steve Rush: What do you think it causes people not to speak up in that environment, given your experiences?

David Marquet: Why?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

David Marquet: Because you corrected speed barriers. Sometimes very subtle. So, for example.

Let's say you raise your hand and I say, what is it? It sends a signal. You are really annoying us for slowing the thing down.

We also have inherited from the industrial age this idea of a bang the clock and continuing the production line as long as possible. In that environment, anyone who stops the production line is a problem; they are creating waves because then you have idle time. There are huge cultural barriers and the team does not have the tools. We actually don't have language in many teams for what to say to stop the clock. We are in a meeting and we say, oh, well, everybody has a chance to speak up, we don't practice.

Okay, if you don't agree with this. How do you voice that? And then even better, the way we run the meeting is don't talk about it and then vote, vote and then talk about it, because as soon as you start talking about it, you're narrowing variability and diversity of thought. The structures, then the language are designed to reduce variability and run away from uncertainty as quickly as possible, even though it is premature in many cases.

Steve Rush:  And it is indicative isn’t it of that kind whole leader follower philosophy that you might have experienced it in your early career in the Navy.

David Marquet: So we have words. The industrial age organization design was this. One group of people will make decisions and one group of people will execute the decisions made by the first group of people. And we have labels because they all look like humans, but we need to know which tribe you're in and we call them leaders and followers or thinkers and doers or management and workers, and we pay people by salary or by hourly. White collar, blue collar. We wear different uniforms but there is this whole cultural industry. With artefacts and rituals to put us in one of these, two groups, and this is one of the things that is suddenly embedded in our language and in minor organization design, which is totally unhelpful.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and you talk about this in your new book. Leadership is Language.

David Marquet: Yeah.

Steve Rush: And you give the type to behave as colour, don’t you? Just tell us a little bit more about that.

David Marquet: Yeah. As an author, you have to create a new term. No one gets credit for there is a bunch of great ideas. Aristotle said everything let me reiterate them. I call them red work and blue work. So the doing work is what we call red work. Red being typically the colour of focus and action and blue work the colour of creativity, and the difference is when red work. I want to narrow my perspective, but in blue work, I want to broaden my perspective so I am using my brain in two fundamentally different ways and industrial organizations solve the problem by not asking people to change. The thinkers were just do thinking and the doers just did doing. And we didn't need the thinkers to do doing and the doers to do thinking. Now we say let the doers be the deciders. So what we're going to do is say this group to the organization at the bottom who used to just do what they're told. We are now going to pause and give them the chance to think and actually make decisions, but that requires them to use their brain in different way. That requires us if we are in the leading group, to talk in a different way.

Steve Rush: And as leaders, it is our responsibility, isn't it? I guess through our language will influence and either help new ideas and creativity or we will stifle them.

David Marquet: You can only control yourself. So when you say, oh, well, this person does not speak up, it the really frustrating working with them. The unhelpful behaviours is to go give them a lecture. How can I give you some feedback i.e. can I permission to be a jerk? You really need to speak up more. Well, how about this? How you look inside yourself and you figure out. You know what, the way we are running the meeting, the way I am asking the questions, if someone comes to me and says, well, I am not sure about this decision, and I said, why would you say that?

Again. Subtle, but it sends a signal you are wrong. Justify yourself, not, oh, tell me about that. I am really interested in that. We really need to know before we go ahead, launch this product.

If you think, we are off track.

Steve Rush: And one I guess create coaching culture as well, doesn't it? So the more questions you ask. The more evidence and inside you have from people to develop thinking and ideas. Right?

David Marquet: Yeah, so it is dicey because I do think that. Teaching is not telling and we can take moments to teach people. I think what happens is leaders don't do the hard work of building a decision-making factory. Putting structures in the team so that when a team has to make a decision or a person who owns a decision that the decision is going to consistently come out of quality decision, i.e. is going to help the organization do something and learn something. And, so if you don't do that, then what happens is I'm getting sucked into being the decision maker all the time, then evaluate and approve all these decisions. So what I think you want to do if you want to be a leader. Is to build decision-making factory.

Steve Rush:  I love that. If you can imagine what this decision, making factory would look like. Just describe them for our listeners.

David Marquet: Well, best thing is what the book is about because. So the question is when do teams and people make bad decisions? And so we look at some industrial accidents and what are the conditions? And it turns out the basis the overall pattern is we're adapting its industrial age playbook where we're trying to narrow variability. The problem is we use it we do spare variability language. To embrace variability game, so one of the stories in the book is there is a ship in 2015 sails into Hurricane. Sank, all 33 people die. This is a ship that is seven hundred ninety feet long.

How did that happen? Well, fortunately, we were able to recover the black box, and so we have a 500-page transcript. It is the way teams talk for real. Not how we wish they talk or one or some fantasy world how they talk, but it is the actual language. Now, what you see is. All the behaviours that I saw in the Navy and to go back later and say, well, they are just bad people, they are oh, so they have been mariners for 30 years, most of the senior people were in the 50s. And they were promoted over the last 30 years based on a set of behaviours that they exhibited, those behaviours they exhibited over the last 30 years are exactly the behaviours they are exhibiting on this tape. So it is not them it's, its good people, but with the wrong playbook and it's a playbook that excludes variabilities, so there's a moment when two officers separated by two hours, they're coming up to a point where they can turn away from the storm and go behind the Bahamas. And it's this very halting, stilted, painful anguish language.

Steve Rush: Right.

David Marquet: And blaming them is wrong. Because the question is, why is the language like that? And if you go back earlier, we can see the playbook of continue at all costs. Don't stop because they deviating will take longer and burn more fuel.

Steve Rush: In my experience of coaching leaders as well. Is that being brave to try new things, to testing things, really we get to learn about ourselves. I mean, in your kind of experience of working with others and other leaders as well as working in the Navy, what would you say would be the one thing you have learned the most about being brave and trying new things?

David Marquet: Being brave and trying new things comes first and foremost from a place of security and safety. If you don't feel secure and say… at the extreme, if you have a lion running at you, you can run in a different direction, maybe but if you don't feel secure and safe. Then you are always in a constant. I'm proving myself mode, and that gets in the way of running experiments and being a little bit playful and trying some different things. If you are on a rugby team and you feel we have to win every game, then you are not going to be able to try different things and try different combinations of players then when you get to the final tournament, you'll have just done what you did versus another team, which maybe took some more.

They will know better. There may be a better way of setting up your players, but you will never know it. But it might be worse, so if you try it and then you lose one game, how do you respond to that? Oh my gosh, everyone kill themselves, so dreadful, like no.

Steve Rush: So cross your new playbook. You got six plays that you refer to…

David Marquet: Yeah.

Steve Rush: And there is some really interesting things in there. You have a principle in there call complete not to continue, so tell us a bit about that.

David Marquet: So when the industrial age, Imagine you are on an assembly line making cars. So there's a cost to tooling the assembly line. Once the deciders just figured out the quote, optimal way or an optimal way. We don't want downtime, just keep going and so every day feels like the next and there's never a moment to pause and celebrate, and there was never a moment to reflect on our work. Is making cars the right thing is making…. so, like, why did Elon Musk have to come from left field? To build the viable electric car.

Yeah, I know there were some electric cars in the traditional auto industry, but they really never did anything, and it's because we just continue…we make cars with four wheels and internal combustion engines. And so there's just not pause and reflect. If there is no complete. There is no pause and reflect. So what we want to do…let say you want to treat strategy like a hypothesis. Hey, here is what we are going to do and do it for five years. We know the world's going to change. I mean, 200 years from now. Who knows?

Steve Rush: So isn't a habit, though. Good for discipline and creating that routine and consistency.

David Marquet: Yeah. So when you do your thing, get into the habit. So, for example, let's say I start a yoga program. I like to do 20-minute yoga program in the morning, and so I don't know how I'm going to feel about it. Just thinking about it is not going to answer the question. I have to actually do it; I can't just do it twice.

Okay, so let's do it. I am going to do it for 100 days in a row. Then I can ask my wife. Do I seem calmer? Do I feel more in control of my life? How do I feel about this? Is it worth the extra 20 minutes that happens in the morning, which is a busy time for most people?

Two mistakes I see. One is obviously twice, and then when I evaluate it, the other mistake is, yeah, I am going to start doing yoga and you don't put an end point and then it's just forever and then it feels heavy and burdensome.

Steve Rush: So the other one of the six plays, it really intrigued me. And it's also something I experience a lot, too, in my world, is that people seem to shy away from emotion, but its emotion what really drives behaviour, right?

David Marquet: For people to make decisions, all decisions are emotional. We can do all the rational work we want, but at the end of the day, it going to passed a little emotional circuitry in our brain. And you know this, who am I marrying? Where am I living? Which house am I going to rent? The spreadsheet says this, but I can see us living here.

Steve Rush: Yeah. People want more sure than not sure, don’t they? In their world too.

David Marquet: Well they want certainty, but I think there is an emotional component to decision. Well we know it. I don't think it, we know it from science. So, hell, if you want.

So in the past, I didn't care about your emotions because you were just a doer and I don't need you to be self-reflective, so if you had a screwed up emotional life, it didn't cost me anything. First of all, it's immoral, but the second thing is. If you let the doers be the deciders, which is going to be better for you, the company and the people who are doing the work.

Then we have to have healthy emotions and healthy emotions only come from being feeling like a human being, so that's why the last play is connect and it kind of underpins everything. That this idea that until you feel a sense of connection. The connection is not trivial. Hey, would you do this weekend? And it's not. I agree with everything that you say. I don't want everyone from one party in one company. That would definitely not work, it violate the diversity thing. Connection is I actually give a shit about you in a deep…

Steve Rush: Meaningful level.

David Marquet: I want you to be successful in your life, because once you have that. If I need to go to you and say. You kind of showed up like a jerk in that meeting, it does not sting. Deep in my heart, I believe and I feel that you really love me. You want me to succeed and I want the same for you, so it comes across as an embrace, not a stick in the eye.

Steve Rush: Really powerful, isn't it? Really emotional, too. When you make that connection.

David Marquet: Yeah, listen to me. I am a submarine commander. That is the last place you find emotion.

Steve Rush: Does that changed too. When you were on-board, the Santa Fe?

David Marquet: Yeah, I think we did. If you asked me on my last day, I would say. Oh, yeah, we did really, really well. We made such a big change. I think now we made a change and we did well, but I think there is so much more we could do.

Steve Rush: And talking about emotional connections whilst on board the Santa Fe. Not many of our listeners might know this, but Stephen Covey, the famous author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, spent some time with you on board the ship, right?

David Marquet: Yeah, and that was a magic day. His book had a huge impact on me, and my life. He helped me understand what we were actually doing by putting it into words, and I was very sad when he passed away a couple of years ago.

Steve Rush: Sure, and he cited, you actually as being partly responsible for his eight habit. I just wondered how that felt when you heard that words from somebody with such a broad experience at that time.

David Marquet: Well, I was amazing and when he was on a ship, he said, this is amazing. It is the most empowering place I have ever seen. I want to write about you in my next book. And I'm like, sure, sure. Right. Then, sure enough, you know a couple of years later, this big box of books and I am like, no way.

Steve Rush: Did that inspire you somewhat to put pen to paper yourself?

David Marquet: Yeah, Plus my wife told me I needed to do it. After I left the Navy, I really wanted to tell the story. Not like here we were, how great we were, how great was I? But by doing this, we ended up creating so many more leaders. They have gone out and had much better lives.

Steve Rush: That is great. It is awesome stuff. And Dave just to finish it off. Could you just give us a few top leadership hacks?

David Marquet: Steve, my top leadership Hack. Start your question with how. How sure are you? Not are you sure. When you are running a meeting, a decision meeting. Vote first, then discuss.

Steve Rush: David thanks ever so much for spending time with me, really grateful. Good luck with leadership is language.

David Marquet: Thanks, Steve, for coming into town and doing this in person.

Steve Rush: You are very welcome.

And if you'd like to learn a little bit more about David and what he's up to at the moment, check that out in our show notes. Also, head over to davidmarquet.com and Intent Based Leadership Institute.

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 handle there: @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.

Welcome to the very first Leadership Hacker Podcast. This is the new Podcast for leadership ideas, leadership development and learning about leadership.

To celebrate this episode we are giving away 10 signed first edition books and 10 e-copies too.

Each show, we will interview best-selling leadership authors, C-suite executives and leadership development experts, so I can hack into their minds and help you learn more about leadership and leading others.

Here's some of the topics and guest you can learn from:

David Marquet – www.davidmarquet.com

"Start your question with How?"

Andy Brogan – www.easierinc.com

"Followership vs. Fellowship"

Byron Low – www.byronlow.com

"Turn thoughts into tools"

Tony Burkinshaw – www.tonyburkinshaw.co.uk

"Vision is not just for Visuals"

Govert Van Sandwijk – www.timetogrowglobal.com

"Shut up, sit down and ask questions"

Andrew Bryant – www.selfleadership.com

"Self leadership and self mastery"

Simon Tyler – www.simontyler.com

"No hack like your hack"

John Spence – www.johnspence.com

"Be curious"

Michelle Boxx - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellemstansbury/

"How you team process internally"

Michael G Rogers https://www.teamworkandleadership.com

"Really care about your people"

Avi Liran – http://www.deliveringdelight.com

"Contribution, trust and influence"

Steve Rush – That’s me www.leadershipcake.com

"The essential ingredients in Leadership - C.A.K.E.

If you haven’t subscribed to the Leadership Hacker Podcast yet – please do so now, and you will not miss an episode of us hacking leadership tips, ideas insights and leadership hacks.

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Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes

courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

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TRANSCRIPT

The Leadership Hacker Podcast Episode 1 with Various Guests – Hack Away

[Start 00:00:00]

[Music Playing]

Introduction

Steve: 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'm Steve Rush and I'm your host today. I'm the author of Leadership Cake. I'm a transformation consultant and leadership coach. I can't wait to start sharing all things leadership with you.

Welcome to the very first Leadership Hacker podcast. I'm incredibly excited and I'm grateful for you tuning in. Today's show will give you a flavor of what you can expect from future shows, what kind of things you'll experience and how by subscribing now will mean that you won't miss any of our regular lineup of guests, their stories, their future hacks, and their great leadership insights. To celebrate our launch and as a special thank you for subscribing to the show, I’ll be giving away 10 signed first edition copies of my book Leadership Cake along with 10 e-copies too. Stick around to the end of the show. Find out how you can win.

Picture the scene. I want you to imagine you're traveling to your favorite destination. You get stuck on your journey or you're delayed, maybe at the airport or train station, and you have got some time on your hands. Perhaps it's lunchtime for where you work, and the restless curious inner self says I want to learn, gather insights, tips and ideas about leadership and leading others. So, you reach for your device, and when you open where you normally download your podcast, you hit The Leadership Hacker and subscribe.

So by now you probably wondering how by subscribing to The Leadership Hacker podcast that will help me fill my time, right? Well, each show I will have a guest or guests join me and share what leadership means for them, how they've learned from others, and how they'll pass on their tips and experiences with you. We'll introduce you to how you can learn more about each guest and grow your knowledge base. Each show will look at the news and explore where leadership is present - or not, as the case may be - in global events, and understand the role that leadership has played in global decision making. As well we've also grow our community of leadership hackers over time, and as we do, we'll learn from each other. 

Today's show is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of future guests and friends of the show sharing their top hacks and tips to give you a snippet of what's to come. Today I'm going to explore with you the principles of leadership comfort, and if that supports growth and results or how in fact, it might hold a team back, but first, it's Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Everywhere you turn in the news at the moment, you'll bump into a story about Covid-19, or commonly known as Coronavirus. The question we need to ask is, does leadership or has leadership played a part, in either its spread or containment? Just like with a national or international crisis like coronavirus, when disaster happens, it's not about the disaster, but how you respond and you react to it. Some say the World Health Organization was too slow from December to February, in giving clarity and direction and insight as to how to contain the virus, whereas others look to the leadership of China to over trade on goodwill and to damp down its severity, both of which can play an important part in how people respond to a situation. So if you think this is a leadership hack that we need to hack into, send us your insights. Comment on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, and let's get the debate going.

Let's go to our first hack of the show. It's retired US Navy captain and best-selling author of Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language, David Marquet.

David: Steve, my top leadership hack. Start your question with how. How sure are you? Not, are you sure? 

Steve: Thanks David. What a neat idea, and a great way to find out better data. Are you sure? Yes, or no? Bad data? How sure are you? This means that someone's got respond with a level of certainty or assurance, which gives you as a leader an opportunity to ask more questions. So, let's go to our next hack.

Andy: This is Andy Brogan from Easier Inc. My hack for leaders is to stop thinking of leadership as on a continuum with followership. Leadership isn't about creating followership; it's about creating fellowship, and in that regard, leaders can come from anywhere. It's not a role. It's an activity. Perhaps, more correctly, it's two activities. The first one is the act of leadership, being about ensuring that what really matters really matters here. And the second one being that of leadership is about growing fellowship, and that means that what really matters here has to include what really matters to each other.

Steve: Great words, Andy. I really love that whole principle of fellowship. It's about creating an environment where there is an absolute connectivity with the people who you lead and the people who you work with, and the whole principle of fellowship versus followership I think most people can really resonate with. Superb stuff!

So up next, we have coaching catalyst and leadership expert, Byron Lowe. What's your leadership hack, Byron?

 Byron: Hi, Steve. My number one leadership hack is turning thoughts into tools. I believe anyone can learn how to turn their most useful thoughts into tools that can help them grow, solve problems, live the life they want, and experience meaningful and fulfilling work, and it all begins with our thoughts.

Steve: Thanks Byron. What a really interesting philosophy, and we all have our faults, and we all have the ability to influence others, but do we genuinely think of our thoughts as being tools in our kitbag as leaders? So we're going to have one more leadership hack and then we're going to turn our thoughts to think about how we deal with comfort, and whether it helps us or holds us back, but first is over to Tony Burkinshaw, Harley Street cognitive hypnotherapist with his leadership hack.

Tony:  Hi Steve, it's Tony Burkinshaw. When sharing visions, I think vision is a really important part of leadership, but in terms of vision, making sure that each member of your team, the team you're leading, can share that vision. Not everybody does visual equally well so the name ‘vision’ is a bit of a misnomer. So be prepared to share your vision in a variety of different ways, to make sure that each member of your team is fully on board with it, and can absorb it in their own preferential way.

Steve: It’s a great call, Tony. So, we all see the world, feel the world and experience the world in different ways, and vision by default appeals to those people who have a vision or a seeing experience of the world in the way they represent the world, and therefore we need to be thoughtful of those people who are more auditory or more kinesthetic, and need that feeling and sense. So in describing a vision, make sure that you've described it visually, auditory, and with some feeling too. 

So, I want to tell you a little bit of the story as to why comfort could be a problem in us achieving great performance. Just think back on your last 24 hours. You woke up and I suspect you followed many routines - took your coffee, went to the same train station, or airport, took the same route if you're driving. When you get to work, you find there is a little routine or pattern of behaviors that you do throughout the day, most of which might be unconscious, but we've created this bubble. The bubble is there in our life and our work too, and it's a bubble of routine and comfort. We are creatures of comfort and creatures of habit. 

However, when we're looking to achieve high performance, holding us back is the enemy called comfort. Why is that such a problem, I hear you cry? Well, feeling good and feeling assured is right, but comfort creates habits and habits don't look for opportunities, unless we create new habits that force us into new behaviors. Perfect example - I'm not a broadcaster, but I am today. So the start of this Leadership Hacker podcast for me is me moving outside of my comfort zone and trying new things and testing new ways so that I can help others broaden their awareness of what leadership is.

I want to share a story with you about one of my childhood heroes. As a young boy growing up, I was a big racing fan. There was a Formula One World Champion at the time called Mario Andretti, and year on year he managed to find new track records, and new ways of driving, and engineers and spectators alike were really spellbound by the way he used to control his car, and I remember as a young child watching him being interviewed, and in one particular interview he was asked, so Mario, how is it that you find new ways of doing things behind the wheel of a car? And his response was, when I find myself being too much in control and feeling too comfortable, I know I'm not pushing myself hard enough. 

And we can all look around our towns and our cities, and when we look back 5 years and 10 years ago, there were stores on the corner that are no longer there, that were vibrant businesses that were no longer there. And when we transfer that to sports teams who are sometimes top of the leagues and top of their games and then don't sustain it, when you dig deep, what you find is complacency and comfort. Only way to change new things and find new ways of working is to get hold of your discomfort. And being really clear about what it is you want to achieve and how you're going to do that.  

What's most important is doing nothing creates more comfort and more satisfaction, and we need to find a way as leaders to help our team move away from what they know to be true and comfortable and to help them explore new, exciting and alluring ways of working, and in doing so you could find great performance. So, let's hear from one of our other friends of the show. Who's up next with their leadership hack?

Govert: So… Govert van Sandwijk here, and I've got the following leadership hack and this goes for leaders on all levels so it doesn't matter whether you're a team leader, a frontline manager, or the Chief Executive Officer. You find yourself in front of your team during a team meeting. You start to think, hey, why is my team so passive? And actually, you're a little bit irritated.

 As soon as you as a leader start to have those feelings, then basically, you have to check your own behavior. Sit down, shut up, ask a question which will for sure activate the team. So again, the leadership hack is when you start to feel, hey, my team is too passive. Why are they not being more participative in the meeting? Why are they not saying anything else? Check your own behavior. Shut up, sit down, ask a question, and let them become active.

Steve: Thanks for that hack, Govert. What this tells us guys is we are all human, and we will all have a natural neurological response, and what Govert’s sharing is that strategy for dealing with that moment where that chimp inside us, or the amygdala in our limbic system has triggered a neurological threat response in us, take some time out, ask a question. It allows us to regain our cognitive awareness of how we can respond and respond in the right way. So let's go to another leadership hack. Who's up next?

Andrew: Hi.. This is Andrew Bryant, Author of Self Leadership, how to become a more successful effective and efficient leader from the inside out; and of course my top leadership hack is to practice self-leadership which I define as, “the practice of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling and actions towards your objectives. You see, self-leadership contains self-mastery, that ability to move yourself towards your vision, and alignment with your values. You see, when you practice self-leadership and personal mastery, you become an influencer and a more effective leader, so this is my top leadership hack from Andrew Bryant – the self-leadership coach.

Thank you Andrew. He’s right isn’t he, the reason why you are listening to this Podcast today is part self-mastery which we can also define as life long learning. The more we learn, the better leader we become, the better leader we become,  the more we have to give and offer others.

Now out next guest has become renowned for creating simplicity

Simon: Hello, Steve. This is Simon Tyler, coach, facilitator and author, author of The Attitude Book, Keep it Simple Book, The Impact Book, The Simple Way, and I'm here today to talk to you about my hack you've asked me to come up with. There's no hack like your hack. 

There's something about the whole world of all these wonderful ideas that come at us that we pick them all up or drawn to them, we think we want to do something about them. But in truth, the ones that we need are really appropriate and curtailed and personal just to us. So, I say again, there's no hack like your hack. But if I was to land on one thing, Steve, it would be awareness. Anything you can do to wake up your awareness, to heighten what you know about you and notice about you, the better it will be for you. And as you go through any exercise to heighten your awareness, it's not about what you do with it. Simply the awareness can be enough. First, pause more often. That means in your speech, in your day, in your working week, even if it's just for a minute, or an hour every few days. It's just those gaps and in those gaps is that moment when you can slow stuff down, and will start to notice stuff around you and about you. And I look forward to helping you and any of the people that listen to this podcast heighten their awareness.

Steve: And awareness is a real key attribute for great leaders, isn't it? The perception of a situation or effect of being able to adjust our style, so that we can be the best we can be. And to our next hack, we go to friend of the show, John Spence.

John: Hey, Steve, this is John Spence. And my leadership hack is to be curious, to ask thoughtful questions, focused questions, and then be an intense listener. If you hire great people, which you should be, then you want to take every opportunity you can to get their feedback, best ideas, suggestions, to get their help, which will help you grow your business and become an even better leader. So that's my leadership hack. Steve.

Steve: That’s a great message, John. Thank you, and for me curious is about wanting to learn, wanting to learn more about my people, wanting to learn more about my clients, my environment, my community, and actually just learning about me too on that, where curiosity can stimulate things in me to ask questions about my capabilities and can I do and can't I do, and what's causing me to think that way. So great message. So, let's get to our next hack. 

I want to introduce Michelle Boxx, CEO at Boxxbury Business, Speaker, Columnist, and all-around business advocate, Hi, Michelle.

Michelle: Hey, Steve, this is Michelle Box, the blonde fixer. My leadership hack would be to get aware of how your team processes, whether it be internally or externally. It's not that the quiet person in the room doesn't have anything to offer. They just need a few minutes in the meeting to process internally before they speak up. Creating that space within a meeting allows everyone to be heard and the best ideas to come forward.

Steve: And that's great, and in my experience, the best ideas are ones that just take a little bit of nuancing and a little bit of thinking. And if you have people in your team who are sound in their ideas, they're being thoughtful, they're being introspective, it’s our job as leaders too to make sure that we're involving them, and being thoughtful. Keep an eye out for the body language, the nonverbal cues. The book tells us people have something to say and it's important that we help them say it. So, I'm now going to introduce you to a future guest and friend of the show, Michael G. Rogers. Welcome to the show, Michael.

Michael: If I was to provide one leadership hack, it would be to really care about your people. And the reason why is because when you care about your people, they will care about their work. 

There was a Gallup survey done, where people were asked whether their supervisor or anyone else at work cared about them. Only four out of ten strongly agree with that statement. That means six out of ten people don't feel cared about or at least had the perception of not feeling cared about at work. We have to bridge that gap. Perception of reality are not the same thing here. If I ask the leader whether they care about their people, I'm sure every one of them would say they would, but that's not how employees feel. So we have to get to a point where we can demonstrate that and employees can feel that because again, care about your people and they will care about their work.

Steve: Such a simple message, Michael, but I wonder how many of us as leaders take the conscious time out to evaluate how we're caring about people, and ultimately caring about people helps create trust. The more trust you have, the more honest and more candid conversations you have, and the more of those conversations you have, the easier is to cut through complexity and drive great results too. 

Okay, we're going to go to our final hack for today's show. I'm going to take you to Chief Delighting Officer, Avi Liran.

Avi: My name is Avi Liran, and my leadership hack tip is actually starting with a question. What is the one thing, one action, one verb, one mind-state way of life, that if you do that one thing - unconditionally, consistently, continuously - it will be the quickest way for you to earn trust, gain influence, be accepted and feel a sense of belonging, even if you're very new, and feel happy together with the people around you? Well, the answer is very simple. It’s contribution, and the difference between contribution and giving is contribution adds value that the other people need, so go, contribute and make a better world for yourself and others.

Steve: Avi, thank you for giving us that delightful message around contribution. I think it's incumbent on us all as leaders to really create value when we contribute to others. So hey, it would be unfair of me to leave you today without me passing on my contribution of my lifelong leadership and dedication to learning about leaders and leadership. And I find that there are four essential ingredients in leading others. not the only ingredients, but they are essential ones.

All great leaders I've ever worked with, and for, have been great communicators. They learned to adapt their communication style. I call them communication adapters. They're able to flex in an instant how they can change their tone, their pitch and pace, so that they can build rapport, affinity and still be relevant. I find that all great leaders are authentic. They just demonstrate who they really are and what they're really about. They don't mimic, they don't copy, they are just who they are, and knowledgeable but not overly knowledgeable, about the business they're running. Too many leaders spend so much time immersing themselves into the detail of the complexity of their business, it gives them no room for asking crazy questions.

And the most important ingredient that I find in leaders that binds people together - empathy! Empathy and understanding about what people do, how they do it, their motivations and their reasons, creates the real context and cohesiveness in helping others lead too. Communication. Authenticity. Knowledge, and Empathy.

So at the beginning of the show, I said to stick around to find out how you can get a copy of my book, The Leadership Cake. We're giving away 10 signed first edition copies and 10 e-copies, and here's how to do it.

First things first, you need to subscribe to our podcast. That's number one. Number two, we've got a number of different mediums and social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, etc. Go ahead and subscribe or like two of those, and in your social media channels just say ‘today I listened to the Leadership Hacker podcast today, and the key thing that I learned was…. whatever that was. 

So just to remind you three things - subscribe, join our social media tribe, and in there share, I listened to the leadership hacker podcast today, and I learned this. We'll take a straw poll from all the people that do so, and we'll announce the winners and post those books out first-class around the world, next week.

So, we're coming to the end of our very first ever leadership hacker podcast. I just wanted to say a massive thank you to the guests that appeared on today's show. You'll be in for some more of those as the weeks and months progress.

I generally want to say a heartfelt thanks for taking time out of your day to listening 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 haven't done so already. Share this podcast with your communities and network, and help us develop a community and a tribe of leadership hackers.

And finally, if you'd 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 on social media, and you can do that by following and liking our pages on Twitter or Facebook. Our handle there is at @leadershiphacker. Instagram, you can find us there at the_leadership_hacker, and on YouTube, we’re just Leadership Hacker.

So that's me signing off.  

I'm Steve Rush, and I have been The Leadership Hacker.

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes

courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Listen in to find out more about the Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Join our Leadership Hacker Tribe and connect with us:

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LinkedIn (Steve)

LinkedIn (The Leadership Hacker)

Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes

courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

Rhamy Alejeal is the CEO of People Processes, he's also an author and an HR guru. In this fun and engaging show we talk about:

• What comes first people or processes?
• What the HR systems are that business can’t live without?
• The differentials between human and resources.
• What common changes occurred to people and processes since the pandemic?

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

Find out more about Rhamy below:

Rhamy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RAlejeal

People Processes Twitter: https://twitter.com/people_process

Rhamy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhamy/

People Processes Website: https://peopleprocesses.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peopleprocesses/

Full Transcript Below

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

Today's special guest is Rhamy Alejeal. He's the CEO of People Processes. He's an author, an HR guru, but before we get a chance to speak with Rhamy, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: One of the main reasons that keep business leaders awake at night, I ask that question to my network and reached out to over a hundred business leaders. And this is the top six things that they came back with that keep them awake at night. Number one is planning, planning around the short term, financial, their tactical, their team, and their strategy. Having a bad or an ill-informed plan keeps people awake at night, which is also strange. Because number two is long term strategy. So, it goes without saying, if you don't have a short-term plan, you're never going to have a long-term strategy. But long term to me is beyond five years. Beyond the linear.

The next thing on the list was dealing with market changes and in particular, how they've responded to COVID, but generally how supply chains are moving and changing around. Hybrid working wasn’t before on the list but how they can gain access to their team's insights and behaviors while being remote and distant from them. Number five was around staff retention. We've heard lots of discussion in the past about the great resignation but holding onto real talent has become a real challenge for many business leaders and a final one coming in number six was finding enough diversity in their workforce through either gender, race, or just deep thoughts, because thoughts is about differentiation too. And there of course is then the elephant in the room. So, for those who listening to this who sleep peacefully at night, there's also a reason for that. And that reason is that you've likely gone from an intention to an action. You've made something happen. You've made a decision; you've closed it off before the end of the day. And therefore, you can do what your brain's designed to do when you get to bed and that's repair and recover. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Thanks to a number of you in the community who have raised us as a subject that you wanted us to feature on the show. So please also get in touch if there's something that you want to hear. Let's dive in.

Strat of Podcast

Steve Rush: Joining me on the show today is Rhamy Alejeal. He's a CEO of People Processes, or if you're in North America, of course it's Process and they provide the entire HR department for your business. He's also the author of the book People Processes, How Your People Can Be Your Organization's Competitive Advantage. Rhamy, welcome to the show.

Rhamy Alejeal: Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Steve Rush: Me too. Now you have a really fascinating introduction to the world of business that started much earlier than many of us. In fact, you started out your first gig when you were 13 years old and actually made a bucket load of cash as a young man. I love for you to share the story with our listeners and how you got there?

Rhamy Alejeal: Yeah, well, I was a lucky kid. I had an amazing grandmother and I loved to spend time with her. She was in insurance sales, she sold what are called Medicare Supplements. So, for people internationally, when you turned 65 in the U.S., you get to go on the Government Health Insurance Plan. There's a nationalized healthcare plan for people over age 65 called Medicare. And my grandmother would call them you know, right around their birthdays. And she got a big, long list of them. And I wanted to spend more time with my grandmother, but she would never let me spend the night on weeknights in retrospect, probably because she sure didn't want to spend [laugh] needed a couple nights off, but she told me it was because, hey, those are my cold calling nights. I can't have you come.

So, at 13 I told my granddaughter, look, I could cold call. I can figure this out. Let me cold call for you so I can spend the night. And she somewhat, I think to humor me, gave me a copy of her, you know, 24 cassettes of call training and the big Medicare Supplement Guide and scripts and told me to read and listen to it all and she'd be happy to have me cold call. Well, I don't know that she really thought I'd do it, but I did. And I loved it. And I came in and said, hey gran, I'm ready. Let me cold call for you. And she, you know, this was back in the nineties and, you know, she said, well, let's give it a shot. She sat me down at her desk, handed me the big, you know, line printed green and white paper. Came in a big, long green, you had to tear the edges off.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I remember them well.

Rhamy Alejeal: Of everybody turning 65 and a zip code and said, get to calling. And it was, you know, first call, didn't go great. But on the second call, I said, hi, this is Rhamy. I know you're turning 65 soon. And my grandmother, she helps people who are turning 65, figure out Medicare, and she'd love to meet with you. And it turns out 13-year-olds calling people turning 65 and saying, my grandmother wants to meet with you was just the perfect, [laugh] the perfect phone script for a cold approach. And it started worked very well. I wound up setting a lot of appointments for my grandmother.

And then I wound up growing that into a little bit of a dance with a couple of other agents and setting appointments for them. And by the time I was 14, I was making, you know, $50-60,000 a year setting appointment for Medicare Supplements Agents in my hometown. So that was my introduction to the world of business. It lasted for a few years before we figured out that, hey, there are some compliance problems with this, but it all went great and really gave me a good basis for understanding that world of rough cold calling and learned a lot about insurance and dealing with clients and having systems to make sure you’re consistently performing. And it was a great start.

Steve Rush: And your journey into entrepreneurialism started that way. And I think from the last time we kicked this around, didn't you end up in insurance at some point?

Rhamy Alejeal: I did, yeah. So, I worked with my grandmother till I was 16. After that I launched a lawn mowing company for a few years that also, you know, turns out mowing lawn over the summer with three other guys and some trucks make some decent money. At 19, I bought my first investment property. My wife and I bought a foreclosure in 2007, the height of the market. Moved in, it had no floors, no walls. We learned how to renovate ourselves. And after graduating, I actually launched Poplar Insurance Agency. I got my bachelor's degree in finance and economics with minors in math and physics, you know, so I could sell insurance like you do. And totally made a lot of sense to me. And over the years that company, Poplar Insurance Agency. 13 years later has morphed into People Processes and really helped me find my niche and the people I love to work with.

Steve Rush: And you've done that through a series of acquisitions, and you've now got a really successful business, which is predominantly around helping organizations with their HR and their people processes, right?

Rhamy Alejeal: That's right. It started in the insurance space of dealing with employee benefits, right? So, making sure you had attractive reasonable benefits to make sure you can attract and retain good talent in your industry. And very quickly that morphed into also managing the payroll side of the business, because that was a big part of benefits at the time, you try trying to figure out how to keep all that stuff straight, get the bills paid, which led to compliance problems and understanding. In the U.S. Obamacare, the affordable care act came out in 2013. And that really changed a lot of how benefits as a regulatory environment needed to behave. And each time the market became more complex, we either acquired a company or launched our own internal so that we could provide those services broader and broader. And by 2015 or so, we were simply functioning as an entire HR department. Not just benefits, not just payroll, not just compliance, but also looking at things like recruit and retention and performance management, retirement plans, the whole piece of it.

Steve Rush: And of course, when people hear HR, it's human and resources and they're actually quite different things, aren't they?

Rhamy Alejeal: Yes, [laugh]. you have a lot of humans and no resources, and sometimes you have a few humans, but plenty of money to go around. It's an interesting world.

Steve Rush: And however, big, however, small you are, you need focus and attention on those humanistic things and the resources and processes that come with it. What's the reason when organizations scale, they might see HR as being a side gig rather than an integral part of their business.

Rhamy Alejeal: Ah, well, especially, you know, your smaller businesses when they start out, I like to break into three stages. Imagine you are, I don't know, a guy selling insurance, just to use a random example. You start off, you have a product, how you wound up in the industry may be relevant, may not be. Your product is likely very similar to that of your competitors. Your pricing is likely very similar. There's a stage in the early part where you have to focus on your product to make it unique or valuable, find your unique proposition. Another way I like to put, is you just have to start by not sucking at your job, right. You have to learn how to be a provider that doesn't suck. You've got to fulfill your promises. Those promises have to be unique or good in the market, and it's a tough journey. And a lot of small businesses fail there, right. Your average tire chain shop starts off with a completely homogenous product that doesn't differentiate, and they have to figure out how to make their product, their company special. From there, they scale their operations. They start realizing, hey, I've got a thing that people want to buy. I've got new clients coming in through the door and they realize I can't just change all the tires myself. I need other people. And they focus on what I call operations processes. This is the E-Myth Revisited, right. This is writing down your standard operating procedures and figuring out how to benefit from labor arbitrage, where you can have somebody else change the tire, but you can focus on the overall business and continue to grow. That step alone eliminates 90% of businesses. They have enough trouble figuring out how to scale their operations,

Steve Rush: Right.

Rhamy Alejeal: But once that's done, you now have a new problem. You may have standard operating procedures for the standard things. In my business for example, we realized, hey, we've got you know, when we were in one state, in really one city with 25 clients, we developed processes. We grew our staff to around 10, 15 people, and everything was going fine. But then we started to really grow. We entered 50 states. We had clients who were headquartered in LA and in New York and in Memphis and in Kansas City. And the thing that started happening is that new items came up. Not just every once in a while, but every day, things that couldn't be written down as a standard operating procedure. My wife and I worked together; we started the company together. All we really had to deal with was the new stuff. The new stuff happened three times a day. And we were dying. That's where people processes come in, people process. So, first product doesn't suck. Then your operations are standardized. Then you need processes to develop people who will make the same decision you would make.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: But without you, right.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And that requires a lot. That requires they have guidance on behavior. They need to know how you think. And in a small business with four people, maybe the answer is they start off changing tires and then they drink a beer with you every afternoon and you hang out and they get to know your family. And eventually they just think like you would.

Steve Rush: Right.

Rhamy Alejeal: That can work. It may take a year and a half, but eventually you got somebody you can trust to make decisions. You've got a leader you can trust, but that not scalable. People processes is this operating system basically that allows us to take an enthusiastic new hire to someone you can trust to make decisions when you're not there.

Steve Rush: So, here's a chicken and egg kind of question for you. What comes first? Is it the people or the processes?

Rhamy Alejeal: It's a tough question, when I first thought about that question, my answer was actually people come first in that if, you know, if you have a process for requesting time off, but your top guy, you know, breaks his leg and needs to go to the hospital, and he doesn't fill out the form first. Well then obviously people come first, the process is secondary, and that is true. You have to be a human, right. You got to treat your people with respect and realize that processes can create a bureaucracy that can harm your relationship. So, you don't want that. On the other hand, I believe the development of those relationship so that you can trust people to not abuse systems so that you have the ability to say, hey, I know that Steve would never just not do a thing because he doesn't want to do it. It's because there's a good reason and I can trust him. The development of that trust has to be a process.

Steve Rush: And it's interesting, isn't it? When you start to think about how that they're not mutually exclusive at all, that they're entirely intertwined, aren't they?

Rhamy Alejeal: Absolutely, especially you were talking about, how do people start valuing this HR side of the business. When they start off, they're all external. They think all about how do I get new clients? How do I make my product better? How do I make it so that the promises I've made actually get delivered upon? They're thinking externally. And they're constantly looking at that framework. The internal process is what allows you to scale up your business. And those internal processes are around people. The only thing that does anything in your business, people. So, it's kind of like saying, if you look at it from an external focus and you think, well, what comes first? Client or product delivery processes or sales processes. And the answer is, the clients come first, but you're never going to talk to them or they're never going to stick around. You're not going to be able to do a good job for the client if you don't have those processes in place, it's the same for your employees. You have to have the processes in place, or you're not going to be a good employer. Doesn't matter how deeply you care about them. If you have to reinvent the wheel every single time for every little part of the employee process, you're not going to do a great job.

Steve Rush: Guess a lot of the systems as well that you are talking to are actually when you are small in scale often unconscious or at the back of, you know, the own operators mind. But as you grow, they need to be shared and people need to understand them.

Rhamy Alejeal: A system exists. Absolutely. It may just be that you know Steve makes a decision [laugh] every time and that's a system, but until they are standardized, public trained, some of the key pieces that are necessary to implement a process across an organization, it's very difficult for them to be improved. That's the genius of a system or a process. What I often train my small business clients to do is not try to invent whole cloth a better way to deal with an employee performance management, a performance management process. Maybe that's a bonus structure at the end of the year or an evaluation of their behavior or even a goal system. Don't start with that. Start with what you do now. Write that down, publish that, put that in front of the employees and say, this is what we do. And you will find within weeks, a lot of times. There are obvious, you don't need an HR expert to tell you, hey, that's kind of stupid we should do it different.

Steve Rush: mm-hmm.

Rhamy Alejeal: Right.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And make a small improvement to it. Systems processes, the great genius of it is that you can make a change and see the result, make a change, and see the result. And until you actually make it a public system, as opposed to one that just exists in your head, those iterations are very difficult to actually stick. So, the advantage isn't that having a system, lets people know what to do. Though that's not a bad one. The advantage is, is that the system allows itself to improve over time.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, I heard you talk about standard, standardization quite a bit Rhamy and I wondered how that sits alongside being agile and innovative and does one suppress the other?

Rhamy Alejeal: It can, I mean, bureaucracy can kill a business.

Steve Rush: Right?

Rhamy Alejeal: I would say, you know, there's a line between chaos and order and you want to straddle it, right. You want the flexibility so that people can rapidly make decisions and experiment, but you need the order to make sure that everyone's going in the same direction. The information is shared freely so that good decisions can be made. There's a balance to be had there. What I find in most small businesses before hierarchies are heavily developed is that they are more chaotic than orderly

Steve Rush: Right

Rhamy Alejeal: Now when you're talking, for me, a 1500 person or 2000-person organization, I'm sure in 10 and 30,000 person organizations, it has been processed to death, right. There's a process for everything. They just may not be very good ones. They may not provide the flexibility necessary for employees to be able to well exist and grow inside of them, but in small businesses anyway, I often find that they're too far in the chaotic sphere.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and it creates this discipline in the space, I guess, then to give that individual the opportunity to be innovative.

Rhamy Alejeal: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, think of it. Think of it. Anything that has a process removes, significant mental load off those who need to figure it out, right. So, let's take a maternity leave as an example, right. I'm going to have a kid, I'm pregnant. It's three months in. I've got six months to figure out what's going to happen with my maternity leave. That is not the time for the business owner to be deciding what does maternity leave need to look like in our business.

Steve Rush: [Laugh] Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: That decision needed to be made while ago, right. And it may be that the decision they made a year ago and put in place and communicated and is easily accessible to the employee is not the optimal decision. It may very well be that. It's better to have made a decision in most cases so that the employee knows what to expect and knows how this is going to go then to have not made a decision and have to figure that out when you're staring down the barrel of a choice, a fun way to think about this is, perhaps you should think up the name of your child before the baby comes, right.

Or at least before the epidural and you're knocked out on drugs, sorry, I've got a four-month-old. So, I'm a little into this world, right. We had to at least narrow down the list a little bit. Because if Liz, my wife had to make that decision, you know, under the epidural with the baby there, like I don't know what we would've been named, but I know she really loved Godiva Chocolate during the last couple months there. And I'm pretty sure it would've been Godiva [laugh] even if, David was born, so we got to put some time in upfront to make those decisions better. And I think that having the decision, having been made, having it as a process allows you to remove a lot of uncertainty.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And that uncertainty is a huge mental weight on your staff and you. Doesn't mean you can't improve it. You should improve it.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: See how it goes, run it through. If there's an immediate obvious, problem fix it, but allow it to be a process rather than the whims of how you're feeling that week or, oh my gosh, we can't let that employee go on maternity, she's too important. I tell you that kind of stuff comes up and you lose that employee. She's too important to go on maternity. Well guess what? She's way too important, not to, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: So those are the kind of decisions we want to make upfront.

Steve Rush: Now Rhamy, you've had the opportunity of work with thousands of different people in businesses over the time and create and work with them around their systems. And I just wonder if there's a natural leveling or a pecking order on the systems particularly that businesses can't live without. And I just wondered if there was maybe one that sticks out above the others as being the most critical HR system or process that I might want to have in my business?

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, gosh, I think, you know, I love all my children. You need to pay your people on time. You need a payroll system. You know when they work, you need time and labor. You need to know when they're going to work, you need scheduling. You need to know how to recruit. You need a recruiting system onboarding, off boarding. God, you need a way to fire people. And what happens when they quit? All of them are important, but I will say the one that separate the big boys from the newbies, right. I can often tell how developed an organization is by the existence at least, or complexity and depth of their performance management system. Now if you're a small business, the truth is, if you have seven employees, you know what all of them do, [laugh], you know, if they're doing a good job. You may not need an in depth, performance management system outside of maybe setting expectations, right.

So that the employees know what to do, at least that, but you probably don't need an in-depth dashboard that connects and executives and HR and make sure that everything is connected. But what I often do is, one of the first things I try to deep dive in is, where are they in this performance management spectrum? On one hand, a small business where the owner provides nearly no expectations and nearly no review. And everyone is surprised when they're in trouble. That would be the bottom of the spectrum up to something like Google, where every single keystroke, metric, time spent, thought had, contribution made is analyzed by a machine learning algorithm to generate analytics and demographic data. And they know that you're going to quit before you do. Like, there's a whole other world all the way over there that honestly, I like to read about, but I don't get to play with much. If you are at marginal scale, say 20 to 50 employees, focusing on your management of your existing employees, your performance management can often have an outsized impact in both your turnover, your employee satisfaction, and your ability to deliver to your clients.

Steve Rush: And that's where you get your marginal gains, right?

Rhamy Alejeal: They come from everywhere. But absolutely it's much better to have a system in place that allows good employees to become great employees, right. And allows you to keep your great employees than not. And that's probably less work or less financial investment anyway, than a system that allows you to rapidly replace top performers with new people, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: That's an important system too. Your top performers will leave eventually, and you need a way to do it, but for many businesses they could cut their turnover significantly just by really focusing in on that performance management piece.

Steve Rush: And I wonder as well, the whole notion of performance management can sit differently with different focus or can't they, so some will thrive in the opportunity of having clarity and guidance and the process that follows that where others might feel a little bit uncomfortable and uneasy as they start to evolve that as well. What's your experience about some of the psychology that sits alongside performance management?

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, that's a very good question. People creatives, which by the way, entrepreneurs and artists have the same brain, it's the same high risk, high reward drive a lot of times. So, you find that systems that constrain behavior are very important in a hierarchy. It's very important in a system, a business to give people places to go and know what to do. But you will often find that creatives and those who are more entrepreneurial, like a salesperson may find those constraints significantly more constraining [laugh] right. They may chafe under that pressure or the limited pieces there. For them you want to design performance management systems that are primarily around them setting their expectations, right. And then a method of making ensure that their expectations or goals align with the company's expectations and goals. It's a lot more a system of alignment than it is say, giving them a track to run on.

Whereas in an accounting organization, you can be significantly more focused on very specific, measurable pieces. There's actually a great story of a company that did customs management. So, every time someone would come in, every time a shipment would come in, they'd have to fill out all this customs paperwork. And they moved to measuring their primary KPI for their direct frontline agent was not number of cargos filled out because some cargos required hundreds of pieces of paper, some required two, and counting the pieces of paper, which were government forms that had to be filled out by hand or in a typewriter. These weren't even digital forms because it was a customs international thing. They did it by the ounces, by the weight, by the weight of paper, they moved, literally. They had their intake and outtake replaced with scales.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And that was their primary metric every day and said, hey, are we improving or not? That sort of micro level of performance management may suit some, but likely would not do well with a group of aggressive salespeople, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah, I can see that. So, you managed to gather all of this experience and you threw it into the book, People Processes. Tell us a little bit about how the book came about and what was in inspiration behind it?

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, People Processes the book came about because of a podcast that I did call Don't HR Alone. I did a daily podcast for about a year and a half, closer two years, really. Couple hundred episodes. They were daily 15 minutes, hey, we're going to dive in on this issue or there's a new compliance update, or gosh, Minnesota's changing their minimum wage. And what does this mean for you? Whatever I could find honestly, to fill a daily podcast but it did pretty dang well, and that actually led to the book deal. The book truthfully, I wrote almost 400 pages, single spaced in word over the course of six months. I'm effectively made an HR textbook. My editors took that and laughed at me and said, what are you trying to make around Rhamy?

Because this thing, ain't no one going to read. this. [Laugh] right. Are you trying to make a college textbook that people will assign, or are you trying to make a book that your clients or your target clients would like to read? And that really changed everything. People Processes is a broad guide that lays out the key sections of the employee life cycle from onboarding to offboarding, right through termination and even alumni management. It lays out what the key processes are, what a good process looks like, what a bad process looks like. And then the last quarter of the book is actually almost a workbook. It's exercises for you to actually lay all this out in your own organization. The first quarter is justification for small business owners and boards on why they should invest in the time and energy in necessary on these.

And the idea was, and again, I give credit to my publisher on this, was that this book would be an excellent book for all business owner to read, to get their head around or for an HR professional to read quickly. It's nothing earth shattering in there. There's some good fun insights and some great stories, but to read and then pass on to the executive or the boards that they have to work under because it will show them both why it's important, and how it can be accomplished in a reasonable manner.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: And that's where the book sits. If you're an HR professional, who's Sherm certified and done this for 10 years, you're going to find the book to be fun and entertaining and cover all the basics [Laugh].

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: But if you're a small business owner, who's looking at maybe be turning in inward for a little while, you've got the business growing, but you're realizing that the pieces inside your company, aren't up to the task of delivering on the promises and clients that you've been able to make and gather. This is the book for you, because it will give you the steps you need to get this well, moving inside your organization.

Steve Rush: Awesome. And if you think about the journey that we've all been on over the last couple of years through the pandemic, as we hopefully start to move beyond the pandemic, how have you seen people change their approach to processes and their people?

Rhamy Alejeal: Well, HR has been a hot topic over the last few years, of course. In the U.S., especially we had lots of diversity equity and inclusivity issues, and then the pandemic changed everything. And suddenly CEOs started realizing that their processes for keeping up with their people were heavily reliant on management by walking around, right. You had managers and they just kind of talked to their employees every day and sat next to them. That was a big part of management. That doesn't work very well in a remote world. It doesn't work in a global world where it may be 9:00 AM my time and 3:00 PM your time. Many companies were able to adapt very quickly to the pandemic and remote work and hybrid offices and the globalization of the marketplace very well, because they were already there. They already had the processes in place to manage remotely and not just rely on the gut of the manager, right. But the ones that didn't were hit very hard and they, I think over the last two years, three years have learned that they have to have processes in place to be able to scale that people's side of their operations.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: Both over a larger staff, but also over time at distance.

Steve Rush: Yeah. It's that moving from one place to another place, but if it's not there in the first place, then you're going to end up back in that chaotic basically you articulate earlier, right?

Rhamy Alejeal: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, we're going to flip the lens a little bit now. You've been leading people and teams, since you were 16 years old from those grass cutting days, right the way through to now where you've got a really large organization. So, I'm really keen to hack into that leadership experience of yours. If you had to dive in and think about the top three things, the top three leadership hacks, what would they be?

Rhamy Alejeal: I think there are a few places where everyone can improve. Of course, one piece of leadership is to understand and embrace that you are on stage, that what you do matters. It is the price of leadership. And it's not really a hack. It has nothing to do with people processes to a large degree but know that your organization is a reflection of you. And I find that often my business does best when I think about improving parts of my life that are not relevant to my business, right. Being in better shape and having a closer family and having a better balance, it shows, and it matters. So, no matter what processes and what technology and where your industry's at. Know that by signing up to lead an organization, either through entrepreneurship or in an executive role, you are signing up for a public role, a role where you will be judged in a role where the things that are not necessarily exactly tied to your performance at work matter, it's a public role. So, some people just need to hear that and understand that is what it is.

Steve Rush: Like It.

Rhamy Alejeal: It's a tough thing. Next up would be that the genius of processes, as we mentioned earlier, is in their iteration and improvement. Many people, especially leaders are high performing individuals who have turned in perfect papers, their whole life, right. Who have been at the top of the pack, the fastest runner, the best player, the top academic, and they've done it through hard work and perseverance. Business is a little different. Business never has an in season. Well, most of them anyway, unless you're running a football team.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: But most, it's going to go on forever. And the great genius of systems is that you can put one in place and then improve it and improve it and use the scientific method. Change one thing, see what the effect is, change one thing, see what the effect is. It's so much more valuable for you to put something in place and then improve it than it is for you in your great leadership genius, to sit in a dark room with Brandy and think hard for hours and come up with the perfect answer because you won't, there's no chance of it. It's just too complicated. So, I try to pull back my clients from feeling like their unique genius has to be expressed through any system inside their organization, allow it to exist and then make sure that a part of the system is to improve itself. And it will over time become significantly better than anything you alone could have dreamed up.

Steve Rush: Great.

Rhamy Alejeal: The final piece of leadership hack that I would say is, just a random kind of piece of information is to always think at the front lines, many organizations and a lot of times in the smaller organizations, as well as the larger ones, the executives think about other executives. If you ask a small business owner, who do you want to hire? It's always me, right. I want someone who's going to read my email, reply to it as if it were me, make my decisions, handle my books, and talk to my clients and just do me. And that's unfortunately not going to happen.

Steve Rush: That's right.

Rhamy Alejeal: Instead, look at what you do on a day-to-day basis and break it into the smallest job possible. The most focused job possible. One of the exercises I have my client go through as a true hack is to design your org chart for what you envision the future of your company to be. Recognizing that there are only 12 of you now, or 20 of you now. In my organization, our org chart is about twice as large as we are currently. We actually review that org chart quarterly, and that org chart is about half empty. And we've done that since we had three employees [Laugh]

Steve Rush: That's great.

Rhamy Alejeal: We had six people on our org chart and that gives you a direction to go and recognize that you, as the executive in a small business are probably doing seven jobs and your top people are probably doing three or four and that's okay. But think about them as unique individual jobs that have different requirements, descriptions, metrics, goals, competencies, skills. Recognize that in a small business, you may be doing multiple jobs, but think about them as individual ones. And that will give you a path to growth significantly faster. It will help you understand where your next hire are going to be and what needs to be done. And then fill in from the bottom to the top, the number of seven-person, small businesses I've spoken with that have a CEO, a chief marketing officer, a director of finance, a COO, a receptionist and a bookkeeper, right. And I'm like, wait, hey, hang on, buddy. You got to always start. And especially if you're new to hiring and scaling a business, start with the smallest job, you're going to screw it up. Might as well be that rather than a partner,

Steve Rush: Next part of the show, we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something has not gone well, might have even screwed up, but as a result, you've learned from it. And it's now a force of good in your work or life. What would be your Hack to Attack Rhamy?

Rhamy Alejeal: I've screwed up so much. It's hard to pick. When I started my company at 22, I had $105,000 in the bank. I rent a quarter floor and a high rise because I needed a beautiful place for my clients to meet me. I was spending $5,000 a month on marketing and advertising, and I didn't know would be successful. Six months in I had $4,000 in the bank and a payroll due of five and a rent due of five in like three weeks. And it's only gone down from there. We did well. We survived that, but multiple times throughout my business, I have come to these points of near utter failure. I have sobbed in my office. When I first launched payroll eight or nine years for example, my sister who'd worked with me for years. Young college student, she really took it over. She took over payroll. She helped me find the company that we purchased, which she helped me with every client. She was the head of payroll. And after graduating and then getting her master's degree, well, I couldn't afford to pay her as much as a big accounting firm. And it was right for her to move on. But man, I sat in my office and cried [laugh], why are you leaving? I thought we were going to grow this together. And it was incredibly painful.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: Some of the lessons I've learned, every single one of those issues has forced me to find a better way. And they have been the points of the greatest growth in my organization.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rhamy Alejeal: Every single time, every single time without fail, I have actually come to like when reality steps up and punches me in the face and says, you're doing it wrong. There's a major problem. So, try in that moment to take a deep breath and think. I'm so lucky that it happened now and not two years from now, two years of wasted work when I'm just building further into the structure that doesn't work. So, look out for those moments and consider them an opportunity.

Steve Rush: Super advice. Thank you, Rhamy. The last part of the show, we get to give you a chance to go and do some time travel now. Bump into Rhamy at 21, give him some advice. What would it be?

Rhamy Alejeal: I'm going to say 22, because that's when I started my company. 21-year-old Rhamy was going to be a physicist. He was pretty sure. So, that didn't work out. But 22, the day I opened my company. Some of the advice I would give me. Some of it I wouldn't need, but reading, learning every day is a huge value. I don't know that I need to tell myself that I've read and listened every day. So, it made a big difference. I think for most, it shocks me the number of successful businesses who don't just look at a library and salivate and go, oh my God, there's just so much success in there. I got to go look at it. I got to go read it. So that's my number one piece of advice for a younger person. For personally. It would be that this is going to be harder than you ever expected. And the spreadsheet you made, you know, everyone makes a spreadsheet a couple months before they start their business.

Steve Rush: That's right.

Rhamy Alejeal: And they project out and say, hey, five years, I'm going to be making money. And in 10 years, I would tell myself, that my spreadsheet is way optimistic for the first five to seven years of my business, that I was underestimating how incredibly difficult and hard this will be. But I would also say that my spreadsheet at 10 years has way underestimated how good it can be.

Steve Rush: That's nice. And that leads me to ask of you Rhamy, how we can get our listeners to connect with you? Find out a little bit more about the work that you and the firm do, but maybe you'll get a copy of the book?

Rhamy Alejeal: Oh yeah. Well, peopleprocesses.com is our website. You can search People Processes on Amazon to find in the book. It's also linked from our website. @peopleprocesses.com. We have some great free resources for subscribers, including things like overall templates to use, great onboarding checklists, ways of setting up a performance management system. Up at the top there's an academy where you can sign up for courses. That'll help you develop this in your own organization. And of course, right on the website, there's a contact us where you can reach out and schedule time with my staff or even me to figure out if we can work together. We work in the United States, but our academy is internationally focused and can help you with anywhere across the world.

Steve Rush: Excellent. And we'll make sure that's in our show notes so that as people finish listening, they can dive straight in.

Rhamy Alejeal: Wonderful.

Steve Rush: Rhamy I've really enjoyed chatting to you, and it's no surprise that you've made an enormous success in helping others build their business in the way that you've built yours. So, I just want to say thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule, to be on our show and thanks for being part of our Leadership Hacker community.

Rhamy Alejeal: Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate it.

Steve Rush: Thank you Rhamy.

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 https://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.

Gary Frey has served as president of a number successful companies, including Bizjournals.com, a business news portal which he helped transform from a three-person organization to a $100 million company which he sold to Microsoft. In this show you can learn about:

• The most important attributes of successful leaders today
• The role gratitude plays in leading others
• The philosophy of just connecting with good people
• How to use the Thrive-Wither self-assessment.

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

Find out more about Gary below:

Gary on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garydfrey/

Gary’s Blog Page: https://gfrey.wordpress.com

Full Transcript Below

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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 

Our special guest today is Gary Frey. He's an entrepreneur, multiple C-suite executive, and now super coach. But before we get a chance to dive into the conversation with Gary, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, we explore how to balance employee happiness and building business expectations. Toxic workplaces are nothing new. We've likely heard of horror stories of offices run on terror. What is new is, few workers are willing to put up with such conditions, a recent study for the Human Resources Management, SHRM. Completed the study that indicated one in five have left their job in the last five years because of company culture. So that culture is not only bad for the health of employees, but it's also bad for business with an estimated cost to businesses of being over 200 million pounds. Clearly, then keeping employees happy is critical to run a successful enterprise but needs a balance, and that balance needs to be achieved so that you get productivity too. And we can't become subservient to the needs of every employee, or we lose sight of the business needs.

In 2017, Google's apparent overcompensation of some staff politically was incorrect at the time called the F.U. Money, but colloquially led to a departure of many, and they took their hefty paychecks and used them to pursue other roles. And if you're underpaying employees so much that they can triple their salary elsewhere, well, then they should leave. However, if we allow every person who is headhunted to jump ship, we won't be left much talent at all. Those do stick around most likely to be under performers and unable to get a job elsewhere. And therefore, the companies left scrambling again. So, we have to create the right environment that fosters loyalty and motivation, so that talent feel the need to stay and want to continue on that journey. And of course, some businesses may not have the budget or flexibility to pay more, but it's still vital to show employees that ownership or leadership of a firm are doing all they can to cultivate happy and healthy work culture.

Paying more doesn't necessarily mean you get results. And this is where the key to balancing employee happiness lies. It's critical that we first communicate clearly and transparently any responsibilities that are tied to a position. If performance doesn't match that position, then there needs to be some open dialogue about standards, expectations, and the consequences of positively achieving and negatively achieving those outcomes.

And honest, candid conversations can motivate individuals to work hard, to improve their skills while simultaneously given them a reason to stay finding their purpose. There'll also be times when it's in the best interest of the employee to leave too whether we'd like them to stay or not. Someone may get an offer that comes along, gives them new opportunities. In that case, I know that moving on is likely to be best for the individual in the long term, albeit it's going to be painful for you.

The goal for each staff member is to thrive in tandem with the business and as leaders to clearly communicate honestly and identify the circumstances that will allow them to thrive and clear communication and openness fosters trust. So, show people your engage with careers so that that helps them want to succeed. And the hack here, with clarity, trust, and mutual understanding on both sides, you are more likely to achieve your expectations and outcomes and therefore standards are adhered. Expectations are met and positive consequences achieved by all. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Dive into our social media and let us know what you'd like to talk about.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Joining me on the show today is Gary Frey. He served as president as a number of successful companies, including bizjournals.com, a business news portal, where he helped transform the business from a three-person organization to a hundred million dollar plus company, which ended up selling on to Microsoft. He's now done two turnarounds and held executive positions in two Fortune 100 Companies, and now runs an incredibly successful coaching business and community. Gary, welcome to the show.

Gary Frey: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be with you.

Steve Rush: Looking forward to diving into learning a little bit about the journey you've been on so far. And we'd like to kick things off by our guests, just giving our listeners a little bit of a perspective on how they've arrived to do what they do. So, what's the backstory for you?

Gary Frey: Oh man, we don't have enough time. I started out as a graphic designer early in my career and did my first turnaround when I was 28 years old. I had no credentials whatsoever to be able to do that. But we did in nine months, which was really cool. I thought it was going to be my forever home. It became the Morris Frey Agency. So, my name was on the door, and we grew it into a really cool creative small but powerful little juggernaut. It was only a dozen people or so when we turned it around and then caught my partner, you know, his hand in the cookie jar one too many times financially. And I had to leave my own company. And so, I always thought I'm just going to, you know, I define myself as a creative director, you know, a designer and creative director and a guy in the ad agency world.

And you know, again, kind of, I planned God laughed and my career journey has been anything but to typical. And it's been an amazing journey, actually terrifying in many times and exhilarating in other times and taking me into places that I would've never imagined. So, as you had mentioned, I've run four companies and done a couple turnarounds and I've been inside the belly of the beast of two Fortune 500 Companies and that's where the MacGyver in my title comes from actually was one of those Fortune 500 Companies, which was really cool. But you know, being able to look back in the rear-view mirror and, you know, it's easy to see patterns when you're looking backwards. It's hard to see it when you're in the fog of war.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Gary Frey: Anyway, I'm extremely grateful. It's taken me into industries that I had no business doing, including bizjournals, you know, I was not a publishing guy and I was not, you know, a tech guy and yet, you know, I was running a .com in the middle of crazy .com stories. And I got some amazing, funny and wild stories from that time too. But, you know, on insulating glass manufacturing company, like what do I know about that? Nothing. When I look through all of these things, all of my jobs, except for two were because of somebody that knew me or had worked alongside me and saw something, typically they saw something in me that I didn't see myself.

Steve Rush: Right.

Gary Frey: So anyway, and I've had great leaders and I've had really terrible leaders and I've learned from both. So, you know, you're talking about, you know, leadership hacks, you know, that's awesome to be able to have worked under some really powerful and wonderful leaders that demonstrated servant leadership. And then under ogres that demonstrated just because you're sitting in a power perch, doesn't make you a leader.

Steve Rush: Exactly, right. So, when you head did off on your entrepreneurial journey and you started bumping into these opportunities, was there something that was common amongst them that was alluring for you? What was that one thing that drew you towards the opportunities you had?

Gary Frey: You know, it's funny. Relationships actually, quite frankly, a lot of it. And I would say early in my career, you know, there were some star gazing moments of, you know, I'm going to, you know, put my name in lights or whatever, and that was pretty short lived, you know, one thing about it, you get kicked in the teeth a few times and then you lose that luster. But one of the things early on, when I was 31, I caught my partner doing some financial impropriety things that he shouldn't have been doing and caught him twice, you know, which, you know, when you got to leave your own company and I chose to leave, because I wasn't going to destroy him, you know, he had made some bad choices, were all one stupid choice away from disaster, I think.

Steve Rush: Yeah, you're right.

Gary Frey: And I didn't want to destroy him, and I didn't want to destroy my own name. And I would've had to do that if I would've taken the company across the street, everybody in town and Wichita, Kansas knew who my partner was. He had been the head of corporate communications for Cessna Aircraft, and he was 20 years older than me. And you know, that’s a big, small town, you know, a few hundred thousand people. And so, my choice was, I'm not going to destroy him and I'm not going to destroy my name. So, I got to start all over again. And one of the things that I did was at the ripe old age of 31, did this really simple T-Chart that I call thrive, wither. And you split the piece of paper in two. On the left side, you right thrive. And on the right side, you write wither. And I didn't have a ton of experience, but I had enough to know what environments and the kind of tasks and the kind of responsibilities and kind of environments that made me come alive. And on the right side, the wither side, I also had enough experience at that point. I've got a whole lot more now, but enough to be able to say, what are the things that I might even be good in these things, but they just drain my tank.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Gary Frey: And you know, one of the things that I learned really quickly when we did that, turnaround, everybody quit except for me and my partner, we had to take 20% pay a cut. Everybody hit the doors except for me and my partner. And so, I had to do everything except for the PR, he was a PR guy. So writing, designing, selling, billing, that all fell on me.

Steve Rush: Right.

Gary Frey: Then when you scale, you got to divide and conquer, and you got to find other people that will never do it just like you did. And I had to find three people in particular pretty quickly to take some of the things off of me and, you know, we didn't have a lot of money. So, I had to hire younger folks, you know, with less experience, but had kind of batteries installed already. And so, I learned really quickly, you know, more about how to communicate better. I wasn't perfect at it, but, you know, set the sites on what the target is, let them find their own way to hit it as long as it doesn't violate core values and who you are as a company and what you're trying to instill, they're going to find a different path than you would've taken.

And that's okay. So, I would say, you know, keeping, you know, true to my, you know, what makes me come alive. I started looking at all these additional opportunities that eventually came and some of them, they came on the heels of destruction, you know, quite frankly, where you're just forlorn, wondering, you know, if the world has fallen, you know, do you have what it takes to continue to move on, et cetera. I started really trying to evaluate, well, does this fit me and my unique giftings and that sort of thing or is it asking too much of things that I might even be able to do or that I really suck at that would drain my tank because that's not going to be a good move if that's the case. So hopefully that answers some of the question.

Steve Rush: Sure does. And one thing, I guess I've just noticed in all of the things that you've just shared is that in entering those entrepreneurial journeys, you were pretty confident you had most of the attributes that were going to get you there, but not all. And therefore, there was definitely this energy that comes with that around confidence and conviction, as well as having a majority of the attributes, but not all of them, right?

Gary Frey: Yeah, and quite frankly, in some cases, I didn't think I had any of them.

Steve Rush: Right.

Gary Frey: You know, it's really funny. That turnaround, that was kind of the first of many times where I've felt completely outgunned, completely unworthy, you know, completely like they've tapped the wrong guy on the shoulder. In some of those cases, in some of the biggest moves I've actually been brought into, which had me terrified. And I thought, oh my gosh, no, I'm not the right guy, because you know, then once I take that job, then they're going to see the emperor has no clothes. I don't know what I'm doing. In all of those cases, people identified stuff in me. So that first one, this guru that was brought in from Richmond, Virginia. He was a really a business development guru. And it was a Hail Mary because my partner was basically bankrupt. I mean, it was a last-ditch effort to try to keep from going bankrupt. And this guy was extremely expensive. I mean he was 10,000 bucks a day plus expenses in 1991.

Steve Rush: That’s a lot of cash.

Gary Frey: It was a lot of money, but it was, like I said, a Hail Mary. And when they called me at home, we didn't have cell phones at the time. I didn't know him from Adam, and he said, Gary, you know, I know you don't know me, but here's the opportunity that I'm looking for. I've talked with a number of people and your peers around town, your name keeps coming up. And I said, I don't know anything about, you know, doing a turnaround or anything. Like, he goes, yeah, but these are the things that we need, and you know, the kind of position in the marketplace they were wanting to own. And I had worked for the top firm in town that had that position that they wanted to have. And that firm ended up selling to a larger company.

And so, kind of destroyed a lot of the stuff that made it unique and special. And in all of those cases, bizjournals.com, same thing. When their top publisher said, Gary, you're the guy, we've got national search looking for somebody to be president over this entity. And I said, Ed, I don't know anything about, you know, publishing, I don't know, I'm not an early adopter technology guy, that's not me. And he goes, no, no, no, but here's what we need. You have started, run, and turned around companies and we need somebody to take this three-person entity and grown into real Bonafede business. Two, you're a bridge builder, you know, you connect really well with people, even in warring factions, in big companies. And I'd done that in a couple big companies. And he said, we got 41 publishers that basically run their own businesses. And they are terrified of the chairman announcing that we've got this .com entity and it's a separate entity. And they think they're going, by the way, the dodo bird, they're very defensive and we need your bridge building skills. And then the final thing is, it's called am city.com for American City. The holding company was American City Business Journals. And he said, it doesn't make sense, that name makes no sense for papers that are called business journals. And some of them are business chronicles. His was the Atlanta Business Chronicle and he was the top publisher. And he said, so we're going to have to rebrand this thing and you're the right guy to do that. So, he outlined very succinctly three things that I would was really good at, but I was terrified of going into a situation where I was going to fail because I didn't have those credentials. Oh, and by the way, I'm a college dropout. So, you know, I have two years of college and was offered a job at the height of the great recession actually before 2008-2009. But in 1982 is the highest unemployment in U.S. history since the great depression. And so, I had this job offer and my advisor said, ditch the paid scholarship and take it because grads aren't finding jobs. So, I had this additional achilles heel or, you know, albatross around my neck that was following me around everywhere saying I'm not good enough.

Steve Rush: In hindsight, Gary, do you think that the fear of the unknown has actually been a driver in many respects?

Gary Frey: I don't know if it was a driver, but it was definitely there. And the responsibility of providing for my family, you know, I got married at 21 and my wife was 19 and we're still married 39 years later. And we had kids, you know, a couple years later her after we got married and she stayed home with the kids. So, I had no option, you know, I had to provide for my family. I wanted to provide for my family.

Steve Rush: Right.

Gary Frey: And in many cases it threw me into situations where if I would've had an option, I wouldn't have taken the option. I would've taken a safer option. So, you know, the best boss I ever had was still one of the top execs at Bank of America, a woman. And she would often say, Gary, we have more confidence in you than you do, which was very true. But she did the same thing where she would just push me and encourage me, you know, you've got more under the hood than you think that you do. And sometimes a little bit of that kind of encouragement and cajoling combined with the necessity of, I just got to do this. has pushed me into it, but she would often say, Gary, you're just so entrepreneurial. And this place was a pretty entrepreneurial place. We went from 80,000 associates or employees to 160,000 in two years with the three largest bank acquisitions in history at that time. And so, it was a whirlwind all the time and she would say, you know, you're an entrepreneur. And I'd say, you know what, actually I'm not. I'm more of a turnaround guy. Entrepreneurs, like they see the non-existent and they call it into existence. I've worked for some I'm amazing entrepreneurs. And sometimes you would go, well, you're lying but they would go, no, I'm not lying. I can see it, even though it's not there yet. And that really isn't me, but I am a problem solver, and I can see things. And so typically I love to come in alongside, in bizjournals, the same thing, three people, we turned it into a real business, but you know, somebody had gotten that thing off the ground, they got it moving and then they needed some additional oomph to take it to the next level.

Steve Rush: That must have been some moment though, when you know, Microsoft come along. Hundred-million-dollar company at this time, and you sell out. That must have been a really proud moment for you, right?

Gary Frey: It was very interesting. So, they bought 20% of the company for $20 million. And before that, that was the second all offer that we actually had. And that was a year after the .com bubble blew up. And so, we had .com wasteland everywhere. The one before that though, and this was only a few months into my time there as the president, I was meeting with a competitor in San Francisco, we put a million dollars in this competitor, and it was before I got there. So as soon as I got there, the chairman said, I need you to go out to San Francisco, meet with these guys. I put a million bucks into them. I go, why'd you do that with a competitor? And he goes, and he just kind of winked at me. And he's like, I like to keep my enemies close, like smart, right.

And so, I go meet with these guys. And then shortly after, within a few months I developed a pretty good rapport with them, but one of the first meetings was really hilarious. They were losing 40 million a year, burning it. They were just spending money like drunken sailors. They had a million-dollar top line, not quite. And I asked the guy, he was an Oxford educated, really brilliant Egyptian guy. And I said, Timor, you know, I was just blown away. They had big screen TVs everywhere when they were about $15,000 a piece, you know? And like, it was just crazy. Hundreds of people running around, bringing you lattes, doing neck massages between meetings. I'm like, what the heck is this? I said, what is your business model? And he says to me, look, Gary, it's a very nimble business model driven by eyeballs. That's what he said, word for word. And I said, so Timor, what you're telling me. I said, I'm not a real smart guy. And I didn't go to Oxford, but what you're telling me is you don't have one. And what you do have is advertising.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Gary Frey: And he goes precisely. Well, they sold about a month later. He calls me and he says, Gary, you got to come out here and you got to meet with all these investment bankers. We're having this big celebration party. We sold to NBCI for $225 million. We're rich, and I thought, you have freaking got to be kidding. After they sold, they wanted to buy 20% of our company. And they had that same valuation. But we were going to have to take all of our traffic and run it through. It was called allbusiness.com. And so, I take this to my chairman. He has to think about it for a few weeks and he comes back and he says, you know what, that's mind blowing. But he said, I don't think these guys are going to be in business in 18 months. He goes, Gary, this whole .com thing is going to blow. And he called it to the month. He called to the month, and we ran extremely conservatively. I had gone from running tens of millions of dollars in marketing budgets at Bank of America. I had to arm wrestle this guy for, I think, 7,500 bucks for the whole year of marketing. But he called it. And so, when the next year when Microsoft came through and I mean, that really validated what we had, you know, a .com that sells to NBCI for stupid money in the stupid world of the .com crazy at the time.

That was novel, but it, you know, toysrus.com had a much bigger valuation and they were losing money, hand over fist versus their brick and mortar, so that was kind of not real. Microsoft made it legitimate. But what that also meant was I was not going to be having the reins that I did and, you know, things were going to change. And so that's when I left actually to go, I had merged two companies together when I was at Bank of America. I was consulting with two friends who owned separate firms. And I actually merged those things together. I made the introductions, they asked me to be the third partner. And I said, no, you know, I'd been through the partner fiasco that I'd bitten once, I'm not doing that again.

Steve Rush: Right.

Gary Frey: Well, they came back after they heard about the Microsoft thing and they said, you know, why don't you come and be our third partner? We'll still give you a third of the company. You be president, so it's truly a merger because I don't really actually believe there are mergers. Somebody acquired somebody. And then the person that got acquired, they're made to feel better by yeah, we merged in with them. Well, you actually, he got acquired. In this case they really did merge. They both had very complimentary groups of people, their places in the marketplace. And by having me come in as president, it wasn't, well, one acquired the other is like, I'm completely a neutral party. And I actually brought those guys together. So that was kind of a cool thing. So yeah, it was cool with Microsoft, but it also meant that okay, things are going to change and I'm probably not going to enjoy a lot of it, you know, beholden to somebody out in Seattle

Steve Rush: When one door closes another open though, right?

Gary Frey: Well, yeah. And it did, yeah.

Steve Rush: It led you to do what you do now, didn't it?

Gary Frey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Quite frankly I loved what I was doing there, but I'm glad I'm not in publish, you know. I mean, I loved it and I loved the people, but I've been in private equity since then. I've been in some really interesting places that I would've never been brought into had I just, and I actually took a pay cut to leave that gig and, you know, joined these two partners.

Steve Rush: And one of the things that I remember from the first time that you and I met Gary, is you have this philosophy that cuts across all of the work you've done and that's just connecting good people with other good people. And that's been a real tenet of yours, isn't it?

Gary Frey: Oh yeah. I love it. If I was a billionaire and when I was in private equity, we actually had a couple billionaires in the group, and I learned so much from these extremely high net worth people. But what I learned from them is even if they were in their eighties and some of them had run the largest oil companies in the world, you know, I mean just some amazing human beings. They were still engaged in what they loved to do. And, you know, rarely were they out playing golf.

Steve Rush: Right.

Gary Frey: You know, they were engaged in business. They were engaged actually in helping other people. And that was one of the things that I did within that private equity group, where we had 300 ultra-high net worth families in the group. I had actually invested in it a year before they bought my company. And I was small potatoes compared to all these other guys, quite frankly. But what I learned from them was, and what I learned about myself I guess was, I became the connecting rod in between these people, because they're all high value targets. They can't trust anybody for a good reason, you know, everybody is coming at them with an angle, and they want in their pockets quite frankly.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Gary Frey: And so, it was an honor and a privilege to be able to connect these really amazing people with other people that they could trust. Because it's very lonely. It's very lonely, actually running a company and at the top of a company, but I can't even imagine being a billionaire or worth $350 million. And when you've gone from not much to that, and then all of a sudden, you know, everybody's coming at you for something rather than for who you are.

Steve Rush: It's an interesting perspective, yeah. Because people then see people that high net worth as a commodity, don't they? Rather than a person,

Gary Frey: Oh, big time.

Steve Rush: Right.

Gary Frey: Big time.

Steve Rush: So, you're now focused on coaching some super big hitters, as well as some startups and a really nice diverse portfolio of coaching. What's next for you on your journey then Gary?

Gary Frey: Well, so here's, what's interesting. Coaching is really lonely and every time I've done it, somebody's tried to hire me. So, the biggest one that I got to work with was the CEO of Yokohama Tires in California. And it was because the top American introduced me to them because after he had gotten to know me for about a year or so, I was helping them on some challenges that they had. He's like, you need to meet Mr. Karashima and so I did, and from what I can tell, I was the first kind of American outsider that was allowed to come into the inner circle, which was really cool. That was wonderful. And then they tried to hire me, you know; we did this huge project. And it was re really successful even to the point where a number of years later, when I talked with Jim, who was the top American, I said, you know, and this is right in the middle of the rubble of 2009, when the decimation of the great recession was everywhere.

And our company, our private equity firm blew up 30 million bucks, most of us got wiped out, including me. And I just felt extremely low at that time. And I said, Jim, did we make a difference? And he said, do you know how many people we had to let go during the recession? And I said, no, I was just going to be even more depressed. And he said, zero. I said, are you kidding me? He goes, no, we didn't have to let go one person. And he goes, you know what? Karashima still says to this day that, that exercise and, it was kind of a repositioning and getting them really clear on their core values and their purpose. They had been chasing, you know, each CEO would come in after, you know, they'd do a three- or four-year stint and they would chase and put their own mark in the American market of whatever they were chasing.

And they'd kind of lost their way, quite frankly. And so, all I did was help them using some research, but then also guiding them as to no, you guys need to own this market, hold fast, don't waiver. And, you know, they saw great success. Well, he said that was the single most impactful thing. He said, Gary, and I think we charged him a quarter million bucks for this. He said, you could have charged us 10 times the amount and it would've been worth it. And I thought, wow, this is amazing. But I've kind of taken that bait one too many times. But as soon as you take the bait and you go on the inside of the company, you lose your voice as the coach. And so, I've got kind of the best of both worlds right now. I rolled my coaching practice into a regional CPA firm.

I'm not a CPA, don't want to be, but it's very unusual because 11 of the 80 of us have started run or turned around companies using our money. That's extreme unusual in the CPA world. And we work with privately held companies. We love helping them grow. So, for me, one of the things I learned early on part of my thrive, wither was, I got to be part of a team to really have fun. I could make more money just being a solo guy, coaching. And all you got is, you know, your brand and your time. And if you can, you know, one to many it by doing programs and stuff like that. But I love being part of a team. I swam my fastest splits when I was a swimmer in high school and college on my relays because I wanted to win more for the team than I wanted to a win for me.

And so, I think, you know, I'm probably going to be the first non CPA to become a partner and buy into this company, because even if they changed all the tax laws and you could mail it all in, what we do is help business owners who know their industry and they know their company, run their companies better, more financially prudent and smarter to where they understand those things. But also, on the culture side to where they can get above the three line and not have to just be working in the business but working on the business. So that's kind of my happy spot.

Steve Rush: Excellent stuff. So, this is the part of the show where we turn the tables a little bit.

Gary Frey: Yeah.

Steve Rush: And I get to have the great honor of diving in and hacking your great leadership brain. And if I could, I'd ask you this to get those leadership hacks down to your top three belters, what would they?

Gary Frey: Yeah. So, the first one, and there's no substitution for this, in my opinion. And it comes down to, are you going to adopt the position of I'm going to serve or I'm going to be served. And only each CEO can really ask that, or each leader. Is my objective to be served or am I going to serve? That's the number one, the best leaders I've ever had and worked around. They had the disposition of humility, and I am going to serve. I'm going to choose to serve, and they walk among the troop. They're the ones that stay in the fight versus issue edicts from a position of safety. That's hands down, the number one thing. Number two would be, understand kind of your own thrive and wither. Like what makes you come alive and what makes wither? Because if you do that and then you do it among your team, then all of a sudden, what I do with my high growth coaching clients on a yearly basis, we'll go through kind of their thrive, wither.

And then we'll look at how their functions are working you know, do we have bottlenecks where too many people are going into this, you know, are waiting for this person where they've got too much on their shoulders. And I do, I call it horse trading of responsibilities. The CEO is still the CEO, the CFO is still the CFO but sometimes stuff that they've willingly shouldered because there was nobody else do. It's dragging them down, kind of like barnacles on a boat, slowing the boat down, you got a dry docket. And then you see, oh gosh, we got barnacles, scrape them off, so that's really an important number two. And it is in that order because you could do thrive, wither and all that, but if you still have the disposition of y'all are serving me, well that's, you know, it's going to show, and you aren't going to go real far.

Steve Rush: Yep.

Gary Frey: And then the final thing is, really how do you, and you got to keep asking this question because you never really arrive, but getting the team, your team one, your core team around you. Aligned, focused and executing on the important versus the tyranny of the urgent. Those are my three.

Steve Rush: Awesome. I love this whole notion of thrive, wither. Because it not only is it visual, but you can actually almost anchor energy to what makes you thrive and what makes you be aware of dragging that energy away from you as well. Love it.

Gary Frey: Yeah. It's so simple, man. I'm again a T-Chart. you split the piece of paper vertically into two and you write and do a horizontal line at the top and you write thrive on the left and you wither on the right. And I have everybody do this. I say, give yourself 30 minutes, quiet, turn off all the distractions. And seriously just give yourself 30 minutes. Stream of consciousness, all the stuff that makes you come alive, the environments, the variety, or the routine, whatever those things are, focus on, what the positive first then move into the wither and think about even the stuff that you've accepted, because you may be good at it. You may be the expert in pivot tables, but you just hate doing pivot tables. Well, put it down.

Steve Rush: Yeah, super. Next part of the show we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is to where something hasn't worked out well, but as a result, you've got some good learning out of it. And it now serves you positively. What would be your Hack to Attack?

Gary Frey: You know when I was at Bank of America. Early on, I was given a team because I had to go figure out why did this acquisition, why is it not working? And why is our attrition high and blah, blah, blah. They thought it was a communication message. And you know, having run Ad Agencies or whatever, that's why they thought. And I was from that part of the country, this 11-state region in the Midwest versus the East Coast. And so that was another reason why I was in there. But what was interesting is, one of my lieutenants, she was really good at helping me kind of navigate the organization because you start in and you know, everything's new. But I had a very young associate vice president that was on her team. And what I was doing was I was actually micromanaging some stuff like; I wanting status reports probably too frequently on some stuff. I mean, we were moving at the speed of light, it seem like anyway, just trying to, you know, assimilate these acquisitions and then getting stuff done and dealing with problems and all this. And they were long days and short nights for sure. But this Lieutenant came to me and said, Gary, you know, Lisa, you are just killing her, you know?

 And I said, well, first of all, I'm really glad that she raised this to you. I wasn't aware that I was doing it.

Steve Rush: Right.

Gary Frey: So, she has complete access, and I was a senior VP, and she was, you know, three rungs down. She can come to me anytime if she sees me kind of grab up in the wheel again, she has a permission to spank my hand. Like, no, no more of that, and I will adhere to it. So that was one thing but another one that was kind of hand in hand with this is, she said when's the last time you ran? Because I was a big runner and I said, oh, it's been a few days. And I said why? And she kind of looked at me, she's go, Aah. I go, what do you mean? And she goes, well, your kind of edgy. I go, really? She goes, yeah. And so, she said, I'm going to take over your calendar and I'm going to make sure that at least three days of the business week, because on the weekends, I would run anyway. But at least three days, we're going to put meet with Jim and that's code to get your butt to the gym, strap on those running shoes and go run. And that was a huge thing for me, and my wife acknowledged that. She's like, yeah. And so, I know that I'll get more edgy. I want to get more controlling. If I'm not physically exerting myself and getting exercise to clear my head routinely. So not six days a week, period. I don't miss it.

Steve Rush: Awesome.

Gary Frey: So that's another one.

Steve Rush: Yeah. And the last part our listeners have become really accustomed to and love diving into is you get a chance to give Gary some advice when you were 21 and do that time travel. What would your advice to Gary 21 be?

Gary Frey: Well, I would've said ditch the Tom Selleck mustache that I was trying to hide behind first of all, it was ridiculous. But seriously I'm actually writing a book right now with this is the working title and it's ignored the imposter, give me anything but typical. And the imposter syndrome was really heavy with me. College dropout, every job I was up for was masters preferred, bachelors required. And yet somehow, I landed these jobs, but I always felt less than, and I was always comparing myself to somebody else. And it's been working with so many CEOs and entrepreneurs that I've realized that they have had some. There's this woman, she had 10,000 employees at one point, privately held business. And she's become a very good friend and she had two years of secretarial school. She never even had a CFO, even a fractional CFO when she had an organization that big, and she said, Gary, I don't know what I'm doing.

I said, Tana, I know people that don't even have a hundred employees that they still can't survive without a fractional CFO or a CFO. You are far better than you thought. And some of those conversations just reinforced to me. Oh dang, you know, we're all created uniquely. We all have unique fingerprints by design. And so, I'm very, very passionate about helping people understand, like, you know, that imposter syndrome none of us are immune to it necessarily, but there's a way you can silence it and that's, you know, and some of that kind of goes back to thrive, wither and being true to yourself is, you know Shakespeare said, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah, very much. So, Gary, I've loved chatting with you. You got loads of great stories, and I'm confident that our listeners would be thriving versus withing as a result of the conversation.

Gary Frey: I hope so.

Steve Rush: But how can we make sure that we can get them in touch with you?

Gary Frey: Yeah, probably the easiest thing is just connected with me on LinkedIn, you know, it's just Gary Frey at LinkedIn and that's probably the easiest way to do it. I'm also on Instagram and again there, I’m just Gary Frey.

Steve Rush: Brilliant.

Gary Frey: But I love writing about leadership and things. Some of the crazy things that I've experienced to hopefully help and bless somebody else and give them encouragement. I'd be remiss if I mentioned we started a podcast like you.

Steve Rush: Absolutely

Gary Frey: A couple years ago and it's called the Anything But Typical Podcast. And we just feature privately held business owners and entrepreneurs. And primarily in my City, Charlotte, I've had people from around the globe say, hey, can we be on that? And typical, I say, no, because I want to continue to elevate what's happening in my own backyard first.

Steve Rush: Well, Gary this goes without saying thanks ever so much coming and sharing your stories with us and thanks being part of our Leadership Hacker Community.

Gary Frey: No thank you. It has been a blessing and just a ton of fun. So, thank you.

Steve Rush: Thanks Gary.

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.

Matt Schlegel is the Principal of Schlegel Consulting and Evolutionary Teams, he’s an entrepreneur and ex Tech Executive and now author of Teamwork 9.0. In this show you can learn:

• How Matt evolved Teamwork 9.0 and why numbers and not letters?
• How Teamwork 9.0 plays to “Whole Brain” thinking
• Neuroscience and the Enneagram
• How to build problem solving muscles

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.

Find out more about Matt below:

Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattschlegel/

Matt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MattSchlegel

Company Website: https://evolutionaryteams.com

Full Transcript Below

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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

Matt Schlegel is joining me on the show today. He's an author, consultant speaker, and founder of Schlegel Consulting. But before we get a chance to speak with Matt, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: We've all heard of the great resignation, right? However, employees say and sustainable workloads and expect are the things that are driving to quit. In a recent article by Emmy Lucas of Forbes. She describes that not only unsustainable workloads or one of the top factors contributing to the great resignation, others such as uncaring managers, inadequate compensation, lack of career development are all contributory factors. However, survey completed by McKinsey recently, which queried nearly 600 employees looked at those who'd left without another job lined up and those who returned to work. Much of the analysis of how to solve the great resignation is really focused on giving workers higher pay, better career opportunities and nicer perks and days off and mental therapy and help and better family leave. But there's been less attention paid to actual workloads employees have. And how employees plan to address that issue. 35% of respondent said unsustainable work performance expectations were they reason that they left their job without another in hand.

And the same percentage said that they would leave uncaring leaders or a lack of career development. Following these reasons were a lack of meaningful work, better support for employee health and wellbeing, inadequate compensation, but ironically compensation ranked six as a reason of leaving, suggesting that evidence that pay isn't everything. It means something, of course, the report showed that those who work in an environment, they like also find purpose in their work and have better relationships and therefore, probably stick around. When it comes to returning to work. 47% of the 600 respondents polled and about a quarter of those return to non-traditional work, whilst three quarters went back to traditional employment and of those 600 respondents who left without another job lined up, 44% of them said that they'd have little or no interest in returning to the same job doing the same work in the next six months. The highest-ranking reason for why people did return to work in the work they were doing previously was having a strong identity and policy that addresses workplace flexibility. So, post pandemic workplace flexibility includes not just ours, but flexible places, space, time, empathy, understanding. Commitments to the work that they're undertaking. So, organizations and employers really need to take a hard look at whether they're ready and can actually deliver on making the right structural changes to actually deal with things like work overload.

As we move into the next phase of change, we're already in the future of work. So, it's really important that the work itself is prioritized. We tend to want to make those quick and easy solutions, but it will take us all effort and time to readjust in the hybrid world or whatever label we choose to give it. So, my leadership hack here is. Often when people leave an organization, we conduct exit interviews. I wonder if it is time for us to have stay interviews, to really get to the heart of understanding. What's really driving the needs and desires of people who want to stay here. And if we listen, adapt, and create the right environments for our teams, our coworkers, and our organization, we're all going to be the beneficiaries of that. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Really love for you to share any stories, insights on either our social media or through our website. Let's get into the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Our special guest on today's show is Matt Schlegel. He's the principal of Schlegel Consulting and Evolutionary Teams. He's an entrepreneur and ex tech executive. And now the author of teamwork 9.0. Matt, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Matt Schlegel: It is a delight to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Steve Rush: It's our delight too. And we always like to kick off our shows to dive in, to find out a little bit about the man behind the magic. So, tell us a little bit about how you, Matt ended up doing what you're doing now and moved away from the tech business to help lead Evolutionary Team.

Matt Schlegel: Oh yeah. thank you so much. Yeah, so like you said, you know, I started out with a tech background, studied engineering, electrical engineering. And as I, you know, proceeded through my career, my boss came to me one day and said, hey, Matt, you know, we want you to manage a team. I'm like, why do you want me to manage a team? I know nothing about leading people. I only know about leading electrons. And he is like, don't worry, you'll be fine. Well, I'm not the type to be not worried. So, I was worried. And when I get that way, what I do is, I go and study and get my hands on everything, you know, information I could find and learn about, you know, what it is that I'm embarking on as you know, a leader of people.

So, along that journey, I encountered a system called The Enneagram and Enneagram is, you know, commonly understood as a personality system, has nine types that are in the system. And by the time I had encountered The Enneagram, I had already been exposed to other you know, personality systems in the workplace like Myers Briggs and Disc and Strengthfinders, there's a bunch of them. And so, I kind of put it into that category and, you know, I want to use it and I tried it and I used it for myself and my family just to kind of test it out. And I found that it was so powerful and fascinating and helped me understand myself in a way that I'd never understood before and understand my relationships both professionally and personally as, you know, my type interacted with the other types. And so, yeah, so, you know, that fascination just led me on this journey of exploring it more and more. I started to use it in the workplace and had incredible results and that's why I went on to build a consulting practice around that. And you know, eventually wrote my book Teamwork 9.0 to share, you know, some of the learnings that I had along the way.

Steve Rush: And was there a pivotal moment for you? Because, you know, let's speak quite frank about it. You're quite modest. You had some big roles in some big organizations, you know, you were part of the PalmPilot evolution, you know, back in the day, there must have been, you know, you were riding the crest of a corporate career at one stage and there must have been a pivotal moment you thought, you know what, I can take what I'm learning and I can share it with others, what actually happened there?

Matt Schlegel: Yeah. So, my career you know, it started out in tech. Started in San Diego, I was raised in the Bay Area. And so, when we had children, we wanted to move closer back, you know, to where our families are to raise the kids. And so, I started on the, you know, just that journey of startups and it was just exhilarating to be in that environment, and you know, and developing new products, you know, cutting edge all the way. And so, you know, being in that for, you know, 15 years or so, just very intensely, I got to the point, and I guess it was around 2007, it was during the downturn. And I just had this idea of, you know, one day I wanted to go into consulting and have my own practice.

And at that point in my career, I said well, if that's kind of what my long term path is, why not test it out? Why not see if I can start a consulting business and run a consulting business now and, you know, if it works, great, because then, you know, in my dream role, you know, earlier than anticipated. If it doesn't work out, then my Plan B, you know, go back into tech. Well, fortunately and gratefully it did work out really well. And so, I was able to just go down that path and build my consulting practice. And I've been doing it now for 15 years this year.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Excellent story. So, when you talk about The Enneagram, it's revolved around nine numbers, which I guess is what's driven the whole Teamwork 9.0.

Matt Schlegel: Right.

Steve Rush: What is it about the numbers then that is so different with what you do versus then some of the others which are letter driven like Disc and Myers Briggs and the like?

Matt Schlegel: Right, as an engineer, you know, one of the things that I found really satisfying about The Enneagram as opposed to some of the other systems is that it, really speaks to, you know, our evolving over time, how our behaviors change over time. And those behaviors will change depending on our stress level. Are we feeling secure or insecure? And our level of maturity. Are we younger? Are we older? And so, this is one of the fascinating things. And if you look at The Enneagram diagram, you'll see these lines within the circle. And that's what those lines are talking about is, how it moves. Well, so that was one aspect. But then I did ask that question, why are they numbers rather than letters? And it turns out there's a reason why they're numbers and it's because it speaks to motion around the outer circle.

And so, if you look at The Enneagram, you just look at the circle and numbers, it looks like a clock, right? And just like the hands of a clock, go, you know, clockwise around the circle, The Enneagram is also describing a dynamic of clockwise motion around the circle. And when I thought about it more, I realized, oh, this is describing a process. And these are the steps, the order in that process, one through nine, and it describes the way humans solve problems. It's a problem-solving process.

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt Schlegel: Once I had that epiphany, I'm like, oh, now I have a problem-solving process. I can work with my teams on. And there is a personality type that's perfectly tuned for each step-in problem solving. And once you have that, you know, model, then you can have, you know, great success with teams understanding how to work teams around problem solving to get results.

Steve Rush: So, it's almost kind of decoding the problem inside out, isn't it?

Matt Schlegel: Exactly, exactly. And it lets you understand, you know, where your teams are going to be really good at problem solving. It's going to tell you where they might struggle or where, you know, steps they might skip altogether, just because there's no dynamic represented by the team at that point in problem solving.

Steve Rush: And from the top to the bottom of those nine steps, there's a neurological and chronological order in the which way we do this, right?

Matt Schlegel: This is another thing that before I really dove into The Enneagram, I wanted to make sure that there was some neurological underpinning to the system and it's still very early. And we don't have, you know, really good understanding yet. But I found a fellow who described a model of how you could get those nine distinct types out of two parts of the brain, which is the Amygdala and The Prefrontal Cortex. Each one of those parts, since we have a Bicameral Brain, you're going to have right dominance, left dominance and then a middle, Ambi or Ambiguated. And it's the three states of the Abliqua, times the three states of The Prefrontal Cortex give you the nine types. So that's a model that I came upon and it seems to match well, the behaviors described by those states of the Abliqua and The Prefrontal Cortex match well to the behaviors described by The Enneagram. So, it kind of gave me, you know, at least two ways to look at the way people are behaving that were consistent with one another.

Steve Rush: When we first met Matt, I had this kind of look bit of an aha moment around the fact that this is where it can really start to engineer great teamwork and thinking, because if we're thoughtful of what triggers a reaction or a threat response in our Amygdala, which is that part of the brain that regulates the emotion.

Matt Schlegel: Right.

Steve Rush: We can maybe think about tactically, how we can avoid them. And then we can practically spend more time in our executive thinking, which is that Prefrontal Cortex. And it was that aha moment for me around, ah, that's why there's nine and that's how they kind of fit together.

Matt Schlegel: Yes, exactly. And you bring up such a good point. And this, you know, speaks to one of the ways that an individual can use The Enneagram is, once you understand, you know, that  Amygdala trigger in yourself and what that feels like, and what you know, that's going to cause you to do. Once you have an understanding of that at intellectual level, then when you do go into that state, you know, you can know it better and manage it better and then, you know, bring yourself through it and back out to, you know, a more secure and healthy state without inadvertently just letting yourself be taken over by that emotional state.

Steve Rush: Right, yeah. So, let's dive into the nine themes. Like, it'd be really helpful just to get a sense of what are they and how they work and how they all related?

Matt Schlegel: Right, right. Yeah. So, you know, I'll go around in order and also describe how each one of the types helps in problem solving. You know, so, you know, what's the first step in problem solving? It's, you know, hey, there's a problem. It shouldn't be like that.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt Schlegel: It should be like this. Well, that's the dynamic of type one. Often called the perfectionist and the perfectionist is the one who's going to like identify, hey, things shouldn't be like that. They should be like this. So, that's the dynamic of one. And then the dynamic of two, speaks to, you know, who cares, right. And that's the next step in problem solving is like, you know, if there's a problem, then you need people to care enough about the problem to actually want to do something, to solve the problem.

And type two is called the helper. And so are there are ones who identify, oh, there's something that needs to be done and I'm going to help get that done. So that's step two, and that's the dynamic. Then, you know, step three in problem solving is just coming up with ideas for how to successfully solve the problem. And the dynamic of three is, they're often called the achiever and they're the ones who want to succeed. And there always scanning for, you know, what ideas can I work with and execute for ultimate success. And they also have this wonderful ability to suppress their emotion because every time somebody throws out an idea, you know, most of us are going to go, oh, that's a great idea or, Ooh, that's a terrible idea. Well, the three doesn't have that filter and so when they start throwing out ideas, they can generate lots of ideas, kind of unfiltered. It's like throwing spaghetti against the wall.

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt Schlegel: Right. So, then you get to step four because step four is to see what sticks, right. It's that, oh, that's a great idea. You know, it's that emotional reaction to any idea and type four they're often called the romantic. But what it's saying is that they are the most emotionally tuned in to, you know, the emotional content in their environment. But it also in problem solving gives you kind of this emotional filter to pass ideas through so that you outcome, you know, the most positive ideas. The ideas that the team wants to pursue and has the emotional energy to pursue because, hey, we still have a long way to get the problem solved, right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt Schlegel: So now we move over into, what's called the head group. The head group is the five, the six and the seven. So, after you have your positive idea, then what you want to do is validate that idea. You need to test it; you need to analyze it. You need to, you know, so you do your pro, con analysis, your cost benefit analysis, and maybe some prototyping to make sure that the idea's going to work. Once you have validated your idea, then you need to build, oh and by the way, type five is called the analyst or the observer. They're the ones who like dig in and go very, very deep and explore ideas and collect lots of information. So, then you go to six. Type six, it's kind of like a planner. They're always thinking about the future, and they map wherever they are, connect the dots into the future to a successful completion of the goal.

And so, you have that idea. Now you map into the future, and you create your plan, okay. Next step is, you need to sell the plan to, you know, the rest of the team or the broader collect of stakeholders and get buy-in and that's step seven, that's called often called the enthusiast. So, you can imagine a cheerleader, you know, saying, hey, we found a great idea. Let's go, let's go solve the problem.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt Schlegel: And get everybody excited, okay. Now what have we done steps one through seven? Talk, talk, talk. Now we get to eight, time for action. The type eight is one of the most action-oriented types and they want to get stuff done, you know, they want to just get to the point and just move forward. And the type eight dynamic is essentially wanting to secure control of the environment. So, it's really a take charge, get stuff done, type of dynamic. And then finally we get to nine, you know, you think, oh, after the eight's done, you know, oh, okay. We solve the problem. And inevitably whenever you have any kind of transformational change, some feathers are going to be ruffled and some toes are going to be stepped on. And so, what you want to do is, you know, have the conversations to smooth out and integrate the solution with the broader community. And that's the dynamic of nine, is listening, understanding other people's perspectives and trying to reduce and conflict and harmonize with everybody. And inevitably in those conversations, people are going to identify new problems, which is why The Enneagram is a circle

Steve Rush: And it goes round again.

Matt Schlegel: Exactly.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt Schlegel: So that's in a nutshell, that's the dynamic.

Steve Rush: So, if I completed an assessment on Enneagram, would it give me a kind of a push and a pull kind of, so I might be strong in a nine, but less in a one, how would it kind of play out as a result?

Matt Schlegel: Right, and that's a great question. And, you know, I advise people when they take an assessment to just, you know, use it as a process of eliminate because whenever most people take the assessment, they score highly on two or three types and low on other types. So, you eliminate the low scoring types, and you keep the higher scoring types.

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt Schlegel: And, you know, the first time I took the assessment, I scored highest on type eight. But I'm not a type eight. It turns out I was a type six and that was my second highest scoring. But I was in an environment where I had to behave like an eight and environment the encouraged me to be like an eight. And so, when I'm taking the assessment, it's like, yep, I do that, yep, I do that. Yep, I do that. But it wasn't really speaking to, you know, the way I would like innately, you know, respond is just my environment was encouraging me to respond in that way. So, you know, that's pretty common. And so, when you have, you know, high scoring on several types, then you have to kind of go to that next level of understand those types, understanding the underlying motivators of each types, and then identifying which of those motivations best match with your internal innate motivation.

Steve Rush: Got it. So, is there a naturally occurring opportunity or is there a natural occurring time when it's best to do this?

Matt Schlegel: Oh yeah. It's probably okay to do it anytime if you are interested in, you know, knowing more about yourself, knowing what, you know makes you tick and knowing that, you know, having that knowledge will make you, you know, a better leader, a better entrepreneur, you know, it just can improve, you know, all of the relationships that you have in your life, both personally and professionally. So, you’re ready for that, then that's the best time to take the test and then start to ask those questions about yourself. You know, what is making me tick? You know, where is it that I excel? Where is it that I'm not as interested? And I want to put people around me that can, you know, compliment my skillset so that we can be an ever stronger and more effective team.

Steve Rush: And I love the whole idea as well, that, you know, when you first did it, you came out as an eight, but actually you recognize you're more of a six and it's important that we don't just do this once in isolation, that we may be revisit it from time to time to ensure that we fully understand that, how the environment's impacting on our behaviors as well, right?

Matt Schlegel: Exactly. And once you do understand your dominant type, you know, and I kind of look at it this way, it's like handedness, you know, our brain has dominance that drive our handedness and it will, you know, people will say they're right-handed or lefthanded, or maybe you know, they're ambidextrous, well, the same way with your Prefrontal Cortex and the same way with your Amygdala. And so, you know, one of these Enneagram types tends to be more dominant than the others. And that's kind of your starting point. And then you can, you know, once you know that, then you can see yourself change over time based on that Enneagram model and those lines within The Enneagram.

Steve Rush: So, is there a perfect map for a team? So, you've just studied this for years, and I'm just curious to find out whether or not you've noticed a pattern occur over that period of time that said, in order to have the perfect mix across a team, this is what it might look like.

Matt Schlegel: Yeah. And so, you know, I'll start off and say, you know, it's highly unlikely that any team that you come across is going to be completely and well balanced. For whatever reason, you know, you're not going to have all nine types represented on your team.

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt Schlegel: When you start to, you know, work with a team to try to, you know, solve a problem, you know, if you have an initiative that you want to, you know, bring your team together to tackle, what I found is, you need to pull people in from whichever starting point they're at. Pull them into the dynamic of that step-in problem solving, right. So, you know, step one is that, you know, let's define the problem and take the time to get everybody to think through what is the problem from their perspective.

And then also think. Once the problem is solved, you know, what will the world look like? So, in that step, you're essentially getting your list of things that need to be solved, and then also creating a vision for the team of how the world would look like once the problem is solved. And, you know, and even though you might not have any type ones on your team and type ones would just naturally get this, but you can pull people into that if, you know, direct the team to actually focus on it and make sure that all the voices are heard. And so that's how I use it. I just pull people into that dynamic and then work through the various steps so that the team systematically hits each one of those energies.

Steve Rush: Yeah. And I suspect also, if you are highly dominant in any one of these nine, then that also becomes then a development area I suspect.

Matt Schlegel: Right. Right. And, you know, and this speaks to, you know, how people want to play to their strengths, right. So, they want to jump to that, you know, point in problem solving where they're naturally gifted, right. So, the eights want to jump right into action, you know, so they already have a sense, I know what needs to happen, let's just go do it, you know, and they want to jump straight to type eight, or excuse me, step eight, without having worked through, you know, the other steps. And so, you'll see this in teams, you know, so if you go into a team that is dominated by a type eight leader, you know, you'll find that the team has kind of learned to just, you know, do what the eight said. And then, the type eight leader might confide in me and say, you know, I really wish the team would take more initiative and you know, come up with ideas and execute them themselves.

Steve Rush: Mm

Matt Schlegel: Well, right. And I'll say, well, you know, you would need to let them do that in their way, working through those steps, because the team might not have that same intuition about what to do that you do. So, if you want to encourage them to, you know, take initiative, you have to allow them to do it in their way, which won't be your way and give them the space and the time to work through this process.

Steve Rush: Hmm.

Matt Schlegel: So, that's one of the ways I guide, you know, my clients who are type eight leaders is to, you know, let them work through the process and let them kind of build that problem, solving muscle themselves. So, they're not always relying on the type eight leader for direction.

Steve Rush: Right. And I also wonder if a type eight leader might make assumptions by jumping straight in at eight that could have been identified by going through the steps proceeding that?

Matt Schlegel: Well, of course, you know, when you jump straight to action you know, you are having assumptions and you're making assumptions and, you know, the interesting thing about the type eight you know, they're in the intuitive group, which is the eight, nine and one. So, they already have intuition about what it is that they want to do. The other interesting thing about eight is that they don't really dwell on, you know, failure, you know, they're happy to just jump in, try something, hey, it doesn't work, okay. Let's adjust and you know, do a course direction and start going in this direction, right. So, they will, you know, just, you know, by always acting iterate towards the solution without necessarily stepping back and taking time to think things through. This works great for type eights, but, you know, for those of us who aren't type eights, it can be a little uncomfortable because, you know, like type six right. We're trying to map the dots into the future, right. And we're thinking, but if we do this, then this could happen or that could happen. And then our brains start racing on, you know, all of the problems and that we want to try to mitigate, but, you know, rather than, you know, crashing into the wall and then changing direction. So, you know, and that's where a dynamic, you know, that's just like a six, eight dynamic that happens on teams.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, you wrote the book Teamwork 9.0.

Matt Schlegel: Yeah.

Steve Rush: How does that differentiate from the traditional Enneagram? What would be the kind of the extra layer of context they get from that?

Matt Schlegel: Right. So, the thing that I really wanted to focus on in my book was that dimension of problem solving, and, you know, there are many books about The Enneagram as a personality system. So, I didn't want to write another book just about the personality side of The Enneagram. What I wanted was to take that and then build onto it that dimension of working through that outer circle of The Enneagram in order of those steps with teams to you know, show that The Enneagram has this other dimension to it, of a problem-solving process. And so that's where I talk about the problem-solving process. I give some case studies and anecdotes. I talk about as a leader, you know, how do you respond when your team doesn't have a specific strength in problem solving and how to overcome that? How to get each of the team members to step up, I call it shared leadership, you know, because if you know, you have somebody who's really strong at a certain point will then encourage them to take the lead at that step and problem solving. I talk about the creativity, you know, each type brings a distinct creativity to problem solving. So, there's, you know, a number of aspects that you can apply The Enneagram to when it's in the context of team, problem solving.

Steve Rush: Love it. And we'll have an opportunity to share with our listeners at the end of the show, how they can get hold of some of that information too, before we get there, want to dive into and hack into your leadership brain. Now having led and worked with numbers of teams all over the world to distill all of that great knowledge and learning you've had on your career, Matt and hack into those top three leadership hacks, what would they be?

Matt Schlegel: Right. So, you know, the first thing that, you know, I mentioned at that opening story, you know, is, I realize that you know as a type six, that worrying is a part of my dynamic and that is caused by anxiety. So, you know, the five, six and seven are in the thinking group or head group, but the underlying issue for us is anxiety. I have this like feeling in my gut, that's kind of a constant friend I have, and I could feel it kind of go up or down. I like a thermometer and The Enneagram gave me a word for that. It's like, oh, that's anxiety. That's, what's causing that.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt Schlegel: But it's also, you know, it's like a nuclear furnace for me. It gives me tremendous energy. And now that I know what's going on, I can use that and say, okay, well, where am I right now? Am I feeling comfortable? Are we headed in a good direction or my Spidey senses telling me, oh, you know, something amiss and we need to kind of reflect and look back? So, you know, so that's one way as a leader learned to just be more conscientious of my internal state, both to, you know, understand myself, but also to make sure that, you know, whatever is causing my anxiety, doesn't spill out over into my relationships with my team that, you know, might adversely affect our forward progress, right.

Steve Rush: Right.

Matt Schlegel: So that's you know, I think just that self-awareness is super important. And then, you know, the other aspect is, you know, once you understand yourself, you can really start to understand the dynamics of the other folks on your team. And they really appreciate this because you are understanding them in a way that helps you better communicate with them, helps them better motivate themselves, you know, and you can put them in roles where they can really thrive and show off their natural gifts and allows you to have deeper, more meaningful conversations with your team, so that you can better build rapport and trust with them, which is another key to leadership.

Steve Rush: And your third

Matt Schlegel: And the third I would say is, you know, once you have that, then you can understand what your, you know, the strengths and weaknesses of your team. And then what you want to do is like realize, okay, I have gaps in my I team. I want to make sure that, you know, we have a diversity of perspectives and so many people are talking about the need for diversity on teams. And there are many dimensions of diversity, but I would also say that, you know, be aware of style diversity.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt Schlegel: Because people tend, you know, to like people like themselves. That's why we have the saying, you know, birds of a feather flock together. And, you know, if you're a hiring manager and then you're hiring people, you like, what's going to happen is, you're going to build a lopsided team. So having the understanding of, you know, the value of having a more diverse team in terms of styles, you're going to get, you know, a better set of ideas to work with. And you're going to have, you know, better overall outcomes, because you have all of these different perspectives that are adding to the overall success.

Steve Rush: I love that last one. Difference makes a difference.

Matt Schlegel: Yes, exactly.

Steve Rush: So, the next part of the show, we actually call it Hack to Attack.

Matt Schlegel: Okay.

Steve Rush: So, in essence, this is where something is just screwed up. It hasn't worked out well, maybe it's been catastrophic, but as a result of the experience, you've now taken that as a learning, and it's now a force of good in your life or work, what would be your Hack to Attack?

Matt Schlegel: Yes. And you know, so one of the things that I've learned, you know, as a person who is somewhat based in anxiety, I tend to be on the cautious side. And so, I might overcompensate on being too cautious. And so that's one of the things I have to, you know, I've learned about myself. And then I learn, you know, and this is where I can, you know, value the perspectives of others who, you know, aren't necessarily as prone to that perspective. And then, you know, tap into that dynamic when I need to. And that's been a great learning for me, and it's allowed me to better appreciate the other perspectives and the other members of my team so that I can, you know, rely on them when my anxiety might start to, you know, get too much. So, I would say, you know, one of the, you know, bigger learnings I've had to, you know, deal with personally and overcome personally

Steve Rush: All starts with self-awareness again, though, doesn't it?

Matt Schlegel: It does.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt Schlegel: It does. And I think, you know, that was the starting point. That self-awareness was the starting point for some of, you know, the best learning and experiences that I had in my career. That's why I got so excited about this and wanted to pursue it and write the book

Steve Rush: Exactly. Last part of the show. We get a chance for you to do a bit of time travel bump into Matt at 21 and give them some advice. You have a chance giving some words of wisdom, what would they be?

Matt Schlegel: Yeah, that's a great question. And if you ask my kids, they'll tell you what it is because they know, and that's you know, learn The Enneagram. Learn that, you know, style is, learn, you know, how that's influencing your behaviors and your decision making and learn that, you know, your style, isn't the only style. It's not the correct style. It's not the right style, you know, and once you understand that, you know, there are these distinct styles and that you can now put them into context of, you know, it's valid to just be, you know, like the type four swimming and emotions, what does that bring to the party? How does that help the team move forward with that, you know, connection to emotions or, you know, where are the intuitive people that sense of how is that informing the team? And so, just that appreciation of you know, where each type is coming from is hugely important. And I think as a young person, to be able to appreciate that and understand the value in it, you know, just makes you have a better appreciation for all the people in your life.

Steve Rush: Great advice, as you are sharing that, you know, I'm thinking I need to get my young teenagers and my kids in their early twenties into this, because actually the more dynamically they're aware of things, the more it can help them. And also, I wonder if this works across the family as well, right?

Matt Schlegel: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Matt Schlegel: You know, and this is really, you know, how it's commonly used to help people, you know, understand, you know, the dynamics with, you know, in your personal relationships. It's, you know, very valuable for that, because then you can end up you know, avoiding, you know, conflicts and understanding if you do go down the path of conflict, why that's happening and then how to get back out and great tool for that. And then young people, you know, they're experimenting with different relationships in their life, you know, and then, you know, having a framework for, oh, okay, well, I'm a type eight. And I was, you know, I had a relationship with a type nine. And what did that feel like? How did that work? Is that feel right for you? You know, and at least understand and navigate those relationships a little bit better when you have that framework to work with.

Steve Rush: Awesome stuff. So, as folk have been listening to this, Matt, I'm pretty certain they're thinking I need to get a copy of Teamwork9.0. I need to find out a little bit more about The Enneagram. And of course, you've got a bunch of resources that can help them. Where's the best place that we can send them so they can connect with your work?

Matt Schlegel: Oh yeah. Thank you so much. So, my website is evolutionaryteams.com. So that's all one-word evolutionaryteams, and there you'll find you know, some resources, there's a complimentary assessment. Enneagram assessment that you're welcome to take there. And also, you can find out information about teamwork 9.0, and then I blog and share, you know, different topics on leadership decision making and teamwork. And I'm doing a series of interviews with leaders who are using their essentially self-awareness about their emotional state in their leadership practice and how that motivates, inspires, and drives their leader of behaviors. So, it's really fascinating stuff.

Steve Rush: Great. We'll put those links and the links to your social media connections as well in our show notes. So, folk can connect with you as soon as they finish listening to this.

Matt Schlegel: Well, thank you so much, Steve. I really appreciate it.

Steve Rush: Matt, it's been fascinating talking. I am incredibly excited about the different dynamics that Teamwork9.0 brings about, and actually how that can help other teams become more effective in their work that they do. And thank you for coming and sharing your stories and being part of our community on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Matt Schlegel: Well, thank you so much, Steve. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Steve Rush: Me too. Thanks, Matt.

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 the 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

Michael Sahota is a thought leader, author, and speaker in the Agile industry. He's also the co-founder and CEO of SHIFT314, and he's joined by Audree Sahota, Chief Metaphysics Officer and also co-founder of SHIFT314, together they wrote the book Leading Beyond Change. In this amazing show we discover:

• The story behind SHIFT314
• What is emotional science and how that could that help me as a leader
• Why leaders find it so hard to unlock the right energy in our lives
• The SHIFT314 Evolutionary Leadership Framework (SELF)

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

Find out more about Michael and Audree below:

Michael on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelsahota/

Audree on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/audreetara/

Michael on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MichaelSahota

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shift314_leadership/

Company  Website: https://shift314.com

Full Transcript Below

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.

Our two special guests on today's show is Michael Sahota who's the founder and CEO of SHIFT314, he's a speaker, a thought leader. And the author of Leading Beyond Change. His co-author is Audree Sahota who's also the co-founder and Chief Metaphysics officer at SHIFT314. But before we get a chance to speak with Michael and Audree, it’s The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: It turns out in times of crisis, that's a perfect opportunity for us to do some self-reflection and think about what's really important to us. According to some recent research completed by Microsoft, workers' sense of worth grew during the pandemic and during 2020 during terms to crisis, so did their expectations. For almost a year of publishing the first study, Microsoft shared results of another iteration of the Microsoft world index. And it's a study run across 31 countries, 31,000 people along with analysis of trillions of productivity signals in Microsoft, 365 trends on LinkedIn and labor trends.

Some findings found that flexible working is here to stay. And leaders seemed out of touch with employees while workers were highly productive, yet also exhausted. Gen Zed or Gen Zers if you're in the U.S. needed, re-energizing due to a lack of networking opportunities. And finally, talent availability grew with the hybrid work, but the word hybrid work means so much to so many. Organizations still grapple to get an understanding of what hybrid work really means to them. What comes out in research from Microsoft is that COVID changed our relationship with work forever. 53% of employees are more like to prioritize health and wellbeing over their work compared to that pre pandemic. And in addition, 47% of responders said that they're most likely to put family and personal life first ahead of any work commitments. Employers must be ready to accommodate the needs and trends that are playing out or risk losing their talent to competitors who might offer exactly what they're looking for.

The study shows that many hybrid employees, in fact, 51% say they'll consider a switch to remote working over the next 12 months. And even more remote employees, 57% said they would consider a switch to more hybrid. And while the two data points could be confusing, they clearly speak to the role of hybrid working is here to stay, providing the flexibility needed to lead a more blended life while offering opportunities to stay connected with coworkers. And it clearly shows that deciding what's best for your talent will not be a one size fits all affair either.

Needs will be different based on the seniority within the company, the type of job, how long somebody's been with the organization, their home circumstances. It's also critically to fully understand and embrace hybrid work so that it requires more than just offering working from home. It really does mean making sure the employees feel part of their work at home and are also being seen and communicated as if they were in the office. And the final data point I wanted to share with you is that 54% of leaders felt that productivity had been negatively affected since going to a more of a remote and hybrid working environment. Although 80% of the same employees said that there had been an improvement in their productivity since that shift.

Getting people back into the office must be driven by the employees and those who want to have a real desire to build connections. But particularly for those who were joining during the pandemic and may have not yet had the opportunity to form strong relationships. And the leadership hack here is, it's not just about flexible work location, flexible environment, but most importantly, flexible mindset and a flexible mindset from business leaders who understand their talent, know that it's not the same as it was two years ago. And they also know that their needs have changed. Understanding intrinsically what's driving each individual on your team could be the one thing that really unlocks true high performance. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Looking forward as always to hearing your tweets and information about what you'd like to hear and see on the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: I'm joined on the show today by our first ever husband and wife duo, who are also business partners, Michael Sahota is a thought leader, author, and speaker in the Agile Industry. He's also the co-founder and CEO of SHIFT314. He's developed unique IP to unlock success with agile, digital, and lean, in other new ways of working. And he's joined by Audree Sahota. Chief Metaphysics Officer, and also co-founder of SHIFT314, and Audree has a mastery over many practices and techniques for rapidly shifting consciousness, which I can't wait to explo.re. Welcome both, to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Audree Sahota: Thank you.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, pleasure to be here.

Steve Rush: So, first husband and wife duo, first question. Who made the first move?

Michael Sahota: That would probably be me.

Audree Sahota: Well, yeah. Considering I didn't really like Michael, when I first met him,

Steve Rush: Which is often the case, isn't it with relationships?

Audree Sahota: Right, yeah. He was kind of a thorn on my side. We actually met in India in a really incredible personal growth and transformation course that we had both been involved in for many years. And they put our classes, no, you skipped, did you skip a grade?

Michael Sahota: Yeah, I did. I did two courses back-to-back.

Steve Rush: You, only just found out now, right Audree?

Audree Sahota: Normally you're supposed to wait six months and then join the next course. And I was in the course ahead of him. I think I was in the pilot program, and he was there, and we had some mutual friends and so eventually as I got to know, Michael, I was like, oh, this guy is kind of different on the inside than what he's projecting on the outside. So, you know, it's a longer story. But what I found was that when I needed help and I was working through a really, really deep block, that was probably the biggest block that I had that was blocking all of my success in my life. We were sitting around the dinner table with a bunch of people, and I was expressing what was going on with me.

And it was like 10 o'clock at night. We had all been processing and doing these like crazy, very intense, deep, personal growth and transformation processes that included a lot of breathing and dark spaces and stuff like that. So, we were all pretty crispy and everybody one by one just kind of left the table. And it's just Michael and I sitting there and Michael's like, well, do you want to work through this issue? And I said, yeah, I want to remove this block. And he said, well, I'll only work with you if you go all the way through, like, I don't want you to stop, I want you to opt in fully into this process. And I said, yes, I'm totally ready. And so, as he was working with me and kind of holding a space and facilitating my process, which was touching into some really, really deep, deep issues, I was like crying. And it was just like really intense. And at the same time, every time he would say something as a facilitator, I would be like, oh, that's what I would say. That's exactly how I would work. And at the end of the whole entire process, which was incredibly liberating for me, I went back to my room with my roommate, and I said, hey, you know, that Michael Sahota guy just helped me with a really deep issue that I had. And he works exactly how I work, how I facilitate. And I've never met anybody like that. And she's like, oh, he's your other half. And I was like, no, not Michael Sahota, there's no way, he's not my type. And she kept saying it. And I think that, that was the moment that I knew that there was something else deeper going on, and then it went from there. Then we started discussing like our kind of, like our dreams and our hopes and our life purpose and stuff. And turns out we had the same life purpose, which is, take it away Michael.

Michael Sahota: Yeah. So, it's really about helping people evolve from their current limitations. Like this deeper level of work that gets ignored, that isn't fully addressed by traditional means to allow us to show up as the partner we want, the parent we want to be, the leader we want to be, which ultimately is what we need to create, create high performance environment. So, it's really about creating a better world, a better workplace, starting with ourselves.

Steve Rush: In my experience, having spoke to hundreds of very successful business leaders and coached many, it often starts with ourselves.

Michael Sahota: Well, yeah, there's this funny saying, everybody's heard this, and everyone knows this true. You can't change anyone else. You can only change yourself. Everyone knows this, but 98% of leadership behavior acts as if this statement doesn't exist.

Steve Rush: What do you think the reason is for that?

Michael Sahota: Oh, there's a really simple reason. It's the ego, our default egoic conditioning causes to look outwards for the problems rather than look inwards.

Steve Rush: Hmm.

Audree Sahota: Right.

Michael Sahota: Basically, we're all tricked by the ego.

Audree Sahota: And we always say, you know, we're the problem and we're the solution. But I think that we don't really know where to go with all of that as well. So, part of it is the ego blocking and the other part is, if you don't have the tools, the techniques, mostly the knowledge or the education about what's actually really going on, it's very difficult to start to explore your inner world. And so, I mean, we found ways to do it through our own, I think our own evolutionary process and our own journey.

Michael Sahota: Our basic view is that everyone is innocent.

Audree Sahota: Yeah.

Michael Sahota: Like, so if someone is listening to this call and they, well, geez, I'm not doing that. I'm mostly focused on outward. And how do we make changes around me, blah, blah, blah. You're innocent, and the reason is because, you don't have the tools. You don't have the knowledge and awareness and understanding. Even if you discovered that there's some sort of inner block inside of yourself, actually work through it. And that's really what our work is about is, giving leaders, the evolutionary capabilities for not only the self-evolution, which is one part of it, but it's also how to put that into practice, right. There are lots of people who go to yoga classes, they go to a, you know, 10-day meditation retreat and they go back and it's the same thing all over again, like nothing's changed in their regular world, right. They have a little bit of stillness and then it fades off.

Steve Rush: Right.

Michael Sahota: As they go through their day. And so, it's really about how do we integrate that into our regular work? How do we do that in every single thing that we do at every single interaction as a leader, as collaborator, as a parent?

Audree Sahota: We even think about coaching and leadership. And we always say that it's a transmission, like transformation is a transmission. You're very being, who you are and what you've been through, and all of your experience is what is going to shift and change another person or another organization. And we find the clarity in that statement, you are the transmission, a very powerful perception to have when we're looking at organizational change, or we're looking at working with our clients who, you know, want to show up as better leaders or create high performance, or we, you know, for our own selves personally, in our relationships with our family and our friends and in our partnership as

Well.

Steve Rush: And the whole evolutionary framing that you have, and you talk about. How did that come together from your different work experiences to create what you do now? Because you both have very different backgrounds that have now come together as SHIFT314.

Audree Sahota: Right. So, I have a little weirder background. I'm a professionally trained energetic healer. So, what that means is I didn't take a weekend workshop and I became a healer. I actually went to eight years of formal training. I worked on a medical team for five years. I worked with very, very ill people. But what that really means is I've studied the psychology of disease. So, I learned in my profession, thoughts, belief systems, behaviors, lifestyle, all these things contribute to a healthy body or an unhealthy body. And so, I believe that looking at the psychology of disease, you start to look at, what's going on in your mind? What's going on in your consciousness? What's going on in your perceptions? And so, that's where I take this weird thing of energy, kind of mixed with psychological background. And then I start to work with my clients in a way, not only to heal, but also then to transform their lives. But in order for me to do that, my training has always been you first.

Steve Rush: Right.

Audree Sahota: Always, I'm the transmission of the work. If I'm clear and clean in my perceptions, my glee systems, my psychological makeup, and my body, I'm able to transmit a very high vibrational frequency that will aid in the healing of somebody else. So that's kind of where my background is from. It's like the weird stuff.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, my background is the exact opposite. It's an engineering. I worked in research. I've published papers and artificial intelligence, robotics. I went professionally, started working as a software developer and had management roles and got involved with a thing called agile, bringing organizations to like a more people-centric way of working, a more evolved way of working. And that eventually led me to this realization. Well, wait a second. It's really hard to help companies make this shift because the leaders don't get it. The leaders are stuck in these traditional mindsets, these traditional patterns that are totally incompatible with these new ways of working, what they call agile, digital and so on. And then I looked at it, I said. Well, how do I help these leaders like transform? How do they help them show up as leaders that we can create these amazing work environments, we can actually get high performance? I said, well, the only way to help them to solve this is to help them grow. And I thought, well, am I equipped to do that? And the answer I got back was well, no Michael, you're a well-intentioned hassle. You can see everything that's going on, but you are not showing up in a revolved way. So that's what kicked off this realization that I'm the problem and I am the solution. That I am the limit for everything that I want to create around me. And so, kicked off this you know, really broad scoped search for, how do I grow myself? How do I evolve? And I had no idea. So, I just started doing random things. And eventually this is one path took me to India, right, and that's where I met Audree.

But really, I think this is true for me still today is, that I am the limit of everything that I want to create in the world. And I continue to invest in my own personal evolution. That's why I got a lot of humility around this. It's not like, well, oh, I'm better and blah, blah, blah. It's like, hey, we're all on our journey of evolution. All of us, every single one of us, the only question is, how much energy are we putting into our own evolution? Number one, and number two, what are the rate of progress we're making? And what we've seen here is a lot of leaders are at zero rate of progress and zero investment in their evolution. And as a result, they're continue to be the same leaders that they've always been

Audree Sahota: Because it's so hard.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: The pressure to succeed, the pressure to get things done actually takes you backwards. So, you have to be very, very careful because that's where you get tripped up. It's like when something's happening and the organizations in a crisis or your teenager just, you know, crashed the car, it's either one.

Michael Sahota: And It’s kind of weird, right? Because I started as an engineer, right. And scientifically running experiments of like, what can we do to a system to improve performance? And I followed root cause, eventually it said, wait a second. The only way to do this is through inner evolution, integrated with, you know, external models, tools and so on. And that's what we've created is this technology, this co-creation of Audree and I, we didn't like wake up one day and say, here it is. It's been this evolution over like the last decade of both of our work.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Michael Sahota: It's called the self-framework.

Audree Sahota: Right.

Michael Sahota: And it's just really this beautiful tool kit,

Audree Sahota: And we didn't even know that we had a framework, we had no idea. We were just trying to explain to people what we did. And it was through writing the book. It was through that process of writing the book that it actually really homed in

Michael Sahota: What it is we're doing.

Audree Sahota: Yeah, what it is. First the intention that we had no idea what we were doing.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: We were just doing it.

Michael Sahota: Be very successful.

Audree Sahota: Very successful.

Michael Sahota: Training thousands of leaders around the globe and giving them transformational experiences and like, this is the thing, is like, you know, on the outside, okay. It looks like we're leadership trainers, looks like we're organizational consultants. So, we help companies with agile. That's the external, right. That profile fits lots of organizations around the world, but there's some something special and deeper about what we do. That's very human where it's not just about the workplace. People who go through our trainings realize, oh, wait a second. This is actually more important to me with my family.

Steve Rush: And the reality, I guess, of what you've just described is that evolutionary journey that people take. But if you went to an organization and started with those energetic, emotional science-based conversations, most organizations would go, whoa, hang on a second. That's a bit too deep, but they could probably understand and contextualize the broader conversations around leadership development and organizational consultancy, right?

Audree Sahota: Right, and high performance.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: Because everybody wants results. Everybody wants to do well. Even people sitting in a yoga class, why are they there? It's because they want to make their lives better. So, I think it's a natural occurrence in nature. Nature is always perfecting itself. And it's really, really beautiful, you know? We think of like having a disease or birth defect and transitioning or not living as something that's really, really terrible. And we look at the way nature functions. It is always trying to perfect itself and we're doing it everywhere. It's not just in nature, but we are nature, we're animals. It's the natural progression in the life cycles of an organization that we're looking at where things have to get destroyed in order to create something new and something better. So, we tend to forget the natural cycles that occur in life.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: And when we start to look at, we're just wanting to create high performance and that's okay. It's okay. Michael said all the time, in our courses, he goes, I don't care if you're here because of financial success and you're worried about the bottom line or you're here because you want to make workplaces a better environment for people. We don't have any judgment of why you're here, but what is that there's this merging together of, oh yeah. I want both. And why can't we have both?

Steve Rush: Right.

Audree Sahota: Yeah, and it makes sense that if your workplace is healthy and people are happy and engaged and love what they do and they're supported, there's a benefit to the organization and it's a financial benefit.

Steve Rush: And there's loads of science about.

Audree Sahota: Yes.

Steve Rush: That happy workplaces create better productivity, better productivity creates better and happier environments and therefore more purposeful business. And it becomes self-fulfilling, doesn't it?

Audree Sahota: Yeah. But it's an old way of thinking in the traditional work environment, it's oppressive, it's slave like mentality and it's this old way of how humans existed in society. That is beginning to change because we realize, oh, oppressing people doesn't actually work. You know, having poverty and lack doesn't work.

Michael Sahota: I mean, no manager goes into work and thinks, oh, I'm going oppress people today, right. Nobody thinks that, but everyone is caught up and this is why I see people as very innocent. We're caught up in this industrial machinery, this structure's is a business as unusual and we're just like hamsters running around the hamster wheel. And so, it's about helping people wake up to say, wait a second, do you see what's going on? You're just following in this traditional pattern, traditional management path and these are the consequences. That's where we start. We don't talk about any of the personal shift, any of that stuff. Because like, hey, let's just have a conversation about what's going on in your organization and how's it working for you? And it's never working out well for organizations. Everybody is struggling out there.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Audree, you spend quite a lot of time with metaphysics, energy, you know, the root of kind of what drives people's behaviors. I'm keen to just understand a little bit about why it is that organizations and often individuals who lead those organizations and teams find it really difficult to peel the layers right back to where they need to be effective and explore some of that?

Audree Sahota: That's a great question. And I actually don't know the answer.

Michael Sahota: I know the answer. So, the answer is, we don't ever try to get anyone to do anything.

Audree Sahota: But he's saying like a general, like.

Michael Sahota: Why is it happening?

Audree Sahota: Why is it happening?

Steve Rush: Why is it so difficult?

Audree Sahota: It's a really deep conversation that I'm not going to go into right now. And a lot of it is that, oh, it's way too deep to go into. But I can't tell you that. We're raised from birth in a way that we're just in this command-and-control habit, we're in a habit of fear and anxiety. We're in a habit of thinking and believing. We're duped into believing that we deserve eternal punishment.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, and everyone listening to this. Well, that's not me. And it's like, well, if you don't know that's going on with you, you just don't know what's going on with you, but it's going on with everyone until you're actually enlightened. So, it's there and most people aren't aware, but we don't even start there. I just want to back up, this is not a good starting place. The starting place is what we actually do in our trainings, which is saying, well, okay, great. We're here to talk about how do you create business agility? How do you be high performance leaders? Right? So, the egos invested. People want the result. People want the outcome. And this is what our whole book Leading Beyond Change goes through. This is the anti-pattern of what you're doing in your traditional business. And this is the pattern for what is happening in healthy organizations that get really extraordinary performance. And we just take people through a series of patterns where they realize, wait a second. What I am choosing to do every day creates low performance.

Audree Sahota: Nobody wants to understand the fundamental fabric of why humans are in suffering.

Steve Rush: That's right, yeah.

Michael Sahota: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: Except for me.

Michael Sahota: So, what we get people to do is realize, wait a second. When I try to drive a change program, I'm actually create a lot of resistance. When I mandate things as a boss and use my power without listening to other people first, I'm creating damage.

Audree Sahota: And inner more advanced courses what we do is, once you can see that behavior, that I'm creating damage, then when you have the tools and the techniques and the understanding, then it's easier to look inside. And we always ask, what does it feel like in your body when you're trying to drive change?

Steve Rush: Because your body's a good barometer to tell you exactly what's going on, right.

Audree Sahota: It is the thing, that is the radio receiver. So, the body will tell you, it's like, oh, I feel tight. Oh, it's hard to breathe. Oh, there's a knot in my stomach. And then we have the tools to help to dissolve that because those are patterns from the subconscious part of the egoic system that are actually, it's like the root cause of why you're trying to drive change to begin with. It doesn't mean that you're not going to create change.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: But an impact change, but it's going to come from a very different place where there's a release within your system and you're letting go. You're not attached to the outcome, which is very, very hard to do. But when not attached to the outcome anymore, you're no longer pressing onto the system and creating that resistance. And there's an opening that happens.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: We always call it the secret to the universe.

Steve Rush: Wow. If only we could all tap into that, it sounds incredibly.

Audree Sahota: We all can, and we all deserve it.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: Like every single one of us deserves to be successful and happy and productive

Michael Sahota: And having an amazing day at work every single day,

Audree Sahota: Every single day.

Steve Rush: And the reason why some do, and some don't is completely about how we are showing up, thinking about or how our mindset is driving, how we're thinking and showing up at work.

Audree Sahota: Oh yeah, and that's a choice.

Michael Sahota: Well, actually there's two factors. One is internal. What is our internal composition? And how are we choosing to perceive the reality that we're in. The other one is the external system because a really beautiful organization can help people uplift, to help people heal and help people grow. Whereas their traditional organizations are taking people down.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, you both talk about a series of patterns, which are the series of patterns that you explored and bumped into as you started to write the book Leading Beyond Change, and you talked about this self-evolutionary framework. I'd love to get into a little bit about that and explore some of the elements of what that is and how I might use it?

Audree Sahota: Well, let's start off with the name. SHIFT134 Evolutionary Leadership Framework.

Michael Sahota: The abbreviation is the S E L F or the SELF.

Audree Sahota: And then we went, oh my God, about the self, it is the self.

Michael Sahota: Think about it?

Audree Sahota: But it was an accident.

Michael Sahota: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: I just want to say that's how miraculous it is. It was an accident.

Steve Rush: So where does SHIFT314 come from?

Michael Sahota: Ah, okay. So, everyone has heard of this number 3.1415, and you go, oh my gosh, it's Pi.

Steve Rush: Pi.

Michael Sahota: A Pi symbolizes the universal timeless principles of the universe through mathematics. With SHIFT314 we give the universal principles, the timeless principles of human dynamics and organization dynamics. We're talking about how do things actually work. Not some, you know, popular, made-up theory, do these three things and you'll have success and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's actually worth the laws of cause and effects of human beings. And when human beings working together and creating change in organizations

Audree Sahota: And how to mitigate the damage.

Michael Sahota: Hey, so here are the patterns. Hey, do you notice when you do this, when you oppress people, here's how you're oppressing people. It actually disengages them, demotivates them so on. And when you create a space for people to contribute, they can, and they're happier and they perform better, like very simple, simple ideas. And we go through, I think about 40 patterns in the book to give people like a really clear sense of wait, when I'm stuck in this matrix, this mindset, trap of traditional business, or even slightly, some of these progressive things are actually, very weak sauce countermeasures, you know, oh, wait a second. I'm not getting high performance. What I'm doing today is not high performance, it’s the opposite.

Audree Sahota: And a lot of it is common sense. It's just that we don't set our intention to really think about it. And I believe we don't do that, and I'll go back to it is, we don't have the tools and the techniques to move through these patterns. So, like for one of them is, we talk about leaders speaking last. So, when you go into a meeting, you allow everybody else to speak first, before you give your opinion, give an answer to the problem, you know, give a solution.

Michael Sahota: Yeah. I show you the anti-pattern, hey everyone, you know, here's my idea for this. What do you guys think? Yeah right. Versus like, hey, you know we need to solve this problem. I've got some ideas, but we're all smarter together. Why doesn't everyone share their ideas and then we'll have a conversation.

Audree Sahota: And everybody goes around the table, gives 30 seconds or a minute. Shares their perspective, shares their opinion.

Michael Sahota: Then we get the deeper truth of well, okay, but this is not a trick. It's not a tactic. For a leader to do that they have to get their ego under control. They have to stop trying to be the smartest person in the room and create a space for others to be leaders and to want to build other people, to be leaders. That's the inner journey. That's why people need tools to make it.

Steve Rush: Is there a particular pattern that you've recognized through these different of patents? Is the stickiest, like people get stuck the most.

Michael Sahota: Command and control habit. Command and control habit. We don't understand that we're addictive.

Audree Sahota: Very different and we're exactly the same.

Michael Sahota: We don't understand. We're addict. Gender is the commanding control habits, is actually two different words to the same thing. We don't understand. Like right now, everyone listening to this probably said, I'm not addicted to command and control habit. That's what everyone's going to listen to, is going to say to themselves, I'm not addicted to it.

Audree Sahota: I give people their freedom, let them explore. I give them autonomy.

Michael Sahota: Guess what? Get into one of our trainees. And you'll see that you actually don’t, and you'll see the damage you are causing. And it's going to wake you up to an extraordinary journey. That's going to change, not just your workplace, but all of your relationships with your partner, with your kids, everything. That's what happens because we're stuck trying to use the same words that everyone else uses, you know, leadership and culture.

Audree Sahota: Mindset.

Michael Sahota: And blah, blah, blah. But we're doing something at a very different, very deeper, much more personal level, touching the core of our being.

Steve Rush: Which is where energy plays that vital role because you're dealing with then raw emotions, much of the time, aren't you?

Audree Sahota: Yes, my philosophy on healing has changed quite a lot. I mean, and I've been doing this since probably 1994. So, what I can say is that I no longer believe there's has to be a story. I no longer believe there has to be something that takes a very long time. I do believe in instantaneous healing, I believe up and out, up and out.

Michael Sahota: Not just believe, we live that with our own work on ourselves and the work we do with our partners, clients and those in our training programs is like the, you know, we tell people, if you get stuck, don't stay stuck, just reach out to us and we'll get you unstuck. We've got a lot of tools.

Steve Rush: Mm.

Audree Sahota: Right, and I think the biggest thing here is that it's a choice for everyone, no matter what you're doing, whether it's like our work or somebody else's work or your own work or whatever you are doing in your life. But we really believe that if you're having an issue or a problem that you don't have to, you have a choice. And when you understand that you have the choice, that becomes a very different perspective to live by. And when you make the choice not to have the issue or the problem, the solutions come, it just makes it easier if you have the tools and the techniques ahead of time, on purpose, you know, striving towards creating more success.

Steve Rush: That's the essence of metaphysics as well, isn't it? You know, it's the kind of the whole energy. Allowing the energy to feed your direction, so to speak.

Audree Sahota: Yes, and energy is moved by thoughts.

Michael Sahota: Yeah. So, this is where it all ties together. Like, you know, our oppressive behaviors, our anti patterns of traditional business, our low vibrational frequency, like it's actually like stuck trapped energy in our bodies. And we're walking around basically emitting all this like sort of toxic radiation. That's most traditional leaders right now are walking around emitting toxic radiation, acting as a beacon of a very destructive, oppressive culture, which is why so many people are disengaged. Now really effect leaders aren't doing that. They haven't evolved consciousness. They're pure in their being, they're operating in from a higher vibrational frequency. They're emitting positive energy around them, and people just feel good around them, right. It's not just what they're doing. So, what we're saying, it's a transmission. And, you know, taking it back to the energetic layer, they're actually admitting, you know, good vibes, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: But Michael, what if you're not the leader and you're just in an organization with those toxic leaders, then what do you do?

Steve Rush: That's a great question.

Audree Sahota: I will interview Michael.

Michael Sahota: Well, first of all, the first thing you need to see is that how those toxic leaders are taking you out and you are now part of the problem.

Audree Sahota: Exactly.

Michael Sahota: And so, what we see is that anyone and everyone can be a leader. Our approach or framework is about leaders at all levels that anyone at any place in the organization can create change starting with ourselves, because we can't control everyone else, but we can control ourselves. So, change, therefore, is 100% possible if we choose to do it.

Audree Sahota: And it's a moment-to-moment choice. You can, you either choose to be in resistance and negative, in anger, in frustration and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or you can choose to be in peace in harmony and calm in not getting taken out by the drama and the chaos that's going on. So, you can actually just show up and function with your full intelligence.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, we're calling it almost like radical responsibility, like just taking full 100% responsibility for one's interstate of being, thoughts, actions, energetic stake, and taking responsibility in stewardship and taking action and looking after it, the way you look after, you know, a child that was in your care. So, we need to look after our interstate of functioning.

Audree Sahota: Yeah. I think as a society on a whole, we're generally in a low vibrational state, we're always in the state of fear, anxiety, worry, anger, blame, all these different aspects of who we are. And it becomes an addictive pattern. There's actually an addiction going on in your body. So, if you start to really slow down and feel like, just watch the news, that's a really great example. While you're watching the news, what's going on in your body? Oh, I'm feeling this searing burning sensation and this, you know, tightness in my chest, sit with that searing burning sensation in your chest for a while. You'll start to feel like, oh, that feels really good. And then start to notice how many times a day do you actually instigate that sense and that feeling in your body, there's a chemical release going on in your body. There's a biological reaction to whatever emotional state is happening. You know, that's caused by the environment and what happens is our bodies become addicted to those chemicals, the cortisol and all that stuff that's going on in the body. So, you really have to almost like take back control of this addictive patterns. That are not only, you know, psychological patterns, you know, with emotions, but it's also.

Michael Sahota: It's like energetic, it's physiological, its neuro chemical, it’s societal, it's in our environments and the conditioning. So that's what we're talking about, breaking out this matrix, we're trapped in, right. And that's where, you know, our work is very, very different because we're looking at, you know.

Audree Sahota: Everything.

Michael Sahota: Universal principles, what is really going on here? Oh, I'm in fear. So therefore, I'm not getting blood supply in my frontal cortex, therefore my brain can't operate. Ah, okay, no wonder, now I know what's going on, right.

Audree Sahota: And just taking it back to something really simple because you shouldn't believe anything that we're saying at all, it should be an actual personal experience to validate your own belief system. And so, this is what I always offer people. Find somebody that you can't stand, that you have a huge problem with. And let's just say, it's your boss okay. You could pick a lot of other people, but let's just say, it's your boss, because this is an easy one to work with. There's somebody in your organization that you have such a hard time with and spend a bunch of time, maybe 30 minutes just sitting and feeling positive about this person. Like what if everything I thought about this person was wrong? What if, and just start to calm the nervous system down, calm your body down, calm your mind down, open your heart and change your perception of this person. Just do it, make the choice and just do it. No matter what the external circumstances are. I guarantee everybody, if you do this, that relationship will automatically shift.

Steve Rush: Like it.

Michael Sahota: That's the advanced step. Most people aren't ready for. The first step.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Michael Sahota: The first step for that is just see how you don't want to do that. Just see how you not want to do what Audree just described. That's how you are the problem right now. You're not ready to let go of that anger.

Audree Sahota: Oh yeah. Because you're addicted to it.

Michael Sahota: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: It's an addiction.

Michael Sahota: It's not your fault. You just need to be aware of it. Step one.

Audree Sahota: It’s like drinking, smoking, doing drugs. It's the same thing, right. We love it. Oh, we love getting angry, oh my God.

Michael Sahota: At that person. We tell other people about it, yeah anyway.

Audree Sahota: Right, sometimes our identities are wrapped around, you know, certain situations that we're having. For me personally, when I started to look at, why do I want that? Why do I want the negativity? And then I was like, oh, wait a minute, I don’t. Why do I want too not be successful? Well, wait a minute. I want to be successful. Why would I create something that's you know where I'm going to fail?

Steve Rush: Addiction.

Audree Sahota: Why would I do that to myself?

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, this is where we turn the tables because I could spend all day talking to you by the way. You are in incredibly fascinating and I'm getting juiced up listening to you. But this is a show that we have thousands of people listening to all over the world and it'll be rude for me to not exploit the opportunity to hack into your years of experience and wonderful learnings. So, I'm going to now ask you to tap into your top leadership hacks. So, if you consider the things that you've experienced, things that you've done, and of course we know leadership's not hack, you've got to work at it, but what would it be if you were to distill top tips, ideas or tools?

Michael Sahota: Listen to other people's ideas before sharing your own.

Audree Sahota: I think for me, it would be. Asking what if I'm the problem? Just what if I’m the problem.

Steve Rush: That's a fabulous reframe, isn't it? To think of a different perspective.

Audree Sahota: And then the other one for me, this is my favorite question. How can I help you be successful? Turn the tables instead of it being about you, how can I help you be successful? And that might mean that you're on a team and the whole team is like, how can I help another team be successful?

Steve Rush: Really, really like that last one. So, the next of show, we affectionally called it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something in your lives or work has gone, particularly not well. It's been more catastrophic. It might have been a complete failure, but as a result of that experience, you now have that tool that is useful in your life and work. What would be your Hack to Attack?

Michael Sahota: You know, it’s really interesting, it’s really a great concept and our answer is, everything. That’s one of our teachings is, everything that’s going on around you is a gateway to learning.

Steve Rush: I like that.

Michael Sahota: And most of our lies, we ignore everything, all these gateways to learning and evolution, but it's every single moment, every single frustration, every single you know, thing we perceive as failure, everything we're resisting and we're not flowing with life is the gateway to evolution.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Audree Sahota: Oh, I would say my marriage, my first marriage.

Steve Rush: Well, without that serendipitous moment that you had in India, of course you wouldn't be where you are today either.

Audree Sahota: No.

Steve Rush: So, the last part of the show, we get to give you an opportunity to do some time travel, bump into yourselves at 21 and give yourselves some advice. Audree, you go first.

Audree Sahota: Oh my God. I would say stop partying so much. And, you know, I don't really know. I think for me it would be things are going to get better and you stop sabotaging your own self, yeah.

Steve Rush: Great.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, for me it would be Michael, you're not going to believe me because one of your problems is you think you have it all figured out and you don't need to listen to anyone. So, I'm not going to ask you to believe anything I'm saying now, but just keep in your back pocket when things are going to go wrong, because they're going to go wrong. And when they go wrong, I just want you to think about this.

Steve Rush: That's super.

Michael Sahota: You can't help anyone else until you stabilize yourself and your own healing and growth is the most important thing you can do. And I know it will not make any sense to you now. I understand that, but when things are going wrong, it's not about what's happening around you. It's what's happening inside you.

Audree Sahota: I think you told yourself at 21, you're going to go to India and meet some hot girl and to pay attention.

Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely. If only we could have a crystal ball, right? So, I'm pretty certain that you've inspired people to want to learn more about what you're doing and maybe get a copy of Leading Beyond Change, diving into some of the communities that you work with and run, where is the best place for us to send them?

Michael Sahota: The best place is our website shift314.com.

Audree Sahota: Yeah, we also have another book, Emotional Science, and I think you can get through to both of those books, Leading Beyond Change and Emotional Science from shift314.com

Steve Rush: And we'll make sure that links to the website and how people can get hold of the copies of the books are all in our show notes as well.

Audree Sahota: Thank you so much.

Steve Rush: I've really enjoyed this conversation. I hope it's not our last. I'm pretty certain it won't be, and I'm really delighted that we have you both on the show to share some experiences and get us to think differently about a few things that you've really poised today. So, thanks for being part of our community on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Audree Sahota: Thank you so much for having us here. We really appreciate it.

Michael Sahota: Yeah, our pleasure.

Audree Sahota: Yeah.

Steve Rush: Thank you both.

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.

Richard Medcalf is Founder and CEO of Xquadrant and an executive coach to some of the world's most impressive and successful CEOs and their teams. He’s also the host of the Impact Multiplier CEO Podcast. In today’s show you can learn about:

• The productivity paradigm and the infinity trap.
• Why we don’t need a productivity hack, we just need a mindset shift.
• Why many struggle to focus on higher-value tasks and prioritization.
• How to kick start our strategic thinking.

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

Find out more about Richard below:

Special Link to resources: https://xquadrant.com/hacker

Richard on LinkedIn: https: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardmedcalf/

Richard on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rmedcalf

Podcast: https://xquadrant.com/podcast/

Company  Website: https://xquadrant.com/

Full Transcript Below

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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

Joining on today. Show is super coach Richard Medcalf. He's the founder of Xquadrant, and he's an Executive Coach of some of the world's most impressive and successful CEOs and their teams. He's also the host of The Impact Multiplier CEO Podcast. But before we get a chance to be Richard, it's The Leadership Hacker News

The Leadership Hacker News

Time is a valuable commodity that should not be wasted. A marketer is likely to be concerned with both time and money about the value they create. Luckily, plenty of thought leadership techniques are also available for those who do not mind spending time on their strategy, but don't wish to spend a lot of money on marketing. Thought leadership is a leader's best friend for promoting what they do. Recently I researched Services, a global thought leadership agency that focused on evidence-based research, published a list of techniques and ideas to help leaders in the space of thought leadership. And I'm just going to share with you the top four.

Be accessible. Thought leadership is about being visible. You can boost your visibility by making yourself accessible to others. Sharing your expertise freely and having your team do the same. Don't be afraid to speak to media outlooks or bloggers or write articles. It can all help you get your brand out there and your message to the audience.

Always create content. Consistently creating content can take time, but it also can help you build an audience for your brand. Additionally, it can help you create more ideas, content creations is an excellent way to show that you're aware of your industry. You're aware of the news and you're aware of what's trending. This can really help you become an industry leader, become more renowned so that people can see your content and become familiar with who you are and what you stand for.

Hone your problem-solving skills. Problem solving is a life skill and one you should hone. It shows that you can identify, analyze, and solve a problem. It also shows that you are innovative and capable of being an industry leader and helping others solve problems with you, demonstrates credibility. Be a leader. Thought leadership is about being a leader in your industry. This means that you should express ideas and take action when the opportunity arises. While you shouldn't strive to jump into every issue of controversy that abounds, you should also not be content to sit on the sidelines, particularly if it concerns your industry, it's all about having balance. So don't be afraid to try any these techniques for your thought leadership. It will cost you nothing. It might cost you a bit of time, but you'll get loads of value, and you'll learn along the way. So good luck with your thought leadership. That's been the leadership hacking news, and we are looking forward to sharing more news as the weeks go by. So please let us know if there's something specific, you'd like us to talk about.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Joining me on today's show is Richard Medcalf. He's the Founder and CEO of Xquadrant. He's an Executive Coach and coach some of the world's most impressive and successful CEOs. He's also the host of The Impact Multiplier CEO Podcast. Richard, welcome to the show.

Richard Medcalf: Hi Steve. It's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me

Steve Rush: Looking forward to getting into the mindsets behind some of the work that you do and the work that Xquadrant do with you and your clients. But before we do that, we'd love to get the opportunity for our guests. Just give the bit of the backstory as to how you arrived doing what you do? So, tell us a little bit about Richard?

Richard Medcalf: Well, sure. Obviously talking about myself with my favorite subject. So, you've got a spare five-hour, strap in and we'll, no, just kidding. So, my background is that I'm a bit of a strange hybrid. I like to describe myself sometimes as what you get. If you take a kind of a McKinsey Consultant, a slightly unorthodox pastor, and an entrepreneur, and you put them in a blender.

Steve Rush: That’s interesting.

Richard Medcalf: I'm a Brit’, but I've lived in France now for twenty-two years. My first role having studied Oxford, got my master’s degree there. My first role was in strategy consulting. I was asked by one of the partners in that firm to come over, to help him build out the Paris office for a year or two, sounded like a good idea. And then 22 years later, I'm still here. I married a lovely French lady and have kids and everything else. So that was how life evolved. I really enjoy strategy consulting; I think have a strategic brain naturally. And that all work really well. I became the youngest have a partner in that company, worked with a whole load of really interesting clients at board level, mainly the tech and telecom space. And then I was head hunted by Cisco, just at the point I'd been in the partner role for a couple of years. And I felt, you know, perhaps it was time to do something new and keep learning. And so, I joined Cisco, obviously a huge tech company. So, I became a smaller fish in a much bigger pond and cut a long story short after about 11 years again, I had a really interesting ride at Cisco. The last role was in a small team set up by Cisco CEO to really catalyze board level business initiatives with partners and customers. I'd like to describe it as fulfilling rash commitments made by the CEO in executive meetings.

Steve Rush: Which happens a lot, right?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, so they both get excited about, you know, let's do something together in enterprise, you know, Wi-Fi, or I don't know, in internet of things or in the cloud or whatever the subject was, and they'd get like very excited and then we'd get the phone call to say, okay, there's some excitement to the CEO level, but now you need to help these organizations find something in that space that is strategically meaningful, operationally feasible, and both sides actually want to do at the actually operational level. So, it was really interesting role. For various reasons though, I kind of started to think after a couple of years of that, you know, although it was a lot of fun, I was thinking, you know, what's the legacy I really want to create in my career, in my life? What do I want to be telling my great-grandchildren when they're on my knee? You know, at age 90 or whatever it is.

And I realized that although I love creating business results and I still love doing that. I didn't just want to tell my great-grandchildren that I helped increase, you know, AT&T and EBITDA margin by north 0.5% or whatever, you know, that wasn't quite enough. So, I decided to really look at what did I do really, really well, you know, what was my unique secret source? What’s the impact that I really wanted to make in the world? And I kind of came to the conclusion that what it was, was helping already competent successful leaders make an even bigger and more positive impact in the world. And to do that, you have to obviously make a bigger impact in your organization, in your people and on the mission that you're there to create. And I think that was for me, the heart of it, was saying, you know, how can I actually help people who have already got a success formula that works really well as evidenced by their track record?

How can I help them reinvent that success formula and think strategically and get past their own fears, perhaps of change or of failure or of stretching too far to actually create the impact that they can make? And that's really what sets me on fire today. And so, I set up Xquadrant a few years back, it's basically a small boutique coaching and consulting practice where we help leaders generally often CEOs or Founders, or sometimes other C-suite members, generally of tech firms or firms going through a lot of technology, disruption and shifts. It really help them find what their next level of impact is going to be? And to do that, it's always about thinking more strategically and operating more influentially and that's it.

Steve Rush: Got it, yeah. So, the title Xquadrant, is there something in the name there?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, there's a few things in the name, obviously, apart from the fact that the domain name is available.

Steve Rush: So, it was a good start, right?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, there's a few things. So, you know, the first one is a bit of a, you know, a nod, right. Consultant’s love drawing two by two matrices and drawing an X in the top the top right corner to say, that's where you need to be. And so first of all, it kind of speaks to ambition, right. The second one is, is often, insight is found when we realize that it's not an either-or choice in front of us, but there's perhaps a new option that allows us to do both things, right. So, you know, we either support our team or we challenge our team. Well, you know, what happens if we created an environment where we really support them with high support, but we also create really high challenge? Right. Suddenly something feels like an either or becomes a both and.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: And that is also kind of, if you like that X on that two by two represents to me. And the final reason for Xquadrant is, the X stands for multiplication. And this is really key for me. It's easy in a sense to continually add value and play the game of being incremental, but I'm really interested in what does multiplication look like, right? How do we create an exponential curve for people? Where behind us, it looks flat and ahead of us, it looks vertical because we're on such a curve, and that's what excites me.

Steve Rush: I like that, really nice. So, when we are talking around exponential and matrices. From the last conversation you and I had, I'm going to be talking about a lot of execs get stuck in this productivity paradigm. So, tell us a little bit about what that really means and how I get out of it?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, so the name I like to use for this paradigm is the infinity trap actually. So, the infinity trap is, you know, we live in a world of infinity, right. There's an infinite number of tasks, of people, of content out there. So, there's always more to do and we just can't get through it, right. The more books we buy, the more recommendations on books we get, the more emails we reply to, the more emails we get back. It's never ending, right. And so, we can't use productivity to break out of that because you can't defeat infinity with productivity. There's always more to do. And so, the infinity trap, and I see it all around and is, just for people going, you know, I'm crazy busy or even I'm good busy, but people are so focused. They're running, they are perhaps very clear on what they're trying to achieve actually, but they've got their heads down trying to achieve it. And so, what happens is, they haven't got enough time to think. They know they're not really thinking about all the big issues around them. They've got tunnel vision, in fact. So, in a sense, they might be really focused, but perhaps they've even lost serendipity from their lives, lost a bit of randomness or lost a bit of contexts. So, it shows up in different people in different ways.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: But I think the infinity trap is really where we are running fast. It feels good. We kind of feel that we are making progress. We kind of feel that we are perhaps being the super leader in our organization and, you know, lifting things on our shoulders and everything else. And we know it kind of works in a sense, but actually progress is becoming incremental at this point.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: We can't see it.

Steve Rush: However, I guess the flip side of that is, we still need to keep productive and improve productivity where we can. And I remember, again, from the conversation we had before, there aren't any real productivity hacks. It starts with yourself, and it actually starts with shifting your mindset. From your experience what's playing out there?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, so obviously there are things we can do to kind of organize ourselves and do things differently and create an environment around us that's conducive to the work we need to do and all those things, right. But I think the fundamental limits to all that are, it's what we believe, right. It's what we believe is necessary desirable or achievable, possible around things. It depends on the self-image we have, right. How do we achieve things? How do we get things done? Right. What has to be true for us to succeed? What is success? All these things actually shape us. So let me give you an example. A couple examples come to mind. Let me just start with this one. I was talking with an executive, just being promoted to board level in a seven-thousand-person firm. It's pretty big firm and he'd got operations around twenty different countries.

And I was being asked to help him really onboard into this executive role, into the C-suite and maximize his impact as he does that. He was clearly a high performer. People loved him, but he knew he really wanted to play bigger game. And so, we identified together a couple of big transformational projects that he was going to champion throughout the business. Things that had never been done before on a global scale. And he was really going to move the needle. And he was very excited about this, and all the stakeholders were excited, and he was working on them and making some great progress. And then one day he came to me and said, you know, Richard, I'm just stuck in my email. I'm just like, I'm not getting enough time to work on these projects. They're not going as fast as I wanted.

And so, I kind of asked him, well, why is that? You know, why are you spending so much time in your email? He says, well, you know, I just want to be a good team player. I want to be trustworthy and reliable. I don't want to be the guy that people have to chase up. I don't want to be that person, right. The one who never replies to emails, who is a bottleneck for everybody else, who's not pulling their weight in the team. And indeed, he was a people person, right. He really wanted to do his best with people. And so, I stopped, and he was asking me for a tip, you know, Richard, what tips can you gimme about email? And I said, well, you know, if you’re coming to me for a tip, it's probably a waste of your money, right. You can probably Google the tip, right. I don't think that's what you need from me. In fact, I can just tell you that whatever tip I did give you, you wouldn't do anything with right now. I can't help you on that level. And he was like, what do you mean you can't help? I said, well, you've just told me that the reason you do your email and you spent so much time there is, because you want to be reliable and trustworthy and a team player. So, I'm not going to tell you to be an unreliable, untrustworthy, non-team player. You're never going to buy it. So, he was like, ah, that's a good point. So, I said, well, let try it another way. If the CEO was in the room with you, what would he be asking you for? He had to think, and he said, well.

Yeah, work on those big transformational projects. Because he's really excited about the benefits that's going to bring. Okay, what about the investors? What would they be asking for if you were in, one of those board meetings? Oh, well. I guess same thing I suppose, because that's going to make a really big difference on our financials if we can shift the employee experience in this way, okay. What about the employers themselves then? What about the team? What do they most want you to be doing if they could be in this room with us right now? And he thought, he said, well, I guess the same thing, right? Richard, the same projects, because they're sick and tired of the old ways of working and the inefficiencies that we've been working with.

And what about customers, if they could talk to us, what would they be telling us? And he said, well, they won't know so much. Because it's a bit of an internal project, transformation project, but I guess it'd be the same kind of thing. Because if the employees can focus less on internal admin, they can spend more time with the customers and solving customer issues. So, I said, okay, so at this point, you're telling me, that all these different stakeholders really want you to focus us on these two or three transformational projects? Yeah, that's right. Okay, so let me put it to you that you're being untrustworthy, unreliable, and not a team player when you are busy getting to inbox zero, you know, and managing all these inbound requests. And at this point, you know, the penny drops, right. And he’s like, oh, you're right. Like, this is not who I am anymore, right. I need to be playing a different game. And so, at that point he didn't need me to tell him how to set up a filter in Gmail, right, or how to turn his notifications off. Although those things always help, right. I’m a strong believer in turning notifications off, right. I mean, these are proven things, but the key shift was in that identity, you know, thinking actually, what is the trustworthy and reliable thing for me to do?

Steve Rush: Yeah, and then choosing that right identity creates the right behaviors and beliefs that come with it, right?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, exactly. I was working with somebody else, and he was explaining how he couldn't possibly delegate to his team because things had to be done at certain level of quality and he wasn't sure if his team was able to do it. So, I just kind of made up a concept on the fly and said, oh, so you're telling me you're being the high performing janitor. Then you want to be the high performing janitor, you know, wiping those floor tiles to perfection. Whilst there's a business to be running. And again, he just a little aah. I know you're right. Perhaps I'm focusing on doing low level tasks incredibly well.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: And perhaps not getting on into the messy business of working on the big issues.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: Which I'm not quite so certain on. And again, it's these kinds of shifts that when you make this shift, then the productivity stuff finds its natural flow.

Steve Rush: And the story you just shared, ironically is not, you know, an isolated incident. You get a lot of people, certainly at the senior level, also getting drawn into those menial tasks.

Richard Medcalf: Certainty.

Steve Rush: From your perspective, then Richard, what would be the reason that many executives and this is not exclusive to executives by the way, this could be, you know, junior team leader, right the way through to senior executives. I think most people will struggle with this. What's the reason we then struggle to prioritize in the right way typically?

Richard Medcalf: I mean, there're actually a bunch of possible reasons, but I think some of the common ones are, yeah, number one is instant gratification and the comfort zone. Have things put in front of us that we deal with. So, you know, if you're always getting notified by your email, then it's easy just to deal with emails as they come. Because they give you instant gratification, right. It's not the important work necessarily, but it’s some something. So, I think that's part of it. I think the comfort zone is another, right. In other words, there are some areas that we know how to do pretty well, but those are probably areas which actually are not the cutting edge of the work that we need to do. But we do know that we add value when we do them.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: So, there's a bit of fear. I may as well just do the things that I'm really good at, and I know that's going to do some benefit, right. Rather than tackle this kind of other stuff, which I probably should be doing. But it's a bit less clear and that's really the third point is, ambiguity, right. We don't often take the time to really define what are those high I value tasks? Right. If I had five minutes, how would I actually proceed on them? Once we can define how you'd spend five minutes, then it's quite easy to do that five-minute task. But if it's like, I'm just need to do some strategic thinking. Where to begin on that? Right. It's really difficult. So, I that mixture of that kind of comfort zone, instinct gratification, and then this kind of fear and ambiguity on what are these higher value tasks that we want to be doing. But all those things play together

Steve Rush: And there's some chemical reactions that go on with us as individuals that happen there. This is not kind of an instinct. That instant gratification, and it gives us that dopamine rush. It makes us feel good in that moment. And therefore chemically, we're also drawn to those quick hits rather than the other chemical reactions that come with uncertainty and fear and challenge that can sometimes hold us back as well, right.

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, exactly. So, it's also important to try to hack those emotions a little bit, right. And celebrate when you start to feel those, right. I've defined something that was a bit ambiguous, like give yourself a fist pump, right. Actually, reward yourself for making a dent in those ambiguous fluffy areas that are actually the important ones.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and you mentioned strategic thinking there as part of that kind of role that we all have and strategic thinking's quite overplayed in my experience. I'd love to get your spin on this, by the way. So, for me, strategic thinking is just about thinking about what we don't know yet and thinking about what we don't know, that we can then translate to what we actually do know. And again, role agnostic, whether you are a junior team leader or a C-suite executive, it's all of our responsibilities to think that way. What's your experience about how strategic thinking plays out in our workplace, these days?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, there's a couple of ways you can look at strategic thinking, right. For me, strategic thinking actually is a laser, right. Or it's a lens, right. For me, it's a lens that focuses us in, right. So where do we put our focus and our attention? What are the subjects where we need to focus? So that's part of it. And I think the other part is the more diffuse one, as you said, which is like, what is it in the environment? What are the factors that I’m not, that we're not folding in at this point? And I think those are both important ways to look at it, right. But I mean, but for me the most pragmatic way or most is to think about, there's a book I called The One Thing. And it's quite a helpful question they ask, which is, you know, what's the one thing that if we were to achieve that would make everything else easier or more relevant?

Steve Rush: That's a great question, isn't it?

Richard Medcalf: And I think just focusing on that, so what's the one thing right now that we most need to do? Right. I think that's just a really simple way of thinking about this.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: And the answer to that lens, right, that focus. My particular angle on strategic thinking is, I suppose I kind of call it exponential leadership, right. So, I'm always thinking, you know, how do we multiply impact rather than add value? How do we multiply value, not add value? How do we multiply things? And the way to think about that is, what's the constraint, right? Where is the constraint in the system in which we're operating at the moment? There's pretty more than we can get into right now on that and exactly all the constraints, but for example, we have limited time, we have limited attention, we have limited resources, you know, there are kind of things.

We might have limited ambition, right. I need to understand, like what frustrate me personally, as a leader and also in the organization. And again, the goal here is to find, what's the one area that if we were to address and improve would allow all this whole system, this business, for example, to kind of expand up to the next level of impact or to the next level of results? And for me, that's kind of the question. So, it's about rather than just turning the handle on the machine, it's trying to step back and look at the machine we've built and think about, you know, what's the one thing that's holding back performance? Just a little point on that. If people are interested in this idea of exponential leadership and moving from a more of an incremental, to more of a multiplicative mindset, I've actually written a short email series is about, I think, six emails and people on my newsletter have just been going through them. And I think I've had more feedback on that one email series than anything else I've ever written. So, it's really resonating with people, it's called The Exponential Leadership Principles. And it walks through, you know, these different constraints and what and do to overcome them. If people are interested, they can just go to xquadrant.com/hacker is a simple way for them to find their way there from this podcast.

Steve Rush: We also make sure that links in the show notes, because as you said, it's just a simple process that gets people to think and reflect, and that's half the challenge, isn't it with strategic thinking? It's giving yourself the capacity, the time that you need to be thoughtful about what it is you're doing.

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, it could because just one insight can change anything, right. One insight can certainly make us see the world in a new way, see the options we have differently. See, what's not working, that we're spending so much time on or whatever it is. And so often it's just encountering new ideas, new people, having new conversations that opens us up, right. To get onto a different trajectory.

Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah. Now you managed to interview some of the world's largest CEOs on The Impact Multiplier Podcast. And it's really interesting to dive into, I've listened to quite a few of your episodes now, and they all bring different perspectives and different stories, but there are still some commonalities. And I'm sure you find, as I do with many of our guests, that there are some common themes. From your perspective in having those conversations, Richard, what would you say is the maybe the most common challenge that keeps representing itself in and amongst these CEOs and Executives?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, I've seen this. Yeah, right on the podcast and in my own work with these kinds of leaders. Actually, there's a couple of things on trends. I mean, a bonus point, I'd almost say one of the things I've really seen as a success component actually is a theme, you know, is (A) genuinely being interested in people, right. And (B) really thinking about creating structures that multiply in fact, right. I interviewed some of the CEOs of the fastest growing companies in Europe and in the U.S. and like their common refrain was how they pushed down decision making responsibility, created independent little entities, you know, and empowered leaders who could build their own subparts of the business, and really, really interesting. In terms of the challenges. I mean, I suppose what I really see is, I think there's an internal challenge actually in a lot of people, which is even at that level, it's about confidence and imposter syndrome and all those things that's always there. There is that kind of focus challenge of getting out the weeds. I think, you know, they all say, you know, my next level is going to involve me living behind even more operational tasks, right. Trusting in my team, even more. Focusing, even more on some of the new areas, perhaps it's, you know, it's an acquisition plan they want to roll out or whatever it is. And so, continuing to get out the weeds and focus on higher level tasks. And the third one is, that one around nailing the critical conversations. So, you know, leadership is delivered one convers and at a time, and you can have all the plans and strategies you want, but actually just slowing down to master that one conversation with that one report, that one stakeholder, whoever it is, perhaps bringing them on board to what you're trying to achieve is really important. And so, I think perhaps those three areas that, you know, be in a game of confidence, the kind of higher-level activities and those critical conversations would be the three themes that I see come up.

Steve Rush: Awesome. Yeah, good. And delighted you share those now, however, I'm going to turn the tables a bit and hacking to your top thinking and your top tips for the future. And I know we think about tips and hacks and ideas. People kind of have this different perspective about what they mean. And in essence, hacking for me is just shorting into your great thinking. So, if you think about your career as a leader and what you do now, if you had to kind of get them into your top three tips or hacks, what would they be?

Richard Medcalf: Number one would be play the long game, which means they'll always be so transactional, right. It's easy to kind of get transactional and just focus on the thing in front of you, but, you know, build relationships for the long term. Think about where you want to be, you know, a little bit longer than the next year or the next quarter. Play the long game, right. And build relationships that last, right. So that'd be number one. The second one would be, go in the direction of your discomfort. See the discomfort zone is where you learn, that's where you grow and therefore treat imposter syndrome as a feature and not a bug. In other words, when you're feeding imposter syndrome, it generally means that your confidence is lagging your competency, in fact and it also means that you are actually playing a bigger game, right. You're pushing yourself; you are seeking to add more value and as a result, it feels a little bit uncomfortable. So, I think that second one, go in the direction of your discomfort.

Steve Rush: I love that.

Richard Medcalf: And then, I think the third one would be, I guess it comes back to what I talked about earlier is, focus on the key constraint, think about multiplication and not addition. Goes back to that email of course, I mentioned. Goes back to that thinking around yeah. How do I stop just using my time, doing the same tasks, time and time again? And how do I invest my time?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: To remove constraints

Steve Rush: Three fantastic hacks. I particularly love the idea of playing the long game. I guarantee many people listening to this will be going, ah, because we often don't think long game. We think, you know, this quarter, this year, next year, but actually it's all part of the long game, isn't it?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, it's what I said. I thought about, where do I want to be when I'm 90?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: One thing I love to ask my clients, you know, is what's so important to you that you have to 100 X it? What really matters, right? What do you really want a 100 X? So, for me, for example, wouldn't it be amazing if I got a 100 X, you know, the number of leaders who really point to me as a real catalyst for the impact that they've had in the world, right. As somebody who's really helped them a 100 X their impact. So, I'm on a mission, you know, I said, let's actually do that for a hundred leaders, right. Let's actually a hundred X the impact of a hundred leaders, that'd be a fantastic legacy. So that's what I'm excited about, but play the long game, think about, what would that 25-year vision be? What would be bring a silly grin to your face? Because it's so exciting, get a bit embarrassing. Because you're not sure how you're going to do it.

Steve Rush: Yeah. My unconscious thinking though, is just worrying and ticking as I'm thinking about my own long game. So, I'm hoping that it's inspiring our listeners in the same way. Next part of the show, Richard, we call Hack to Attack. So, this is affectionately where we dive into something in your life or work that has not worked out as you'd planned, could have been a complete catastrophe. It could have been a minor hiccup, but as a result of that event, it's now serving you well as a learning in your life or work, what would be your Hack to Attack?

Richard Medcalf: Yeah, I think when I look at my time at Cisco, I think there was a period at that time and perhaps it was okay. It was just life. There was a bit of a time in that 10-year period where I think I stagnated a little bit I, my kids were very young. I was in my comfort zone, shall we say, right. So, I was delivering, I was performing, people like my work, but I think I had not necessarily growing and not necessarily increasing my impact for a period. And looking back, I felt that's a bit of a missed opportunity because just like putting money in the bank, you know, things compound over time, right. If you want to play an exponential game, things compound over time. One example that's recently come to my mind is, you know, dominoes, right. If you lineup dominoes and you knock the first one over, it can knock over another domino, that's 50% bigger than itself. And then that one can knock over another domino that's 50% bigger and that's again, exponential, right. And so, I think I got into a time at Cisco where my dominoes were all the same size, shall we say, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: And it was okay. But I think that also started to kind of, I got to a think at a stage where I realized that perhaps I'd missed some opportunities and again, I had a good career, right. Good thing, and I got into this amazing team that was, you know, reporting to the CEO. And so, it wasn't a bad moment, but I think within that, before I got into that team, there was a phase where perhaps I wasn't making the most opportunities that I've been presented with. Wasn't my eye on the ball. And so, I think that's something I've really thought about now is, invest in myself, you know and reinvent. I think probably reinvent is probably the best word, right. So, I always say to people, what's your Madonna moment? You know, Madonna who, you know, turns up and she's like, we got a new style and, you know, whatever it is or any other rock band or pop star, who's been around for a long time. And most of them have had moments where they've reinvented themselves and they've changed things up.

Steve Rush: That's right, yeah.

Richard Medcalf: And I did when I left Cisco, you know, I changed things up. And it's worked really, really well. And I think continuing to reinvent ourselves, not to leave things behind actually. We think we are leaving things behind, but we don't, we just build upon them, right. And we add to ourselves, we become more multifaceted, and I think that's what I would say. So, reinvent ourselves.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: Get stuck.

Steve Rush: Cool. Now the last part of the show, we've affectionately become used to giving our guests some time to do some time travel. And you get to go and bump into Richard at 21 and give him some words of wisdom. What would your advice to Richard at 21 be?

Richard Medcalf: I think, I'd say read self-development books. Invest in yourself more, generally, never be scared of investing in yourself. Don't always wait for your company to do the investing in yourself and always be wary of the comfort zone. And I kind of knew that in some ways. But I think all those things I kind of learned more and more over time. Yeah, so now I invest in myself more than, you know, more than ever by orders a magnitude. I remember when I was in the corporate world, I was invited to go to a conference by a friend who's running the conference. I knew it was going to be a really, really good conference, but I didn't go because I had to pay for like a 200 Euro, you know, Eurostar ticket or something, right. The company wasn’t going to pay. And so, I said, oh, I'm not going to go then, and ridiculous right. I mean, and nowadays I write checks for, you know, five figure checks, right. I wrote check for $25,000, the other day for my own self development, right. Because it's so important.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Richard Medcalf: And yet, you know, there I was in a well pay corporate job and even spending a few hundred euros, seemed like a bit of an ask. It's completely ridiculous. So, investing ourselves is the best investment we can make.

Steve Rush: Great advice. So, what's next for Richard and Xquadrant then?

Richard Medcalf: Well, there's quite a few things. This year we're kicking off a CEO mastermind group. I've got a group of really, really incredible CEOs. Some of them are running kind of startups, scale up. Some of them got million-dollar companies in the U.S. and in Europe and other places around the world. And we're creating that community, which is really, really exciting because, you know, iron sharpens iron, right. You know, you get these really impressed, capable leaders together, often of whom they don't get enough of that peer input. And that's really exciting group. And then I'm also doing another program for kind of the slightly lower-level leaders as well, but another kind of community for them called Xquadrant Core. We kicked off the first session of that a couple of weeks ago. And that was a really strong start as well. So, there's a couple of kind of programs I've been up to. And moreover, what I'm focused on is that mission right. Of helping a hundred top leaders multiply their impact by a hundred. That's what gets me out me of bed.

Steve Rush: Yeah, awesome. And if we want to connect our audience with you beyond today, we know we've got that one link that we shared a little earlier, but where's the best place for us to send them?

Richard Medcalf: Yes, absolutely. So obviously, if you go to xquadrant.com/hacker, that's going to be a blog post. You can sign up at the bottom to my email and newsletter, The Xquadrant Insider, which is where basically once a month, I talk about something around this whole idea of multiplying impact. And you can deep dive into different topics if you're interested at that point. The podcast you mentioned as well, right. The Impact to Multiplier CEO Podcast where I interview some really interesting business leaders. And people are always happy to look me up on LinkedIn. Just if you send me an invitation request, just customize your message so that I know why you're connecting and where you found me. And I'm always happy to have a conversation, right. Because play the long game, build interesting relationships with interesting people, add value and generally good things come back to you over time when you take that approach

Steve Rush: And we'll help people play that long game by making sure those links are in our show notes as well.

Richard Medcalf: That's perfect.

Steve Rush: Richard, I've really enjoyed chatting with you and looking forward to you and I working together in the future. And I'm really looking forward to letting our audience find out a little bit more about the work that you do and explore some great things together. Thanks for being part of our leadership packet community Richard.

Richard Medcalf: You're welcome. It's been fantastic.

Steve Rush: Thanks very much.

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.

Rasha Hasaneen is the Vice President of Innovation and Product Excellence for Trane Technologies. A former executive with global businesses, Rasha also leads the Center for Healthy & Efficient Spaces as Executive Director. In this show learn about:

• Why, when the world is diving into ESG and Climate measures we are not normally drawn to consider inside spaces, – why is that?
• Why is how we live indoors so crucial to a sustainable future?
• What is the impact on productivity loss due to unhealthy indoor spaces?
• Covid 19 is not the first pandemic and not likely to be the last, learn about the “extra layer.”

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

Find out more about Rasha below:

Rasha on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rashahasaneen/

Rasha on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rhasaneen

Company Website: https://www.tranetechnologies.com

Full Transcript Below

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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

Today's special guest is Rasha Hasaneen. She's a Vice President and Executive Director, at Trane Technologies where she runs Center for Healthy & Efficient Spaces. Rasha is also a board of advisor member, a board member for a number of technology and climate tech companies and councils. But before we get a chance to speak with Rasha, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, we explore whether or not organizations and leaders are taking ESG seriously. And if they do, how it can directly correlate to great results. The letters ESG of course stand for Environmental, Social and Governance, and are typically how organizations structure activities and commitments to each be it greenhouse gases and emissions and waste, that's E. Staff, labor, relations, employee safety, that's the S or board diversity in supply chain management, that's the G and while most organizations will have a view and a lens. Having tactical and focused activities can be really relevant to the business world and more and more shareholders and stakeholders, as well as customers, staff and consumers are starting to take more notice around ESG and ESG ratings.

The momentum towards ESG has not slowed with the pandemic. The crisis has intensified and reinforced the important issues of ESG. George Serafeim, a Harvard Business School Professor and ESG expert said COVID 19 has caused us to dive deeper and integrate our ESG inside organizations around them management and their strategy. And it's no longer just about feel-good issues. We're talking about even more important value drivers. So, let's have a look at how ESG can really drive shareholder return and maximize value for the organization. In one HBR Study, they found that $1 investment yielded $28 return over 20 years for companies that focused on ESG. And those that didn't focus on ESG measures only returned $14. In a recent study by McKinsey's, they explained executing ESG effectively can help combat rising operating expenses. Affecting operating profits as much as 60%. For leaders who want to reap such reports, they should immediately begin measuring ESG metrics alongside other KPIs.

Of course, companies can then demonstrate what they measure and the impact that has to returns, and ESG helps with talent too. According to Wharton, Professor Peter Cappelli. Most hiring is a result of drastically poor retention. This issue has only been compounded in recent years with Mercer Global Talent Trends, 2020, calling the great recession. Revealing that nearly half, that's 46% of C-suites believe that their organization is ill equipped to attain, attract, the right talent. Though ESG and talent may seem unrelated, they are deeply correlated. A study from Marsha McLean & McLennan found employers with an attractive ESG strategy, attract, and retained the best talent in the marketplace. In addition, saw performance roughly 25% higher than average employers. There's enormous amount of evidence pointing that ESG is a value driver and will be even more of when moving forward. So, if leaders want to win, they should be putting those three letters, ESG at the heart of their strategies. That's been The Leadership Hacker News, as always please get in touch, in news, stories or insights that you might have.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Rasha Hasaneen is our special guest on today's show. She's the Vice President of Innovation and product excellence for Trane Technologies, a former executive with Global Businesses. Rasha now leads the Center for Healthy & Efficient Spaces as Executive Director for Trane Technologies, Rasha welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Rasha Hasaneen: Thank you, Steve. It's a pleasure to be here.

Steve Rush: So, you and I have taken an absolute age to try and get together, right? With the moving schedules, global pandemic but we are finally here at last.

Rasha Hasaneen: Yes, agreed. It's been a little crazy. I mean, every time we think there's, you know, there's light at the end of the tunnel, there's more to come. And so, I think we're all trying to navigate it as best we can

Steve Rush: Indeed. And the first time you and I met, we were talking around climate change and the role that Trane Technologies plays in that. And if anything, timing's perfect because the world has just really grab hold of the whole climate change initiative, hasn't it?

Rasha Hasaneen: You bet, absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah. I'm looking forward to getting into that in a moment before we do, though, we love our guests to give our audience the opportunity to share their backstory and understand a little bit about how they've arrived to do what they do. Tell us a little bit about Rasha?

Rasha Hasaneen: You bet. So, I'm originally Egyptian. I moved to the United States very young. My mom came here to study. And then, you know, I spent my formative years between sort of the U.S. and the Middle East. Came back to do University, actually in Canada. So, I am also Canadian. Then worked for a few years, came back to the U.S., did a Masters, then sort of dug in on the digital side of things. So, I worked in Silicon Valley for a number of years. Decided I was really interested in sustainability with a big S, versus sort of sustainability with a little less S. Sort of doing stuff at home and composting and doing all the cool stuff. I wanted to really understand how I could impact climate change at the time.

I will not date myself by telling you when the time was, but it was before climate change was cool. But I realized that sort of the combination of digital technologies with actually the industrial world was going to have a much bigger impact than the combination of digital technologies with the consumer world, which was kind of all the rage at the time. This was the early days of Amazon, again, dating myself. The early days of Amazon. You know, I had an iPod before the iPhone came out, which a lot of listeners may not remember.

Steve Rush: Yep.

Rasha Hasaneen: But it became clear to me that actually the integration of digital and industrial was really where it was going to be. And so, I went back and did the Doctorate, focusing on sustainability, but really focusing on industrial businesses. Made my change from Silicon Valley to sort of oil and gas and power. Finished my Doctorate. And then I was really on the supply side, I would say of climate change. So, power generation, you know, fossils versus renewables, et cetera. And then at the time Ingersol Rand, which then became Trane Technologies, came to me and said, hey, how would you like to be on the demand side? And they presented a very compelling argument about what it means to be on the demand side of climate change and really understanding how to reduce consumption through efficiency and so on. And so, they convinced me, and I joined the company to do product excellence and innovation and have never looked back since.

Steve Rush: Awesome. So where did the bug come from? Because the whole career so far for you has been around sustainability.

Rasha Hasaneen: Yes.

Steve Rush: And where did that kind of a little S turn into a big S?

Rasha Hasaneen: For me, you know, I'll share a very personal story. When I was working in Silicon Valley, I got really sick. I was in the hospital for about nine days in the intensive care unit. I was very young. And until that point I was kind of invincible and so was the world. And then you kind of examine your own vulnerabilities at that point. And then, for me, it was more about what, you know, you get to a point where it was like, what do you want to do with your life? And you want to do something that matters, right? And you also want to do something you're good at, and that you enjoy. So, I knew I enjoyed building things. I enjoyed, you know, building teams from scratch, doing things that were completely new and what I loved to do.

And so, when it came to where I could apply my skillset in a way that would really help, sustainability became sort of part of the narrative for me personally, right. It was like, you know, how do we make businesses more sustainable? How do we make it better for people all over the world? Not just people in certain economic situations or in certain countries. And how does that the ubiquity of climate, how do you impact that? It was a big problem to solve, and it seems really overwhelming. And that was kind of, you know, it became a big puzzle for me, like, it's overwhelming, how do you break it down into kind of bite size pieces? And so, I started to understand it more and I wanted to really work on something that would really like change the world.

And, you know, at the time, you know, apps were growing in popularity. And so, people would make apps for everything, right. I think at one point there was an iFart app. I was like, that's not what I want to work on. And so, I started to really sort of get the bug back for, you know, industrial businesses, I’m Mechanical Engineer by trade. My Masters is in Industrial Engineering, so I kind of missed that sort of the tangibility of being part of a business that builds things. But I also knew that it was that combination of my digital experience, bringing it to sort of the heavy metal type industry that was really going to make a difference. And every time I looked at something that was made better by digital, it was like the gains were humongous. And, so for me, it was really about doing something of import with sort of your superpowers. And that's kind of how I landed here. Some of it was serendipity of course. But a lot of it was really just having an internal sort of self-reflection over a period where your kind of most vulnerable, I think.

Steve Rush: It's a great reflection. So, when it comes to climate change, our listeners are probably thinking, you know, traditional ESG measures. It's unlikely that when they do think of climate measures that they think of indoors.

Rasha Hasaneen: Yeah.

Steve Rush: And being drawn to consider indoor spaces, what's the reason it doesn't get the same profile, maybe as some of the other more explicit things that folk are undertaking right now?

Rasha Hasaneen: Absolutely. Great question. And it's a question I think about a lot. So historically it has taken a very long time, even for climate measures to become acknowledged as quote unquote real or something that we need to pay attention to. It took focused effort by science and researchers. It took, you know seasons and seasons of intense weather for sort of this very deliberate approach to take hold among the population. Indoor climates are very similar. They're intangible, right. Like your indoor climate is fine until it's not.

Steve Rush: Right.

Rasha Hasaneen: And it has to be really bad for you to want to do something. Like, just think about your own home, right? Like you're in your home, if you're a little cold, you put on a blanket, right. You know, if it's a little stuffy, you open a window or you kind of deal with it. And it's not until like somebody burns something that you're like, okay, I got to turn on the hood vent. I've got to clear out the smoke and it's got to really be irritating. And humans tend to go to the bad, like I want to make the bad better. I rarely want to make the good, better if it's good, it's fine. And indoor spaces are no different. The impact of negative indoor environments is chronic. It's not acute. So, it happens over time, and it could be so many factors. And like, is it genetic? Is it this? Is it that? Why do I have asthma? And so, in the south here, in the United States, we call it the boiling frog syndrome, right. If you put a frog in really hot water, it jumps right out. But if you put a frog in cold water and you heat up the water slowly, it can boil to death. I know it's very gruesome, but without realizing that that's what's happening to it. And that's kind of how indoor environments are. You can't see it. Most of the times, you can't smell it. You can't feel it. And so, these indoor environments are not given as much attention by individuals.

Steve Rush: Mm, and also. People perceive climate change to be an outside thing. They don't actually make the association that it's everything around us.

Rasha Hasaneen: Inside, exactly. And so, were so focused on planetary health and sort of, you know, our very existence that we won't always then come back and think about human health. And if you just think about ESG metrics, the E gets a lot of attention. The S gets a little bit of attention, but not nearly as much. And human health is really a part of that social piece, right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Rasha Hasaneen: So, if you think about, you know, environmental, social, and governance, that social piece, that human health, the health of employees. The health of communities, it's something that's very big. It's very nebulous, very much a like climate change, but hasn't gotten the same attention. And people don't realize that, you know, you experience 90% of the outdoors in indoors, right. Because that's where you spent most of your time. And if you're bringing outdoor air in, if you're bringing in, you know, outdoor lights, you're bringing that in, but you don't think about it that way, because those walls are up and it feels very safe inside and you could be creating some negative health effects or maybe not negative health effects, but they're not super positive, right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Rasha Hasaneen: They're okay.

Steve Rush: Yeah. What are the things that contribute to inside sustainability? The things that are around us at work and at home we can be thought full about.

Rasha Hasaneen: That's another really great question. So, I think that what people most associate with is thermal comfort, right. Am I too hot? Am I too cold? If I'm too warm, you know, I can't sleep. I can't work. I can't get creative. I have to sort of get to the right temperature and that's absolutely part of it, but you also have a number of other factors. Air quality is one of the main one’s. Different levels of what we've historically measured as a proxy, CO2 can improve or decrease productivity and the amount of CO2 in a space can make you sleepy, but it can also make it very hard for you to think and process information and complete tasks. In addition, you know, with respect to air, you know, there's compounds that are generated all the time, either by the materials in your room or by activities of people, we call them volatile organic compounds.

Those can be pretty harmful. They can be irritants. You hear about allergen, so air quality is a huge part of it. Lighting is another part of it. We've seen a lot of focus on lighting recently with the capability that LED gives you. So, when you had incandescent bulbs, you know, it was just one temperature, it was on or off, and so, you took it for granted. The productivity that came with the introduction of electricity and indoor lighting will far outweighed any potential issues with lighting. But as we started to have more access to light emitting diodes, now you could vary dimness, so light intensity, you could vary the temperature of the light. Is it white? Is it yellow? Is it sort of darker or lighter? You see daylight bulbs come out; does it simulate daylight?

So, lighting has a huge component on our circadian rhythm, but it also plays a huge part in how well we also process information and so on. So, the third one here is lighting. And that's part of a bigger sort of piece around visual comfort. And that includes things like outside views. It includes things like, is there enough greenery? You know, our bodies are programmed to feel better when we are exposed to things that are good around us. And we're programmed to love plants and love outside views and so on. So, lighting and visual comfort is really important. And so, the last part of this is really acoustics. So, acoustics is really about sound and noise and really poor acoustics that you get from either equipment in a building or even externally coming in. So outside noise pollution can have a huge impact on how productive you are, how well you sleep. So, you might be able to sleep. You might be able to work, but the quality of that sleep and that work matters. And that has a lot to do with ambient noise, whether it's noise intensity, or noise frequency.

Steve Rush: That's really insightful actually. And as you were spinning through those different themes, I'm putting myself in that scenario in my office and thinking about, oh, I'm not got enough light here or you know, I know how frustrated I get when I hear some outside noise and I get distracted easily.

Rasha Hasaneen: Right.

Steve Rush: They're all things that contribute to that. So not only is that sustainable, but absolutely has a direct correlation to people's wellbeing, doesn't it?

Rasha Hasaneen: Exactly. That's exactly right, right. So, we think about LED lights, for example, we use the lighting example as being a phenomenal way to reduce energy intensity in the home or in the office, right? So, you see all these sort of LED projects where I'm like I'm going out and replacing all of the lighting in a skyscraper, all of the lighting in a mall. But what you don't understand is, what we are starting to understand is that that also improves wellbeing. So, that technology has enabled us to vary lighting temperature in a way to make, you know, and commercial organizations have known this for a very long time, right. The type of lighting you have changes, you're buying behavior. So, if I want to buy something, it's got to have the right lighting around it in order for me to be attracted, to buying that. Or if I'm at a restaurant, I have to have the right ambiance in order for me to feel relaxed or romantic or whatever it is you're aspiring to do in terms of the restaurant.

Steve Rush: Right.

Rasha Hasaneen: LED lights have turbocharged that, right. So, in an effort to reduce energy intensity and improve outdoor kind of sustainability or the carbon footprint of the built environment, we've also introduced a tool that can improve human health indoors, but you have to use that tool. So even though for example, LED lighting is very dimmable, most switches are still on, off. The dimmability of light is very important, right. You need to reduce light intensity throughout the day so that you can sleep at night, so you can be healthy the next day, so you can be productive. And, we're still learning in the built environment, how to do that. Air quality is no different, acoustics are no different, right. And so, as we're starting to learn about the impact of these different elements on human health, we can start to change how we build things, how we implement these systems in a way to take full advantage of not only their impact on sustainability, on climate, the big climate, but also their impact of the indoor climate on human health and start to tune these environments in a way that allow you to have different environments for different situations.

Steve Rush: It's far more scientific than most people give this credit, right?

Rasha Hasaneen: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: You are talking about it in almost a forensic way, which I love by the way. I think it's really insightful, but I wonder how many people have to struggle with getting as thoughtful about that?

Rasha Hasaneen: You're absolutely right. And we did a survey recently of just homeowners, right. So commercial spaces are a little bit different because a lot of times, you know, facility managers and building owners are really focused on employees, but the home tends to be where kind of your average consumer is. And when we talk about indoor air quality, for example, it's like, so what are the types of things you would do to improve your air quality? It's like, we light a candle. And you're like, oh my, right. Because it's like that fantastic. Except you know, there's so much more to air chemistry, you know, than lighting a candle and you could be making it worse.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rasha Hasaneen: Funny story, we're doing a project with a company in India and it's an indoor air quality sensor. And they had put it in these locations and every day and around the same time, they would see these particulates go up, right. And particulates are not great for a lot of reasons. They kind of get into your lungs and they cause asthma. But they also kind of carry viruses, bacteria, et cetera. And some particulates would go up and they would spike around the sensor. And so, they went to this place, and it turns out they were like lighting incense to worship. And it's like, okay, well, you might not want to get too close to God right now, right. Or in this way, there's other ways. But they were lighting incense right around this sensor. And the incense was creating, you know, this really crazy indoor environment. Now, again, in the grand scheme of things, right.

Huge space, little stick of incense, not a big deal, but that's how people think about this kind of air quality. It's very unspecific, unscientific, but really the impacts on human health, super scientific, lots of studies out there that show the impacts of different elements of air and light and acoustics on productivity and health. And so, there's a lot out. And the challenge we're going to have through the pandemic have been sensitized to this is really bringing that science to the average consumer in a way that they can understand it and that they can digest it, right. And then really developing solutions where I don't have to have the consumer know every scientific detail to implement those solutions where they can just say, hey, I want a room for an asthmatic child. Can you please dial that in for me?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rasha Hasaneen: Right, and somebody else who understands the science, who understands the situation can help them really get the best indoor environment.

Steve Rush: And it's like anything with, if you take the whole climate or journey to net zero, whatever your focus is right now.

Rasha Hasaneen: Yeah.

Steve Rush: It's everybody taking personal responsibility to do their bit, that will make the big difference overall, right?

Rasha Hasaneen: Absolutely. And there are definitely strategies just like with anything else that could give you a really fantastic indoor environment that could have a really devastating impact on the climate, which then creates a poorer outdoor environment, which makes you have to work harder to create this really good indoor environment. So, I'll give you an example of that. If you in an urban environment, a lot of times the immediate microclimate around where you live or where you work is not fantastic, right. So, then you get the indoor environment, and you know, guidance that says, hey, you need to ventilate. The easiest way to ventilate is to open a window. Well, if you're out in the country, or if you're in a suburban environment, chances are your outdoor air is fantastic. And if you open up a window, you're going to create a really great indoor environment.

However, if you have an HVAC System, if you've got your air conditioner on, summer, you have your air conditioner on. It's going to have to work harder because your kind of air conditioning, the world, right. All of that cool air sort of goes out your window, and the hot air comes in. So, it's going to work harder. It's going to use more energy. A lot of that energy is still very much fossils, and you're going to start to get a degrading outdoor environment. So even when you now open the window, you're not going to get the environment you want. If you're in an urban environment, you're already there.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rasha Hasaneen: When you open a window in an urban environment, a lot the CO2 and all of those things that are accumulated inside, they dilute, that's great. But what you're bringing in could have different things going on, right. You could have different pollutants coming in, allergen, smoke, VOCs, et cetera, depending on where you are in an urban environment. So, it's not easy, right. It's not easy. And your actions as an individual have a direct impact on climate. So, if you do one of these things and you have to use more energy to do it, multiply that by 7 billion people.

Steve Rush: Right.

Rasha Hasaneen: Right, so if everybody, and not 7 billion, not all 7 billion people have air conditioning systems, but a billion, let's talk about a billion, right. If everybody opens their windows and keeps their air conditioner on, or if everybody opens their windows, turns it off, then everything gets hot or everything gets cold depending on whether or not summer or winter or where you are in the world. Then you have to bring down the temperature again or bring up the temperature again, if it's cold, that air conditioning unit is working so much harder, multiplied by a billion.

Steve Rush: Yeah, exactly

Rasha Hasaneen: Right. And so that's the issue, and that's just homes, right. Now, let's talk about industrial environments or commercial environments and so on. And so, there are things that if you do them, could give you a negative environment on climate and give you a positive outcome when it comes to indoor environments. And the key is to get those indoor environments in a way that also reduces your greenhouse gas footprint, because you don't want to do one at the expense of the other. And that's why, you know, we call it The Center for Healthy & Efficient Spaces. It's because we want to make sure that the actions we're recommending to our clients, we want to make sure that the actions that I recommend in these podcasts are actions that will have a positive impact on both indoor and outdoor climates.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it's all about pulling levers and getting balances. Isn't it?

Rasha Hasaneen: Exactly. That's exactly right.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Now you mentioned this a little earlier on, as you were talking through the different things that we could be thinking about, and you mentioned productivity, and there's a real business case that sits behind this, alongside that sustainability case, isn't there?

Rasha Hasaneen: There absolutely is. So, if you look at a given building, right, let's say you're renting a space in a building or you've got a building and you've got a small business, you're an entrepreneur. The amount of money you spend on energy is a 10th of maybe the amount of money you're going to spend on people. It could be as much as the hundredth, right? So, it's a much smaller amount of money that you're going to spend on things like utilities and that's sort of our proxy for energy consumption, right. But your people are probably going to be one of your biggest assets and the health of those people becomes a huge economic lever for you as a business owner. We know, for example, that indoor air quality can have a productivity. So, let's just take indoor air quality as an example, and we can do this.

We have studies on lighting. We study on acoustics, but I like air for a couple of reasons, you know. It's not just about sort of direct productivity every day, cognitive function, et cetera, but think about airborne pathogen transmission, which is still, I think, top of mind for a lot of people with the pandemic kind of still raging. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year is lost in productivity due to absenteeism.

Steve Rush: Right.

Rasha Hasaneen: Same with schools, then you combine both, absenteeism as a result of kids being sick from school. And then there's hundreds of billions more of loss productivity as a result of employees working while sick. Now think about that. I don't even have to make everybody perfectly safe from pathogen transmission. Like, I don't need to reduce a hundred percent of pathogen transmission in a building to improve this. If I can just improve the air quality in a building such that I reduce transmission of cold or flu, or COVID in this particular case by 10%, tens of billions, right. 20%, like, just think about that. Those are not big numbers, but if I create these environments in such a way that I can just reduce absenteeism, that's hundreds of billions of dollars.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rasha Hasaneen: And that's, just one part of the productivity. We know that air quality impacts asthma, chronic illnesses, which reduce productivity without creating absenteeism, right. If you're a chronic sufferer asthma or upper respiratory disease that has an impact on your productivity, but also impact cognitive function, right, as much as 30%. You can have poor indoor air quality and just your ability to process things and do tasks at work goes down dramatically.

Steve Rush: That's a significant amount of time too, isn't it?

Rasha Hasaneen: Absolutely, and learning, right. So, we think about school systems and the measures they have with student learning. Let's take out absenteeism for a second, right. Like just kids being sick. We found that, not we, researchers have found that the indoor environment can have as significant and impact on test scores as grades. So just think about public test. You want to predict how well a student is going to do on a test, okay. On a public test. There's a number of factors that can give you an indication of how well that student is going to do. The most common one we think about is, are they a good student? Do they get good grades? That has a really strong correlation with how well they're going to do on these tests. As strong a correlation, how good is their indoor environment?

Steve Rush: Wow.

Rasha Hasaneen: As strong a correlation on how well they're going to do on this test is whether or not while taking that test, do they have a good indoor environment? And that includes acoustics, it includes lighting and includes air, and it includes temperature. And so, you're thinking about this and you're like that child's ability to score on a test is that dramatically impacted by indoor environments. Like it boggles the mind, right. And these are, I mean, these are scientific studies. They're peer reviewed, they're out there. You can kind of see them, but I mean, these are, you know, they've done control groups and testing doing these things on days where it's good indoor environments, days on bad indoor environments, it's amazing to me and that's the type of productivity we're talking about. And so again, there's so many people on the earth, right. Multiply that by hundreds or millions or billions. And you're talking about a huge sort of impact, not just on human health, but also on sort of economic productivity.

Steve Rush: Yeah. It's amazing when you start to just think of the tiny little changes we could make and then multiplication across the globe, we can make a massive difference, not just for sustainability, but also productivity and wellbeing.

Rasha Hasaneen: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Really fascinating.

Rasha Hasaneen: And then when you think about, just to close this up, when you think about the places that have poor indoor environmental quality, it's typically those places that don't have a lot of investment.

Steve Rush: Right.

Rasha Hasaneen: And therefore, they're in disadvantaged communities and disadvantaged areas. So, it exacerbates any equity issues we have, right. So, you just think about social equity and having sort of high-quality indoor environments as a human right almost, right. To say, look guys, like kids in school and disadvantaged communities, have the card stacked up against them already. And this is yet another card that's kind of stacked up against those who are less fortunate. And so, you start to look at the equity impacts of this and how much this exacerbates that. And you start to realize that a lot of where we think about human health and social equity, it comes right down to, you know, can I create these indoor environments for people in different economic situations, in such a way that I'm leveling the scales a little bit as it relates to social equity.

Steve Rush: So, ponding, how many of our listeners right now are thinking about their environment as they listen to this? Very interesting to get some feedback from our listeners about that, wouldn't it?

Rasha Hasaneen: Oh, you bet.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rasha Hasaneen: Absolutely would love to hear from listeners on that.

Steve Rush: So, we're going to flip it a little now, and this is where I get to hack into your leadership brain.

Rasha Hasaneen: Awesome.

Steve Rush: But before I do that, I just wanted to get a sense from you that if I was a listener listening to this and I was a leader or an entrepreneur, where's the first place I should really start to think? What's the immediate kind of win I can make?

Rasha Hasaneen: When it comes to indoor environmental quality, it depends on your situation, right. If you're working, you know, from home, if you have control over the environment, definitely you can start by doing things as simple as improving your lighting, right. You can get LED lights pretty much from any hardware store, you can get dimmers. You can improve of your lighting. You can connect with your HVAC provider, make sure you have the right number of air changes that you're getting enough ventilation, that you've got filters, right. The simplest thing is make sure your filters are changed on a regular basis. You know, there's a lot you can do when it comes to acoustics, to insulate things like window coverings and in fact, now there's actual window coverings that say on them, how much energy they save. You know, there's a lot you can do when it comes to your own space or the space for your employees. And then you can also consider in room type solutions. If you don't have access to those broader systems, right? So, we carry an in-room air purification solution, you just plug it in and run it and away it goes, and you do a little bit of maintenance. You can do an in room HEPA. You can think about opening windows on a regular basis to make sure there's enough ventilation. So, there is a lot that can be done by the individual, by a small business, an entrepreneur just by being conscious of this, if you want to do things that are more sophisticated, definitely, you know, you would need to connect with a professional. And I would say, if you do have a larger business or a larger building, it's not a do it yourself.

Steve Rush: No.

Rasha Hasaneen: Right.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rasha Hasaneen: It's definitely not, because you want to make sure you're balancing energy or make sure you're balancing the different elements of indoor environmental quality. So definitely if you're a listener, and you're a building owner or you've got multiple buildings, you're a real estate investor, or you've got sort of a number of opportunities to improve people's and their environments. Don't try to tackle it yourself, definitely reach out to a professional and have them come in, do an indoor air quality assessment or indoor environmental quality assessment, understand where some of the gaps are. There are fantastic certifications, right. Out there for building performance. So, whether it’s wealth certification, fit well certification, there's a number of certifications out there that can be done to ensure, and to communicate to your tenants, that these buildings are optimized for indoor environmental quality,

Steve Rush: Great advice, good hacks too. So, leadership hacks time.

Rasha Hasaneen: Awesome.

Steve Rush: I want to dive into your experience. You've led businesses all over the world, different types of businesses and different types of teams. And I want to try and get into your top three leadership hacks. What would they be?

Rasha Hasaneen: That's a really good question. So, my leadership hacks, or I think there are things that I do deliberately that if I were to say them, you would be like, of course, but most people probably wouldn't do subconsciously. I know I wouldn't do subconsciously. So, the first thing I do is, you know, so most of the teams that I lead are innovative high performing teams. And I think there's a leadership approach that says you have to have a vision and the strategy, and you have to have the answer as a leader. And the answer is you don't. And it's very jarring for employee or for team members that are used to kind of having a more autocratic approach. So, I take collaborative to the sort of, to the extreme and I work with my teams and have for years to build strategies, to build visions. I don't expect to, you know, I don't expect to come up with the vision and kind of have everyone follow. So, for me, it's really around early and often with the team. Talking about the team's vision and the mission and how we want to be seen. And so, that sort of extreme collaboration, I'm not going to call it delegation, but really working with your team and giving them ownership of not just the tactical execution, but also of the strategy. Really for me, has worked exceptionally well. The outcome is a lot better. It's scratchier, and so that's my second sort of leadership hack, which is, don't be afraid if people are uncomfortable, don't be afraid to be uncomfortable because that's when kind the best outcomes are. And I always feel like afterwards people really appreciate discomfort.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rasha Hasaneen: I've had a couple of team members that are just, oh my gosh, I never want to do that again. But most of the time people start to get it and they're like, oh, I get it now, right. And it's like, there's no epiphany there. It's a really uncomfortable place when there's a lot of disagreement about where to go and feels very chaotic, I think at first. So that's the second one, is to really get comfortable with other people's discomfort and your own discomfort, right. Of not having the answers and maybe being seen as vulnerable. And that leads me into my third one, which is really sort of leaning into the vulnerability piece with teams. And again, a lot of times there is this view that the leader has to be a strong leader and you have to kind of carry the burden. And I don't actually think you do, you know, being comfortable with not having the answer, being vulnerable with your team, being very authentic. Like I tend to hear on the side of being transparent.

Steve Rush: Right.

Rasha Hasaneen: And again, for some people that's very uncomfortable, but for a lot of people, I think having that context and transparency, even if it takes a little bit more time matters. And what that then leads me to do is I actually have unstructured time even during the pandemic. I have a lot of unstructured time with people I interact with. And I feel like people really appreciate that. So, by unstructured time, I mean, like we're in a meeting, it's 30 minutes. It may only take 10 minutes to get the work done. But you know, taking that extra 20 minutes to get to know people, having them get to know me. Being really transparent about what's going on just in your life, just creates this sense of empathy with others and with yourself that gives sort of, and I may use a very Southern term here, that allows people to give and get grace, right. Like there's so much of business interaction that is very businessy.

Steve Rush: Right.

Rasha Hasaneen: Get the work done. Don't waste my time. And it's like, no, no, there's grace too. Like no one is perfect. And so, if you know people's circumstances, you can give them grace, if you know people's circumstances, you can be empathetic. And so, when they do make mistakes or if deadlines are missed, there's a very sort of collaborative approach to it versus being very adversarial. And I think that comes with really getting to know people and showing them that kind of grace in interaction. I know they're very wishy washy, but those are my top three.

Steve Rush: Awesome advice. No, not wishy washy at all. The next part of the show, we call it Hack to Attack. This is typically where something in your life or your work hasn't worked out, but there's a real learning that come from that, and it serves you well, what would be your Hack to Attack?

Rasha Hasaneen: I thought, didn’t I already share the time I almost died. Like that was my thing in life that didn't work out well. But you know, that to me is probably the standout one. I've had many sorts of things that haven't worked out well. In Innovation you tend to have something called a pipeline conversion, which is, how many things have to fail, fail is a bad word, but how many things don't turn out the way you expect it before you kind of have something succeed, right. And for me, I look at it like, if things don't break when you're doing them, you're probably not taking enough risk.

Steve Rush: Yeah, exactly right.

Rasha Hasaneen: And so, things go wrong around me all the time, right. And the question just is, what are you learning from that? And how are you turning that kind of into a positive experience? And I feel like I do that all the time. I've had a couple of big ones, or probably the biggest is when, you know, you expect your body to do something, and it doesn't want to comply. I like if you expect your body to breathe and it doesn't want to breathe, that's not a good thing, but I did learn a lot around sort of work life balance or work life management, whatever you want to call it, making choices about who to work for, where to work and being sort of an understanding that you're blessed enough to be able to make those choices, because that again, leads to a lot of grace when it comes to working with others. So, for me, it's hard to point to one thing outside of almost dying.

Steve Rush: Yeah, maybe dying kind of does it though, doesn't it?

Rasha Hasaneen: Yeah. That kind of trumps everything you possibly could do.

Steve Rush: So now, the last thing we get to do. You get to do some time travel, bump into Rasha at 21, give her some advice. What would it be?

Rasha Hasaneen: Don't color your hair. That's the advice.

Steve Rush: If you have hair, of course.

Rasha Hasaneen: If you have hair, of course. But me at 21, I did, and I had a lot of it, and it was starting to turn gray. I remember at 21, I was started to get gray, and I was obsessed with coloring the gray and it led to about 20 years of hair damage, which I have now thankfully reversed.

Steve Rush: On a serious note, though. That's really serious advice. If it starts to happen to you, it can change your future outcomes for sure.

Rasha Hasaneen: Yeah. Well, that's it, I mean, for me, it does come down to sort of being really authentic as a leader. Don't color your hair is just a euphemism for that, you know, at 21, man, I had just graduated college. It was my first kind of job. I was still a competitive martial artist and appearances really mattered and they kind of don’t anymore.

Steve Rush: Talking of which, little bird tells me, you were actually national karate champion, is that right?

Rasha Hasaneen: I was, I was. And so, I will tell you at 21, I was pretty oblivious to a lot of stuff going on around me and I grew up in a very sheltered sort of, high school. It was a small girl finishing school in the Middle East. And you know, my graduating class was like 10 people. I was very sheltered, when I went to college, I didn't have the same college experience as everyone else, but I will say, you know, at 21 that would be the one thing is, sort of, you know, while I would say at 21, I was definitely judged differently because I didn't have a lot of the credibility I have now. I do feel like I spent an inordinate amount of time sort of maintaining appearances and I was very naive. And I feel like, one. I trusted people too much, but at the same time I felt like I only trusted them so far, which was kind of the worst of both worlds, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Rasha Hasaneen: So, you're either all in, like you're all in, on being kind of your authentic self and your kind of over the top or you're sort of super reserved and it's kind of in the middle that confuses people a lot. And I was definitely in the middle for a long time before I embraced being all in on authenticity. So, I'm glad I did that, but that would be the one thing. Negotiate your salary. That would be another thing like, yes, you can negotiate and no, that's not enough. And the third thing I would say, would be, definitely look at work relationships differently than I did. I would say, I probably didn't understand the role of sponsors and mentors and sort of those work, call it friendships. I didn't understand how important they were at 21. And I made some sort of real mistakes in terms of getting that kind of sponsorship early on. And so, it took me some time to get there, but that's it. That’s what I would say.

Steve Rush: It's some great advice for people listening to this, for sure.

Rasha Hasaneen: Yes.

Steve Rush: So how do we get people who are listening to this to connect with you and Trane Technologies? Where’s the best place to send them?

Rasha Hasaneen: So, couple of things. Definitely they can reach out. We know tranetechnologies.com I think, is what it is now. The Center for Health Efficient Spaces has a spot under sustainability there. And you can definitely connect via the inbox. In fact, that likely get a faster response since the team definitely monitors that and there's a lot of great resources on The Center for Healthy Efficient Spaces. All of those numbers, I quoted about productivity. We have a primer on indoor environmental quality if people want to learn more. I would definitely recommend they go to the Trane Technologies website and look us up at Center for Healthy & Efficient Spaces.

Steve Rush: We'll drop those links into our show notes as well.

Rasha Hasaneen: Absolutely. Thank you.

Steve Rush: Rasha, thanks ever so much for taking time out and I know you have a really, really busy schedule, so I am super grateful that we've been able to connect and get you on the show. Thanks for being part of the community.

Rasha Hasaneen: I appreciate it as well. You've got a lot of fantastic guests, and this is a great podcast. So, thank you for having me and help helping us tell our story.

Steve Rush: Thank you, Rasha.

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, @LeadershipHacker on YouTube and on Instagram, the_leadership_hacker and if that wasn’t enough, you can also find us on our website https://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.

Shannon Russo is the Chief Executive Officer for Kinetix, After a successful career as a finance executive Shannon founded Kinetix with the goal of creating a firm that could help growing companies get the talent they need to compete. In this special show, learn about:

• How to pivot in a pandemic.
• The six flavors or “potential factors” for success.
• How has the workforce changed and how you need to change in it.
• The Great Resignation, is it just a moment in time or a change to how we work for good?

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

Find out more about Shannon below:

Shannon on LinkedIn: https: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonwrusso

Shannon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kinetixhr

Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kinetixhr/

Company  Website: https://www.kinetixhr.com

Full Transcript Below

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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

Today's special guest is Shannon Russo. She's the CEO of Kinetix, has a background as an executive with companies, such as M&M/Mars, Kidder Peabody & Company, and after riding the corporate wave, she opted to run her own firm and founded Kinetix, with a goal of creating a firm that could help grow companies, get the talent that they needed to compete. But before we get a chance to speak with Shannon, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: The great resignation is a real thing and it's happening to many people around the world, but of course it even impacts on global enterprises as well as global superstars in the world of business. Tesla, CEO, Elon Musk has joined the great resignation, or has he? He's tweeted numerous times over the last few months that he's quitting his job to become an influencer. But while he still sits as a CEO, his role has significantly shifted to appeal to his lifestyle choices in philanthropic adventures.

Shareholders, customers, and regulators haven't always appreciated the humor in Elon Musk's approach to his Twitter or high jinks, 2018 Tesla shares plummeted after he posted an April fool’s day message saying the company gone bankrupt. He quoted earlier this year that he was going to dispose of all of his shares and equally had a massive impact. Tesla shares fell from about 20% from November to now, as Musk has offloaded his shares. And he tweeted in December that he would be able to buy by a poll that he took whether or not to sell his stake in the car maker. So even Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and space exploration technologies cited to be the world richest person with a fortune and an estate worth 266 billion dollars. Even Elon Musk has been affected by the world around us over the last couple of years. So, if you're a leader, listening to this, pay attention to how our teams are performing and behaving. Some of the idiosyncrasy, and little idioms that you might notice in people's behavior could be a sign that they're being restless and actually having conversations to help people find their purpose is really what it's all about.

Finding out what your team need, want and expect from you as a boss is incredibly important as well as appealing to their intrinsic motivation, and that can really help the great resignation become the great retention. So that's been The Leadership Hacker News today. Please continue to get in touch and contact us through our social media. We'd love to listen to your insights and ideas about what we can talk about on the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Our special guest on today show is Shannon Russo. She's the chief executive officer for Kinetix. After a successful career in finance, as an executive, Shannon founded Kinetix with the goal of creating a firm that could really help growing companies get the very best talent that they needed too to compete in a marketplace that is really tough. Shannon, welcome to the show.

Shannon Russo: Thanks Steve. Great to be here.

Steve Rush: So, I'd love to hear about your journey from finance executive to Kinetix. Tell us a little bit about kind of what happened and indeed before that?

Shannon Russo: Yeah, absolutely, thanks. Really, and it's a sort of a joke because prior to forming Kinetix, which now has been 16 years, crazy. I was a finance person for an HR company. For a workforce solutions company for the prior 10 years. So, while I was doing finance, I was helping drive the strategy for a company that was in the workforce solution space. So, I've had a much longer perspective. I think what finance gave me was really this ability to drive analytics into the HR processes and talent acquisitions specifically. And so, when I went down the path of forming Kinetix, it really was because I saw some opportunities to really bring value to clients. And it was my finance background and the analytics that I did. Sort of looking at it that helped me come up with, there's a better way, right? These multi-billion-dollar companies do it and outsource their recruitment, but smaller companies never think that they can do that. And I came up with a model in which small and growing companies up to big companies, could do it in a way that's slightly different than what it was done before. So, it kind of helped me feed what I was doing if that makes.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and I remember from the first time that we met as well, it was kind of almost born out a bit of frustration from you. Watching how others were getting it wrong and how the opportunity was just almost there for the taking, right?

Shannon Russo: Yes, well, and part of it is that the relationship between recruitment providers and clients, right. Hiring leaders and companies in my mind is very much like the real estate. I don't really like that relationship. And so that was the other thing we were trying to do is, really go at it a little bit differently. We can really provide some leverage, perspective, process, you know, a lot of that kind of stuff that, especially if you're a growing company you don't have, but we could also provide this perspective if you're a large company that said, you're doing it wrong, you're taking too long, right? You're caught up in your own things and bring that to the table and really provide value. So, it's really been an interesting ride because of that. I don't want to call it a conflict, but just difference in terms of what, the historical way that firms deal with each other, to what we've been trying to build.

Steve Rush: Right, yeah. And there's a double sword question for you.

Shannon Russo: yeah.

Steve Rush: Interesting to learn a little bit about the work you do specifically now, and just wondered as a result of the crazy world we've been in over the last couple of years, how that might have changed?

Shannon Russo: Yeah, thanks Steve. You know, what I would tell you is, the media loves to talk about the great resignation in air quotes and how this is this amazing opportunity for workers and while in some cases that is absolutely true. I think that the mist that we are living through that my team and my clients, and hiring leaders are living through painfully is, for many folks. They think that that has given them the right to be in many cases, unethical in doing things and really not to realize that this is some kind of a relationship that's happening. And when you're going down the path to get a job, you should decide who you want to be with. And if you accept a job, you should take it. So, what we are seeing is sort of the dark side of the great resignation is this willingness for people, again, to be unethical, in that. They will accept a job and then take another job before they even start and just ghost the first job.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: Just doing things that are really horrendous and somehow thinking that that's okay and the world is all about them and there's no honesty and things, it's okay if you don't want to work for someone, right. That's the whole reason that you go through this recruitment process is to figure out if it's right fit for both parties.

Steve Rush: Right.

Shannon Russo: If it's the right fit for you, take the job, don't look back. If it's not the right fit, say no, move on.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: This sort of, we're seeing it. And it's not just low end. We're seeing six figures plus people doing things horrible things like that, where they take a job and two weeks later, they take another job.

Steve Rush: Wow.

Shannon Russo: That's ridiculous.

Steve Rush: And do you see that this being generational as well? Because I think I might have shared the story with you before that when my son who's 22. His most recent job he's in now, and it is the one he stuck with. He was kind of almost lining up these opportunities and in so much as he was going to have like a juggling game at the end, when they'd all offered. And I said to him at that time, you know, hey, this isn't right. You know, focus on one role, the role that you want, because ultimately there's people in the process at the end of this. And actually, you're taking up space for other people at the same time, right?

Shannon Russo: Yes, without question you are, yep. And I do think that the younger generations have been, they're less jaded than us on the one hand, but because of it, they're more enamored with this. It's all about me perspective.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: And so, I do think there is a little bit, well, we've seen it. Irrespective of age, I do think that what we are seeing is a little bit more willingness to do that. If you are slightly younger than myself, I'll say.

Steve Rush: And I guess, that comes with a little bit of naivety, maybe you can be a little bit green around the gills, but actually, at one point in time, you're also going to become the hiring manager. And at one point in the future, you are going to be in a position where you have a group of people applying for a role. And I think, you know, what goes around, comes around.

Shannon Russo: Steve, that is exactly the right perspective. And part of the reason that they're so willing to do it is because they haven't had it happen to them for someone who they were really excited to join their team.

Steve Rush: That's right, yeah.

Shannon Russo: And that might hopefully change their perspective a little bit, but that's an experience thing, right? That's a time thing.

Steve Rush: Totally. So, you talk about the great resignation and it's, you know, everywhere you turn, somebody is quoting it, somebody's referencing it. I'm curious from your perspective, because you hire thousands of people into different organizations, right. And I'm just curious to find out, is this just a moment in time for us or do we think that maybe this is something that's going to be with us for a while?

Shannon Russo: Great question. I wish I knew the answer to that. What I would tell you is right now for the next 18 to 24 months, it's with us.

Steve Rush: Right.

Shannon Russo: Beyond that. I don't know that I can give your perspective because I'm hopeful that instead of this dialogue about, we just have people that have been beaten down and the great resignation is them fighting back. That we have a dialogue around the actual realities of what the employees are doing, right? So, this is a relationship and both sides have a part to play. And it's not all one sided in terms of who's wrong and who's doing things that are not so great. And so that's really where I don't know how long it'll be around is because the media loves to play that. But here's what I could tell you that, is a significant shift that's going to be with us for a while.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: Because of that. And because of really some of the workforce mentality and shifts that we are seeing a tremendous difference in the volume, we are needing to contact in order to get to the same number of candidates to be interviewed. So, we call that the funnel and so the top of our funnel has gotten significantly bigger in terms of the amount of outreach that we have to do because less people are responding. Even if they're saying like, hey, not interested. And then because of some of these other things, we just talked about. Less people moving through the process, because we have people dropping out in the middle which doesn't necessarily bother me except for their ghosting us instead of saying, hey, I took another job. I'm not interested or whatever it is, any of those things are okay. So, it's just making the recruitment process from a delivery standpoint, more challenging, right? You're talking to more people; you're reaching out to more people. I don't that that's going to go away for a while. I don't love that, but it's sort of what I'm seeing, and I can't see until sort of the mentality starts to change.

Steve Rush: Sure.

Shannon Russo: Some of that changing and then we have all the demographics that are working against us, right? Aging population, people retiring, right. People getting tired, all of that stuff that just makes it where we really have to kind of build up the younger generations to where there will be enough people for certainly some of the technical jobs going forward.

Steve Rush: And from your experiences. The great resignation just for those specialists and technical jobs because the talent pool hasn't significantly changed in the last two years, right?

Shannon Russo: Nope. Now, that's the rub, right? So, here's what I would tell you. You're seeing it across the board for the niche’s skills, you're seeing it, but you're seeing it for things that you and I might consider pretty basic, where there's a pretty good volume of employees or candidates, you're seeing it there as well. And so, I think that's driving a lot of dysfunctions across those. I literally have a client in the Midwest. I'm not joking. We are hiring candidates that I consider to be making a decent amount of money. So, between 45 and $75,000 a year, so not low, low end, right. These are not $10 an hour workers. And they are having one half of their hires drop off after they have accepted an offer.

Steve Rush: Wow.

Shannon Russo: Between then and start.

Steve Rush: That's massive in terms of cost for hiring, isn't it as well?

Shannon Russo: Think about that.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: Yes, just in terms of the volume and what you're doing, and we've been working hard together to kind of shorten that, so right. Because time is part of it. But also, how do we kind of close out people? Yay or nay. It's more we, right? The hiring processes are not taking so much time with people that are not going to make it to the finish line.

Steve Rush: How do you expedite that as a process then to make sure that you do, you know, speed up that early kind of vetting if you like?

Shannon Russo: Yeah, it's a great question. So, you try to truncate the recruitment process once the person has been, right? Are they qualified and interested? Once you know that. For us, that's around the submittal. Then the interviews should be fast, right? Even if you do some of them via video and some of them face to face, so you don't want to have this really long 10 step recruitment process. And then at the very end in your kind of pre onboarding and onboarding for some clients, we're actually starting candidates while the background check is finishing. So, for some states where the background check process is long because the court systems are slow, we're having people accept, what we would call a contingent offer as long as their background comes back clear, they start early and they get paid for that, right? So, there's nothing untoward happening, but we're doing things to kind of speed up that onboarding.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: To lessen the time from when you accept the job to when you start. And obviously that depends on if you're coming from another job, then that has to be two weeks, but just how can we make that as tight as possible?

Steve Rush: And having you talk through kind of the process, I wonder how many of your hiring managers maybe have changed their approach in so much as maybe feeling a bit more anxious or bit more, you know, desperate almost to hire people because of the environment we're in now and whether or not that's going to help hold people back?

Shannon Russo: You know, I think it's interesting, you're right. The ones who are really taking it on the chin right now, they are starting to adjust. Where I see as big of a challenge in terms of people being willing to be flexible are folks that maybe don't hire as much and don't have as much experience in the world that we're living in right now. Still thinking that, oh, everybody wants to come work for me. So why don't I have ten candidates to review for this, you know, very nichey job. Well, the reality is, that the world has changed and you're going to have to move faster. You are going to have to actually sell the candidates at the same time, as you are vetting the candidates to figure out whether or not they fit you. So, it's a very different challenge than some of these older mentalities. It's not an age thing, older mentality. Like if you were a hiring leader three years ago, your perspective is very different or needs to be different than it is today in terms of how you deal with the candidates that you are talking to. Does that help clarify a little bit?

Steve Rush: Yeah, it does.

Shannon Russo: Big shift.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and of course it's in parallel to future employees and candidates having the opportunity to completely reevaluate what's important to them in their work and life at the same time as well, isn't it?

Shannon Russo: It is, 100%, and that's what we're seeing. And one of the things, and you'll chuckle, your son may have done the same stuff. Sometimes the candidates have unrealistic expectations of what they're getting and they just sort of lay that out for hiring leaders, which they think they’re a little bit smug in that, oh, hey, this is what I want. And this is what I got to have, and I'm all that, right? And sometimes they're off in what they're thinking, right. In terms of the reality of, you know, this is a job where, I'll give you some limited examples, that'll make you laugh, right. The big call now, along with the great resignation is a hundred percent remote. Everything has to be a hundred percent remote. Well, if the job requires you and I to touch each other or face each other, or do any of those, then guess what?

Steve Rush: Exactly

Shannon Russo: Not remote.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: And so, there's a little bit on the middle of the spectrum where, you know, there's some myths where people have a job. We did something for a manufacturing company, and they needed the person to be on site because they're actually doing quality, right. How else can you do that?

Steve Rush: Exactly.

Shannon Russo: But for us to have to actually have the conversation to be like, no, you can't check the quality of what's happening on the line unless you are physically there.

Steve Rush: Yeah, exactly.

Shannon Russo: And so, some of those things are, you know, in some ways surprising, but some of the shifts with this where people maybe aren't, they listen some of the stuff in the media and then they don't think it all the way through, into the reality of either their kind of job or any of that. And whether they do or not, they want some of the other stuff.

Steve Rush: And you know, you and I have seen these cycles a few times in our careers. I'm sure Shannon, and one thing is for sure, is that in a few years’ time, 2, 3, 5, 10, whatever the number of years is, there'll be a time where jobs are scarce, and the tables will have turned. And it's important that we're just really thoughtful of that in terms of our behaviors, isn't it? When we start to proceed on these journeys.

Shannon Russo: It’s 100% vital. And what I would tell you, unfortunately. I agree with you, who knows when it's going to be. But the inflation that we're seeing is kind of making me a little, you know, stressed about how soon it might be. But what I can tell you this time. This will probably make you chuckle Steve, is the whiplash is going to be very harsh.

Steve Rush: I think so too, yeah.

Shannon Russo: Because if you are really trying to hire right now, how you're getting treated by candidates. Yeah, it’s going to come back to bite some folks on the other side, I don't disagree at all.

Steve Rush: So, there's one thing that you have created, which I really love. And you call it the Kinetix Code and it's definitely not a playbook because I know you say it's not a playbook. It's not a handbook. It is really a set of principles, or you call them flavors actually that are just really potential factors that you not only help your clients with, but it's also key to your team. And I'd love for us to just get into those six principles or potential factors.

Shannon Russo: Yeah, thank you Steve. So, you're exactly right, right. In the United States specifically, handbooks are very typical. And in many cases, you need them. Same for us, right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Shannon Russo: Certain things in terms of the basic expectations and legal requirements and what we're expecting when you have to start work, when you finish, how does pay time off work? All of those kinds of policies, HR policies necessary. For us, we know that's important, but coming out of the HR space, one of the things that we felt like was missing and that's the Genesis of the Kinetix Code and then I'll get into the potential factors. As part of this, and you heard me talk about it, right? You're vetting candidates, but you're also trying to share with them and either, on the one hand sell them.

But, but conversely, maybe repel them, if who you are, isn't a fit. You don't want them literally. You don't want them. Think Zappos back in the day, who used to give you a bonus to leave. If you weren't the right fit, it's sort of in that model that says on the one hand, I want to be as transparent as possible to have everyone understand who we are as a company and how we operate and what the expectation are. And if you like that, that's going to lean you in. If you don't like that, my hope is, it's going to lean you away because I don't want us to dance and waste each other's time, right. So that was sort of the first part. And we wanted more than just the policies, which is sort of the, you know, legal jargon. But we set about with the Kinetix Code to really introduce you to how we think about things and what kinds of people are successful, so we could get you there.

And then the potentials as a key part of that, the potentials for us are what other companies call their culture or maybe their values. That's probably the best comparable. So, if you think about your values, our potential factors, our values. And I'll talk about them in just a second, but what I would tell you is they flow through everything. They're not just in the Kinetix Code, as what we think is important. We use them when we give kudos to each other, on a daily basis and when we do performance reviews. Your job is one part and those potential factors, right? Our values are the other thing that we rate you on when we try to decide kind of what's next for you. So, most companies have values, for us taken that to the next level and put it into as much of everything that we do. So, if you are an employee of ours, you know what to expect, how we're going to rate you. What's important to us and all of that. And so that's really how we came up with it. And as you mentioned, we have six, we tried to do five. But we just couldn't get it done with five. And so, when we came up with it, the last one is KICK ASS TEAMMATE, and it's really important. Plus, we call it a plus one because what we found is, the people who are the most successful, that is one of the traits of who they are. And Steve, you know, you've worked with people who that's, who they are, and you've worked with people by the way, who that's not who they are.

Steve Rush: Definitely.

Shannon Russo: And so, when we were doing it, we just ended up adding that to the table. Because when we thought about who, was the most successful working for us? That was something that with the other potentials or values, however you want to frame it, that might have been missing in that. So hopefully that gives you the framework.

Steve Rush: Let's dive into them, just maybe give us a bit of a framing on each of them and what that means. And as a leader, then how I can think about using that with my team.

Shannon Russo: Yeah, yes. So, one of the things you'll notice, and you heard it from my sixth one that I just mentioned, these are not things. So, we actually spent more time than average thinking about them and I'm going to piss off some folks with what I'm about to say.

Steve Rush: Go ahead.

Shannon Russo: They don't include something like integrity. And I'm sure there's a lot of people whose head's going to be like, what do you mean? Integrity's one of our values. Yes. Integrity is something that we find very important. Here's the problem with integrity. How do I measure it? You either have it or you don't. And I typically only find out if you don't, when it's too late.

Steve Rush: Yeah. It's not one of those things you can jump on an e-learning course to see, you know, I'm just going to take a course on integrity and top that up, that doesn't work.

Shannon Russo: Right, and so while we value it, since we were using the potential factors across how we're going to rate you, how we're going to decide if you're the right employee, how your performance management is going to go. Integrity, because you either do it or you don't, or you have it, or you don't, how do I, to your point, how do I say, you're doing really good Steve, let's do a little bit better on your integrity. That's not how it works. It's a switch.

Steve Rush: Right.

Shannon Russo: Right, either you do, or you don't. And so, we spend a lot of time really making sure that the things that we have as our potential, our values, that they were also things we could articulate. And they were also things that we could measure and rate people on.

Steve Rush: Got it, yeah.

Shannon Russo: So, all right. I'm going to go through the six. I'm just going to them one at a time. And Steve, please give me your comments.

Steve Rush: Sure.

Shannon Russo: So, the first one is, get stuff done, because for our perspective, listen, it's a job, right? We're hiring you to do stuff and to execute what's in front of you and to not get distracted by all of the things that can help you slow down. So, for us, getting stuff done very important, we operate at pretty high pace and our clients are relying on us. So that's a really important one for us.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: And we brought it down to something that makes sense, right. Get stuff done, Steve, I'm pretty sure you know what I mean by that.

Steve Rush: You don't get paid for effort, do you? You get paid for results.

Shannon Russo: Exactly. Exactly. We also call it shipping product, right. Getting stuff done, executing and moving things forward, yep, that's it. The next one is, figures it out. Again, Steve, I'm guessing, you know what figures it out means. We call it the smart factor and we spend a lot of time because politically, that doesn't sound nice, right. But here's what we mean by that. This is not an IQ discussion. This is, we're going to give you incomplete direction sometimes. And we need you to dive in and figure out what we mean by that. Ask questions. Do any of the stuff to figure out how to execute on what's in front of you and what your job is. That's what matters to us, not high IQs, willingness to figure it out, take the next step to deliver for our clients.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: So again, we try to dive in a little bit deeper. So, the next one is one that we found some of our most successful people have this as part of who they are. And that's passionate innovation. This one was a little harder, frankly, for us to kind of dive in. But I feel like we got to a good spot and so passionate innovation. If you asked just about anyone, Steve, Steve, are you passionate? Do you believe in passionate? Yes, right. Like, are you going to pick up the garbage?

Steve Rush: Yeah. Everybody's passionate. Everybody says they're passionate, right?

Shannon Russo: Right, but here's how we define it. So again, defining these so that someone can understand what you expect more than just saying you're into it. What we are expecting is that you love what you do so much, that you routinely spend discretionary effort. Let me be really clear, discretionary effort, which is more than average, more than expected, extra time learning things that can make you better. Experimenting on things to make processes better. That's how we define it. Not just some esoteric. Oh yes, I'm passionate. No, how do you do things routinely that help you and us do better, get better? Figure things out.

Steve Rush: Like it.

Shannon Russo: All right. So, the next one is self-evident, given that we are a recruitment firm connector, right. You've really got to be able to connect with people for all different ways, right? So, you're doing it because it's who you are. These kinds of people connect when they're at the coffee shop, right. It's just how they are. And they also, as part of that for us, we include a little bit of that paying forward because I might connect with someone or you might connect with me, Steve and I might not be able to help you fill a role you're working on right now, but a good connector at Kinetix means I'm connecting with you and I'm getting your information because tomorrow I might have that great opportunity for you. And so, we see it as a little bit, even more than that, all right, I'm coming into the home stretch, Steve with this. The next one for us, again, we're kind of keeping these front and center, but they are real in that. These are things that make Kinetix a successful company. The next one is called likable. Yep, we said it, likable.

Steve Rush: It's one of those those things that people are quite uncomfortable using that word these days, because it doesn't feel particularly quantitative, but actually we all feel it.

Shannon Russo: That's right. And again, it’s similar to the other ones, we've dove into kind of tell you what we mean by that. So yes, for us likable means authentic, means professional, means that you have command of what you are doing in person, on the phone, how you write and communicate with people. So, it's very much around communication. But at the same time, you're viewed as approachable, and you can work with teams. So, this is something that we actually spend a lot of time on. We talk about being classy honest. That's the other part of being likable is being real enough to tell the truth, even if it's not what the person wants to hear, because ultimately that does make you likable because you're trustworthy.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and without that trust and likability, you actually can't be honest with people. So, if you wanted to give some feed forward or feedback to somebody and you didn't like them, it would be really uncomfortable. And it would be really hard to execute because you have this unconscious worry about offending them. But if you have that trust and likability with somebody, then that communication's going to be more, free flowing anyway.

Shannon Russo: 100% Steven. We even take it a step further with our views on being classy honest. Here's what we would say that aligns perfectly Steve, with what you just said. I could give you Steve, some feedback on the job you did for me yesterday. And I probably could get that done in thirty seconds to a minute in terms of giving you very direct feedback, Steve, that might not be how you can receive it.

Steve Rush: Right.

Shannon Russo: So, as a leader, I need to take a step back and maybe I need to take five or ten minutes to give you that feedback in a way that you can hear it and that you can a simulate it and not burn you up. Being honest does not mean I need to scorch the earth with you. I just need to be honest and truthful about the situation, especially if it's a performance thing and communicate that to you, but the likability part for us comes in. I don't need to burn you up to get there. I can take a little bit longer. I can be a little more caring in giving that feedback.

Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely so, and when you think about your six flavors, your potential factors, how has that evolved your teams since you've introduced it?

Shannon Russo: What I would tell you is, it has really helped, and this is our view of what's critical about how you manage culture at your organization as a leader. One of the reasons that we spent so much time on the languaging was, we want people to use it in their regular conversation. We want people to reference it and that Steve is the benefit, that is what has happened. So, we literally talk to each other about man, Steve, that call that you were on, you were so likable, right? You really showed that. As I mentioned, you know, way back in the old days, we used to put it on cards. We had six of these cards that you could write on and put on my desk, but now we actually use an app where I can share kudos with the whole company on an app, and tell you Steve, the great things that you did. So, we've really kind of brought it into our day-to-day culture and the app that we use, which is called Recognize, we buy it. It actually integrates to outlook what a great way to be able to just get it done. So, we tried to make it as simple as possible for our team to recognize each other and recognize when they are executing on these potentials. And then to cement it, we use it for performance management, but let me tell you what really gets people going. At the end of every year we have, and if you didn't know this by now, I'm sure you do. Orange is one of our main colors.

Steve Rush: Exactly.

Shannon Russo: And so, we have the bleed orange awards. How do you get a bleed orange award? You ask Steve. You get it by getting the most of these kudos

Steve Rush: Love it, yeah.

Shannon Russo: So, we're keeping everyone very, also focused in their day to day, because it's really easy to lose kind of those cultural tenants if you don't make them part of everyday conversations.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and so many come make the mistake of just having words on wall. And that's the perfect example of creating some themes and making them part of what you do rather than words on wall.

Shannon Russo: And that that's how we make a difference. It makes it easier for us to recruit people. Here's what I could tell you. Like so many people, 2021 was a heavy recruiting internally year for Kinetix as well. We have doubled the size of our team. It helps them because here's something that I hear from new employees regularly. What's amazing is how consistent everyone is and how everyone that I meet kind of displays the same value, is like, by the way, for me, as CEO, I'm like, oh, can I hug you? That's exactly what I want.

Steve Rush: Exactly.

Shannon Russo: Because that's how we're successful, right? And the bigger you get, the harder that is to do. So, continuing for us to focus on it, is really how we think, you know, we continue to be successful.

Steve Rush: Well, kudos to you. So, this is part of the show where we get to flip a little bit and dive into your leadership brain and tap into your years of experience and leading teams and others, as well as, you know, coaching other leaders around the way that they do things too. So, the first thing I'd like to ask you is, if you could try and dive in and think about what would be your top three leadership hacks?

Shannon Russo: Whew, big one. So top three leader hacks are a little bit aligned with some of the stuff that I talked to you about on values. So, I'm not cheating, but that classy honest that you heard me talk about in terms of being likable, being a leader is very much about making decisions, executing on stuff, or driving execution as a leader, right. And then holding people accountable and performance managing that. So that classy honest is a leadership hack.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: That too many people on the hard, and I'm very hard driving, but on the hard driving side miss that I would tell you is a critical one. Here's the other one that some folks, especially people trying to get into leadership. Often what I hear people say is, I can't wait to be a manager and have to do less. Like you don't really understand what's coming.

Steve Rush: No way.

Shannon Russo: And so that's the second part because I do see this sometimes, especially with candidates that come from very large organizations where their ability to actually do stuff gets limited by the nature of the organization. So, my leadership hack is being willing to dive back in at any moment. Now that doesn't mean you always do that, but I had a situation. I'll give you an example of where it kind of came back to me and it made me smile. We had a situation where we were working on a presentation for a client, and I'm not normally in the middle of all of that, right. As you might expect as the CEO of the company, but the account leader really was struggling with a couple things, and I had some history, and we knew that. And so, I dove in with her and we worked together one afternoon. And unfortunately, because the presentation was the next day into the evening, she was like, oh my gosh, it was so amazing that you were willing to dive in. And when I heard that, you know, I thanked her, but I was like, but that is being leader. Not just let her fall.

Steve Rush: And it's the willingness bit that's most important is just letting people know that you are willing too.

Shannon Russo: That's right. That's right. And here's what I would tell you about that person that works for me, she will never doubt me again.

Steve Rush: Right.

Shannon Russo: Now, I didn't do it for that. But after she told me and I thought about it, I was like, wow, wow. That's not why I was doing it. I was doing it because I wanted her to be successful and I wanted us to be successful. But the reality is, I was building my leadership profile with her in the process without even realizing it, last one. I would tell you; this is a mixed bag because some of the worst leaders do this too much, but I still call it a leadership hack. Because for me over the last two years, it's really been a rough two years, like so many people, and I've really had to work on this and that is, take time for yourself. Don't be embarrassed about that but be willing to do it and balance it, right. Don't bleed it through everything that you're doing but be willing to kind of take that time for yourself, whatever that is.

Steve Rush: So Important.

Shannon Russo: Right.

Steve Rush: So important, right.

Shannon Russo: And so, I know you didn't probably think I was going to give you that as a leadership hack, but I would tell you it is, because that's about sustainable leadership.

Steve Rush: Totally, yeah.

Shannon Russo: Those are my three.

Steve Rush: Awesome, really great hacks, great lessons for people to dive into. Next part of the show we call Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something in your life or your work has maybe screwed up. Hasn't worked out as well. But as a result of the experience, you've now got something that you can use as a force of good for you, what would be your Hack to Attack?

Shannon Russo: So, my Hack to Attack was, I formed Kinetix. So, I had come out of the finance as you know, I'd come out of the finance side, which means. I was in the corporate infrastructure of a very large company; we were Fortune 500. And so, when I formed Kinetix, right, I didn't have a ton of experience running a small and medium size business. And so, I have lots of learnings, but the learning that really was a challenge that now has become better from my life and from work is realizing a couple things. And that is, I don't know, everything. And by the way, it's 100% okay.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: Right. So that was the biggest thing because coming up in the corporate environment of a very large company, you really were known for what you knew, right. And so, you sort of build this up in yourself and when you sort of, I don't want to say I started over, right. But I sort of started with a small business that I was going to grow into what Kinetix is today. But the reality is, there was so much, I didn't know. And so, my willingness to ask questions and be opened to feedback, because some of the feedback that I got, I did not want to hear. And I did not like, but being opened to do that, because it really, you know, listen, I was not a young kid when I started Kinetix, right. I was in my late thirties and like so many folks in their late thirties, right. A very successful Fortune 500 top five person, LA, LA, LA, LA, LA, all this stuff that says I'm good at what I do, whatever, yeah. What about the stuff you've never seen before?

Steve Rush: That’s right.

Shannon Russo: What about the situations you've never had to deal with? And so, the big learning, some of them did not go well. And my takeaway that I really feel like has made me better today is, darn you know, don't let my ego get in the way of being willing to learn every day from anyone. Because that was the other thing. Working for big companies, right. You're working with all these very smart, very professional people. You can learn as much. And I did from somebody who really doesn't articulate very well.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: But they can teach you some hard lessons and they can teach you good lessons. So be ready and willing to accept that learning wherever it's going to come from because that's literally a hack.

Steve Rush: Yeah, totally is, isn't it?

Shannon Russo: To getting better.

Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely so. So, the last thing we get to do today, Shannon, is you get to do a bit of time travel, bump into Shannon at 21 and to give her some advice, what would it be?

Shannon Russo: Oh shoot 21. Wow. That's a long time ago, Steve. But here's what I would tell myself. There was some things that I feel like I've learned later. The biggest one is, when you've done all the work and you have gotten all the perspective, don't be scared and don't waste time before you make the decision. I had some things that I ended up getting involved in as I was coming up in my career were looking back, if I had, you know, an example was. I needed to let somebody go whose role I was taking over, but I was afraid. I didn't know what they knew. There was all this other stuff. And so, I waited six months. That was the worst decision of my life. I should have let them go immediately and taken the risk. That's the kind of coaching that I would give myself because I only got it by hard learned results. And so, I would tell myself again, not to be ego, right. So don't be ego. Be careful, make sure you're getting all the information, but once the decision has been made and you're ready to go, go, take the risk. And a lot of times it's around things like letting people go, right. Liberating them, freeing them, freeing you.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Shannon Russo: Be willing to just jump off the cliff. Once you're prepared, don't wait, nothing good can come of it. And that's probably the coaching I would give myself at 21, that took me a while to learn.

Steve Rush: Yeah. It's lovely. I like it a lot. Thanks for sharing that, Shannon, great stuff.

Shannon Russo: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Rush: So, for folk, listening to us talk today who might be curious around the work that Kinetix do, maybe getting their insight around the Kinetix Code, but also tapping into you and your network. Being true connectors in your potential factors. How can we make sure we connect them with you?

Shannon Russo: Absolutely. So, our website is kinetixhr.com. That's K I N E T I X hr.com. You can get a little bit of scoop about us, connect with us. Any of that kind of stuff. Also, that kinetixhr is my handle on Twitter. It's my handle on Instagram. So, if you want to find us there, LinkedIn is name obviously. And then if you want to dig in a little bit more to The Kinetix Code. One of the things we did for recruiting as well, but it's an opportunity for you. You can go to the kinetixcode.com.

Steve Rush: Awesome.

Shannon Russo: And that's where it is, and you can actually see it all. So, it's not locked up in some vault. We want it to kind of be living and breathing and it can give you a perspective on who we are and kind of how it makes us tick if you're thinking about that kind of thing for your company

Steve Rush: And we'll dump all of those links and connections in our show notes as well. So, it's dead easy for people to connect with you beyond today.

Shannon Russo: Wonderful, wonderful.

Steve Rush: Shannon, I've loved chatting. You had I had some really interesting and deep conversations about the world that we're in and how it's changing and evolving. And I'm just delighted that we've got you on the show so that we can share that story with our wider audience. So, thanks for being part of the community.

Shannon Russo: Steve, thanks for having me. It's been really fun, kind of talking through some of this stuff. You made me think about some things that I haven't thought about for a while and I think that's always super helpful.

Steve Rush: Thank you, Shannon.

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 there: @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.

Martine Kalaw is the author of The ABC’s of Diversity, she’s a speaker and DEI consultant helping individuals and organizations overcome unconscious beliefs and implicit bias. In this insightful show you can learn about:

• Martine’s fascinating story from being a stateless, undocumented person to CEO
• What diversity really means, looks and feels like
• How has the hybrid world has impacted firms approach to DE&I?
• The ABC’s of Diversity

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

Find out more about Martine below:

Martine on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/martinekalawconsulting/

Martine on Twitter: https://twitter.com/martinekalaw

Martine on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/martinekalaw/

Martine’s Website: https://martinekalaw.com

Full Transcript Below

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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

Our special guest on today's show is Martine Kalaw. Martine is a DEI expert; she's worked with some of the world's top companies, helping them navigate through their organization's diversity, equity and inclusion, and created more diverse and inclusive workspace. She's also the author of The ABCs of Diversity. Before we get a chance to speak with MartinE, It's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: We all know that telling stories is a great leadership skill. So today I'm going to have a go. Once upon a time there was a beautiful kingdom ruled by a Prince. He took over the kingdom after the death of his father, the King, after a few months of ruling, the kingdom things started testing. There was no rain. Drought had brought losses to farmers and killed many animals, birds, and precious plants in the forest. It was followed by an unknown disease that caused loss of many lives. After a few months of pain, things started to improve gradually, but before they could recover completely, an enemy took over the kingdom, killing many people and imprisoning them. The young King managed to escape. He planned to meet his childhood friend, a King of a neighboring kingdom. On his way he was thinking about the past. He was born to be bred King of this powerful and wealthy nation.

Now he's lost everything. He believed that he was cursed because nothing had happened to his father. It had only happened to him. When he reached the neighboring kingdom, and he met his friends. The guards did not allow him to pass because he looked dirty, and bedraggled. He tried many times to get access to the kingdom but failed miserably. Being cast outside the kingdom, he eventually took a job so he could buy food and clothes. Several weeks had passed and he'd now earned enough and ate enough. So, they allowed him to look presentable. So, he set off in a chance to get through the guards and to meet with his friend. After carefully navigating the guards and entering the kingdom. He was greeted warmly by his friend, the King of the neighboring kingdom, after explaining the sad story and things that had happened to him.

The King took pity and ordered his people to give him a herd of a hundred sheep. While grateful, the King was a little surprised as it was expecting much more than just a hundred cheap. He was a King after all. He doesn't want to be a shepherd. Down on his luck. He realized there was no way out. After a few days of grazing his herd, group of wolves attacked his herd and killed all of them. And while the wolves were merely feasting on this new herd, the king ran away. He returned to his only allied at this time, his friend, the King from the neighboring kingdom. This time he gave 50 sheep in pity. But once again, he failed to protect the walls. He returned for a third time, and this time the King gave him 25 sheep with a clear message of, there are no more sheep.

And this time the young King decided if he didn't protect his herd, he knew that he would be on his downers. So, this time he took a different approach. He examined the environment. He understood where the wolves were living, the areas where they would attack. He built additional fences and guards around the herd to protect them. He set up a schedule to monitor those key places and key times when he knew that the wolves would be most active, a few years had passed, and its herd had grown into a thousand sheep. His activities were monitored by his friend, the King and in recognition of his great feat in growing a herd, his friend had ordered his ministers to give him a whole state to rule. He asked his friend, why did you not give me the state to rule when I first come to help you? His friend, the King replied. The first time you came for me for help. Your mindset was like you were born and bred to be a leader. You were expectant. And the truth was far from it.

The King went on to say, you may have been born with wealth, pride, and power, but you have never had proper education and training to lead your people. So, when I gave you the herd, I wanted you to learn how to manage and lead others. Dear friend, I have seen you suffer, return, be resilient, work out a plan. And now I believe you're ready to lead. The moral of the story and leadership hack if you like, is that, just being born into a powerful family or being born with privileges, doesn't mean you'll be successful. Being a manager or leading people in higher position does not make you a leader. Being in charge, such as a King or a Manager or a CEO does not make you a leader. Holding position is just a position. Leadership is a behavior and leadership is a service. The most important role of a leader is to build and develop other leaders. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Let's dive into the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Martine Kalaw is a special guest on today's show. She's an author, speaker and DEI consultant. She's the founder of Martine Kalaw Enterprises and her firm offers strategy development, implementation, and education, and helps organizations overcome unconscious beliefs and implicit biases. Martine also published her second book, The ABCs of Diversity. Martine, welcome to the show.

Martine Kalaw: Thank you so much for having me, Steve. I'm excited to be here

Steve Rush: Now, you have a most fascinating backstory. There are not many people that you can say. I understand how that is because there's not many people would understand your position. Just tell us a little bit about that backstory and how that's really given you the passion to do what you do?

Martine Kalaw:  Yeah, certainly. Born in Zambia from the Democratic Republic of Congo. My mother and biological fathers were from there and having been raised in the U.S. but having spent seven years of my life as an undocumented immigrant and stateless individual in the United States in removal or deportation proceedings for seven years has really shaped the work that I do around DEI, in the years that I, you know, navigated through. One being orphaned, two, being undocumented, three, being stateless. I was exposed to various communities. I actually had to, you know, I had to learn how to pivot into different communities as I navigated the world on my own. And so, what this taught me was to, it gave me a different perspective on how people show up and view different circumstances.

It also gave me a level of sensitivity in how to and putting myself in somebody else's shoes and trying to see things from their perspective. And so, for that reason, I feel like I can be a bridge builder in a lot of ways across different communities. I also knew from my experience of being undocumented and stateless, I also understand the importance of having individuals invest in you rather than help you when you're marginalized, right. When your part of an underrepresented community, that's how we actually strengthen our communities, how we strengthen our workforce, is when individuals who have access recognize the access that they have and, or privileged, and some people are not comfortable with that word and then extend that to others and bring them in and do it in a way that's not charity like, and they're not positioning themselves as saviors, but really they're investing in others because they know they're also gaining something back. And in that way, we strengthened our communities. And so that was the experience I had as an undocumented immigrant and stateless person was setting it up so others can invest in me. And then once I, you know, navigated through my journey. Sharing that and passing that forward to my mentees and other people within undocumented stateless community, but then tying it into the larger conversation of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and I guess what you've really described is so extreme in its diverse experience, but to your point, gives you that sensitivity to be able to be really thoughtful in your approach, right?

Martine Kalaw:  Right, absolutely. And just having seen, and just the intricacies of bias and discrimination in various facets. I mean, people don't necessarily think about immigration, and you know, statelessness and think of diversity, equity and inclusion, but it's a subset of it.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Martine Kalaw:  And certainly, it's nuanced. I mean, we can see that with, you know, the war in Ukraine and we saw the response and how different communities of African immigrants, how they were treated, Moroccan immigrants. We saw that, right. We see that time and time, again in the policies that are enacted around immigration in the U.S. based on different subgroups within immigrants, you know construct. So, in that way DEI is a subset of immigration. Immigration is a subset of DEI, so, it can be a microcosm for the larger conversation around diversity equity and inclusion.

Steve Rush: And diversity also transcends lots of different religions, colors, and creeds, doesn't it? It's not just about, you know, an atypical perspective somebody might have when they join a firm. What's your take on we pet peel, the layers back, diversity in its simplest terms?

Martine Kalaw:  Diversity is about variety, right. And representation across variety of different groups, different backgrounds. So, in its simplest term, diversity is offering and embracing variety. Now variety, when we talk about diversity, I like to break it down into three different buckets, right. There's the physical biological bucket in terms of defining diversity. And that can be, you know, that's race, gender, race, it can be age, you know, all of the elements or subcategories of diversity that has to do with somebody's physical definers and their biological, right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Martine Kalaw:  Sexual orientation. And then the second bucket that I you know, I group diversity into is, cultural. So cultural can look like a number of things. It could be nationality. It can be your marital status. It can be your education background. It could be your socioeconomic status, right? So that's cultural. And then the third category especially within the work or business context is really around business. The culture or the persona you bring into the business. So, some people are introverts, some people are extroverts. You know, some people are more strategic in the way they show up to work. Some individuals are less strategic, you know, they're big picture thinkers or there, you know, detail oriented. So, these are the different categories, these three different buckets or categories, and they are interrelated. There are correlations between one bucket, right. The business persona that you bring into the workplace is influenced by your culture, the cultural, you know, associations you're a part of. And then that can be influenced by biological, you know, physical. And so, another way of saying it is, look, you know, as a black, you know, African woman in the United States right, these are some of the physical, you know, being black and African are some of the physical you know, associations that I'm a part of.

So culturally, you know, perhaps if I grew up in a community where it was predominantly you know, black and predominantly African immigrants, right. That might influence how I show up in the workplace. If I go to work and everyone else doesn't look like me, everyone else ends up being white. And I'm the only African immigrant. It might actually influence my communication style. Because I'm responding right to the experiences I have and I'm responding to my outward environment. So that's how these three categories or buckets can be related or correlated.

Steve Rush: The interesting thing that you just shared is a perfect example of how diversity can be seen different and that's where equity comes in, isn't it?

Martine Kalaw:  Right.

Steve Rush: Tell us a bit about that?

Martine Kalaw:  Yeah, so, I'll say, you know, diversity, equity, and inclusion. I feel strongly that they are like a three-legged stool. You can't have one without the other. So certainly, you can have variety and representation, but that's not enough to keep people, right. You can have, you know, you have the representation, but if people aren't treated fairly, right. Equity is really about fairness. It's about distribution. If people aren't treated fairly and they're not given the same equitable opportunities, then why would they stay? What would be their incentive? I like to distinguish equity from equality, because people say, oh, well, you know, equity is about equality. It's actually not right.

Steve Rush: No, it's not. And that's where people get confused, right?

Martine Kalaw: Right, equality is what we're aiming for after we reach equity. But right now, across the globe, I mean, you know, this is not just specific to the U.S. or the UK or any one place, but across the globe, what we know is that there are different communities, they're different ethnic groups, they're different races and not everyone has had the same history in their country and have had the same access. In the U.S. we can see that because the history of slavery in the U.S. that was so prominent has made it, so, there have been systemic inequities in the workplace, in education, all of that has been the trickle effect from slavery, right. And as a result of that, it's still trickles. It's still there. It's still, you know, and so what happens is people show up in the workplace and they don't have the same experiences.

They don't have the same access, right. someone who has grown up with certain privileges, access to certain academic institutions, access to certain you know, in a higher echelon of socioeconomic status, right. Might show up in the workplace with a different level of acumen, right. To the business and feel more comfortable navigating the workplace, feel more comfortable looking for a mentor, reaching out to the C-Suite Executives and asking for them to be a mentor and also feel more comfortable showing up in spaces. Like, you know, work off offsite events, right. Like lots of work offsite events, at least historically were like you know, usually they're sports events, they're, you know, happy hour, golf events, what have you. So, if you come from a space where you're familiar with that, it's easy for you to just an acclimate to that. If you come from a space where you didn't have access to that, it's a lot harder for you to navigate that space in the workplace and create more accessibility for yourself. And so that's where equity comes in. It's having the organization find ways to create that level of fairness. So, the best visual that actually someone shared with me, an anecdote is, you know, equality is giving everybody a pair of shoes, a pair of sneakers, let's say. Equity is giving everyone a pair of sneakers that fit their feet.

Steve Rush: It's a great analogy. Love it. So, the workplace has changed over the last few years with the pandemic and our approaches and responses to that. How do you see that that's impacted on how firms are dealing with DEI now?

Martine Kalaw:  Yes, that's a really great question. So, what I've seen is in the last two years, so prior to the murder of George Floyd, because I really think that's what sparked this new, you know, movement across organizations, quite frankly, globally, before that it's not that diversity, equity and inclusion didn't exist. It did. But at that, you know, before that it was really focused on diversity, right.

Steve Rush: Right.

Martine Kalaw:  It was focused on diversity and there was less of an emphasis on equity, less of an emphasis on inclusion. This is generally speaking. And you know, when you look at the numbers and the statistics in the workplace, white women were the prime beneficiaries of those diversity initiatives, right. And so then, two and a half years ago with, you know, the murder of George Floyd, things shifted, there was a greater awareness that whoa, you know, there's a lot of inequity, that's still trickling into the workplace, right. That's happening nationally, but it's trickling into the workplace because the same people that are in, you know, that are in society are also going into work, right. So, we can't distinguish these two, these two worlds collide and that's in the workplace. And so initially organizations, again, generally speaking, were responsive or reactive to what was happening, right. There was a level of reaction because employees or staff members were hypersensitive and hyper aware, right. And almost like daring the organization to do something, fix this. So, organizations generally speaking were reactive and trying to like quickly fix things and quell the concerns of their employees, right. The responses with that with, a lot of programs, let's come up with programs, let's give money to this organization. Let's have an internship program and bring, you know, look at interns from certain colleges and universities that we wouldn't have looked at before, at least in the U.S., historically black colleges and universities, HBCUs, right.

Things like that, very reactive. So that's not a bad thing because I think the programming was important, but the thing is, there are two issues with that. When you have program without strategy, it's really hard to sustain the initiative. And when you don't have strategy, it's hard to position what you're doing as a real business imperative, right. It doesn't seem like a business structure. It seems more of like something you're just slapping on a band aid, and you know, wanting to move on. So that was the first challenge. The second was the fact that the same people were doing the work, we're being charged to do the work, mainly human resources professionals who don't always have the experience or the expertise. They are also oftentimes already overburdened by their workload. They were being charged with the responsibility of doing this work. As well as, you know, employee resource groups, basically employees who are part of underrepresented communities or are allies, right. So, the same individuals we're being charged with this responsibility, right. And that's exhausting. It also means that everyone else wasn't as involved. And what we know is that if not everyone is bought into an initiative, it's not going to work, right. You need leadership's involvement; you need manager's involvement. So that's really where we are at the moment. And the organizations that really want to do the real work are reaching out to consultants like myself, they're reaching out to others, right. They're bringing in chief diversity officers and saying, look, we want to go beyond just the performative and you know, with programs, we want to have strategy.

We want to have our leadership involved in this. We want DEI to be positioned as part of the business strategy. We want to be able to tie metrics to things, right. We want to be able to connect our programs with a larger initiative so we can scale these programs. So that's where we are now, right. So not just about training and programs, training is great, but training has to be reinforced with strategy. So that's where we are now where organizations are at this, impasse where they can either keep doing what they're doing and being you know I guess their employees are feeling impatient and are putting the pressure on them or they can actually start to really build strategy and make DEI part of their business structure.

Steve Rush: And let's be realistic here as well. Those businesses aren't, are also missing out, not on just massive opportunities to unlock human potential, but there's also a direct correlation to return on investment too, isn't there?

Martine Kalaw: That's it. I always talk about the ROI of DEI. And so that is, one of the very first things that I do in working with organizations is, especially if I'm working with human resources, professionals, not directly with the like the, you know, CEO is getting that HR professional to identify what that return on investment is so that they can position it to the leadership, right. Discussing ROI is the common denominator. The challenge that we've had historically with DEI is, certainly there's an emotional quotient component to it. That's the most significant component. Stories, people's experiences, experiences of employees and how they felt marginalized. The biases they may have experienced, that is critical. But when we start with that approach, what we end up doing is, we exclude indirectly and unintentionally. Exclude anyone who doesn't understand that. Who cannot relate to this story, right.

Steve Rush: Right.

Martine Kalaw:  People feel either shamed or blamed or they just don't get it. So, they tune out, right. And then again, we're just reaching to the cryer, the same people who have the issue are the same people engaged in these conversations. So that's why I always recommend starting with return on investment, let's look at the value that DEI can bring to the organization. Let's look at the numbers. Like let's actually find what that metric is. If your business to business, business to consumer organization, there is a possibility, there's always a possibility of increasing market share. There are certain markets we have not considered if we're providing a service or a product, right. And so that is where DEI can actually help. If you educate your salespeople and they are much more savvy and they're representative of a larger group of individuals. There's more representation in your salespeople let's say, or if they have more sensitivity in navigating DEI, then they're more likely, they'll know how to reach and look for new markets, right.

Explore markets they haven’t considered. And once we've attracted those markets, it's building those relationships, that rapport with those markets. So that's one way, for example, that a business to consumer organization can benefit. Revenue wise, ROI wise from DEI. When we talk about business to business, same idea in terms of retention, in terms of building those relationships and attracting new partners, right. I mean, if you're business to business, think about the clients that your partners or that business you're supporting, think about who their clients are, think about who their customers are. And if we're supporting them, we also need to understand their clientele. We also need to help them or support them in reaching a larger market share. We also need to make sure that we're able to create more diversity in our partners, right. So, these are ways in which we can actually measure ROI. We can look at the retention of our partners. We can look at recruiting and gaining more partners. And what does that mean in terms of our dollars? So, there are direct correlations between DEI and return on investment. And what I encourage is for organizations to start there, start with that number, start with what the cost, right. What we think the estimated cost of bringing in a chief diversity officer, bringing in a consultant, you know, doing this work might cost. And then let's talk about what the potential return could look like.

Steve Rush: Yeah, love it. Now you wrote the book, The ABCs of Diversity.

Martine Kalaw:  Yes.

Steve Rush: Let's quickly just spin through the ABCs and dive into a couple of them.

Martine Kalaw:  Yeah, I mean, the ABCs is kind of what I, I alluded to this a little bit earlier, which was, a lot of the work is dumped on human resources and I use the word dumped intentionally, because that's how it feels like, right. It feels like a burden to them, to them and sometimes employee resource groups or diversity, task forces, because these are individuals that don't always have the expertise. They can come to this from a very emotional standpoint. And so, it's really unfair to expect them to have all of the responsibility around DEI. So, the ABCs of diversity, by the way, the subtitle is a manager's guide to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the new workplace. So really what this book really encapsulates are two main things. One is that when we approach the conversation of DEI, we make it sometimes over complicated, right.

It's very ethereal. There's a lot of jargon. A lot of you know politically correct terms and people are so afraid of saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing, that they'd rather disengage and not involve themselves in DEI conversations. But what I want people to understand is that, okay, we don't have to focus so much on the jargon, the terminology, it's really the fundamental practices, the fundamental things that we do. And a lot of it can be driven by managers. So, when we think about who shapes and influences the makeup of an organization, there are two main groups, human resources, and managers, managers influence hiring decisions. They influence compensation decisions. They influence promotion decisions. They influence attrition when people decide to leave, right. All of that is influenced by managers and they're working in tandem with human resources.

So, what we get to do is pivot our lens when we look at all those elements, those foundational elements of being a manager and consider how we can have more representation and less bias in these different areas, right. And so that doesn't require learning all this terminology and jargon. It just requires thinking a little bit more broadly. So, for example, as hiring managers, one of the things we can do differently, we're looking at resumes is, asking our talent acquisition or recruiting team. I'm seeing like a lot of similarities across these resumes. Like it seems like all of these individuals are from the same region. This is just me speaking, hypothetically. Is there a possibility that we can look at other resumes more broadly? Can we look at other resumes or can we look at candidates from other regions? right.

This is just a small way as hiring managers, we're looking at, we're interviewing candidates and we immediately feel we have this affinity bias, right. Where we have a preference for someone because, oh, they went to this college and you've heard of this college, or you're familiar with this college. Well, what we can do is, manages go, oh, wait a minute. I'm picking up on the fact that, you know, I feel more, you know, I have this affinity, this person, just because of what I'm seeing on the resume, let me then assume, what if every other candidate went to the same college, right. Let's rule out. Let's take that one scenario or that one qualifier out. And let's focus on all the other, whether the candidates who actually can do the job, right. And when we're interviewing candidates, let's see how we can be consistent in the way, the order in which we ask questions.

Let's also invite other people on our teams to interview these candidates, right. And when they are interviewing candidates to avoid influence, influencing our decision, let's have, you know, the other people are interviewing candidates, our candidates. Just share their feedback to the talent acquisition team rather than to us, right. And we don't actually hear, or, you know, know what they're thinking until the end, after we've made our decision on how we feel about the candidates. So, these are things that we can do as managers. Another example of creating, establishing inclusion as a manager or equity is mentorship, right. So, as you know, a lot of organizations, some organizations don't have formal mentorship programs. And as I mentioned, based on your background, some people might come into a company and feel really comfortable looking for a mentor. They might be invited to certain spaces like golf events, like a happy hour, where they will engage and build relationships and then ask someone to be their mentor.

What I can say is not everyone has that familiarity or that confidence, not everyone is invited to the same events in the same spaces in the workplace. So as a manager, what we can do is, we can establish a way to make sure that everyone on our team has access to a mentor. We can invite mentors to come to our meetings, invite our senior leadership, to come to our weekly meetings or biweekly meetings with our teams and let people know that, you know, make sure everyone on the team understands that, you know, you can access and reach out to this person if you need a mentor, right. These are subtle things that we do to create equity, right. Create fairness, accessibility. So that's the ABCs of DEI, right. Its common knowledge. Things that we're already doing as managers, but we just don't realize that this is actually reinforcing DEI, right.

And it's natural. It's much more organic than thinking, okay, I have to put on my DEI hat, and you know, I have to use this specific terminology. So that's really what the ABCs of DEI is. And it's really meant to be a workbook, you know? So, when you open it up, it really actually is a primer. It reads like a workshop, like you're in a workshop. And at the end of each chapter, it's 150 pages, not long. At the end of each chapter, there are two takeaway exercises. One is for self-reflection and the other is something you can take back to your team and implement as a manager. So, there's actual application.

Steve Rush: Awesome. Now we're going to give folk a chance to get hold of a copy or find out how they can get hold of a copy in a moment. So, I'm going to flip the lens very quickly, do some quick, short fire, top leadership hacks. What be your top three leadership hacks?

Martine Kalaw:  My top three leadership hacks would be you know, one is, to be transparent and vulnerable, right. I would just combine those two. Transparency. I mean, as leaders, we can't be completely transparent with everything, but at least walk people through why you're doing what you're doing. They'll appreciate it more. They feel like what they're doing, adds value to the end goal. So being able to be transparent in that way and being vulnerable. If you have challenges, if you have issues, things aren't going the way that you ideally wanted them to. It's okay to share that with your team as a leader because what they're observing is how you respond to it, the solutions, your problem-solving abilities, that becomes an example for them.

So that's one leadership hack. Another leadership hack for me would be to find people who are smarter than you, to be, you know, part of your team. You know, I think as leaders, sometimes we're afraid that somebody's going to outshine us, but really what we want to do is bring people who have skills that we don't have, because what that ends up carrying us, if they grow, we grow, right. And so, I do believe that's a really important one that I've always you know, believed in and it's really been beneficial to me. And the third leadership hack would be, I have to think about this one. I would say, always be on quest to learn. So maybe that's more humility or just always learn. As leaders, we can never know enough. We're always learning, learn from our team members. The people who report into us. Learn across the board, pick up a book, read. There's always something we can learn as leaders, right. And so as long as we show up in our role as leaders in that way. We're always going to continue to grow and be better than who we were the day before.

Steve Rush: Awesome advice. Now you shared the biggest Hack to Attack that we've ever heard, which is your story up front, but if you could give yourself some advice when you were 21, what would that be?

Martine Kalaw:  Ah, that's a great one. If I could give myself advice when I was 21 was to, trust the process, right. Meaning like, I'm a little bit of a magical thinker in a sense that, you know, if you take action and you do everything that you need to do, sometimes things just need to kind of work themselves out, right. Kind of like everything has to sort of be synchronous, and it takes a little bit of time. And I think that's something that, you know, millennials, you know, Gen Z, like, you know, there's sometimes a level of impatience right, with things. And so sometimes, you know, put all the pieces together, do your part and then give it a little bit of time, right. For things to come together. So, trust the process a little bit.

Steve Rush: That's great, and that's definitely been the case for you. You've a perfect walking example of that. So, thank you so much. So, Martine, conscious, we want to make sure we can get our guests to connect with you beyond today. Find out a little bit about the books that you've written and maybe buy a copy. Where's the best place to send them?

Martine Kalaw:  Perfect. you can go directly to martinekalaw.com, www.martinekalaw.com. And when you go there, you'll have access to the link from my book, which is on Amazon. So, you can purchase the hard copy and you can also purchase the audio book on audible. So, if you go to my website, it'll give you the link to both of those sites. And certainly, on my website, you also have access to sign up for my complimentary, otherwise known as free master class, which is coming up on July 21st. I usually have a monthly one-hour monthly masterclass where I really work with human resources professionals. And I offer them the five things that they can do within the next 90 days to really drive DEI in their organizations.

Steve Rush: Awesome.

Martine Kalaw:  And so that's something that you can sign up for if you go to my website.

Steve Rush: We'll also put those links in our show notes as well. Martine, I wish you had more time to chat. I really love chatting to. You’re such a great advocate of doing exactly what's right for folk when it's right. So, thank you ever so much for taking time out of your super busy schedule, being with us on our Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Martine Kalaw:  Thank you so much, Steve. I enjoyed it too.

Steve Rush: Thank you, Martine.

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.

John Reid is the president of JMReid Group. He's an entrepreneur and author of multiple books, the latest being the Five Lost Super Powers, why we lose them and how to get them back. In this show explore:

• John survived cancer 4 times, find how that builds resilience.
• Why context is king.
• Compassion with Empathy is life changing.
• Explore the Five Lost Super Powers and if you need to get them back.

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

Find out more about John below:

John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-reid-a3007a2/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jmreidgroup/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jmreidgroup/

Company Website: https://jmreidgroup.com/

Full Transcript Below

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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

Joining me on the show today is John Reid. He's the president and founder of the JMReid Group, a global behavioral change organization, specializing in leadership development, sales effectiveness, and skill enhancement. But before we get a chance to speak with John, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: Recently, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pointed out the power of empathy in an interview with Harvard Business Review. He connected empathy with not just taking care of people, but also to design thinking, to innovation, customer care, and ultimately the bottom line. We’ve been taught since school, that empathy means stepping into somebody else’s shoes and seeing the world from their perspective, but truly powerful forms of empathy, neither start nor stop there. They reach all areas of our life and work. They help us feel seen and safe, connected to others and empowered to manage conflict with kindness and inclusivity. A truly empathic leader is proactive.

Good leaders just don’t solve problems when they arise, but they actively seek out ways to smooth the path for their people and smoothing the way and removing obstacles requires empathy. It requires the ability to understand the wiring, the needs, the pace of people, and to respond accordingly. This kind of proactivity may require you to do your homework on the people you work with, understand their strengths and their challenges. It may also be required that you occasionally push back on things. And it’s difficult as those things may seem, the kind of investment in your people. The compassion you need will really drive empathy and pay you back richly. Cognitive empathy is just what it sounds like. Empathy based on cognitive understanding. Somebody else’s perspective. It doesn’t require emotion from us, but it does require understanding and a willingness to engage with what is their understanding.

Effective empathy is empathy that is based on emotion. When somebody cries or feels anger. This is effective empathy at work. A truly empathic leader is inclusive. More than just seeing someone else’s perspective. Empathy means slowing down and seeing others’ needs, speeds, and creeds, and then helping them find the environments that work best for them. An empathic leader is a leader who understands that not all of our brains are wired the same. Taking time to see other people’s perspectives. Seeing them as individuals with unique wiring, with unique needs and unique motivations that creates them as an individual. So, if you want the best work from the people that you work with to encourage innovation, design thinking, all of the good things that come from psychologically safe environments, then take your compassion and your empathy muscles out for a workout. Building empathy as a leader is a skill and it’s a great investment. You can do it for yourself, your people and your organization all at a time when the world needs kindness more than ever. That’s been The Leadership Hacker News. We’d love to hear your insights and your stories, so please get in touch with us.

Start of Podcast.

Steve Rush: My special guest on today’s show is John Reid. He’s the president of JMReid Group. He’s an entrepreneur and author of multiple books. I’m delighted to have John on the show. John, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

John Reid: It’s great to be here. Thank you, Steve.

Steve Rush: We always like to dive into our back stories of our guest, because they provide such a great landscape to how people have arrived at doing what they’re doing. So maybe we can start John by this digging into a little bit out your background and how you’ve arrived to do what you do.

John Reid: Why, thank you. I think everything’s, you know, everything’s important and sometimes nothing’s important, but I’ll leave that to the audience, I’m the youngest of five, and I grew up in Maryland, went to the university of Maryland and got an undergraduate degree. At that point in time in America, anyway, companies would come interview you on campus, and I got interviewed and got hired by Dow Chemical. What’s interesting there, is that I’d never taken a chemistry course in my life and there was a brief period where Dow would hire people that they thought were good communicators for sales roles, despite having no chemical background.

Steve Rush: Right.

John Reid: And I joined them and that’s the beginning of my chemical career, which I had great success in. I was actually in chemical week magazine as a rising star of the chemical industry back in the early nineties. So I was in sales, marketing, business — I had P&L responsibility, sort of the classic path. Left all that behind to join the training and development industry because I had a real passion around that. Around the idea that people could get better and wanted to get better if the development training was better. So, I got into that industry and worked for several different companies and ultimately started my own company 13 years ago.

Steve Rush: And what was that pivotal moment for you when you thought, okay, now it’s time for me to lead my business versus work for others?

John Reid: It’s a great question. And the truth is, I’m a four-time cancer survivor. And in America, again, at that time, when you have cancer, you need health insurance. I had four kids and I was the worker. So, I had to have health insurance and it’s hard to have health insurance. So, I changed jobs to work for a company in Dallas, Texas, and we were negotiating to be the head of sales. And I was asking for, you know, a compensation, should they decide to let me go. And they said, no, that’ll never happen. They’ll never let me go. But I did negotiate health coverage for a period of time. And within three months they let me go. They were having real cash flow problems and they couldn’t really afford me they thought. Interestingly enough, they called me two weeks later and asked me to come back because I made the point to them that they had a revenue problem, not a cost problem, but they thought they had a cost problem, let me go. That was the driver to start my own company, because I had that safety net of having health coverage and I could take a chance finally.

Steve Rush: Yeah. It’s funny, isn’t? How unconsciously, we sometimes just need a little bit of security to give us that entrepreneurial flare of spirit to moving different directions.

John Reid: Yeah, absolutely. Because we’re always making risk reward calculations.

Steve Rush: Right.

John Reid: That’s part of the work that I think about when I do leadership or sales training — you watch current behaviors and how they’re behaving, you know, unconsciously, they’re making this risk reward calculation and oftentimes they’re making it incorrectly. And that’s why they’re behaving the way they are. And so sometimes you have to— you need to have them see a different calculation for some of these behaviors.

Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely so. Nonchalantly you just said, yeah. Four-time cancer survivor. That is, one. It’s incredibly unusual to survive cancer four times. But what I’ve learned from having met you previously, John, is you have this huge amount of resilience that comes from having been able to battle through these different events, time after time. And I just wondered, you know, how much of that drives your current approach and how much of that helped you with resilience?

John Reid: Oh, it’s helped me greatly. I had a type of cancer that you should frankly die from. It was a spindle cell sarcoma, which is a very rare sarcoma, and they don’t know much about it and all that good stuff. To survive that of course you need others. So, I had a strong social network, particularly my wife Rose. So, you know, you need to have that. What it does give you — I had a friend who was a New York Times a writer and he had the chutzpa or whatever to ask me, you know, so what’s good about having cancer? And I thought that’s a gutsy question, you know, but it is a good question. And what’s good about it is, it does give you perspective, you know, it does make you step back and what really matters? Like what am I doing? What matters?

Steve Rush: And for your perspective’s, been massive, isn’t it? In all of your work in life. And I’ve seen that through, you know, some of the articles that you’ve read and some of the writings that you’ve done. There’s lot re recall to perspective and get people to think about that context.

John Reid: If I could wave a wand across the world and if I had my wish, I just wish everybody knew they’re just walking around with a perspective. They’re not, objectively, right. They’re just not, it’s all subjective. So, it’s just— we’re people walking around with perspectives. And unfortunately, we quickly because of the way our brain processes and all the stuff we know, we quickly go to right, you know, and us versus them and right versus wrong. When no, it’s just a different perspective.

Steve Rush: I love the framing of that because we all do have a perspective, but from often we come from a position of being sure or being right or being wrong about things. How do you get people to think about reframing that perspective so that it can serve them well?

John Reid: When we look at learning and development, we’re very learner centric. We’re very much “who’s the learner and where’s their head at and why are they acting the way they do? Do they even know that?” And we don’t approach anything from right wrong or from bad to good. People aren’t behaving— I mean, bad is bad and bad is obvious. So, we don’t, you know, we’re not going to say— but most people are behaving good. They just could be better, better versions of themselves, better decision makers, build trust in a different way. So, they could be great, right? But most of us behave in a good way. So, to get the learner there, you’ve first got to say, hey, you know, we all make inferences and assumptions and that’s quickly easy to do. You can have an inference test where people make all these inferences and you say, look, and then you show, them like the ladder of inference, how we move from data to selecting data, to assumptions, conclusions, and forming beliefs.

And then you can have them explore another person’s ladder and show that. And so, you can get people to quickly realize, yeah, I just have a perspective. And then what’s cool is, we have this activity where we have a list of hot topics and not that hot, but topics like, I think vegan stuff is nonsense, or I think college should be free. Whatever the issue is. And the other party selects a topic that they have some interest in, that they have a point of view in, and then they’re required to ask questions to a different point of view. So, I’ll play the other point of view and adults simply cannot ask a good open ended, curious question about a topic that they believe they’re right in. The questions are leading questions. Don’t you think? Wouldn’t you agree? How about, you know, it’s just, we struggle. We can be curious in stuff we don’t know about, but once we have a point of view, we really get in our own way.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I love that. And curiosity is one of the things you were called out for when you were in your sales career at Dow, when you were on that rising star and RMB telling me it was that curiosity that really set you apart from all the other salespeople. Tell us a little bit about what happened there?

John Reid: Yeah, and it was a blessing, right? These are all hidden blessings. So, I get hired by Dow. A lot of chemical engineers, chemistry degrees, technical experts. And there’s little old me, you know, with the university of Maryland marketing degree and I’m going out and I’m actually one of the most successful salespeople in the company. And they had a rating system. And anyways, I just simply was. And I was because I would ask questions because and you know, I didn’t know anything, but turns out, surprise, surprise, something with all know, people like to talk about themselves. People like to talk about what they do. They like to talk about their machinery. Now I wasn’t going around acting like a complete idiot, but I was like, geez, you know, I don’t know much about this operation. Why do you do it this way versus a different way? And people would talk. So early on I realized, you know, let the client talk. I do believe that salespeople work way too hard.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: By that, I mean, they’re just talking too much. Just ask questions and let them talk. They’ll come to you; you know. I was lucky not to have that knowledge. There is a curse of knowledge. There is the technical expertise trapp. The more I knew, the less curious I got. There were people Steve who would say, I would never ask that question because you should know that, but I don’t know it.

Steve Rush: Even if you did know it, you should still ask the question.

John Reid: Yeah, and it’s not fake until you make it. A lot of technical salespeople by the way, what they do, having observed them now year after year, they’ll hide their technical expertise in the question.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: You know, ‘what do you think about a high membrane ion exchange system?’ It’s like, okay, what are you doing there? What is that? You’re trying to show what, you know, in your question. That’s terrible. So yeah. There it was a good blessing to be who I was at that time.

Steve Rush: Yeah, exactly. And it’s an interesting notion, the whole sales thing. So, you know, at some point in my future, I’m going to regurgitate this in either in articles or maybe even another book, but this whole notion of, if you want to be really successful at selling, don’t sell, ask, be curious, ask questions, find out, learn. And by default, if you have a product that helps fill those gaps and problems and solutions, then people will buy it from you.

John Reid: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I would say the other part of that, which I’m sure you agree is, listen.

Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely. Starts with 1.1, right?

John Reid: A colleague of mine has a great quote that the customer will tell you what your next question should be. What I see, you know, because of how people have been trained is that they prepare a list of questions and they’re going to be consultative, but they’re really not consultative. They’re quasi consultative because they’re only asking questions about stuff that drives to a sale.

Steve Rush: Right.

John Reid: They go through the question in order. And so, the buyer could say anything, to the answer the first question and there’s no, let’s chase that rabbit. They go right to the second question, right to the third. So, they’re not really listening and then going in a conversation. So, we’re doing a lot of work now on just, how do you have a conversation? We need to untrain salespeople on, how do you have a consultative sales call, where you ask questions and then, you know, position yourself, versus having a conversation, which is much more fluid.

Steve Rush: It’s ironic, isn’t it? That if you’ve got a list of 10 power questions or whatever, you know, the buzzword in that organization is, you can’t be listening because you’re cueing your next question.

John Reid: Ah, it’s even worse than that. And we have insight selling and hypothesis selling and it all makes great sense. The idea that before I go in, I ought to have a point of view. And I agree with that. I go in with a point of view, but it’s so hard to unwind somebody that, you know, your point of view could be wrong.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: Right. Your point of view is not objectively right. Just having a point of view going in, they get trapped by their own point of view.

Steve Rush: Goes back to your perceptions and assumptions.

John Reid: Yes,

Steve Rush: Exactly right. So, in your latest book, The Five Lost Superpowers. Title, which of course I absolutely love and it’s around why we lose them and how to get them back. And you talk about these five key elements that as leaders, if we were thoughtful of them, we could pay attention if we started to lose them or indeed lost them, but here tactically, how we could put them right. And I wondered John, if we could just spin through each of those five, just to get a sense of how I might pay attention to them and notice them and maybe tactically, how I might go about fixing them. First one, ironically is curiosity.

John Reid: Yeah, a fan favorite with me, of course, curiosity. And it was the first one that I came up with. So, years ago, I would say, I would teach it as a lost superpower in the sales training. And of course, at one point I said, there must be at least five lost superpowers. And so, I got a team together and we brainstormed, and we came up with these five and they had to be independent. They had to research based. I mean, you know, it wasn’t just an opinion. It had to be something grounded in research, curiosity is for leaders. I mean, it’s critical, right? It gets back to this. You don’t know everything. One reason why leaders make terrible coaches. We actually ask this question, Steve, you know, we ask people, ‘what do you have to believe to coach somebody?’ And people will say, oh, that they’re motivated, that they have skills, they have capability. They miss the most important thing that you have to believe to coach somebody. And that is that the person you’re coaching knows something you don’t know.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: Otherwise, why would you ask questions? Except for, to lead them. But we act like we know it all. It’s just the human condition. We act like we know every everything, you know. And so, curiosity’s critical to be more curious about why this person’s behaving this way, doing this thing, you know, how did that get done? How can we leverage that? What we talk— it all gets squelched, by the way, most of these get squelched, you know, in school.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: And with our parents, right?  We have our parents to blame. We have society to blame. I mean, it’s just, you know, we grow up wildly curious and all of a sudden, we stop asking questions and we’re rewarded for answers and all that good stuff. We say here, cast a wide net, read fiction. That’ll make you more, well there’s a variety of things that fiction does, but you know, cast wide net, read a lot of different things, be a person of interest. You know, ask better questions, questions that make the other person think, questions that demonstrate you really care. Not just, how’s your day going? Which, you know, do you really care? Do you really want to know? Is that the best you can come up with?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: So, there’s better questions in there. There’s perspective seeking, of course. You know your own perspective, you love your own perspective. You want to be… great? Good for you. Who cares?

Steve Rush: Exactly.

John Reid: Find out a different perspective and learn something.

Steve Rush: Yeah, that’s really neat.

John Reid: You know, and then of course the whole system is sort of designed. I came upon this in the research. I can’t remember the researcher but explored then exploit. Like the idea as we explore stuff. And then as we get older, we exploit what we know to make money, to make a living to do that. And we sort of lose that explore part.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: So, I like the explore exploit idea. They continue to explore.

Steve Rush: I like that too, yeah. Your second lost superpower is resilience. Now, if ever there was time, we needed to grab hold of some resilience is now, right?

John Reid: Oh, absolutely. And it’s doable, right? It’s teachable. It’s not something that if you’re not resilient… it’s not a fixed state, right? It’s all learnable. The key things around resilience are always, you know, the network, your tribe, your group. Do I have a group that supports me, or do I have a group that brings me down? In other words, when things are going bad, they, is it ‘hey, you can get through this’ or do they say, ‘yeah, you know, they took advantage of you. You ought to leave. You know, they don’t like you’  you know, what group am I hanging around? So, the tribe matters. Of course, optimism, right. Having an optimistic viewpoint. And that’s all the, you know, ‘Is this permanent? Is this temporary? Can I get through this?’ But there’s an Optimism— Seligman from University of Pennsylvania calls, explanatory styles.

How do I explain things when they happen to me? Do I explain them if I’m a victim? Or do I explain them in a different way, that’s more optimistic. Of course, meaning. Finding meaning in what you do with what you do is a way to get through resilience, find something of meaning. So, there are techniques and of course being present.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: You know, being mindful, being in the moment. I don’t subscribe to, you know, go out and meditate. I’m not one of those people, you know, I meditate it every day. Because I think it’s all up to us. I had cancer four times. I’m almost always in the moment.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I should well imagine that. Gives you a sense of focus that meditation just won’t give you, right?

John Reid: People will say, oh, you know, I’m always in the moment where, but I know that people in other places are worrying. Whatever their words are, searching for. But you know, they’re worrying about the future. They’re thinking about the past, but I’m pretty much in the moment. And you have to decide for yourself. Now we’re not necessarily good, right, at self-assessments, but nevertheless, you have to figure out what what’s going to work for you.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: But the point is, you want to be present when it comes to resilience.

Steve Rush: And it’s got to be right for you. There’s no good trying to read a journal or replicate somebody else’s behavior. So, it doesn’t fit for you, right?

John Reid: Yeah, context is king, which is, you know, it’s the number one premise of my company. When I went through training in the chemical industry, what I was shocked to find out and still happens is that, you know, a training company built something let’s say in 1980 and there you are in 2021, and it’s the same program being delivered to you and voila. They just happened to have designed it in ‘80 for you. It’s the silly season.

Steve Rush: Right.

John Reid: I mean, nothing off the shelf was designed for you. Does it have value? I guess some, but we all want to be considered unique. We want to be appreciated. We want to be respected. And you do that by understanding the context and, you know, treating me with some respect versus treating me as an empty vessel that you’ve got to fill with a model.

Steve Rush: Sure. Now authenticity is your third superpower that we’ve lost. Now, it’s interesting because 10 years ago, everyone was blogging around authenticity and it’s almost become a little bit cliche in so much as a little bit overused, perhaps. How do you think we did end up losing some focus around authenticity and how do we get it back?

John Reid: Yeah, that’s a good question because I think it’s anything, so authenticity is just the latest, you know, in the bag, is the answer, right? So unfortunately, there is this desire for simple answers to complex problems.

Steve Rush: Yep.

John Reid: So, the simple answer is empathy. Oh, the simple answer is grit. The simple answer is purpose. The simple answer, you know, it just drives me up the wall, frankly, as a learning professional, and these people participate in it. I mean, the people that create this stuff, you know, don’t say, no, this is just an answer. It’s not the answer.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: They go full in it. This is the answer. Authenticity, you’re right, it was in the mill. I think it gets it because, you know, people know when they see it and there’s genuine authenticity and transparency. And there’s something that you learned in a classroom that you’re trying out, which by definition isn’t authentic,

Steve Rush: Exactly. You know, the other funny thing I hear a lot is I’m going to be my authentic self. Well, one, if you’re having to tell me that, then you’re probably not going to be. And because you’ve given it a label, you’re probably not going to be.

John Reid: I always think I’ve operated under an…. So, you know, there’s a better version of yourself, right? That’s why we’re all after, right? We’re after a better version of ourselves

Steve Rush: And that’s the right language

John Reid: And there is a better version of yourself, right? When you fly off the handle, you know, there’s a better version of you that wouldn’t have flown off the handle. When you were gossiping, there’s a better version of yourself that doesn’t gossip, whatever it is, there’s a better version. You want to be the best version of yourself. And that best version of yourself, you know, is authentically you, it’s your true self that we’re after. So, we have a relationship with a company called The Wise Advocate. The idea that there is this wise advocate inside of us, all, you know, there’s two mental pathways. One is the habitual sort of reactive “How do I get out of the situation?” The other one gets in the executive center and says “what’s the right thing?” And what we want to encourage people is to take that other path and think about, is this decision, is this behavior aligned with my best true self?

Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely spot on. Allied with that is compassion, which is your next lost superpower. Tell us it about that/

John Reid: Well, Compassion’s probably my favorite, again, I had other authors, so I should have said this earlier, not just me, but there was Corena Chase, she wrote Authenticity, Lynae wrote Resilience, Andrew Reid, my son wrote the chapter on compassion. So, I have other authors here, which I should have mentioned earlier. Compassion, I love compassion. And I’ll tell you why I love compassion because I was tired of empathy a little bit on so many levels.

Steve Rush: So, here’s the thing, what’s the difference then between empathy and compassion, is there a difference?

John Reid: There is a big difference, and it depends on whose definition. So, everything becomes definitional, but I think the majority of people would agree that compassion is empathy with action.

Steve Rush: Nice.

John Reid: Empathy is, “I feel your pain. I can take that perspective. I feel what you must be going through” but I don’t do anything about it except for verbally maybe acknowledge it. Compassion has risk. Because now I put myself in that situation, that’s personal risk. I take action. So, compassion is, I think what we ultimately get judged on, not what you say, but what you do. And we want to encourage people to take more action, an inclusive environment. It’s not like sitting around going, oh, you know, it’s got to be tough. And I know, you know, I’ve thought about this a lot and being different but what am I going to do about it? You know, am I going to become an ally? Am I going to risk my neck? Am I going to say something? So, Compassion’s the right word.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: And I think Compassion’s the next authenticity, unfortunately. As you point out that authenticity might be dated, compassion might be, I might be cutting edge on compassion. So, part of my problem with empathy, and this is debatable, but I had cancer four times and I did not want empathy. I wanted sympathy.

Steve Rush: Yeah, big difference too.

John Reid: And Brené Brown acts like sympathy is some horrific thing. And I’m like, she’s wrong about this! She’s brilliant. I think she’s brilliant, but she can be wrong, right. And I don’t know. I would like to have her on the podcast now to explain, maybe I’m understanding it wrong, but all I know is in that moment, I wanted sympathy. I don’t want you to say, oh, I know what it must like to have cancer four times. You have no idea. You just have no idea.

Steve Rush: Absolutely.

John Reid: And you look foolish and why are you putting yourself into my pain? If you’re not going to do something about it. So, the other thing about empathy that is problematic Steve, is that we are empathetic to people who are like us. This is the us, them quandary. I’m very empathetic to people that look like, me act like me or who are in my socioeconomic. It’s the them’s that I have trouble with, right? Humans now, not me personally, but you know that doesn’t get talked about enough. We get told either that we’re not empathetic, which is not true. And we know it’s not true because we are empathetic or, you know, so we ought to be told, hey, we teach empathy, we do, and we do in terms of emotional intelligence, we say, look, you’re wildly empathetic. We tell that to the participants, right? Because they are when it comes to people like them. So, we say, hey, here’s the data, here’s your empathetic, here’s the bad news. So, we have to expand, we have to have a different way of viewing the ‘them’s’ in a more inclusive way or a more belonging way to think about the others in order for us to tap into our empathy.

Steve Rush: And for me, compassion is a little bit more experiential as well. It means, I’m actually really thinking and immersing myself into that situation so that I can change either a behavior or a skill, or indeed my approach to other people in different situations, right?

John Reid: Yeah, it takes bravery. The five lost superpowers, we have the superpower theme. So, we try to carry that through the book in some degree that wasn’t hokey. But for each of the superpowers, we have like a tool belt and the tool belt for a compassion is BAM and the B stands for brave, right? It takes a level of bravery to be compassionate.

Steve Rush: It does, yeah. Because you put yourself out there, right?

John Reid: Yeah, you’re putting yourself out there.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

John Reid: You’re taking personal risk. I mean, he took personal risk, obviously again and again and again. So yeah, compassion is very deserving of being a superpower.

Steve Rush: Your Last Lost Superpower. I absolutely love, and I’m really excited to kick this around with you. And it’s a whole notion of playfulness. Now, as kids, we had no boundaries and we would’ve done this willingly, vast majority anyway. And yet it’s something that when we get to become more mature and we get careers and jobs, we do less, and it can unlock such a lot of greatness in our lives and work. Just wondered if, what your take on that would be?

John Reid: Yeah, I mean. I loved playfulness because, you know, I’m writing a book for businesspeople and, you know, there’s risk, right? With playfulness, you know, we don’t want to be silly and we’re adults now and we shouldn’t be playing. And that sounds like a waste of time. I mean, the biggest thing is that being playful sounds like a waste of time, you know? But in fact, if we look at imagination, we look at creativity, we look at innovation, there’s a sense of playfulness you have to have. So, we went playfulness versus the other words. The time I came upon playfulness in the business context, when I was reading, unfortunately, the report about the towers, the 9/11 report, and it starts with, it was a lack of imagination and I thought, wow, that’s, you know, we never could see that happening.

We weren’t imaginative enough. Which lends itself to… we’re taking ourselves so seriously we couldn’t just go there and think wildly. And then as I got in the business world, I ran into this theory by Lev Vygotsky that really transformed our thinking around this. Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who talked about children on the playground playing a head, taller, meaning he observed that five-year-old played like eight-year-olds and eight-year-olds play like twelve-year-olds. We took that quote to mean that kids from a playground would take these risks. They played head taller. They took risks, but eventually we play a head shorter and that’s tragic, right? We don’t take those risks. We don’t extend ourselves and it’s not the best version of ourselves again. And so that really struck me. And then when I looked at like things like brainstorming, I always had this resistance to brainstorming. This idea, that great ideas come in this antiseptic where no ideas are judged and everybody’s ideas the same. And I always thought, boy, when people are being creative, they’re having fun. They’re laughing. They’re making fun of your idea. That’s a stupid idea, it’s just like, we forgot to have fun. Now it needs to be safe, and people need to be respected and talented, but you can interrupt people and laugh at some idea or, you know, be a fool yourself, and I think you can get more creative than what we’ve been led to believe by a lot of this stuff. So, and I think we know that now to, even to a large degree, but playful is an exciting one to think about. It’s not being silly. It’s just not taking ourselves so seriously. And there is a gift of going second. I love this idea, Steve. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but if I, as a leader can be playful and make fun of myself. I’ll give you an example. Can I give you an example real quick?

Steve Rush: Yep, yeah. Please shoot for it. Yeah.

John Reid: So, I’m six foot four and I weigh too much, but I went paintballing once in the woods and there was a tree and I tried to hide behind tree, but the tree was a small tree. And so, people were pelting me with paintballs because they could see me. Well, years later years later, I find this picture of a bear hiding behind a tree. So, I send it to all my employees. I say, this is me at the paintball game. Now they thought it was funny, but that allows them to be silly. So that’s the gift of going second, if you, as the leader can say, you know, we’re all human. We have foibles, we do stupid stuff. I’m like you, and you get people’s again, you get their best self at work. You get their playful self, their imaginative self, a ’try this’ self, a sense of that can take risk. You know, not everything is life or death. I mean, I think you want that in your environment. I’m glad you like that chapter. And I think it deserves its own space.

Steve Rush: And also, this is not about whether somebody’s introverted or extroverted because there’s also an unconscious assumption that if I’m introverted, I can’t be playful. It’s just a different style of playfulness.

John Reid: Yeah, I’m one of those introverts who can do extroversion obviously by the pace at which I talk and all this, but I am, you know, much more regenerated when I’m alone reading, thinking, or small groups than I am in large crowds. It’s where you get your energy from and it’s so easy to judge somebody quickly or you’re an extrovert and like, see, you don’t even know what it means and that’s not good. And why are you putting me in that box? And what does that mean anyway?

Steve Rush: But it happens all the time, right?

John Reid: Oh Yeah. We love boxes. We’re trying to make it simple.

Steve Rush: Labels.

John Reid: Labels and boxes, and you’re one of them and you’re DiSC style is this. And your insight style is that, and therefore this and you do that. And it’s like, oh my gosh, what’s that about?

Steve Rush: Well, listen, I’m delighted we had the chance to spin through those. We’ll give you an opportunity at the end of the show so we can connect people to find a copy and the rest of what you do. Before we do that, though, just going to turn the tables a little bit. Now you’ve been a successful leader in lots of different businesses, including of course leading your own successful group. So, I’m going to tap into your leadership thinking and your leadership brain right now, John. And I’d like you to distill those down to your top three leadership hacks, what would they be?

John Reid: I would say, what we did, which was very clever of me by accident, I think. We didn’t declare values until we lived them. So, I had a company that was going on for four or five years and I said, okay, what are our values? Because we give grace, have a perspective, you know, but we actually lived the values before we declared them. So, I like that, well, I like the idea of having alignment, right? If you’re going to say you’re about this, you got to hold yourself accountable to that. Because people are going to look to when you’re not. So, I think as a leader, you always want to be very clear. You don’t want to leave it to people to try to figure it out. You want to be able to articulate. Here’s what matters to me, and here’s what it looks like.

So, people have trust in you. So, there’s building a trust. I would say the other one related to trust, because trust is the coin of the realm. As a leader, you’ve got to show an interest in the whole person. So, if they say, hey, I’d like to take off, my dog’s sick. You’ve got to ask, oh, what’s wrong with your dog? Most leaders are like, okay, no problem, you can work later or something tomorrow. They miss the opportunity to build a human-to-human connection. And then they wonder why people don’t trust them, don’t like them, don’t confide in them, don’t leave, you know? Well, because you just missed all these rapport cues.

Steve Rush: Compassion again. Of course.

John Reid: Yeah, it’s just taking that extra step to show you’re listening and oh, and that doesn’t mean you have to care about this person’s dog. No, what you care about is this person and you know that to care about this person, have a relationship. The dog’s important to them. So, I’m going to ask about the dog. People get all caught up and that’s not authentic, that’s not me. I don’t care about dogs. No, you do care about a relationship though, right? So, get out of your own way and ask about the dog. So, there’s rapport building, there is aligning your values or whatever it is. I think the last one and this is where the training industry always gets it wrong. Not wrong, I shouldn’t say that. But candor is a compliment. Being honest with people about their performance is a compliment, good and bad.

Oh my gosh. Could talk so much about this. If you do nothing else, start recognizing people more. When they do something, right, thank them. That was great. I like how you did this. That makes having the difficult conversation so much easier.

Steve Rush: Exactly.

John Reid: You can just go right into it because you’ve got that. You’ve done that. You’ve told them when they’re good. It’s much harder when you’ve never said anything good to them. And now you want to deliver some bad news and then you try to hide good news in it and create that infamous crap sandwich. So, people that work for me never have to wonder what I’m thinking about their performance. They just don’t, that burden’s gone. Sometimes they’ll say, wow, that’s terrible. Oh, don’t do that again. What was that? You know, but I do it in a playful way. We shank that one, we talk about that in the book, ‘shankapotamus’ - I shank that one. But that’s what you want to do as a leader, you want to recognize people and then be honest about their performance. People deserve honesty. People deserve to be treated a like adults, not children. And they deserve the truth in a way they can hear it. Not just let it all hang out, but in a way that is intentional about the way they can hear it.

Steve Rush: Love that, great advice. Next part of the show, John, we call it Hack to Attack. Now this is typically where something in your life or work hasn’t worked out. But as a result, the experience you’re now using as a force of good. Now, we’ve already talked about surviving cancer four times. But if there was a moment in your life where you look back and think, well, that’s definitely something that was pivotal for me. What would that have been?

John Reid: I think the moments that are pivotal in my career were when I was under stress, and I didn’t deal with things in the best way. And that happened a lot. And so as much as I said, I was mindful in the moment, I still had stress, right? Because you have cancer. You’ve got kids, you have kids in college. And I worked for some managers who were great. And I worked for some managers who were really not good human beings. They were really, you know, dysfunctional human beings and those dysfunctional human beings got to me. And one of them made me cry. I was like 50 years old or 45 years old. I don’t know. It’s a long time. It was like 45 years old. And I’m crying because this person is making my life hell. And it was funny when I did my exit interview, I said, you know, you made me cry.

He said, do you think I meant to? And I said, I don’t know what you meant to do. All I know is I cried. And I’ve never cried before, but I think those turning moments are, you know, not dealing with it, trying to wish it away, not taking control of it, not taking action on it, but just becoming a little bit of a victim, right? Where you look at things that are being done to me and losing your sense of agency. And that’s where I first fell in love with the word agency, right. That we have to have agency and we don’t have agency if we’re so helpless until we’ve got to regain it if we don’t have it, we’ve got to find a way to regain it.

Steve Rush: And that’s where it’ll make you stronger and you’ll become more resilient and more effective as a result of the learning that you get from that experience.

John Reid: Sure, and I want to give people agency, I want them to know everything. I mean, I tell my employees, we just had a meeting and here’s all the numbers. Here’s everything you need to know. Here’s everything I know. So, you know, you’re making choices with full information. Because you’re an adult and you’re entitled to that, and you have agency and I want you to know how we’re doing.

Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely so

John Reid: The right thing to do.

Steve Rush: So last thing we get to do today is we get you to do some time travel, bump into John at 21 and give him some advice. What would your words of wisdom to him then be?

John Reid: Well, I would say to John at 21, there’s some things about you that the world is going to say is wrong, but it’s actually your secret sauce. So, the secret sauce was, I was always authentic. I was never anybody, but me. I was always curious and always playful. I think those three qualities I had from the beginning, what I would tell 21-year-old me is, you know, it’s not about you though, right? I mean, I was that guy. I was a little bit too much of that. Hey, look what I did, look what I accomplished, and nobody likes that guy. And also, there was a better version of me, a sort of a more controlled. I used to walk in a room of people. This is what I would tell younger me. I would walk in a room, a group of people, 21 and probably just start talking. And I would defend that behavior by saying, well, that’s me and the people around me go, that’s John, look at John, only John can walk in a room and just start talking. But you know, there is a good percentage of people in the room are like, you know, I hate John, John’s a jerk. I was talking and John interrupted me. And this John that some of you like is kind of a jerk. And it took me a while to realize that you can be authentically John without being a jerk. And you know, I think that’s what I would tell 21-year-old, John. I hope he would listen. He wasn’t a good listener, either 21-year-old John.

Steve Rush: Well good news, it kind of all figured out at the end, right?

John Reid: Yeah.

Steve Rush: So, John, listen, I’ve really loved chatting and I could spend all day chatting or be at our listeners will probably drop off about now, because this is typically where our shows kind of run to and from, but before we wrap up our conversation today, how can we make sure our global audience can connect with you and the work that you do, maybe get a copy of some of the books.

John Reid: Yeah, please reach out. A couple ways, one, is the website, http://www.jmreidgroup.com and I’ll give my email. Can I do that Steve?

Steve Rush: Absolutely. I know you’re really connecting with people, so please do.

John Reid: It’s John, J-0-H-N at J-M-R-E-I-D group.com. And please email me, any emails I get I’ll send a copy of the book if it’s in the United States of America area. But the book also available.

Steve Rush: Hashtag expensive international postage.

John Reid: Exactly. But you know, we’re on Amazon. We’ve had good success with the second book and the first book. So, you know, they’re readily available. We’re going to have an audio version coming out, I think in the next month.

Steve Rush: Sure thing. We’ll make sure that the links to your books, as well as to the JMReid Group and your email are in our show notes. So, folks can click straight into when we’re done.

John Reid: Great. Thank you, Steve.

Steve Rush: John, I’ve had a ball and thank you ever so much for being part of our community. Wish you ever success. I know that you are in the moment, and I know that there are some great things ahead for you and the JMReid Group. So, thanks for being part of our community.

John Reid: 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 handle there: @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.

Dr Kerstin Potter is an Executive Coach with over 30 years in international business the private and public sector, She is the Founder and CEO Visual Metaphors at Work. Explore these topics:

• What is the difference between metaphors and visual metaphors?
• The unconscious thoughts and neuroscience triggered by visual metaphors.
• How visual metaphors help leaders express themselves in situations they find difficult.
• It’s not about being a leader of – but a leader with.

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

Find out more about Kerstin below:

Kerstin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerstin-potter/

Company  Website: https://www.visualmetaphorsatwork.com

Full Transcript Below

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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

Our special guest on today's show is Dr. Kerstin Potter. She's an executive coach with an enormous amount of international experience, and she's now the CEO of visual metaphors at work. But before we get a chance to speak with Kirsten, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: How can use in the news today, we explore how we can control our brain for optimal functioning, that mighty three-pound organ that sits in amongst our skulls. How do we get that to work for us instead of against us? When we are preparing for significant events in our careers and our work, we tend to focus on preparation. For a big presentation to do we practice until we get comfortable. If we have an interview for a new job, we'll practice some research so that we understand what the obvious questions might be. When we take this approach however, we're only doing half the work of being effective and successful.

How often do we take time to prepare our brains? What do you do to ensure that you keep that pivotal organ in the game? Not just your body in actions, it's fair to say that physical preparation is what controls the brain, but there are specific things we can do to ensure that our brain is as prepared as our body for those important career situations. Let's dive into a few areas. Thoughts play a massive part in how our brain is used. Truth is, we can manage emotions, but it starts with controlling our thoughts. Every emotion we experience comes from a thought which occurs consciously or unconsciously. Then we experience one or more emotions based on it. And if those thoughts don't serve you well, it can be pretty destructive. You might find yourself getting into a Whirlpool that takes you away from the work that you're at distracted, and therefore will reduce your opportunity for peak level performance.

The hack for brain training here is to be thoughtful around whether or not your thoughts are helping you move forward, or they're going to hold you back. Take the time to consider these thoughts and replace them with data by asking yourself specific questions. These questions can help you replace the thoughts with information that could be really helpful. An example could be consider how many times you've given a successful presentation and then do a quick mental scan of what it was that helped you accomplish what it was that you set out in that presentation. What were the things that helped you? Do you have evidence to support your experiences, aligned your education, your previous jobs and your career accomplishments, all will give you data to reinforce your capability in order for you to do a great job. And when you provide your brain with evidence and data, it doesn't have to do the hard work of finding the information to fill the uncertainty, but reminding your brain, you have the skill sets to take on the task that you have the background to be credible on the topic.

Your brain will create the right emotions that align with these thoughts, replacing anxiety with confidence, the power of words is a really important hack to continually evolve and build brain power. As a professional, you're like to be aware of the power of words. It can be used to motivate, demoralize, strengthen, undermine. But how often do you think about the words which you use on yourself? Yourself talk. Such words might be conscious ones that you say to yourself, as well as the unconscious words that whisper around in your ears when you're thinking to yourself. The problem here of course, is that words create thoughts, thoughts create actions. So, these words have to be the ones that serve you well. And I've been quoted in saying before, this is the voice in your head that you wake up with. It's the one you go to bed with, and it'd be the last one you hear before you die.

So, it has to serve you really well. The heck here is to avoid the words that don't serve us well. And there are a few examples could be, should, have to, need to, must have, which create thoughts of you not doing enough or not being enough. They may experience feelings of guilt or put you under a position of pressure. To avoid creating an internal climate of negative thoughts and emotions. Replace these pressure words with power words, such as, want, will, do. Instead of telling yourself, you should going to work to review X, Y, Z, use the words I will. Changing the pressure word of should to will and want. Shifting the focus from my making a mistake to building confidence puts you back in control of your thoughts and emotions and builds brain power. And with the hacks that we've shared so far, we've talked about the thoughts that are creating actions in the way that we do things.

These all stem from mindset. When you work on a project for your organization, do you plan to start and only complete 50% of it? Of course, you don't, but this is a metaphor of how we've been engaging our brain when it comes to preparation for our professional roles. Overall, how you function is your choice, it's a mindset. You can determine what thoughts you want to encourage to create beneficial emotions, your mindset related to create the thoughts you need to get you closer to big performance. And that mindset will allow you to decide what words will generate the right behaviors and actions that align with you achieving your goals. And you can tell your brain where to focus and in doing so unlock the results that you want. These simple strategies and hacks will help your brain become a better tool for you and remember mindset triggers, your thoughts that triggers your behaviors. That's been the leadership Hacker News, we'd love for you to share your stories and insights with us so please get in touch.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Joining me on the show today is Dr. Kerstin Potter. She's an executive coach with an enormous amount of international experience of over 30 years in leading both private and public sector businesses. She's now the CEO of Visual Metaphors at Work. Kerstin, welcome to the show.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: It's great to be here. Thank you.

Steve Rush: I'm delighted that we've got you to come on our show for two reasons. One, the first time that you and I met, it was a kind of a bumping into visual metaphors. And then subsequently I've been coached by you. And it was an enormous experience for me. And I just wanted to get our listeners to feel how that might have been for them. But before we dive into the whole notion of what you do, let's get to know a little bit about you. What's your backstory?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Right? Well, I was born in Sweden, and I spent my early childhood there. And then when I was 13 years old, my family moved to Switzerland. I was placed in a convent school where only French was spoken. And I didn't know where to French at the time. And my family wasn't religious. So, I didn't understand any of the rituals either. So, I felt very much as a mute, you know, for six months I had to really get by, by looking at how people were acting, what they were doing and the tone of their voices and so on to try to understand what was going on. And at the beginning I made many mistakes and didn't really get it at all. And then I got better and better at really looking at what's going on around me. And after six months, I was ready to then with my French to start the normal school. But I think with hindsight, that time of newness was what made me really interested in how people work and operate and listening and looking at people in that way. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the life and culture in the French part of Switzerland. So, I stayed on there and trained as a scientist by reading chemistry at the University Lund. I was interested in how a scientist mind worked in the observation experimentation, looking at feedback from systems and then making changes and looking how that worked. I then had a brief interlude in Sweden, reading history of art. This is where images came in, I think. And this was really because I needed to see Sweden or this culture of Sweden from the viewpoint of grownup, rather than a child, because many people were asking me about Sweden, I couldn't really answer them.

After that brief interlude. I then went to the UK to do a PhD in chemistry, in Cambridge. And this was really to get myself or make myself a better scientist by training in actually doing real research work. After I had finished my doctorate, I joined a pharma company AstraZeneca as a graduate trainee. I think I went into this with some detail because I think this is the pattern of my career really is trying to move on into a different and new industrial or business area. And at the same time change country, because I really enjoyed the learning and the new culture.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: The new cultures I encountered. So, I carried on in that pattern. After working the pharma industry, I moved back to Switzerland as part owner of a startup, and that was specializing in mentalized textiles for high precision printing and also protection cages for electronic equipment. So, a completely different area again. I then spent three years with Nestle in food ingredients, six years as management consultant in Germany. And then I moved back to the UK, setting up European safe effort for high tech consultancy. Again, in Cambridge, I was back made a complete tour. I then moved on to become director of Executive Education at Cass Business School in the city of London, the school specialized in finance. So again, I walked into a new area for me. This is also where I was first asked to act as a coach, particularly for me for women who moved in from outside the UK into the higher levels of management in the city of London, I thoroughly enjoyed coaching. I mean, this was, again, something completely new to me and I felt I needed to become more professional here. So, I trained as an executive coach at HEC Business School in Paris. I wanted to do this in Paris rather than in the UK, because at the time UK coaching was very much influenced by the US. And I also wanted to see how a different culture was working with coaching. And in addition, I also knew that in France at the time a team coaching was very important, and people were very interested in how this could work out. That hadn't really started yet in the US and in the UK. So, this is where I then really started as a coach, as a professional coach.

Steve Rush: So, one of the things that just rung a bell with me is, you were talking about that Kirsten, is that the kind of whole notion of cultural backdrop of coaching. Do you notice that there is a kind of a difference between different cultures in the way that we coach and are being coached?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we have a different attitude towards power in different regions of the world. We have a different attitude to how we communicate in general and also the sort of careers, because executive coaching is about coaching people in their business careers, the way you look at your careers and what is important is completely different.

Steve Rush: So, from the time that you became a professional coach, how did you end up with Visual Metaphors at Work?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Well, I've been part of teams and I've been responsible for teams during my whole career. And I was starting to become really frustrated and worried. By the way that corporate culture and office politics get in the way of change and growth both at the level of the organization and the visual. So, this is where the team thing comes in. When I remembered some pioneering visual metaphor work carried out by Professor Angela Dumas at London Business School. She used images and objects to help teams reveal tacit knowledge and promote deeper conversations and trust within the team. I came across though when I was working with this high-tech consultancy in Cambridge. She'd been mandated by the consultancy to kick off a series of workshops for a client in Finland. This was an engineering company producing giant paper making machines. And they had acquired a smallest Swedish company.

Directors and the management teams from both organizations were to meet for the first time to agree on a common strategy for product development and service development. And Angela Dumas had been asked to pick off this whole thing using her images and objects. I was very worried because I don't like putting people into boxes, but I think it's well known that Swedes and Finns are not particularly talkative. And adding to that a group of engineers having to face up to images and try to talk about them. I was worried that it was going to be a complete disaster. I didn't know whether I was actually going to be there and see this big car crash or whether it would be better for me to just keep away from it. But yeah, my curiosity took over and I ended up joining them all. It was in middle of the winter. It was very dark in Finland, very cold. And Angela Dumas took out her bag of tricks, showed all her images, asked her questions, et cetera. And I was absolutely amazed. After 10 minutes, she had these people talking together in a very constructive manner and having fun at the same time. And they ended up with some really strong decisions and ways forward that they actually acted on, which I thought was amazing. So, when I had finished my training as a coach, then as a team coach, I remembered what had happened there. And so, I contacted Angela again to see what had happened with her methodology, her visual metaphors, et cetera, and unfortunately, she had been very ill and had to leave London Business School.

So, I ended up sitting by her bedside and then we took walks together, slow walks together in the park as she was in convalescence and listened to her talking about her research in the area, watch she'd done, the experiments she'd done. And I was also going through her paper asking her lots of questions. So, after that Angela and I decided to start a company together, which is now Visual Metaphors at Work. We set it up in Dubai in 2012. And we started working on developing the Lephorus to be a coaching tool for coaches, facilitators, and executives and companies to have some coaching experience to use with teams and we call this Lephorus. Angela then decided to retire in 2014. And I've been carrying on the work since then.

Steve Rush: This leads us to this point, right? So now you have your organization, and you are inspiring different coaching conversations using a really neat and different talk. And before we get into that, let's just for our global audience. We have 94 countries that listen to this podcast. So, on that basis, let's start with metaphors. For those that might be less familiar with that English phraseology, metaphor. What does that mean?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: We humans have been using metaphors for a very long time, indeed, and young people or young children from the age three or four, understand them without any problem at all and they exist in every culture. So, for example, we say time flies to show that time may have a direction for us and that it can go past very quickly in a flash. We also say time is money. We have hourly monthly wages. So, we paid for the time we spend at work or the time we give to the companies where we are working for our work. And also, if we do something wrong in society, we pay our dues by spending time in prison. We also say time heals. So, these are different ways of framing and reframing the quite complicated concept of time. Using metaphors like this is a way we have developed able to actually get a handle of complex concepts and to talk about them with others. Scientists use metaphors a lot in order to try to explain to each other what's going on in their experiments and so on, for example, I mean, say atoms bumped together, they don't, but it's very helpful to describe it in this way. There are also other metaphors like gestures, and also there are sound metaphors, for example a rooster crowing in the morning could indicate a new start, a new beginning. So that's met metaphors in general, and then there are visual metaphors and visual metaphors are images. We say an image is worth a thousand words, for example.

Steve Rush: Another metaphor as well.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Yes, exactly.

Steve Rush: So, I remember when you coached me, the thing that made the real difference for me in using metaphors is it helped me unlock my unconscious thinking. And when you coached me, you were using words around a situation. So typically, it would start with, let's talk about this situation and I want you to look at these images. And I remember you saying, look at the image. What do you see? What do you notice that similar to that situation? And on the face value, you look at an image and you think, well, it, can't, here's a bunch of colors and shapes and directions, or here's a chair that can't be possibly similar to the situation I’m in, but actually when you allow yourself to be present and in that moment and think about it, you can start noticing some patterns and some similarities. And that was the one thing that really intrigued me about this whole process. So, for me as a coachee, what's actually happening there?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Well, actually when I talk to people and it's interesting the words you've been using there, what people say is that when you see the images you seem to have an instant reaction to these images. It's a more like a gut feel. You know that bit is important to me, but you don't know why. They then say they try to process them intellectually, so there's an internal conversation. And then they go back to the instant reaction, the gut feel they had in choosing one particular image in that situation. So, it's not really very reasoned. It is a gut reaction, you know, does that make sense in what happened to you?

Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely. What's quite ironic is we're talking about visual metaphors on a podcast, which is an audible means of communication. But even as we are describing this, I suspect our listeners can start to think about, if I described that, you know, we had four boxes each within an image, some would have shapes, some would have curve lines, some would have bright colors, some would have less bright colors, and you are naturally drawn to an image that for whatever reason, draws you there and there is no intellectual reason for that either.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Exactly, and then what people say to me is that that picture that you have selected gives you an anchor, it's an anchor point to be confident and specific about articulating the feelings around that situation and the insights you have, so you can do it. It goes very quickly. You start talking about important things very fast, and I think it's also something to do about if you have a white page, you know, how do you start writing? It's always difficult. The same thing, if you are asked to talk about your situation, you know, tell me more about it. Again, it's a blank page. Whereas if you have this image as a sort of anchor, it makes it much easier to are talking about things.

Steve Rush: And I suspect then unconsciously, because something been triggered in that conversation. We've triggered the conversation. Then it allows you as a coach to then ask additional relevant questions because you've got something out early.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Absolutely. And what we also do and what's important with Lephorus is that we use several sets of images. So, we keep on asking questions, using different types of images. That's what you saw too Steve, didn't you?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: And also, it's not just any images. These images have been developed. Starting off bound, read your mind, then by us, we now are at the third generation of images because we have learned as we go along, what works in well in certain situation and what works less well. So, it's very important. The type of image, the family you use, the questions you ask and the type of questions, you have to be very careful with how you word your questions.

Steve Rush: And I suspect if you are not careful, you end up leading people to anchor into an image that they might not naturally migrate towards, right?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Absolutely. And also saying things that they think they should say, because, you know, it's the way you prompt the way you ask questions about the image to try to get deeper into it. You can't ask leading questions, that's clear.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and people learn in lots of different ways. So, if we go back to the core foundations that most of us learn, it's either visual, auditory. So, we see things, we hear things, we like to touch things that's kinesthetic. So, what if I'm not naturally visual, will it still have the same effect for me?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: You know, it's an interesting question. First of all, from the experience, there is no problem. Everybody actually gets this very, very quickly. The only people we've had real problems with are those who are actually in the art world or in the design world, because we use images of abstract images. So, they're immediately trying to get back to, you know, who might have painted that.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: You mentioned images of chairs. They might say, well, who might be the designer of that chair? So, they get into their professional life before they look at the image, just as an image.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Those are the only people who've had problems with. It's interesting, you're saying this about more visual or more sort of language based. It's actually been shown that, and that was some recent research carried out in 2017 by Elinor Amit at Harvard Medical School who showed that, in fact, we internally use both sort of language reasoning and visual reason, but it depends on the complexity of the issue at hand, which one we turn to. When the issue is quite simple, we use more language thinking. And when the complexity is increased, we start to go more towards the visual. And that happens with everyone.

Steve Rush: That's really interesting, isn't it? Yeah, so particularly when we find ourselves in difficult situations or elements of particular conflict, you found that people using visual metaphors can also unlock some learning in themselves far quicker than if they would do through regular coaching. What's the reason that happens?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Because It's yourself, the person itself who is actually finding these insights within themselves, you then move on to actually understanding how you can go forward in a quite different way. You know, if you move towards something, you have to know what would be good and you have to know what would be bad for you. And then you can start building the road.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: From where you are today to where you want to get to, again, using images to show you the different paths you can take. And you then very quickly, very easily get into, right. I can try to do this. I can try to do that. If that doesn't work, I can move on to this other pathway and so on. So, you get to something very quickly and something practical.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and also from a team and group perspective, this can really also help stimulate conversation in broader teams rather than just individuals as well. And I just wondered what your experience was of that.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Oh yes. Well, I mean, one of the things that people do say also is that this creates, you know, the famous psychological safety.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: You know that Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School has been talking about for many, many years. Here, were actually seemed to be creating that. And there are two things. One is the ritual. We ask each person of the team, one after the other in silence, choose an image that represents the situation or the issue at hand or whatever. And then to talk to their teammates about this image. And we find that when they do that, people lean in and want to listen to what their colleague is saying. They're very interested to see which image their colleague chooses. And then to listen to what they're saying about that image. You then very quickly, have other team members more questions about the image. On fact, for example, saying, well, I chose that image too, but for this and this reason, which is different from yours, and you have a conversation happening again very quickly. And because you're talking about the image, you're not talking about the person, it's becomes nonconfrontational and non-aggressive.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: So, you have an openness in the team that happens very quickly, and which is very constructive.

Steve Rush: And to your point, psychologically safe then, isn't it? Yeah, like it.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: They say afterwards, I feel as if, you know, I've been working with these people for years but after this session, I feel as if I'd been to school with them.

Steve Rush: How fascinating, yeah. So, if I'm a leader listening to this and I'm thinking, great, I'll just whip myself onto the internet. I'll download of images, and I'll try and run this with my team. What's the danger in doing that? Or is there a danger in doing that?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Well, it depends on what you want to do with it. I mean, there's something called photolanguage that has been used for very many years in teams, when you start a workshop, for example, and photolanguage is the selection of images to use about 50 images, photos. And it has people in it, it has animals in it, it has as cars, you know, anything. And it's very useful. If you say at the beginning of the workshop, say, you know, how are you feeling now? Or what do you want to get out of this workshop? Instead of doing the usual flip chart, you know, what are you wanting to get out of this workshop? You do it with this image, and that's been going on for years and years and that's useful. However, you don't get any deeper than that.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: You know, the important thing with the Lephorus is that we have the different types of images for different depths of conversation. We are really digging in, we're starting at the higher level saying, you know, what's your situation? What is the situation as a whole? And then we dig down during a workshop, which usually takes about two hours or two and a half hours.

Steve Rush: And your images are scientifically chosen over time through experience and through methodology to make sure that they stimulate the conversation, right?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Yeah, they've been chosen through experience. I don't know about scientifically. But yes, over, you know, over many years, since 2012, we have been working with those images and looking at how they worked in workshops.

Steve Rush: So, if I wanted to dig into visual metaphors, what's the easiest way for me to kick that off?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Well, our website is a good way to start because there are videos there explaining what metaphors are and how they work. And they're also courses for coaching and facilitators to learn the techniques. And in a few weeks, there will be an eBook with more background, more theoretical background and so on. So, there's quite a lot of information there. And then I'd always be happy to talk to anybody about my experience, our experiences and also give examples of what we've been doing and the issues that we have been helping organizations face and find solutions too.

Steve Rush: Excellent, and at the end of the show, we'll make sure we capture how people can connect with you so that they can dive into some of that. But at this part of the show, typically where we turn the tables a little, we're now going to hack into your leadership mind. So having led a number of different businesses, lots of different international experiences, I'm really keen to dive in and hack into your leadership mind. So, if you had to think about your life's work and distill that down to your top three leadership hacks, what would they be?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Right. Well, I think the first one is that it is not about being a leader of, for me, it's being a leader with, so it's about walking together, walking side by side with a team. And I find that important because there is an intelligence in a team. There's an intelligence in an organization that we often don't take account off.

Steve Rush: Okay.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Number two, if you do work in that way, you know, rather than being a leader with, it's very important that wherever you are, the top management, actually agrees with this because if that's not the case, and you do listen to the intelligence of the team and you then are not able to take account of that, then that's worse than not listening in the first place. I've seen that happening. We have been working in organizations where we actually have walked away because we had to say, no, this is counterproductive. If we don't act on the intelligence of the organization that is destructive rather than constructive.

Steve Rush: Definitely.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Numbers, three. Unforce humor is important, has an important place. So that's why I really like when we are running these workshops that those early banter, you know, people laugh a bit about the images, about the things that's being said. And then very quickly when they realize that important things are coming out, it becomes serious, but there is banter and laughter and I think that's important.

Steve Rush: It also unlocks the chemicals in the brain to allow that deeper thinking and trust also comes about as a result of that, doesn't it?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Yeah, that's right. And I think, you know, if we can have more unforce humor in organizations in general, we'd all be happier.

Steve Rush: Definitely, yeah. Next part of the show, we've affectionately called Hack to Attack. This is where something hasn't worked out, it may have been pretty catastrophic, but at the time you took some learning from it and it's now a force of good for you in your work on life. What would be your Hack to Attack?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Well, I told you that I've been moving from one job to another and into and out of different countries. And of course, that can feel very risky and scary. But I must say that at the end, every time it's actually produced something very good, but for me and my family, even in places or in circumstances, when I've been asked to leave an organization, which is never an easy place to be in, with hindsight, that's been a good thing. And I've seen other people in similar situations thinking that their world has had ended. And in fact, this was actually an opening for something new, something different. So yes, it's scary. But I have learned that it's actually, usually very positive in the end.

Steve Rush: It's that moment, isn't it? That you make a call that either something is scary or alluring and it's a very fine line, isn't it? Last part of the show, we get to give you some time travel. You get to bump into Kirsten at 21 and give us some advice. What would your words of wisdom be to her then?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Right. Well, I'm naturally quite introverted and I would advise myself at the time to be kind to myself because I tried to be something I wasn't, I tried to be extrovert because I thought that was the way to be.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: And I've learned over many years that it's better to accept what you are and then to find ways of doing what you want to do, but in that context. So, for example, I go to networking events, but I allow myself to leave 30 minutes. So, it's those little things to be kind to yourself, not to stop yourself doing things because they are, you know, you're worried about them, whatever, but find ways of working it so that it fits with who you are. I have to say that if I'd said that to myself, age 21, I wouldn't have been listening.

Steve Rush: That's the other thing, isn't it? With hindsight. I reflect back on the same question to me. That's been asked many times and at 21, gosh, I was a very different individual and a different framing. If only we could listen to ourselves at 21, our life may have been a bit more seamless.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Perhaps.

Steve Rush: But who knows? Then we wouldn't have had those learning experiences either, right?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Exactly. I was going to say you need those bumps.

Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely, so. So beyond today, what's the best way we can connect our audience to your firm and to you through the work that you do?

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Well, our website is visualmetaphorsatwork.com. It's a bit of a mouthful. But as I said, lots of information there, I'm also active on LinkedIn. So, you can connect with me through that. During the last year, I've discovered that I like doing videos during the pandemic, last two years during the pandemic. I really like doing videos. So, we'll soon have a presence on YouTube as well. Particularly describing case studies from our clients. So, you know, guest contact me via LinkedIn or the website, and I can then give you updates on where things will appear that you might find of interest.

Steve Rush: Super, and we'll make sure all of those links are in our show notes. So, folks can literally head over soon as they've listened to this and click in and find you.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Thank you.

Steve Rush: So, Kerstin, thank you for coming on our show. I am really delighted that we've been able to showcase your work and my experience have been coached by you. And in hope that others will also find that visual metaphors can really unlock their experiences at work. So, thank you for coming on our podcast and thank you for sharing what you do.

Dr. Kerstin Potter: Thank you for having me.

Steve Rush: Thanks Kerstin.

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 there: @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.

Amy Lynn Durham is the CEO of Create Magic at Work. She's also a Berkeley Certified Executive Coach, and one of the world's leading practitioners on spiritual intelligence. In this intimate

conversation we discuss some great learning including:

• What is Spiritual Intelligence (SQ)
• How we can use SQ and EQ at work as leaders
• What to do, to create magic at work
• How to feel connected with your teams or organization

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

Find out more about Amy below:

Amy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amylynndurham/

Create Magic at Work Website: https://createmagicatwork.net

Amy on Twitter https://twitter.com/durham_amy

Amy on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/createmagicatwork/

Full Transcript Below

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

Amy Lynn Durham is a special guest on today's show. Amy is the CEO of Create Magic at Work. She's also a Berkeley Certified Executive Coach, and one of the world's leading practitioners on spiritual intelligence. But before we get a chance to speak with Amy, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: Given today's show is about spiritual intelligence. We're going to start off by diving into emotional intelligence. So what is it? Well at the most basic level, emotional intelligence is the ability to understand your own emotions and other people's feelings. A high level of emotional intelligence will help us as leaders engage with others effectively. Emotional intelligence affects all aspects of our professional and personal life. From our ability to self-regulate our emotions to manage behavior, sell an idea and lead and form healthy relationships.

Many companies have determined employees with a high level of emotion, intelligence increase a company's productivity and significantly impacts on the bottom line. So as a leader, if you're looking ways to boost your emotional, here's a few steps to help you on your way. Learn to stay cool. As the saying goes, you attract more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. You're more likely to get what you need by being polite rather than being rude. We say things we regret when we are stressed and angry, while stress is of course a normal part of life, it can so distract us from the rational thinking that we absolutely need. Stress, however, dramatically affects how we deal with problematic situations. You feel yourself getting stressed, take a walk, get some fresh air, sip some water, but take a break. If you want to boost your emotional intelligence, you need to learn how to avoid succumbing easily to the stresses in our personal and professional lives.

Next, develop empathy and compassion. Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage not only our own emotions, but for those around us as well. Their opinions, judgments, demands, requests of others can also cause us to lose our cool. But by stepping into their shoes, understanding can really set us apart. Be present in the moment and try and examine it from all angles. It could be entirely possible that you are reading into a situation that isn't actually happening right in front of you. Their intent could be altogether different from your understanding of their situation.

Be definitive. Are you someone who has things happen to them or are you the person that makes things happen? Learn how to take ownership of the situations in our lives. You're in driver seat after all. With higher emotion intelligence, you'll realize that you are in control of all of your outcomes, even though you might not think so, emotion and intelligence help you respond in an empowering way where circumstances and situations could be even really quite challenging and help you find a way around. Remember you're in the driving seat.

Change old habits, change how you engage with others. If you are in a habit of cutting people off, when they speak, practice stopping it. Learn to be fully present when engaging with others. Listen thoroughly to what somebody is saying without thinking how you're going to respond, just be in the moment. And yet it takes practice. And lastly, practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is the practice of observing the present moment without judging what you notice. The more you're able to observe without are judging the less slightly you are actually to react to the environment that’s around you.

And to sum this up nicely, Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search For Meaning. States that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, which is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. And developing our emotional intelligence will help us all enjoy this freedom to choose your attitude in any given circumstance. So, in conclusion, researchers have determined that emotional intelligence has more impact on success than IQ, your intelligence. The good news is that your level of emotional intelligence is not fixed, and it can be changed, and we can nurture it and it can grow. If you want some more informational emotional intelligence. One of the godfathers that brought this to our four is Daniel Goleman and he has a book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. Please continue to keep your new stories flowing to us. But for now, let's get into the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Joining me on the show today is Amy Lynn Durham. Amy is a certified executive coach. She's the founder and CEO of her company Create Magic At Work and they offer spiritual intelligence and emotional intelligence tools to energize and transform the workplace. Amy's also written fantastic book named of course Create Magic At Work. Amy, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Amy Lynn Durham: Thank you for having me, Steve. I'm happy to be here.

Steve Rush: We always love to kick the show off with an opportunity for you to share a little bit about how you've arrived doing what you're doing. So, tell us a little bit about the backstory?

Amy Lynn Durham: How have I arrived? What a question. Yeah, it's a roller coaster ride for sure. Being a solopreneur entrepreneur. My background is in the corporate world as a corporate executive. I've worked for private and publicly traded companies. At my peak, I was working for a large telecommunications company, and I was operating about 40 million dollars a year in operating income and managing a little over 400 employees. And I mainly ran half of California, which is the size of a small country if you will.

Steve Rush: It's in fact bigger than many countries, right?

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah. And part of which was the Bay Area in Silicon Valley. So, I have a strong background in achieving sales goals, HR, recruiting, employee engagement, workplace culture, and all of those things that are involved with that. While I was in my position there, I really felt like my creativity was stifled in the workplace. And in my final year in that position, I made a goal within myself that I wanted to show to the C-suite leaders, that human connection improves productivity and profitability versus pitting people against each other in unhealthy competition. And so, I planned for a year to leave my job and I didn't tell anyone because I wanted to go on a journey where I reinjected myself back into the workplace to do these connecting activities. But what I did during the year that I stayed in my job was. I used my employees to test out these field, tested activities that I ended up putting in my book and I wanted to make sure I left on top, again, to show that these things work in the workplace.

Steve Rush: Awesome. And in doing that kind of test and learn under the radar, so to speak, what did you fundamentally learn about your existing team that happened as a result of you changing your approach?

Amy Lynn Durham: Wow, well, it freed me up as a leader to actually do my job. I'm going to start with the end result and then kind of unthread it from there for you. Once the team members saw the humanity within each other, with these activities, we were doing that really at the end of the day, elevated their spiritual intelligence, their SQ, and their EQ as well, their emotional intelligence. They worked together better. So, you know, one person would call the other if they had a question or needed help, collaboration skyrocketed. I wasn't the only main point of contact anymore. And the other thing that it did, which is a huge result of skill building and spiritual intelligence in the workplace, is it decreased the ego induced drama.

Steve Rush: Right.

Amy Lynn Durham: That is pretty time consuming in the workplace. And there were a lot more results. As far as like the ripple effect for humanity. I mean, there were some beautiful moments that I feel were healing that people had where they could really show who they are authentically in the workplace. And I know that team remembers each other forever now.

Steve Rush: Because they've got a deeper, more meaningful connection, right.

Amy Lynn Durham: A hundred percent.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, you pivoted then into the world of helping others on this journey that you'd experienced yourself by really diving into that, what you call spiritual intelligence. Now for focus, listen into this. They may be more familiar with the language of emotion intelligence, but perhaps less so for spiritual intelligence. So maybe you can just give us a little bit of an overview if you like, as to what spiritual intelligence is and how that differs or not as a case maybe from EQ?

Amy Lynn Durham: Right? Right. Yeah. So, this is an arguable data point, but I'm going to share it because it's a great way to frame it. You get to SQ by way of EQ. So, if you have been working on self-awareness of your emotions and working on building connections in the workplace, that's sort of skill building in EQ. SQ you is when you start pondering, you know, why am I here? What is my life purpose? What are my values? And am I living in alignment with those values? And it's that point in your life where you start thinking of those different questions for yourself. The adult development theory says it typically happens around your early to mid-thirties, but obviously we're all human and there's exceptions, right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Amy Lynn Durham: The definition of spiritual intelligence is the ability. And this is from Cindy Wigglesworth who developed the 21 skills of SQ. And her definition is the ability to maintain inner and outer peace, make decisions with wisdom and compassion, regardless of the situation, even under great stress. So, if you take that definition and think, wow, what if all of our leaders were able to do that in the workplace? How amazing would that be?

Steve Rush: Be an amazing place. Yeah, definitely.

Amy Lynn Durham: Right, yeah.

Steve Rush: It's an interesting notion that in order to get to SQ, you've got to go through this emotional intelligence journey, but actually it starts with self, doesn't it? In that kind of foundation block.

Amy Lynn Durham: It does. I mean, you don't even have to know what emotional intelligence is. Again, the adult development theory says that that's around your early to mid-twenties where your brain is developed enough to really start experiencing compassion for others. But if you're in that space and you're working on self-awareness of your emotions, building connections, having emotional management strategies, all of those things.

Steve Rush: Right.

Amy Lynn Durham: The next steppingstone would SQ.

Steve Rush: If I was a leader, listening to this thinking around. Okay. So, I thought relatively grounded in my emotion intelligence. What's my next step to start exploring spiritual intelligence?

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah. Okay. I offer an SQ experience that I take you through all of it. I issue an SQ assessment on the 21 skills, and you can see what level you're operating at, at this current timeframe of the 21 skills of SQ. And then you can go from there, you can deep dive into whatever skill resonates with you. You don't have to work on all 21 skills if there's a few that you're like, I don't even care about this. Great. we can work on the ones that resonate with you. And for me, it's a life lifelong journey. So, I have a client just to give you a client story that knew their life purpose for the majority of their adult life. And they really did a great job with their career, and you know, working in that life purpose space. Well, now they're in a different phase of their life. Their life has changed as our lives do, and they're trying to rediscover a new life purpose. And so, this stuff can be cyclical too. It's not like a one and done.

Steve Rush: Right.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah.

Steve Rush: Got it. So, what are the core elements of then spiritual intelligence?

Amy Lynn Durham: The first Is creating an awareness of your ego versus your higher self. Once you've created that awareness, this is my opinion. This is what I think is really the core element here is moving on to, okay. I'm aware of when my ego gets in the driver's seat, I'm aware of when I'm operating from my higher self, and now I can practice seeking guidance from my higher self. I can practice operating from the space of my higher self-more. And that to me is the core of all of this. How can we become aware of our ego and when it's operating? How can we work to have our ego in service to our higher self? And how can we practice seeking guidance from our higher self? So spiritual intelligence is faith neutral. You can be agnostic, you can be atheist, doesn't matter. As long as you believe there's a place within you that comes from wisdom, compassion, love, that you can access. You can work on the 21 skills SQ.

Steve Rush: I guess you have to have gone through that realizing first in order to be open to this, right?

Amy Lynn Durham: The realization of separating your ego?

Steve Rush: Yeah, and also realizing that there is something else to explore that you haven't yet gone through to find new ways of thinking and behaving.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yes. You have to definitely have some sort of awareness and some sort of curiosity to want to do the work that's required. Absolutely. It does take looking in the mirror and some inner work.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Amy Lynn Durham: And some leaders don't want to do that. And that's okay. That's the space they're in right now, but I really truly feel, this is what will make you and your company a next level organization is operating from these skillsets.

Steve Rush: And from your experiences being a coach using the spiritual intelligence, SQ steps. Maybe just share with us a story or an example of where you've seen somebody really transition and make a significant difference to the way that they lead their business and the team?

Amy Lynn Durham: So, there's a really common skill that a lot of clients want to go to and talk about it. And it's in quadrant four at skill 19, and the skill is making wise and compassionate decisions. And let me tell you where the transformation happens. The transformation happens with the individual most often, lately. And I don't have the scientific data behind it, but I can speak to a correlation with the pandemic. These leaders are great leaders. And what ends up happening is when we dig a little bit deeper, we discover they need to make wise and compassionate decisions for themselves. And they're great leaders, obviously, because they want to dive into that skill, right? Oh, I want to dive into making wise and compassionate decisions. I want to operate at a really high skill level for my team and my people in that area. That is a great intention, beautiful, creating that ripple effect as a leader, but oh, by the way, are you making wise and compassionate decisions for yourself?

Steve Rush: Right.

Amy Lynn Durham: Are you burning yourself out? Are you overworking yourself for your team? Then we get into boundary setting and a little bit of self-care with that. So interestingly enough, the transformation happens with the individual taking care of themselves so they can take care of their people in a better clearer way.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Amy Lynn Durham: That's one example.

Steve Rush: It's a great example. And I remember when you and I first met. You shared this story with me around how you go about helping people on this journey. And I remember you sharing the approach that you take because you genuinely take coaching to another level when it comes to SQ, where you not only do you get the report to make that spiritual connection yourself. I remember you sharing that, you know, you meditate over the report and the words you actually use, which I was quite inspired by was you actually almost ingest the energy that you get from their reports. And if you remember you and I had this conversation, is that the right word? And I think that felt really quite powerful for me. And I just wondered if you could share how that experience evolves?

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah. So once we start the SQ experience. They start the journey with taking the SQ assessment, and then once the results come through, I spend a lot of time reading those results, meditating on the results. And really, like you said, and I ingest the energy of the results. So, I can really show up for my client and be there for them. And then I create custom coaching questions for them in order to help move them forward on their leadership journey with this. It's a really cool experience. I had one particular client. This is just coming to mind. I just love this story. I love to share it. He scored so high on being able to operate from his higher self. And I was like, oh my gosh, did you know that you have this magic gift already innately that you just operate from your higher self?

And when a leader can do that, you know, like I said, before ego induced drama just kind of falls away, or you don't attract drama or people that are angry in your presence, the anger sort of dissipates. And I pointed that out to him because it's nice to name that and to know like, yeah, when I'm in a space with other people, my energy as leader, or as someone in a position of power actually ripples out 10 times over. So how amazing is it that this type of energy, this coming from a place of common healing presence, inner wisdom, compassion, love, is rippling out to the people that I'm interacting with. And he said, oh my gosh, when I was a little boy in school, the teacher would always sit the bad kid next to me. And she always said she did that because he seemed to behave better when he sat next to me.

Steve Rush: That's really fascinating, isn't it?

Amy Lynn Durham: And I said, yeah. The things that come about with these interactions are really cool and people discover hidden strengths that they know we're there, but they just need a light shined on them.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So that's tapping into spirituality the much deeper level, isn't? Than perhaps most people would consciously be aware of.

Amy Lynn Durham: It is.

Steve Rush: And I wonder as a coach, how do you get people tuned into that depth of understanding?

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah. So, I have two parts to the way that I operate. I have that deep stuff that I was just talking about with you. And then I have the super fun, playful tools that I offer. So that's why I designed Create Magic At Work. I put all the fun leadership activities in my book that leaders can grab. My book is like 64 pages, it's tiny. And I did that on purpose, and I designed it for the leader that can just grab it and go to an activity and do the activity with their team. The activity elevates their EQ and SQ, but it's super fun.

Steve Rush: Right

Amy Lynn Durham: So, yeah, we do the deep inner work with the one-on-one SQ experience or the workshops or the speaking engagements. But at the same time, you can just do something fun with your team and it can start simple. It doesn't have to be this huge, deep dive into SQL. I have a journaling exercise in my book. It's called journaling with a twist. I designed a journal prompt card deck for the workplace and for your career. So, you can pull a journal card for your team to journal on a theme. Time them for 10 minutes. They rapid write answers to the questions. And then if they're comfortable, they can share it with everyone. That was a huge connecting activity that I did with my team that brought everyone together. Because once everyone hears each other's answers, you start seeing the humanity in each other. And it's simple.

Steve Rush: Yeah. And fundamentally, this is about that human connection. About how we become more connected so that we become more empathetic, more productive, more, right?

Amy Lynn Durham: Absolutely, yeah.

Steve Rush: What would be your experience that generally in corporate life? We don't have as much human connectivity as we both perhaps could have or should have.

Amy Lynn Durham: Okay. I'm really glad you asked me this. I saw an article the other day on some neuroscience data and I know that there's all kinds of intelligences coming out right now, but it narrowed it down to the three to IQ, EQ and SQ. And to answer your question in the short form, it's because the workplaces that we're working in are mainly designed to only operate under IQ, that part of your brain that works under the IQ space.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Amy Lynn Durham: And then, I'm going to answer your question longer now. I'm just going to give a simple example. Let's say you're working for a company that's like super IQ only, you know, P&L statements, Excel spreadsheets, no team connecting. They don't care about EQ. We're not going to do that woo, woo stuff. We're not going to kumbaya by the fire. Whatever, right? Like boiler rooms. And then you finally get to go home, and you get to kick up your feet and relax a little bit. And then that EQ part of your brain starts being able to kick in. And this neuroscience data was showing that it's actually different parts of your brain that you're accessing when you're utilizing these skills. And so, yeah, you get to use some emotion at home. You get to relax; you get to be who you are. And then finally, what they were saying is the spiritual intelligence part of your brain is another place you can access that takes you into that beautiful feeling where you're aligned with the ebb and flow of life, where you're in that creative, innovative, playful zone. As a couple of examples.

And as I read that article, because I know Steve, you and I are on LinkedIn, and we see all of the latest and greatest for workplace topics. And lately, even on my podcast, we talk a lot about how to be your authentic self at work. Can you be your authentic self at work? Why can't you be your authentic at work? All of those things. And I thought, no wonder, no wonder why some people feel like they can't be their full, authentic selves at work. Well, it's because a lot of these systems and these places that we work in. Their environments that allowing for accessing one third to maybe two thirds of our total potential.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Amy Lynn Durham: Of our brain.

Steve Rush: And typically, and I could be really candid here, right. We just don't teach spiritual intelligence in the same vein as we do with emotion intelligence as we look at leaders, right?

Amy Lynn Durham: No. And I think that some leaders might get caught up with the word spiritual and think that it's religion. And then, oh, we don't want to talk religion in the workplace. We don't want to touch that. And for lack of a better word, I think it's just a little bit of un education or ignorance on what exactly it is and the benefits of it. So that's why I'm happy you have me on The Leadership Hacker to talk about it because it's so deep and it's so much more than that, yeah.

Steve Rush: It's really more about higher self, right?

Amy Lynn Durham: Totally. And when I talk about accessing your inner wisdom and your higher self, if you have a specific religion that you follow, that's beautiful. And if you want to utilize seeking guidance from your higher power, same thing, right. and so whatever works for you in your life.

Steve Rush: we're going to ask you at the end of the show, how folk can get a copy of what you're doing around, Create Magic At Work and so and so forth. So, hang fire to the end of the show and you can find out how to access Amy great stuff. Before that, though, we're going to just flip the lens a little bit Amy. We're going to hack into your broad and deep and wide leadership experiences. I'm going to try and get you to get them down to your top three leadership hacks. What would they be?

Amy Lynn Durham: Top three leadership hack. Okay. So, if you want to asked corporate Amy, like 10 years ago, they would've been like super corporately answers, like on time management and on productivity. But now that I am the spiritual executive coach, I am going to share my top three leadership hacks that are going to be so different for you. The first one is when mistakes and chaos occur in the workplace, take a moment to look for the innovation and inspiration hiding underneath. That will put you in a quantum leadership space and move you into the space of being a true wise and effective change agent. So that's the first one. The second one is, remember, it's never too late to start and there are never perfect circumstances. And the third is, I'm tying it into our whole theme today, Steve. Take time when making decisions to practice accessing your higher self and your inner wisdom or that higher power if you believe in that. We seek advice from a lot of experts. That's okay, as long as you're not just literally doing what they're saying, and you're taking a moment to sit with advice, you seek from an expert and see if it's actually right for you and practice seeking that guidance from your higher self and putting that ego aside in the process. I

Steve Rush: Love that last one. I can honestly say I act on advice that intrinsically feels right and seems right. And off I go into a direction of activity yet had I maybe just spent more time trying to tap into that thinking it might have changed the activity instead, right?

Amy Lynn Durham: When we feel unsafe or scared, sometimes we run to experts to tell us what to do. And I just say, take a pause and see if that really sits right with you before you make a decision, whatever it is. You know, I'm just, real broad here. But think about that because giving away responsibility to someone else to make decisions for your life is not where you want to be. I was going to say it's an SQ failure.

Steve Rush: I know you mean.

Amy Lynn Durham: I don't want to say that. Because it sounds so harsh, but the only reason why I'm sharing that is because I personally went through that journey during 2021.

Steve Rush: Right.

Amy Lynn Durham: And it was a beautiful learning experience for me and yeah.

Steve Rush: And often we will behave differently at work than we would do in our non-work life. We will ask people for advice and decisions and help me make these decisions at work. Whereas at home we probably make them ourselves because we have less people and noise around us.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, or, I mean, sometimes people really have their EQ and SQ like really locked in the workplace and then personal relationships forget about it.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Amy Lynn Durham: And so, that's our practice. Thank you for the lesson. Sometimes it's our personal relationships. That's really our practice that makes us better at work.

Steve Rush: Definitely. Yeah, I can resonate with that one for sure. So, the next part of the show we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where an event, an occurrence, a thing, has happened in your life or your work that hasn't worked out well, but as a result of the experience, you know, use it as a positive force in your life, in your work. And you've clearly articulated a direction, travel using some of those techniques, but was perhaps one event which created that Hack to Attack for you?

Amy Lynn Durham: I'm going to be super vulnerable and share something I did with my business that I don't like. At one point I decided that generating a bunch of leads for my SQ experience was a good idea. And I got talked into using the LinkedIn automated thing, you know, I should have sat with it like we talked about and felt whether it was a right fit for me or not. And I utilized it for a couple of months, and it just was not authentic. And it was not for me. I really learned from that because, it's my whole, you know, transforming workplace culture, human connection. How did I miss that within myself? And I had to shut it down. And what I learned from it is the power of, again, as we know, a reminder, the power of just connecting with people.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Amy Lynn Durham: And having a real conversation. And I knew that, and I gave up my responsibility to some expert, you know, quote unquote experts and I had to take it back.

Steve Rush: That's great. And then trustingly, you know, even when you look at some of the advances in machine learning and data science, there still needs people that are humans that are connected to each other and to the work that they do in order for making the data science advancements in the last 10, 20 years as well. So, without human connection, we still can't even advance through our automated life.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Last part of the show, we get to give you a chance to do some time travel. So, you get to bump into Amy at 21 and give her some words of wisdom. I'm fairly sure I know we is going, right? But I want to sense check and get a sense from you as to what would your advice to Amy 21 be?

Amy Lynn Durham: Oh my gosh, she was a completely different woman than the woman she is today. And my advice would be to slow down. Everything's going to be okay. Take moments, really, to be with yourself, stop running away from yourself.

Steve Rush: Like it. Really wise words. Great stuff.

Amy Lynn Durham: Yeah.

Steve Rush: So, I'm conscious that in the world of human connection, what we do through our medium of podcasting and writing is about that connection and therefore want to make sure we help you connect with our global audience. So, where's the best place for us to send them now we're done.

Amy Lynn Durham: Well, I already mentioned LinkedIn. so, I'm Amy Lyn Durham on LinkedIn. And then also my website createmagicatwork.net has all those fun tools I talked about for the workplace and also the SQ experience that I offer. And you can message me on LinkedIn. You will get me responding now, the full human Amy.

Steve Rush: The real you.

Amy Lynn Durham: Exactly. And I love to connect and chat and discuss the topics like we discuss today.

Steve Rush: So super.

Amy Lynn Durham: yeah.

Steve Rush: We'll make sure we put those in the show notes, along with your other social media links as well. So, folk can head straight over and connect with you from here.

Amy Lynn Durham: Perfect. Awesome. Thanks Steve.

Steve Rush: Amy. Thanks for coming on our show. I love chatting with you. I think the whole notion of SQ is going to explode in the future. I'm a big fan and would love to explore personally some more. So that's call to action for me. And thank you ever so much for being vulnerable, being part of our community on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Amy Lynn Durham: Thank you. Thank you for having me. And I hope we sent some magic to everyone today.

Steve Rush: We certainly have. Thanks Amy.

Amy Lynn Durham: 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 there: @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.

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Music: " Upbeat Party " by Scott Holmes courtesy of the Free Music Archive FMA

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Start of the show

Well, hello and welcome! I'm incredibly excited; this is our 100th show. If you haven't had your opportunity to join us until of late, we started out in March 2020, right at the beginning of the first ever lockdown in the United Kingdom. While all our guests are as global as our audience comes from all corners of the world, we have been a lockdown podcast. And I want to reach out to you personally, while you're listening to this to say, thank you. I really mean that from the bottom of my heart, without you showing up every week, tuning in, downloading, and listening to our podcast, there is no show. There would be no Leadership Hacker Podcast - period. And I think that's an amazing sentiment to everybody that is contributed to the show, both as listeners and more importantly as our wonderful guests. So, to our guests who are listening to this, we have had the most amazing diverse group of CEOs, C-Suite executives, leadership coaches, and experts, and have shared over 300 hacks with us and with our audience. And we're now connected through algorithms, through the internet, through our websites. And I'm incredibly proud and privileged to have been on this journey with you. So, to celebrate our 100th show, we are going to dive into our top five downloaded shows. We're going to revisit some of the stories and we're going to revisit some of their learning that we had from our great guests.

Dr. Oleg Konovalov

Steve Rush: The first of our five top downloads is Dr. Oleg Konovalov. He's global thought leader, author, business educator, consultant, and C-Suite coach. Oleg is named amongst the top global thought leaders and shortlisted the distinguish award in leadership by Thinkers50. He is a Global Gurus top 30 in leadership and has been recognized as the number one thought leader on culture by Thinkers360. Having been named as da Vinci of visionary leadership by many leading authorities of our time, Oleg is helping companies to create and execute their vision and strong purpose and corporate culture. And in our show, we got into talking about visionary leadership and vision is not gift, but a well-structured algorithm can be taught. We talked about how to create and execute a strong, compelling vision and leadership being a system of growing. And you join the conversation. As we talk about why knowledge is the most important part of every leader's kit-bag.

Dr. Oleg Konovalov: Knowledge is the sexiest thing in the world. 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. The 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 best-selling book was The Corporate Superpower. And that was around, you know, taking some theory if you like, but giving it some structure and having read it myself, it's 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 Superpower 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? What’s 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 instructions, simple, because we don't have much time for philosophical conversations about something being good or not.

Steve Rush: You've 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: I always enjoyed talking to Oleg. And what we learned from this episode was knowledge impacts on everything and everyone, it informs our next generation. It isn't the digital world that is changing, it's the people's knowledge that is changing the digital world. And I particularly like the way he reframed the whole notion of being taught and people who teach us doesn't have to be in academia it doesn't have to be a college professor, but anybody who teaches us should be teaching us to be the whole person ourselves. Thanks Oleg.

Michelle Boxx – The Blonde Fixer

Steve Rush: Next up, we're going to introduce you to Michelle Boxx. Michelle is a CEO of Boxx Marketing and started out on her entrepreneurial career when she was just 15 years old, starting out in politics, helping folks fix campaigns and was a real campaign manager for many years. She then had a stint as a successful real estate agent. And after achieving great successes realized that using her public relations knowledge and campaigning, she could turn her hand to marketing. And she's now a small business advocate helping teach small businesses and owners to really thrive. You join us at the part of the show, where I ask Michelle to just describe how her early life in politics and real estate sales has helped her grow her business today and some of the core capabilities.

Michelle Boxx: You know, I learned a lot through policy and politics. I learned a lot about communications, of course, but I also learned a lot about leadership. You know, speaking at that one, the video you found. It’s so funny that you found it. I have tried to take it down so many times, but I have lost access to the account. Through that, I ended up launching a website a few months later that was really a policy website geared at covering legislation here in the States and I recruited a whole bunch of my fellow high school friends to help me with it, and so we would literally read legislation, we would post content every day. And so, the website got 10000 page views monthly just organically from us posting this information, and so that was really my introduction into marketing, into leading the team and everything that I do now as a CEO.

Steve Rush: And it is a super experience because people get often confused with leadership, has something to do with the job title or a career or a salary, but actually what you have demonstrated is leadership is about just behaviors and we can have leadership skills and behaviors at any age, right?

Michelle Boxx: It is so true. A lot of it is really just jumping in and saying, okay, you know what? I am going to do my best here and I am going to figure it out. So many of us in life do figure things out as we go along. And so, it's better to not wait for that moment of coronation, if you will, and instead just jump in and say, okay, I'm going to do my best here. This is the result we are looking to achieve and nurture these people in the process.

Steve Rush: So here we were talking about leading ship as a behavior, not as a thing, not as a job title. And as often we find ourselves just jumping in, gives us the experience to find ways of working and nurturing people on the way. We've rejoined the conversation when I ask Michelle from her experience of being a young entrepreneur through politics and real estate, what her biggest learning in leadership was?

Michelle Boxx: I think the realization that you can't do everything alone, that you really do need support, so you need your mentors, you need your team, you need. If you have a lot of internal drive, it is very natural to think, you know what, I can figure this out on my own. I can do all of this on my own. I am independent. And then just really putting your ego to the side and saying, you know what? I don't have all the answers. Like you said, you know, copy, and paste and really having the network around you to support you along your way up.

Steve Rush: Super wise words for Michelle there. No leader can be successful on their own. They need a team who can support them and help them on their way. And many of our guests have echoed that sentiment throughout the series. We thank the blonde fixer Michelle box for being part of our show.

David Marquet

Steve Rush: Number three, highest downloads of all time was for David Marquet. David's a real superstar. I met David on location in London. We talked about his humble background being pretty much down to earth in math club when he was in Pittsburgh. Then joining the U.S. Naval Academy in 1981, where he ultimately took control of the USS Olympia. A Nuclear-powered submarine as a Captain in the U.S. Navy, it was there that he started evolve his leadership career when he was appointed to lead the US submarine, Santa Fe, which was the worst performing submarine in the fleet.

It was these foundations that gave him the story that now forms Turning the Ship Around his global best-selling book, where Stephen R Covey, the infamous author and guru, spent time on the Santa Fe and ended up creating The Eight Habit. In recognition to his global successful leadership, based on David work. Since retiring from the U.S. Navy, he has shared those lessons and is helping Leaders to think about creating more leaders, and giving control to only those who need it the most. You join us in this show where we were talking around how the language of leaders has changed over time and how the labels, we give people have been unhelpful. How by reframing some of that language and changing our perspectives, we can get a greater outcomes from our leadership behaviors ourselves.

David Marquet: So, we have work. The industrial age organization design was this. One group of people will make decisions and one group of people will execute the decisions made by the first group of people. And we have labels because they all look like humans, but we need to know which tribe you're in and we call them leaders and followers or thinkers and doers or management and workers, and we pay people by salary or by hourly. White collar, blue collar. We wear different uniforms but there is this whole cultural industry with artefacts and rituals to put us in one of these, two groups, and this is one of the things that is suddenly embedded in our language and in minor organization design, which is totally unhelpful.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and you talk about this in your new book. Leadership is Language.

David Marquet: Yeah.

Steve Rush: And you give the type to behave as color, don’t you? Just tell us a little bit more about that.

David Marquet: Yeah. As an author, you have to create a new term. No one gets credit, here is a bunch of great ideas. Aristotle said everything let me reiterate them. I call them red work and blue work. So, the doing work is what we call red work. Red being typically the color of focus and action and blue work the color of creativity, and the difference is when red work. I want to narrow my perspective, but in blue work, I want to broaden my perspective, so I am using my brain in two fundamentally different ways and industrial organizations solve the problem by not asking people to change. The thinkers were just do thinking and the doers just did doing. And we didn't need the thinkers to do doing and the doers to do thinking. Now we say let the doers be the deciders. So, what we're going to do is say this group to the organization at the bottom who used to just do what they're told. We are now going to pause and give them the chance to think and actually make decisions, but that requires them to use their brain in different way. That requires us if we are in the leading group, to talk in a different way.

Steve Rush: And as leaders, it is our responsibility, isn't it? I guess through our language will influence and either help new ideas and creativity or we will stifle them.

David Marquet: You can only control yourself. So, when you say, oh, well, this person does not speak up, it the really frustrating working with them. The unhelpful behaviors is to go give them a lecture. I give you some feedback? i.e., can I permission to be a jerk? You really need to speak up more. Well, how about this? How you look inside yourself and you figure out. You know what, the way we are running the meeting, the way I am asking the questions, if someone comes to me and says, well, I am not sure about this decision, and I said, why would you say that? Again. Subtle, but it sends a signal, you are wrong. Justify yourself, not, oh, tell me about that. I am really interested in that. We really need to know before we go ahead, launch this product. If you think, we are off track.

Steve Rush: So, what David's describing here is the outdated leadership model that we've all perhaps learned about at some point in our leadership careers, however old or young you may be, it doesn't seem to work anymore. It's time to shift perspectives, fall out of love with our own voice and to listen to our teams, let the doers be the deciders is how David described this. In order to harness the eyes, the ears, the minds of our people, our teams, the people we lead and work with. We need to foster a climate of collaboration and experimentation that encourages people to speak up. And when they notice problems that are not working well, to identify them and to get on with testing solutions, we salute you David, and thank you for being part of our community on the podcast.

Andrea Sampson

Steve Rush: Once upon a time in a land not too far away, there is somebody reading a story to somebody else. Wow. The power of story continues to be the most important way of communicating. Well, why is that? Well, it's been the way we've been key communicating for millennia. People have been writing on walls and drawing pictures, around campfires, around dining room tables, as we've evolved, because stories make the emotional connection. I'm going to introduce you to Andrea Sampson. Andrea not only tells great stories but is teaching the world how to tell better stories through her TED Talks, coaching business, Talk Boutique.

Andrea was a former strategist and consultant spending over 25 years in a marketing, in advertising space and with a natural flare for compelling stories and persuasive content. It wasn't long before Andrea sort after, assisting teams and executives in developing their presentations and pictures. Having worked on a side hustle with TEDx Toronto, where she volunteered initially as a speaker coach. Worked out that her technique for teaching storytelling could be really powerful. That led her to create Talk Boutique and is now the founder and CEO.

Not only is this a second downloaded episode of all time in our series is actually the number one for 2021. So, if you've not yet unlocked, the power of storytelling with Andrea now is the time to download that episode. You join us at that part of the show where Andrea was telling us about what she'd learned from her time, coaching TED Talks and how she developed story by helping unlock great emotional connections with audiences.

Andrea Sampson: What I've learned in doing TED Talks and now working with very seasoned professional presenters is that it's really about building a story in five steps. And we developed, so my company Talk Boutique has developed a process that we call the story-spine, which really allows for a speaker to take about, you know, anywhere from 30 seconds to three to four minutes at the beginning of their talk and set up the premise of a story that will hold the idea.

Steve Rush: Really interesting.

Andrea Sampson: The spine is so important because what it does is it forces us as humans first of all, to think about the things that create good storytelling, because it starts off with what we call the environment. So, if you think of an environment, the environment is your sense of place. Now, most of us, when we're at a cocktail party or meeting up with a friend and we started telling a story, what do we do?

We rushed through the environment, first of all, and we rush right into the purpose of the story. But if you take a moment and you step back and you say, okay, let me just set this up for you. So, I was walking in the woods the other day. Now it was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, you know, it was warm, but not hot. You could feel that the day was going to get really hot. But we weren't there yet. And the moisture in the air was activating the pine needles. So, I could smell as I was walking, that musky scent of pine, and it was just a beautiful morning, and it was peaceful. Now you're all on that walk with me, aren’t you?

 Steve Rush: Totally, I’m right there.

Andrea Sampson: Right, now when you do that, what's happening is everybody is leaning in, but what's really happening is their brain has just gone to the place when they were last in the woods or a meaningful moment when they were in the words. That smell, the sounds of the birds, the feeling of this sun dappled through the trees, everybody. Now, if I were to stop the story right there and ask a question around how everybody felt, the likelihood is, I've got everybody at the same place in that moment, which is, in a peaceful place, in a memory that is enjoyable. And from there, it's almost like I'm a mind reader now, because now I'm controlling how they are feeling and what they're thinking.

Steve Rush: Its very powerful, isn’t it?

Andrea Sampson: It’s incredibly powerful. That's the power of environment. So, once we have the environment, the next thing that we want to do is say, who's there with you? Who are the characters? Now, you know, characters, aren't just me and my friend. You can do that, but the thing is, you've robbed the audience of getting to know who you are and who your friend is. So, what you want is just a little bit of a backstory. So, there's me, you know, this was about five years ago. So, I was in, you know, maybe an emotional place. This was just at the breakup of my marriage; I'm making this up. And my friend, who was a dear friend, who was supporting me through this very emotional time, her name was Shawna and Shawna was a lovely human. She's still a dear friend of mine, but she's one of those people whose incredibly compassionate and helps people through really difficult times. So here we were on this early morning walk, going through the woods and, you know, we can hear the birds chirping, and I'm at that point in the separation where we are, you know, separating stuff. And so, it's a difficult moment, and Shawna is helping me to see, you know, that I can let go of things that I thought were really important, but the reality is, they weren't. Now, again, I just want to stress here. I'm fully making this up.

Steve Rush: Hey, listen, you may be making this up, but I'm still ironically with you because of the compelling use of language.

Andrea Sampson: Right, the language I'm using. Every piece of language is using rhetoric, really, right. I'm using a combination of metaphor. I'm using emotional words, words that have meanings that go deeper than just the core idea of that word. I'm also using in some cases repetition. So, I'm using metaphor all the way through it. So, what we've gotten through now is the environment, the characters, and we've gotten to the issue or opportunity. That's the third part of the story spine. And this is where most people jump into a story because this is the real reason, I could've just started it off.

Steve Rush: That's true, yeah.

Andrea Sampson: I could have started off going, you know, the other day I was walking in the woods and Shawna was helping me figure out what I was going to give to my ex, right? Because that is really the story, except you can see I've built it out, right? And so, then what you want, the fourth part of the story spine is what we call the raising of the stakes. This is the difference between a good story and a great story because the raising of the stakes is that tension moment. It's the end to them, and so, you know, as Shawna and I were talking about the things that I was going to keep and what I was going to let go of, we came to that blanket. You know the one, the blanket that my family had given us, but it was also the blanket where we had our first date. And it was the blanket that had followed us all the way through our relationship. And there was a part of me that really wanted that blanket, but there was a part of me that actually didn't ever want to see that blanket again. And I was distraught in that moment. How could I let go of the blanket? Now I think if you're following me, what you know is that blanket is really a metaphor for the relationship.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it is. But it's ironic because it is still also a physical thing.

Andrea Sampson: Yeah.

Steve Rush: It's a metaphor, but actually we all kind of have something that we relate to in our day jobs and our lives that are similar metaphors of physical things but carry loads of emotion with them.

Andrea Sampson: Right, and so, as I'm going through this story, you know, anyone who's listening to this, you know, they may or may not have lived a similar story, but they have lived, everybody, because, you know, here's the thing about stories. Stories are all meta stories, as humans, we all live the same stories. And so everybody has walked in the woods or has watched, you know, a movie or seen an image of walking in the woods. So, there's some experience of it. Everybody has a good friend who helps them through things. Now, you know, you may not have as good a friend or maybe your friend is better, but you have the experience of it. The human condition is that we all go through relationships and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't and heartbreak is common. And then the idea of having something that represents that, you can see, it's a meta story. right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Andrea Sampson: As I'm going through this story, everybody is having the same experience because they're living their own experience and my experience at the same time. And that's what makes it so powerful. So, when you take the time to build it, when you take the time to use emotions through it, what you're doing is, you're building a connection with anyone who's listening to that. Now we've gone through the four elements of the stories. By the fifth element is just the OCA. It's the way in which you tie it together. And so, in this case, it could be that in that walk in the woods, you know, Shawna helped me to understand that the blanket was in fact, a metaphor for my relationship. And as much as it was something that I was having a hard time letting go of, it was time for me to let go of it because I was letting go of that whole part of my life. And that blanket was in a part of my life that was no longer going to be in my life. So, it was time for me to let that go. And by the end of that walk, I had not only let go of the blanket, but I had let go of the relationship, I was ready to move on. So, there's the story spine in action.

Steve Rush: It's the most compelling model. And if you are anything to do with telling stories or engaging audiences or helping people understand something that they don't yet understand well enough, let's think about how we could use the story-spine to really bring our stories to life. Andrea, thank you for being part of our show and bringing our stories to life.

Andrew Bryant

Steve Rush: When I look back over the 300 plus hacks we've had on the show, the one thing that keeps presenting itself is, “lead yourself first” - Self-leadership. It sounds so obvious when you say it in such simple terms, but before you can lead others, you must first lead yourself. If you lack self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-learning, you'll fail to really, truly reach your full potential. And our top downloaded show of all times so far, is Self-Leadership with Andrew Bryant. Andrew is a motivational speaker and has become the number one authority on self-leadership. He's featured on TEDx and wrote the book, Self-Leadership, of course. You join our conversation as we explore the notion of, what really is self-leadership and why that can help us or hold us back.

Andrew Bryant: The concept of self-leadership goes back to the Roman Stoics. It goes back to the Greek philosophers. It goes back to louts. Influencing others is strength, but influencing self is true power. The concept itself is not original. It is human reality around that, we have some sense of personal power if we take ownership and so it is very much the ownership of what can you take ownership of?

And you can actually take ownership of your thinking. We all have thoughts, but do the thoughts have our us or do we have the thoughts? We all have emotions. But are we having the emotions or the emotions having us? Now, if you have ever been in a fury about something, you know that the emotions had you. If you have ever been really sad about something, you've been gripped by the emotion, you were not in control, but when we go, I'm angry about this. Why am I angry about this? What is driving that anger? What is that really about? Then, we take that step back into the observer place, and that gives us choice. You know, that is the heart of Stephen Covey work. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was that proactivity between idea and action, that there is a choice point that we have as human beings.

Steve Rush: And in my experience as a coach, Andrew, and I am sure you see this a lot with your clients too. Is most of my work is in a bit in the middle, the gap between the idea and the action and the evaluation of how you get people to move forward. How has that been part of what you do right now?

Andrew Bryant: Just before I came on this, I was talking to a CEO pharmaceutical company who wanted me to coach one of his executives; I have been interviewed by his head of HR. Before, I spoke to him, she was obviously playing Buffa, I didn't waste his time. Then his opening statement was, tell me about yourself, because I haven’t had time to read the briefing material. I kind of wanted to do… groan, because that means I've got to tell my entire life story, which I'm doing again. It is a long-life story and I have to edit it, and I just I want to come across as like, why are you a different coach? How do I go about that? I really took this point that, you know, the classic coach comes from the inner game and the outer game, and you will be familiar with a book called The Inner Game of Tennis.

Steve Rush: Sure am, yeah.

Andrew Bryant: And that is coaching is about inner landscape. Outer coaching is how you hold tennis racket, how you serve the ball. The inner coaching is how you think about yourself as a tennis player and with leadership coaches, is how do I think about myself as leader? I mean, just this week as coaching the CEO of an organization, it is very successful CEO. I have coached him in other organizations. He has been parachuted into this company, Joint Venture Capital Support, and he his stressing himself out because he built this runway, and he has attached his ego. When I say build the runway, build the runway to profitability in a certain amount of time and a curtain number, and he's attached his ego to that. And if it doesn't work, he's feeling like a failure, and so the way he's created a mental schematic of that is, his inner world is driving his outer communication. The coaching was to help him not spread doubt amongst his troops, because he's having these doubts. But as the leader, there his doubts, they're not their doubts and their only doubts because he's made such a big deal out of this. Now, if the company burned to the ground, he would rise from the ashes and he would lead another organization. He is very successful, very competent, very intelligent individual. But the coaching is around that gap between his inner thinking and his execution, in this case, his speaking was not as aligned and motivational inspirational as it could have been.

Steve Rush: So, David's talking here about the inner game, the voice in our head, that inner coach, and we need that coach to serve us well every day. But in order for us to serve us well, we need to be mentally agile and fit. We need to be physically agile and fit, and we need to be focusing on ourselves first. And you listen to the full show. You'll find out why self-leadership is not self-centered or selfish, but essential for us as leaders. We rejoined the conversation as we're talking about ego and why ego can sometimes get the way of us being really successful self-leaders.

Andrew Bryant: Somebody drives outside the restaurant of the hotel in the Maserati or a Lamborghini, the Ferrari, gets out, you know, after having revved the engine so that everybody's paid attention to him, and then throws the keys to the valet. Do they have a big ego or a small ego? Most people listening will say big ego. But actually, from a psychological perspective, there ego is fragile. Because they are engaging in egocentric behaviors, right. Look at me, look at me, right. So egomaniacal egocentric behaviors are based on a need to feed an ego. When somebody has a healthy ego, a healthy sense of self. They don't need the attention. They don't need to throw the keys at the valet. They could turn up on a bicycle and they would be fine because they know who they are, right. So actually, when you do the work on yourself, you are a better human being to be in relationship with others, right.

Steve Rush: Like that.

Andrew Bryant: Carl Jung talked about ego means sense of self. Egocentricity is a fragile ego. Look at me. Look at me. I am not Okay. You know, a relationship should always be a Gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. If two broken people meet each other and trying to make one complete person, they are co-dependent. When two people have got their stuff together, meet. They create a relationship that has things over and above themselves. Self-leadership is not selfish because when we have taken care of ourselves, we have all the energy to focus on other people. We can listen. We can help and the simplest one is a metaphor that precedes me, but I use it as well. And that is, if you are on the airplane and the oxygen mask does fall from the ceiling. You are supposed to put it over your nose and mouth first before assisting others, because if you don't look after yourself, you're useless to anybody else. The biggest compliment you can do for somebody is to turn up and authentically be yourself, right? If you are hiding behind some mask or you're playing some game and then manipulating them into whatever bizarre reality you have, then you're really not doing anybody a favor.

Steve Rush: So, it's interesting, isn't it? Ego has been seen as being quite a bad thing, but it's a healthy sense of self. It's egocentricity that is unhelpful. And recognizing that egocentricity will hold us back from engaging and behaving in the true sense of self is essential part of our leadership behaviors. Andrew was on one of our very early shows in March 2020, as we launched the podcast, but continues to get regular hits through our channels and our media. And therefore, goes to show that the message of self-leadership is always going to be relevant. Andrew, I'm incredibly grateful for you being part of our community and helping us all lead ourselves better. Thank you.

Closing

Steve Rush: So, we're coming to the end of our time together on our 100th show. It's been an incredible journey and thank you to our five guests for reliving some of those moments from our hundred episodes over the last two years.

And please remember we have 95 other guests who bring diversity, stories from across the world, different genres of leading and leadership. So please head over, download the show, and never miss a future episode. And this is a shameless plug. If you like what we're doing, please tell others, please share it with your business communities. Please share it with teams at work and let's help spread the word of leadership and leadership development so that we can all grow. We can all learn, and we can all develop because the irony here is there are no hacks to leadership. There are just great tools, great tips and great ideas. But if we shortcut them through our learning and our lessons with you, the quicker we learn, the better our teams perform and the better our teams grow.

And before I sign out, I want to make a special mention to Jermaine Pinto. He's my trusted, side-kick and partner in the show. He's been a great support and a great aid as we've developed a hundred episodes together. Thank you, Jermaine. I appreciate you, man.

And I'll be super grateful for you to leave us a five-star review and let us know how you think we can continually grow our Leadership Hacker Community. It's the way that we grow, and it's the way that our audiences get to meet our great guests. Thank you for being part of the community. Thank you for being on our journey. That's me signing out, on our 100th show. I'm Steve Rush. And today I have The Leadership Hacker.

Jeff Chastain is a business transformation coach, he’s the founder and CEO of Admentus Inc and the podcast host of Building to Scale. In this show you can learn about:

• The differences between leadership in a Start-up vs. a growth-oriented business.
• Leading with a visionary mindset, how is that different from the well versed Growth vs. Fixed.
• The key components of an effective business vision and how does the business leader make that vision actionable.
• The reasons some leaders are unable to break through the glass ceiling that could be holding their team or business back.

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

Find out more about Jeff below:

Jeff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omarlharris/

Jeff on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JeffDChastain

Jeff on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/admentusinc/

Admentus Website: https://admentus.com

Full Transcript Below

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The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: Now we're already a hop skip in a jump into 2022, and there are lots of emerging things that leaders need to consider. So, I'm going to give you my top six predictions based on what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing in the world of leadership and people transformation.

Number one, leaders need to give people a reason to stay beyond money and beyond extrinsic motivators. The great resignation is absolute for sure. There are so many people across the globe quitting their jobs because they're focusing on what really means for their life. Therefore, as the problem continues to grow, leaders need to continue to adapt and change and think about their proposition. So, people feel connected to the organization. They have a purpose and most importantly feel that they have something to add value to their lives and their work beyond their compensation. I believe the most productive companies this year will be those that give people a reason to stay beyond money.

Spear no expense when it comes to real time gatherings. Whenever the COVID 19 pandemic moves to an endemic and companies move back to a normality in ways of working, whatever that may be in the future. When the hybrid world has cemented itself in our workplace, we will need as leaders to spear no expense in bringing people together, whether it's once a year, twice a year or infrequently, but leverage the opportunity in bringing people into a real time place together, create experiences for those two, spend time together and experiential team building activities, nice dinners, real quality time together just as if they were long lost family and expect people to be spending more money on hiring the best people.

There'll be a point where organizations wherever they're from in the world facing into this war of talent and therefore we'll need to compensate people better and compensate search firms in helping them find that talent too. I think accountability will come back to the forth. Since remote workers cemented itself in our future and our culture. We're able to see very clearly people's productivity. And it's evident if team members are doing the job that we expect or not even in a hybrid and remote world. And managers have noticed that making people accountable must be a priority in their leadership approach for this year. And I define accountability is the obligation of an individual or organization to be accountable for its activities and accept responsibility for them. And to be transparent, accountable leaders provide a path of person improvement, team performance and life performance.

I can see organizations focusing on their underperforming leaders in a far more rigorous way. In a recent study. Gartner predicted 30% of teams won't have bosses by 2024. And I don't see it this way because leader’s teams don't work. However, collaborative, broad, bigger teams may be part of the case, but poor leadership cannot be tolerated. Organizations will invest more time in assessments and surveys and understanding the human experience. Great leaders will notice this and unlock it in their teams. Poor leaders will fall by the wayside.

And the final one to wrap it up is probably the most controversial of all. Multiple income streams will be accepted by most organizations in the future. In the hybrid will world. There's no reason why we couldn't do two or three roles, two or three jobs. But if this is really about life and human experiences, suppose if we had the opportunity to negotiate with our employer, that I wanted to work three or four days a week for them, and maybe another day a week for some philanthropic activities and giving back to the community, but also maybe a subtle pivot to how I go about earning my total compensation, who knows.

But if we do want to retain our best talent, we might need those leaders to be thoughtful and encourage multiple ways of them making money for their family and their lives, whatever the future holds for us as leaders. It requires flexible thinking, rapid action and elevating others into leadership, thinking and behaviors. The leadership environment we're already in, in 2022 has already changed from 2021 and will continue to rapidly change. And if you don't change with it, you'll be one of those victims too. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. I'm looking forward to more news and more stories that keep coming on a regular basis. So please keep sending them in. Let's get onto the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Our special guest on today's show is Jeff Chastain. He's a business transformation coach and the founder and CEO Admentus Incorporated. He's also the podcast host of Building to Scale. Jeff. Welcome to the show.

Jeff Chastain: Hey, thank you. And thank you for having me.

Steve Rush: It's my pleasure. So, tell us a little bit about Jeff, where did it all begin for you and how did you end up here?

Jeff Chastain: We probably don't want an hour long to show just on that, but I'll give you the quick version. It's been lots of lots of twists and turns over the lifetime, but that's been, I don't know, I've find that's the journey of most entrepreneurs. We jump into the deep end and have it all figured out right off the bat. But now, my background actually started actually in corporate America and in technology so completely different fields there but spent a number of years with corporate America and just honestly was bored as anything. It's like, okay. Just showing up for a job every day just was not my mentality, not my wiring. At that point and couple that together with a reshuffling, reorganization of the company, and one day, all of a sudden it was surprised. Find myself out with the corporate umbrella without the parachute, et cetera there, and trying to figure out, okay, what do we do now?

So, like most people in business getting started, I said, hey, I've got a technology background. Let's go form a CTO, kind of consulting firm. And that's really, where Admentus actually got its start, was in the technology world. But over the years in working with different companies, both large and small, from a technology standpoint, I kept having people coming to me, working with people, et cetera, that were looking to technology basically as business solved. I go back to one case I had where the guy, of course, all great decisions are made on the golf was kind of a thing there. The one CEO was talking to his friend on the golf course and saying, hey, our sales numbers, our sales trajectories down this year. And his buddies said, well, we just got this new CRM. We've really been using this new CRM. It's really helped our team. So that was the point of introduction to me was say, hey, can you help us implement this new CRM system in our business and go going through the process effectively. We figured out, hey, you don't have a sales process. You've technically got a sales team in terms of people, but there's no strategy. There's no vision. There's nothing to your sales team here. They're just kind of fly by the sea of their pants and just putting in a shiny new object, a new CRM system here, not really going to fix things by any means. So just ran into that over and over with business leaders. That for most of us in business, we probably identify pretty well. I know I'm that case of the shiny object syndrome, kind of a thing there, hey, let's go try this. Let's go try that.

And people, these days tend to turn to two technologies quite often for that. To me, technology is just a magnifier of whatever's underneath. If you've got a great system, a great process, yes, technology can make you more efficient, but it's not going to fix the underlying foundation. So, that was really the transition pivot point to me to say, hey, instead of sitting here trying to sell you a new CRM system or something like that, that honestly, I know is not going to really get at the root of your issue. Let's go in and fix the business foundation. Let's fix the underlying systems, the underlying structures, where it's still kind of my systems, my process nature. But that was really my transition to say, okay, let's move from consulting into the coaching realm and say, let's get the foundation fixed. And then we can go put on technology, or then we can go scale the company, whatever we want to do, but we got to get that foundation structured first.

Steve Rush: Yeah. And it's interesting, even if you remove technology period, the behavioral stuff that is still needed to think about strategy, vision, and structure of an organization and a team. That's kind of transferable across every sector, every industry, isn't it?

Jeff Chastain: Oh, it really is. And I'll see it, even talking like marketing or sales, hey, we've been doing Google ads now we're going to try Facebook ads. This salesperson's not performing, so we're going to go hire a new salesperson or we're going do an outsource sales or something like that. It's like, we're always trying new things because what we've got may or may not be living up to expectations. It' the grass is always greener kind of mentality. There's always got to be something over there that might work a little bit better without ever really getting to the root of the issue at that point.

Steve Rush: Right. So, what's the key focus for the work at Admentus right now?

Jeff Chastain: I'm actually narrowed things down recently here within the last year, really focusing on those smaller business, smaller entrepreneurs’ kind of thing. A lot of the times, what I found over the years was the coaching industry, especially out there, when you look at big name systems, like an EOS or like a scaling up or anything, they always focused on more the larger size companies. You got at least 20, 30 kinds of employees. You've got a three- or four-person leadership team. And it's like, wait a minute. We're leaving out the smaller guys, the guys that, hey, I want to go out and I've got a dream, I've got a vision. I want to go build my business, but I don't have $30,000 to go invest in a coach, or I don't have a big team yet that's profitable.

We're still in the early stages. But at the same time, this individual is typically forward thinking enough to say, hey, I want to lay the foundation right in the first place. Let's figure this out in the first place, rather than creating a huge mess and having to come back and pay to clean it up. So, we're really focusing more on that. I don't want to say entry level, but still that early-stage kind of entrepreneur, that early-stage business owner that says, hey, I'm an expert in my field. I know my field, whether that medical, legal, finance, whatever, kind of an area they're in, but saying, hey, I realize there's a lot more to business. And to building a profitable and scalable business than just being a good lawyer, or just being a good accountant or whatever, the case may be there.

Steve Rush: Of course, most big businesses started out with some more businesses and smaller ideas that then just grew, and that's been a force of your work. Isn't it? It's helping businesses scale up.

Jeff Chastain: It really is. And even still, I take a lot of this, even from my personal journey that when I first got into I.T. consulting. The company was me, myself, and I kind of a thing there. While yes, I was having fun with the work I was doing, and I had ideas for what I wanted to become. We actually talked about it just briefly before we got on kind of a thing. It's like all of a sudden, I'm looking at, okay, kids got soccer games or an awards ceremony at school or for that matter, even a vacation with my wife, kind of a thing there. And I started putting that into the mentality or I had what came to mind every time started looking at those as well.

That's two hours at a soccer game and equating that back to a billable, right? Wait a minute. That's a $300,400 soccer game there. Do I really want to do that? Or the vacation, the worst case, actually the vacation turns into three and four times the cost, because not only am I paying to go rent the hotel or do the travel. Now I'm looking at the effectively lost time, lost wages to go do that. And it's like, okay, this is not a good place mentally to be. But at the same time, it's like, okay, what's the solution when it's just you? Because most people jump in and say, well, I'm going to go create a new business. I'm going to start a new business. But effectively what they've created is a job for themselves where, it's they're the CEO, they're the frontline worker and the janitor all in one.

And unless you can figure out how to scale that, how to grow that, then you're effectively locked into that job. And if that's okay with you great. But when it was turning into my direct time was the service to be delivered. It just wasn't scalable at that point. So that's really where it's like, okay, got to figure out a better way to do this. I know other people are doing this, we got to figure this out. So that kind of led journey and now turn around and handing that back to other people that way.

Steve Rush: Yeah, great stuff. So, when it comes to leadership of businesses that you've helped scale up from startups to some of the larger organizations, what do you see as being the differences between leadership and a startup versus leadership in a traditional growth orientated, established business?

Jeff Chastain: I don't think they are necessarily different leaderships. I think what it is, is a case of many times people having to learn how to lead or learning what it means to lead because you take the lawyer that's used to, okay, this is my law practice at best. I've got a virtual assistant or a paralegal, somebody kind of working with me, but it's a different mentality for them to say, okay, now I want to go manage two or three other lawyers in my firm and actually build out a firm model with a support staff, et cetera, kind of a thing there. So, they really have to make that mental shift to say, okay, this is not just me doing whatever it takes today to move the business forward. And now I've actually got to have a plan, have a strategy in place for everybody. Otherwise, we're effectively kind of that rudderless ship of saying, okay, I'm going to walk into the office today and figure out, okay, which way is the boss leaning today? Because that's the direction we're going today. And that's to me is not leadership.

Steve Rush: Right.

Jeff Chastain: That's somebody that's still struggling saying, okay. I don't know how to move out of the solo practitioner into an actual leader in a firm leading a team, driving a business forward.

Steve Rush: And what is it you think when you think about those folk who scale quicker versus those who may be more laggards in that space? Is there a, maybe some secret sauce that goes on there?

Jeff Chastain: There's always a little bit of, I'd say any business, there's always a little bit of luck involved, but to me it's more the planning side. It's the system, it's the strategy because okay. I refer to it kind of as the cornerstone of any significant business or any business there is really what I refer to as a strategic vision and execution plan. Anytime, again, going back to my corporate days, we always talked about strategy planning and stuff like that. And it'd be multiple days of just boring meetings and marketing mumbo jumbo kind of talk. You ended up with all these plans that would go into some drawer or some cabinet that never got seen for another year or two. So, when we look at that from a small business standpoint, we say, I can't do that.

I can't afford to put that together and there's no use for it. Why am I investing in that? And while yes, I completely agree with that. I also say, okay, you can't go the other end of the stream and say no plan at all. We've got to have an entrepreneurial focus middle ground that says, I literally document your entire strategy, your entire execution plan on a single page, caveat, asterisk it's double-sided so you could call it two pages, but still it's that small, that tight that you can sit there and identify who we are as an organization, where we're going, how we're planning on getting there, such that even if you are still the solo premier entrepreneur, you've got that plan to say, okay, I know the direction we're going. I know what we're trying to hit. So that when that shiny object does come in, I've got a measuring stick that I can say, okay, is this a good fit?

Is this something that's still going to further advance my strategy here or do I ignore it? And then once they start growing into multiple employees, bigger team, it gives that visibility to the rest of the team so that, okay, we know as a team. Again, who we are, where we're going, how we're planning on getting there. So, you've got everybody kind of united the boat, everybody's rowing together the same direction, rather than just flailing about trying to thing, wasting resources that honestly most small businesses don't have. So, it's really having that plan. Having that guide, is what's going to jumpstart that the most right there, just to say, hey, we know what we're doing. We're not out there changing direction every month, kind of a thing. And wasting the time, wasting the limited financial resources that we've got.

Steve Rush: A lot of this is also down to mindset, isn’t it? Of those individuals and the way that they approach it. And I know that from most people listening to this, they might be well versed with things like growth mindset, fixed mindset, but you have a different take on this around visionary mindset. And I wondered if you could just give us a bit of a sense of what that would mean?

Jeff Chastain: In a lot of ways, it kind of encompasses both of them really. I really see most people and it's not a across the board people, but most people that go out and start a new business have that kind of visionary mindset. They've got this big idea of, I want to go bring this problem to solve, or I've got a help kind of attitude. I want to go attack this issue I see out in the market or out in the community, kind of a thing there. They've got that bigger picture, visionary attitude to them to say, okay, this is where I want to go. Where they struggle with the most is saying, okay, I'm not necessary the tactician. I'm not necessarily the execution to say, okay, how do I get from where I am right now to that big picture vision that honestly may take 15 or 20 years something out there.

And that's where a lot of times I'll see them struggle because they're still, again, they've got the big idea and great, okay, here's this new other idea. And they end up moving all over the place. It's almost a pairing is what I see the best. Companies in place to say, okay, you've got that visionary person, but you've also got that second in command, that strategist or that technician kind of thing right there to say, okay, feed off of each other. We're work off of each other there, but you've almost got to have both mindsets. And it's rare I find that it's one person has both in place. So, it's either that visionary to say, okay, we need a plan that can kind of reign you in a little bit. Or we work with the technician types to say, okay, it's not just about today. We've got to figure out a bigger plan. We've got to figure out a bigger aim for your business. So, it's almost kind of creating that dual mindset in the case that we don't have a partnership working together to figure out, okay, how do you balance long term, big picture vision with execution today to help you reach that longer term vision?

Steve Rush: Yeah. And I don’t know who it was. It was for almost quote wasn't there? That said, a vision without a strategy and a plan is merely a dream. I think that's what you're inferring at there, right?

Jeff Chastain: It really is.

Steve Rush: And without that kind of core foundations and components, then it's just a hypothetical dream.

Jeff Chastain: You've got to be able to come back in and execute on it. And the same time, the flip side is that, okay. Execution without out a longer-term vision is just busy work at that point. And, yeah, that quote's been rewritten so many times. I always wonder, like, okay, who's the original purpose on this one thing? Because I've seen it rewritten several different ways and it always means the same thing, but yeah, that's exactly what it is.

Steve Rush: It was some guy called “anon”. He's written loads of quotes.

Jeff Chastain: Quite a few, yeah.

Steve Rush: So, talking about then that kind of execution, that business vision, what are the key components that you'd expect to see happen for every team, every business as they kind of grow?

Jeff Chastain: Well, it really starts out with me for that long term picture to say, okay, I put everything in terms of like climbing a mountain or something like that to say, okay, this is our path up the mountain. We're aiming for that peak, that pinnacle on top of the mountain. So, it's clearly identifying what that is in the first place to say, okay, where are we even trying to get to in the next 10 to 15 years? And this is not something that's super detailed. It's kind of the peak, the mountain up there in the clouds. On a given day it may not necessarily be super clear. And the reality in what I like to coach people with is to say, okay, if there's not at least some bit of doubt in your mind that you can even reach that, then it's not big enough kind of a thing.

Steve Rush: Right.

Jeff Chastain: It actually goes back to like Jim Collins, The Big Hair Audacious Goal kind of attitude, right there is, we've got this big thing out there on the horizon, but then it's really working from the execution standpoint to start backing that down to say, okay, great. That thing is out there at 10, 15, 20 years. Something way out there, that's take some time, some significant effort to get there, but okay, great. What do we need to do now as more of a plateau, a resting spot, a milestone on the mountain to say, okay, our first goal is just to get here? Yeah, we've got that in mind. But our first goal is just to get to this first camping spot here. And that's really in the three to five kind of year range to say, okay, this one's a little bit closer, a little bit more defined, but I don't want to go overboard with this. I don't want to get super detailed roadmap because especially after the last year or two with the COVID pandemic, we all realize now for sure. The world changes pretty quick, kind of a thing.

Steve Rush: Doesn't it, yeah.

Jeff Chastain: So, we've got to be able to adapt, but still we've got to have those kind of pictures out there. So, it's a three-to-five-year kind of milestone there. And then bring that back down again to say, okay, with that three-to-five-year milestone, what do we have to accomplish this year? The one-year kind of plan, that's what I'm working with through everybody right now to say, okay, what is our plan for 2022 here? What are our specific goals, objectives, things that we need to go accomplish? And then working with that back down into what I refer to as more the 90-day world to say, okay, we're only carrying specific details from a detailed planning standpoint about this quarter.

We need everybody on the team this quarter to understand, okay, what's our key number. What's our key metric that we're working towards, what specific goals, tasks, projects, et cetera, need to be done this quarter again, in order to reach our one-year goals, in order to reach our three-to-five-year milestones, kind of a thing like that. So, it's bringing that back down step by step. And each step, it gets closer. It gets more detailed, but that way you've got this longer-term picture, this longer-term strategy laid out that everybody understands. Because that was one of my biggest issues in corporate America was just like, I was just going in every day. Yeah, I kind of knew what my responsibilities was. Maybe I knew what a project was at that point, but I didn't have any bigger picture vision to say, okay, what am I doing right here?

How does that really matter? Even in terms of the overall division, much less the company and with a small business, we can't afford to have our limited resources right there effectively kind of get disillusioned. They need to understand and feel part of the overall mission of the organization. Not just be there for a paycheck, because honestly most of the time we're not going to pay them top dollars. So, we need them to really feel like being bought into the organization, bought into the company there for something more than just that paycheck and having this kind of a plan to where they can see, hey, this my role. And this is exactly how I fit into our 90-day numbers or our one-year numbers. And I can see what piece of this I'm carrying is really what gives them that buy-in, that incentive right there to say, hey, I really am a part of this. I'm not just here for a paycheck.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it's one of the big things, you know, I notice when I coach other business leaders and other leaders of teams is they're able to articulate the vision really, really well. And it's well versed amongst a team, but if there's any gaps in context, people don't buy in as well as they could do, right?

Jeff Chastain: Exactly, yeah. And they people throw around the terms all over the place, but it's almost like, okay, treating the business itself as its own entity to say, okay. We talk about, okay, your personal legacy. What do you want people to remember you by? I almost looking at it in terms of the business, what do you want the business to be known by? If your business was to go away in 20 years or something, what would you want people to remember? That, hey, this business accomplishes this, it's like, we look at a lot of the stuff going on today with like an Elon Musk sitting there putting the new space flight missions up kind of a thing there outside of our NASA program here in the states.

And it's like, okay, he's got a bigger picture legacy, a bigger picture vision. And you look at that and say, okay, what's the business legacy? Then bring it down to say, okay, what's our mission? Why are we here beyond just out to make a profit? In my case, out to make entrepreneurs' lives better, give them back the freedom, give them back the enjoyment of their business while still being able to profitably grow and scale. And it's kind of that articulation that you're sitting there. I'm assuming you're referring to, to say, okay, my whole team needs to understand this is really what our end goal is. Yes, we're a for profit business. Most people are kind of a thing there. And even if you're not for profit, you're still got to raise money either way, but got to have a bigger picture mission out there or that people can really understand and buy into. And you've got to be able to articulate that and define that both from an employee attraction standpoint and a hiring perspective from an employee retention standpoint, and even from an outside perspective to say, okay, your customers looking at that, do they identify and believe in that? And most likely that's what attracting them to the company. In addition to the solution that you're solving at that point.

Steve Rush: You talked about getting your plan, your strategy down to kind of a quarter in 90 days, but for you, does it ever get more detailed down into the weeks and the days?

Jeff Chastain: From a company standpoint, I don't ever break it down further than that. From an individual standpoint, we don't typically look at that or our coach kind of a thing into that. There are all kinds of systems out there for managing your week and stuff like that. But to me, the bigger picture issue is to say, okay, you understand from an individual standpoint it's the, who was it? Steven Covey. The rocks, sand, water kind of model, kind of a thing.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jeff Chastain: You understand what your big rocks are for this quarter to know that, hey, I know I've got to get project X done, or I know I've got to get these five steps towards that project done. So having in your mindset and then what we do is, or at least what I coached, I'm losing his name now. Meeting rhythm, meeting, Lencioni’s strategies, kind of a thing there to have an effectively a check in style team meeting on a once-a-week basis, because what they found over time was that this goes back to those that still remember their school days, kind of a thing. Most of us, when you get the paper assigned or the project assigned, we don't start working on it that day. We would effectively wait till the night before and sit there and do the cram kind of style session to get that paper written. And that carried forward into the working environment where you'd see this almost a kind of an exponential curve of effort. Whereas as time got closer, as it got closer and closer to the deadline, all of a sudden, the amount of effort would exponentially increase in order to meet the deadlines. So, by doing more of a weekly style check in, just almost a standup kind of meeting, whatever to say, hey, where are you on your project? What's going on? It starts bringing that back. And you start seeing these little weekly spikes of effort at that point that, hey, I've got a report on this, on Friday's meeting. So therefore, I better get a little bit done this week. So, I can actually have a positive report Friday. Starts getting some of that progress moved in, but in terms of actually doing like a daily planner or anything like that, that's typically smaller scale that we typically work with.

Steve Rush: And let's be honest, I guess you are expecting people to be smart enough to work out the roadmap of what week to week is going to get you to achieve your quarterly objectives anyway, aren't you, right?

Jeff Chastain: You really are. And to me, that's again. Good leadership is, one being able to hire the right people from a mentality standpoint that yes, they can self-manage. They can be their own person. You're hiring the expertise there, but the other side is really getting out their way, because it's interesting with the business leaders I've interviewed on my podcast and say, okay, what's your biggest struggle? What's been the hardest thing in growing and scaling your own business? Almost always come is back to the idea of delegation that, especially when you start small, you're used to having to do everything there yourself and being able to start handing that off and saying, okay, yes. Now I'm going to go trust you to do the marketing, or I'm going to go trust you to handle the finances side without sitting there, reinserting myself back into that role is some of the hardest things that people have to deal with. And to me, that's the sign of a really good leader, is that okay? I can truly hire the right person. I can give you the systems, the tools, et cetera, you need to be successful, but then I'm getting out of the picture. I'm stepping back and letting you run with this, because honestly, hopefully you do a better job at it than I could do, because finance is not my area expertise or marketing for sure. Kind of a thing there.

Steve Rush: So, when you think about the folk that you've interviewed for your podcast, typically, what are the kind of common traits that you see that set those really successful leaders apart? What would they be typically?

Jeff Chastain: It actually goes back to kind of what we were talking about earlier with that visionary mindset, the ones that have the big ideas, the ones that really truly know, hey, we've got a mission here. We're out to go solve this mission here. Honestly, the way I started to say, hey, I know I.T, I'm going to go be an its consultant. Those ones typically struggle more because a lot of times they're more the technical kind of technician type personalities there, the ones that really have that bigger picture vision. And then again, what we've talked about can articulate that vision, can bring that vision, turn that it into a plan and bring a team together to drive that mission forwards. Those are the ones that really seem to have more success from the ones that I've talked to.

Just, again, having that bigger picture, this is more than just ourselves, more than what I can accomplish. And therefore, I need my team to come alongside me to come out and execute on this. Those are the ones that grow. If you're just sitting there looking at it solely as I'm the only one that can do this, I'm the best one at all these tasks. That's just a self-limiter at that point, more than anything. And that's where a lot of the technician types kind of struggle.

Steve Rush: So preneurs versus entrepreneur, right?

Jeff Chastain: It really is, yeah.

Steve Rush: Yeah. So, we're going to turn the tables a bit now, Jeff. This is where we typically hack into your leadership thinking, your leadership brain.

Jeff Chastain: Okay.

Steve Rush: So, I'm going to ask you to think about all of the experiences you've had throughout your career and having coached some fantastic leaders yourself too and distill them down to your top three leadership hacks. What would they be?

Jeff Chastain: To me the first one more than anything is kind of knowing your identity. Either personally or having an identity for the business, because especially when you're the solo entrepreneur or the early-stage entrepreneur, you and the business are both pretty well tied together. So it's like, okay, how do you define out that identity? Your who and your why kind of a thing of your business at that point to build, get other people on board, and then really the second step or of the second hack there as you were calling it kind of a thing for, okay, we know who we are. Building out a roadmap, building out a strategy. Actually, had it written down. Morris Chan is, one of the quotes that was along those lines, saying. Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.

So, it's that same kind of quote that we've talked about. There are so many different versions of it out there. And then the third option, like, or third piece of it is really being intentional about the delegation. Plan to delegate, even if you're still that solo entrepreneur, or you're still the two- or three-person team, right there. Actually, work with those people to say, okay, we're going to draw out effectively the org chart, draw out the functional kind of chart there of all the different functions in your business. Even though it may have your name on 90% of these boxes, we need to help you understand what that bigger picture plan is for your business. So, we can start identifying, hey, this box over here, I'm not being very good at accomplishing the goals here. Maybe this is the first one we need to go work at delegating or find somebody to hire in for. So really developing that kind of plan for delegation, that kind of plan for hiring, even if you can't financially do it right now, but just start thinking in that bigger picture, because the ones that have that bigger picture, vision, that bigger picture strategy to say, okay, next year, I am going to hire these two new people. At that point, you've got a goal. You've got something to work towards rather than just being solely focused in today. So, to me, that's almost really the three things in my mindset is, the identity, the roadmap, and then just planning to delegate, planning to grow.

Steve Rush: I love that last one. And it also relevant for people that work in organizations, where if you theoretically map out an ideal org chart or an ideal team structure, it's how you then go about either recruiting, hiring, or giving away some of that responsibility in hiring in to fill your gaps playing to your strength, right?

Jeff Chastain: Exactly, yeah.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jeff Chastain: As an entrepreneur, we tend to try to take on way too much stuff. And I was like, we were talking about it beforehand, kind of a thing. The ones that can truly sit there and say, okay, yes, I'm not the greatest at everything. And the ones that can delegate are the ones that are going to grow and succeed faster.

Steve Rush: Next part of the show Jeff, we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something screwed up, hasn't worked out well, it's not been a particularly great experience, but as a result of it, we've learned from it. And it's now serving us well in our life or work. So, what would be your Hack to Attack?

Jeff Chastain: Well, I'd say I haven't necessarily completely dealt with this one yet, but to me, it's perfectionism and it's anytime, even previous ventures, everything like that, anytime it was building a product, building a service, anything like it. It had to be completely perfect before it could ever go out the door. And that just leads to paralysis honestly, more than anything.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it does.

Jeff Chastain: It's really this idea of saying, hey, just get started. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's version 1.0, its version 0.1 kind of a thing here. It doesn't have to be perfect. And your team, your customers, whatever will provide the feedback, honestly, probably to build a better system or a better product than you would've dreamed up in the first place. But that's still to this day something I have to keep in mind that, okay, this doesn't have to be perfect. This doesn't have to have every single bell and whistle right out the door. We just need to get started. We just need to get something out there and move forward and iterate on it. So that's been my biggest challenge since day one and still tends to be.

Steve Rush: No thank you for sharing. I think many people listening to this will resonate with that, right. Because we've been taught from an early age that you don't ship a product, you don't buy something, you don't finish your homework, you know, whatever it was at high school, all of those things have to be done completely. And to the end degree. And we have to unlearn that in leading teams and leading businesses, don't we?

Jeff Chastain: We really do. To me that even goes back to the strategy level, that okay, if all you've got in mind is that big 20-year goal out there, you end up paralysis at that point saying, okay, I don't even know how to start reaching that. It's the adage of the little quote about how you eat an elephant is, one bite at a time. You got to figure out how to break that down to individual bites and just say, okay, I'm going to take the first step. Even if it's not perfect, I'm going to take the first step, get it done. And then we can move on and start building that momentum at that point in is really the key to it.

Steve Rush: Yeah. I think it was Steve Jobs that infamously said that you can't connect the dots forward, but you can connect them back, but just make dots.

Jeff Chastain: Yep.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jeff Chastain: Exactly.

Steve Rush: Great. Last part of the show we want to give you some opportunity to bump into Jeff at 21. So, you're going to do some time travel now.

Jeff Chastain: Yeah.

Steve Rush: So, you have an opportunity to now visit yourself in the past and give yourself some words of wisdom. What would your advice to Jeff at 21 be?

Jeff Chastain: Oh, and part of it, I would say is just get out there and try things. Again, not worrying so much about okay, what's it going to look like? Is it going to work? Is it not going to work kind of a thing? Because again, I was always the perfectionist, it goes back to that standpoint of saying, and I would really get stuck on things saying, okay, if I can't do this perfectly, the first time out, then I'm not going to do it all. I think, honestly, I missed a lot of opportunities by that kind of mindset.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Jeff Chastain: To say that, hey, just try something. If it doesn't work out, it's not the end of the world. People are most likely not going to remember it anyways, but just try something and who knows, something will stick. Something will work here.

Steve Rush: That's it, great advice. And I often ask this question every week, as most of our listeners listening to this will know already. And it's interesting, you know, that if we could turn the clock back, how wiser we would've been, you know, a relatively short space of time.

Jeff Chastain: It really is, an actually had somebody ask me a slightly different version to say, hey, what do you regret doing? Or what do you regret having made decisions before? And I kind of got to think about, it's like, you know, I wouldn't call it regrets on most anything, because hopefully we've learned from all of it.

Steve Rush: Right.

Jeff Chastain: So that's kind of the idea of wisdom is that you've got to go through the experience to hopefully learn from it and do it better the second in time. And if you didn't have that experience the first time, then there wouldn't have been any learning at that point. So, to me, that's the story of the journey that, hey, very rarely do you see an overnight success, an overnight business or anything. And if you, do it probably crash just as fast.

Steve Rush: That's right.

Jeff Chastain: So, most of these, you look at the HP or the Microsoft or anything like that. It's like HP came out a garage somewhere. It didn't pop onto the scenes as this massive corporation. You got to start, you got to build. And it's just one step at a time and plan for it. Just not happening overnight. It's going to take some time; it's going to take some effort. And that's why I always look at it as the mountain climbing journey. We're not going to just parachute into the top of the mountain here. We've got to actually make the climb and it's going to take some effort there to get there.

Steve Rush: Yeah, sure. Is. So I've really enjoyed chatting, Jeff, we're coming to the end of the show now, but I want to make sure it's not the end of our listeners connecting with you. Where's place for us to send them?

Jeff Chastain: All of our programs right now are wrapped around the idea of Building to Scale. So, it's buildingtoscale.com is our podcast. It's the coaching programs, everything like that for small business entrepreneurs. So, if it's an entrepreneur just simply saying, hey, I know what my dream is. I want to get there, and I don't have a plan or don't have a system, don't have a strategy. Then always just happen to have a conversation at that point, but it's just buildingtoscale.com.

Steve Rush: Awesome. And of course, we'll make sure all of your social media links are in our show notes. So, folks can listen and connect with you beyond today as well.

Jeff Chastain: I appreciate it.

Steve Rush: Jeff, it's been great having you on the show. Good luck with the future of what you're doing and good luck with your or show too. And I appreciate you being part of our community on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Jeff Chastain: Thank you very much. I've enjoyed the conversation.

Steve Rush: Thanks, Jeff.

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 there: @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.

Dr. Jerry Fu. Jerry is the founder and owner of Adapting Leaders; specializing in helping Asian American professionals. He’s an executive coach with expertise in conflict resolution. This great conversation is full of hacks and learning for everyone including:

• The importance of mindset in Leadership
• What causes conflict in the first place
• The reason people will avoid having a difficult conversation
• The framework for dealing with those hard conversations

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

Find out more about Jerry below:

Jerry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-e-fu-pharmd-acc-53710187/

Adapting Leaders Website: https://www.adaptingleaders.com

Full Transcript Below

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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

Joining me on today's show is Dr. Jerry Fu. Jerry is the founder and owner of Adapting Leaders. Specializing in helping Asian American professionals who want to get better at their leadership. Specifically, with helping them with conflict resolution, Jerry, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Start of Podcast

Dr. Jerry Fu: Hi Steve. Thanks for having me.

Steve Rush: I'm delighted to have you on the show. You bring an enormous amount of experience and an enormous amount of leadership perspective that we are really looking forward to get into. But before we do that, we always like to give our audience an opportunity to get to know you a bit better. Tell us a little bit about Jerry?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah, I love traveling. I remember when I did a school rotation in Dublin, Ireland, and I that's what gave me the travel bug to see more of the world. And I love salsa dancing that has been a hobby. I never would've expected for myself but has become one that has just consumed my life in such a great way. And I love trying new food. And so, Houston is the most affordable multicultural city anyone could ask for. So, it's fun to try any kind of new restaurant you could think about trying.

Steve Rush: Awesome. And tell us a bit about the man behind the business. How did you kick off your professional career and where did it lead you?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah, yeah, so I have this healthcare lineage in my family. My grandpa practiced in Taiwan as a doctor for over 50 years. Several of my uncles are involved as physicians and I even grew up with two cousins. Both of whom went to Harvard and then went to med school. So, the bar was set pretty high.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Right.

Dr. Jerry Fu: I didn't have the bug for myself. It was just more of a cultural default to say, hey, you want to be a doctor too, right, Jerry? And I said, well, yeah, sure, okay. I don't really have any other interest. Nothing had really, you know, struck me early on in life to say, okay, this is definitely one I want to do the rest of my life. In contrast, I have a best friend from high school who wanted to be a pediatrician from a young age. He was great with kids, loved being around them, loved serving them. And, you know, he has a growing clinical practice where he is now. And, you know, that's wonderful to see, but for me, I grew up in a home where my mom protected me from a lot of stress and anxiety because, you know, she's my mom, she loves me. She doesn't want me worrying about things that I have no control over. But the challenge with that is that when I moved away for college, right. I began to face challenges I didn't have the discipline to challenge to face and actually work through. And I say this, because eventually that got me a C in organic chemistry. I had never experienced failure to that level before. In my mind, like my med school dreams were over, right.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: I was just like, nope, don't know how this is going to work. So let me just remove the possibility of the shame that could happen if I were wait listed or rejected from med school. So, while I still want to do healthcare, what else could I consider doing? And so, I said, well, pharmacy seems pretty good. So let me apply to pharmacy school and convince pharmacy school that I would make a good pharmacist. My grades, just decent enough to give him a chance. And so went to pharmacy school, finished pharmacy school, but that was where my life took another challenge in conflict because by now I'm in my mid-twenties and my mom decided that she needed to step in to make sure my life was on track with what she felt was successful.

This involved two main things. Number one, working for the chain pharmacy, she thought would be the safest career choice. And number two, marrying a girl that she had set up for me that she pulled from her network of Asian parents. I had moved back home. let her convince me that moving back home and working for this chain pharmacy, I wasn't excited about working for, was somehow the best option. I realized that was almost like a strategy tactic, because she convinced me to move home, not only could she be a louder voice in my life then she could really push me to marry this girl.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: And even though my mom had never worked a day in her life in pharmacy, you know, moms know best, so here we go, right. And so, I had this very fixed mindset about leader, about conflict and about just life journeys in general, right. Where I felt like, you know, it was key in my twenties to make sure I worked for the best company or marry the best girl or anything else like that, because if I started off poorly, right, somehow that would just kind of lock me into other things. And so, when I felt like I was locked into working for this company and marrying this girl, you know, I was just really not happy with where my life was, you know? And went through just this. You could say self-pity phase. I was living a home; I was making good money. I was using the money. I would've spent on rent to travel and take some fun trips.

And that was a nice side benefit. But I wasn't happy. One stretch, I was happy while I was living at home, working for this chain pharmacy was when I worked for a store that had a really flexible scheduling, all of a sudden, I was able to travel a lot more, do a lot of my own more of my own thing. And I knew how rare that was. So, I was scared to leave it. And so, when it went away anyway, after I had to reshuffle my schedule and do other things, I ended up at another store, which was much busier and I was unhappy again, because I had lost that autonomy over my schedule and it took a really, really ugly customer service incident 11 years ago in January that just said, okay, I can't stay here any longer. I have to find another job.

And so, the problem with that is that, you know, I wasn't working on my career at all. I was just content to work for this chain pharmacy, as long as I was doing better than 70% of my workflow and my staff on other pharmacists, you know, my boss was happy with my effort. And so, I didn't work on my career. So, when I wanted to get into teaching pharmacy students, I didn't have much of a resume to stand on for a conventional university job. But one of my friends who works for a pharmacy consulting company here in Houston told me, hey, I got promoted. My previous teaching position is available. Would you like to apply for it? I said, oh absolutely. So, I get the interviews, I convince them I was worth taking a chance on. All of a sudden, I am taking this part-time teaching job over a full-time job with benefits, which of course my mom did not respond too well. And so, I knew though I wanted to do this and head in this direction. So, I'm moving to Houston from Tennessee where I was living at the time. And you know, I had local friends to help me get settled in Houston fairly quickly. So that was nice. But I realized quickly I was in over my head after the initial honeymoon phase was over. There were some big assignments that my boss had trusted me to handle which is mainly writing new test questions. And for whatever reason, either I got writer's block or mismanaged my time, but ultimately, I didn't want to admit that I was in over my head because I didn't manage my time or anything like that. And so I was still in this mindset that somehow if I told my boss, you know, a good enough reason as to why I didn't get the job done, somehow, she would understand.

And unfortunately, the day before the first exam where I was supposed to have new test questions, she saw the exam and needed to come in early and just rehash everything because she's like, this is well below, you know, the standard that I had expected from you, and I realized quickly, right? Like your boss, isn't paying you to tell you stories as to why I think get the job done. Your boss wants to get the job done, but that was not a lesson I could embrace until much later. But anyway, I say this to say, this set a bad precedent for me. And she struggled to trust me after that. And so eventually after enough rope, 11 months later I got fired and that was just a tough wake up call I couldn't appreciate at the time.

And you know, me still dealing with the failure and the shame and the embarrassment of wasting this opportunity at a company that a lot of my friends covered it, you know, respected. And I just thought, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? And so that's where the rollercoaster for my career took a really bad turn where I ended up at an independent pharmacy job. House of cards, four of my paychecks bounced crooked doctored And after the first check bounce, actually my boss, owned up to him. was like, hey, something happened, sorry about that. We'll we for it. But here's the problem, Steve, is that I didn't have a local bank account.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Jerry Fu: I never bothered setting one up. And so, I was mailing my checks home and when checks two, three and four bounce, right. And my boss eventually I said, hey, we've having some more problems. And I checked with my mom, I said, did I have some mail? Oh yeah, these checks were overturned but I was just too afraid to tell you, and it's just like, no, like this is not how you handle bad news, right.

Steve Rush: Exactly, yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: If a patient has cancer, you don't tell him, well, I can't afford to tell him he has cancer because that would be terrible. It's like, no, he needs to know so he knows how to treat it, right. So anyway, in my own conflict diversion still, right. I felt like was bad at conflict. I was never going to good at it. So anytime someone confronted me or was upset with me, I just needed to take the path of least resistance. And so, what do you do when the boss is clearly ripping you off, right. And so, after nine months of back and forth and trying to chase down as much of the shorted money as I could before finally quitting. My friends got me on with a different, more legitimate company, but money was really tight. And so, they said, hey, we can't pay more than eight hours a week. And I said, uh-oh, so what do you suggest I do? And they said, well, you can cover at our Austin location, which is about two and a half hours away. And you can get more hours that way.

And I said, okay. And so, I'm driving out to Austin with no idea what my life is going to look like. And people would tell me, hey, Jerry, you could end up in worst cities. And I said, yeah, technically, but it just didn't feel like home at this point, right? And so, this summer, this is 2012. Now this was the summer that some friends of mine who run a pharmacy leadership, nonprofit contacted me and said, hey, one of our facilitators had to back out for a national meeting. Would you be interested in stepping in? And these were friends I'd made over a couple years. I said, oh, I love them so much. And so, I said, absolutely, I want to step in and help out. And so, teaching leadership kind of unlock some possibilities in my head because before I said, wow, leadership is hard.

The few times I've tried it. I wasn't really that great at it. I don't know if I'll ever be good at it. And so now I was asking myself, well, what if I could be a good leader? What would that look like? What kind of work would that involve? How I care myself? And so that fall, I had the opportunity to either stay in Austin part-time, which was a great work team, or take on a full-time management position in Houston that had opened up. And I said, okay. I can't be scared. I can't stay safe. I have to take on this challenge. I'm ready to come back to Houston. So yeah, let me take on this challenge.

Steve Rush: It's a great story. And what I'm noticing as you're describing it though, Jerry, right. Is this whole journey of mindset that shifts for you on this exploration, what happened next?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Oh, I got written up again. I had technicians who are not pulling their weight and causing a lot of problems and in my conflict diversion, right. So, leadership I was able to, but then the specific area of conflict resolution I was still struggling with. And so, you know, again, trying to be gracious, but the management said, hey, their behavior is a problem and your unwillingness to discipline them or even fire them is also a problem. So, your kind of in the doghouse again we're going to put you on a performance improvement plan and things. And of course, you know, all my friends around me are saying, you got to own up, if you just want pity, that's not going to help you with the situation.

So, you got to own up to what you got to do and what you have to work on. So, I managed to get out of the doghouse right around the time the company had their funding pulled. Basically, the owners at that point felt like the pharmacy model was no longer viable, so they just decided to pull out. I was still looking to quit and move on, but that didn't change things. It just made a little more urgent. And so, I managed to land on my feet only because I have leadership experience on my resume now. They tell me, hey, we're interviewing you because you have leadership experience on your resumes. So, I tell people, leadership save my career in that I got more job options.

That next job unfortunately didn't last very long. The revenue model was not sustainable for smaller pharmacies that actually offer a higher quality of life. Incidentally, along the way, I had to fire a technician who had gotten pregnant after I'd hired her. And that was tough because when the clinic that I was working with, wasn't happy with her. And then they told my boss and my boss said, hey, look, you got to handle it. And I knew that if I did not fire her, that I would lose my job too. And so that was the main impetus for saying, okay, I got to fall in this grenade, right. So anyway, the next couple of years I managed to land on with another company that I liked a lot, you know, they had good benefits, good hours. And I was hoping that would be the last company I ever had to work for.

And again, you realize, these smaller pharmacies that offer high quality of life don't last long in the pharmacy landscape. And so, when that company went under four years ago, I told myself, well, you know, I'm tired of dealing with insurance companies. I'm tired of trying to chase doctors for scripts, but I love teaching these leadership workshops, which I've done consistently since 2012. What would a career in leadership coaching and facilitating look like, you know, what kind of work would that involve? And so, I proceed to ask some friends who are in this space, and I'm still scared of failing rejection. So, I don't actually start anything, not for real. And I tell people, Steve, that it took a pandemic for me to kind of wake up and say, hey, well, you know, how much longer am I going to wait? Right. You know? And last October file the LLC, got the website up, opened the bank account and you still got to hustle, right?

Steve Rush: Of course, yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: The world doesn't owe you success just because you decide to put some skin in the game.

Steve Rush: You spot on Jerry, but actually there is no substitute for hard work. And what I do know about you is you are incredibly hard working and focused, right?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Exactly.

Steve Rush: The first time we met was like 2:00 AM in Houston.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah.

Steve Rush: That's the kind of guy you are, you're prepared to go above and beyond in order for us to have that conversation because it was important to you.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yes.

Steve Rush: And what I do know about you is that while you still might bump into some of that fixed mindset stuff, the growth mindset is massively dominating your future. And I suspect that's what help you get to where you get to now, right?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Absolutely. It has to, and the fact that you would need to keep growing is really the opportunity there, because I think there some myth that somehow if you have enough of growth mindsets mindset, that somehow you could just stop and say, okay, now I can hit cruise control. And as David Allen says in his book, Getting Things Done with personal development, he says, the better you get the better you'd better get. And so, it's like, wait, it doesn't end. It's like, oh, it doesn't get easier. It's like, well, in a way it does, but only so you can handle bigger challenges, right?

Steve Rush: Right. It's the start of something for you. Having a growth mindset just gives you the permissions to explore, to find things, to learn more. But then you still have to do something with what you learn, what you find, what you've explored, otherwise you bump into that fixed mindset holding you back. So, what was the point that you thought, right. I'm definitely onto something here now. And specifically with the Asian American community that you work with a lot. When was that kind of defining moment that you thought, yeah, I've definitely got something here?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah. Great question. I saw something when I landed my, technically, my first paying client. I met my first client through the church that he used to go too. He's a Chinese guy, similar background, his parents came over from a different country and he was recognizing that, hey, a stable nine to five job only goes so far and maybe I need to take on some leadership challenges. So, he actually left Houston to take on a job in a different city that he felt like that would give him a higher quality of life. And not just give him a boring nine to five or a toxic work culture. And he realized quickly he needed to improve. And so, when I was first trying to test out my coaching, I said, hey, try me out six months for free, just because I need to get better at this.

And this way you have some level of help. And so, after six months I said, okay, I'm ready to start charging, are you on board with this? And he's like, yeah, are you willing to give me a discount if I commit to a year of coaching? And I said, oh absolutely. That's when I knew I was onto something and then same thing with my second client. She was dealing with her own challenges at work. And so, when I helped her navigate a really difficult conversation with her very temperamental, passive, aggressive boss, after he blew a batter, trying to restore things. I knew that this is a problem that a lot of Asians don't want to admit that they struggle, right. I know how private and prideful I was about my own challenges to deal with things and have this image that I have to maintain that, no, no, no. Like I'm tough enough. I should be able to do it on my own, right. And then you realize, how's that working for you? right. Just to be too proud to ask for help when you need help, right.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Still trying to figure out how exactly to help other more Asians realize, hey, it's okay to say you don't have it all together. Like it's okay to say, hey, like you're dealing with some challenges, you're struggling to find your own solution for them. And yeah. Happy to get a solution that's more within your preferred budget if that's what it comes down to. So yeah. I know I'm onto something there because I think a lot of Asians are dealing with that. Whether it's temperamental bosses or parental expectations about how their life should go or even just within themselves to say, hey, what I grew up hearing isn't jiving right now.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: What do I need to do differently? So that I'm actually charting a course for myself in my own life that I know I would be more satisfied with.

Steve Rush: Yeah. And there's no question, of course, that having that experience of being born in a Asian community and living with some of the things that people like, you know, white, Caucasian guys at me just will not get is absolutely going to be a massive strength to those conversations that I just couldn't empathize with the greatest respect as a great coach, I could do my absolute damnest to explore and develop and understand with deep empathy and respect but I still wouldn't be able to get it like you would, right.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Fair enough. I mean, on one hand, I think the joke or not joke, but the interesting thing in coaching is either you want someone with completely fresh eyes that has no frame of reference. I think there's some merit there and at the same time, you know, what better person to help you navigate a path when they have the same skin, right. And they have the same eyes and perspective that you have because they've dealt with the same racial taunt or, you know, familial stress and prideful culture that we've held onto for so long.

Steve Rush: And I definitely think there's something about having a fresh set of eyes in perspective but as part of an intimate coaching relationship, there'll be things that naturally spark off for you that would never even enter my subconscious, right?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah, yeah. I'm just a little further down the path. I skin my knee a couple times and as much as you could learn from skinning your own knee the same, why don't I spare you some of that, right.

Steve Rush: Exactly right. Yeah. And in talking of skinning your own knee, what it seems to me, Jerry, is that those experiences you shared earlier around not facing into some of the conflict, not facing into some of the challenges that you had are really core elements of the learning that you've now applied in the work that you do now, right?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean the biggest catalyst for me, recognizing I need to get better was admitting that the cost of not dealing with the situation is worse than messing up and failing at, you know, engaging the situation.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Jerry Fu: And then also to recognize, hey, you know what, even if I fail, it's better than not doing anything. And then also, you know, the paradox is okay, let me just not settle for, well, at least I tried. It's like, okay, let me really study this and improve this so that I give myself the best chance of success every single time I engage.

Steve Rush: So, from your perspective, are there some common traits that cause conflict in the first place?

Dr. Jerry Fu: I think the first thing is just mismanaged expectations, right? That's usually the easiest conflict to realize, right. This is just, hey, I was expecting you to show up on time. You showed up 30 minutes late. Okay. We have a conflict done, right. That's the first simple conflict. The second conflict I'll see is, you know, expectations for myself and my own path versus expectations that others have for me, right. That's another one. Cultural expectations, right. When just in like social circle, right. When I remember in high school, like a classmate came over and he didn't take his shoes off because he just didn't know, but I was too afraid to tell him, hey, you need to take your shoes off before coming in and now I have to deal with the conflict, right. He's not even aware of this unless he told him.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Jerry Fu: And then, there's healthy conflict, right? The current version of you versus the future version of you or business conflict, right. What makes us money now may not make us money in five years from now or even within healthy business cultures, right. Morale and results usually are on opposite sides. And then, you know, innovation and systems usually don't pair up well, right. Because innovation says, hey, we got to look for new stuff and systems say, well, you know, this is how we're built to handle money now. Those are the most frequent conflicts that I see.

Steve Rush: You mentioned very briefly there around conflict can be positive. Most conflict happens in that part of the limbic system that we try to deal with that whole fight flight freeze in the peace situation. And that's typically get an emotional response. So how can conflict be positive in that sense?

Dr. Jerry Fu: I mean, conflict tells you that something has to change, right. I'll give a specific example from my work, leadership lab in a way. So, my lead technician will call her, Denise. For the longest time she would just show up late, chronically late. And one of my other technicians who is consistently punctual is very upset at this, but Emily, this punctual technician, right. Emily doesn't handle conflict well. And because she's a harmonizer, she wants to get along with people. She doesn't like it when people dislike her for things. And so, she's just quietly frustrated with Denise tardiness and one day on our group text, right. Emily says, oh, basically Denise was late again. And so, Emily is just texting all these really passive, aggressive texts on our thread. And it's like, okay, this is a problem, right. Because when it starts to spill over into these kinds of messages, it's like, okay, now we have a conflict, right. And so, the conflict really revealed a lot of good things that we needed to work on, right. That was the good of conflict because Denise realizes, okay, my tardiness is affecting my team's ability to focus and get things done. And, Emily is recognizing, oh, like holding this in is not healthy, right. She's not going to change until I say something to her. At least I don't have a chance of seeing how she'll respond unless I say something to her. Even though this is an unhealthy conflict, because it reveals a lack of empathy for the other person and just an unaware of the consequences of my own selfishness in this case for either woman. This was the catalyst for both of them to realize it's like, okay, Denise, like, if you don't want her to start passively, aggressively communicating with you, you need to step up your game, show up on time. And Emily, you know, if you're upset, go ahead and say, like we don't want you holding that in.

Steve Rush: What are the kind of main reasons that people don't just air it when it's fresh for them, you know, first time out an incident occurs. What is that kind of fundamental reason we just don't let it out so early?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Well, I mean, I know for me, it's this fear of antagonizing other person. Like I'm just going to throw them on defensive if I confront them about something that I think is problematic. Part of it is just the way people have dealt with conflict with me, when they just, send this really polite email heading like, hey, right. And then you open the email and then they just blast you with everything you did real wrong, right. And so, yeah, number one is just the desire to be liked. I think if I bring this thing up, they won't like me anymore.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: And then even worse is that you bring it up in a way that shows, you're scared to bring this up with them, which is, you know, almost just as insulting as just not wanting to talk about it with them, right.

Steve Rush: I can say that actually.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah.

Steve Rush: And it's ironic. I never really thought of it in that way that you can physically see the non-verbal communication happening way before, can't you? Somebody been stewing on this situation or the event and now they're going to have a conversation, but they're dreading it. You can see it all over their face often, can't you?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Oh yeah. You die thousand deaths before you ever get stabbed, right.

Steve Rush: And one of the things that comes back to your earlier observations was all of this is mindset. The fear of I'm not going to do that is a mindset, isn't it? The assumptions that we make about how people respond to us is a mindset. And actually, often when you get it out there, it's nothing like it.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Excellent. So, talk us through a little bit about the work you've been doing recently. So, I know you have your downloadable version of the framework that you've got. I think we really need just to spin through how that might help our leaders listening to this.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Oh, of course. Yeah. So, in trying to expand the help that I can offer potential clients or anyone really, who's curious about my business. Have this great guide that details a framework on how to handle hard conversations, because basically I took some, you know, material from references and books that, you know, friends introduced to me. And then I kind of put my own spin on it, my own spices in the common recipe if you want to use one analogy. So yeah, the five steps for handling hard conversations, according to me. Number one, you have to imagine what a successful conversation would sound like.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Too often, right. I know what I do in conflict to say, well, I don't know how this is going to go, but I'm just going to go in there. And I guess, you know, even if it goes poorly, well, you don't have to settle for that, right. Maybe the conversation can go easy, right. You could just say, hey, can you stop leaving your dirty dishes in the sink? And they say, oh yeah, sorry about that. Maybe it could be that easy, right. But you don't know. And kind of like, to my point about being a good leader, you give yourself permission to succeed at something, right. Hey, maybe I could actually be good at this.

Number two is to find 10 seconds of courage to set things in motion, whether it's sending that email or sending that text or picking up the phone, right. People think, oh, I need to be more courageous. I need to feel like Superman or Wonder Women. And it's like, if you wait until you feel like you have enough courage, like you'll never do it or even worse, you wait three months, six months. And you know, now all this damage is continuing to go. Like this fire is still, you know, eating up all this property. And it's like, well, I'm not ready to deal with that yet. But it's still causing problems, right. So, you need to stretch yourself for 10 seconds to kind of set things in motion and lock the gate behind you, so you can't back out, right. And that's kind of helped you force yourself forward.

Number three is to script your critical moves, right. So don't just think about what you need to include, go ahead, and write it down, right. Because if things are rattling around in your head, you're not going to remember everything in the moment. So go ahead and write things down you know, organize into a logical flow and make sure this way you can address things impartially. Number four though, is to rehearse those critical moves, right. Rehearse in front of a mirror, record yourself on your phone, get your friends to role play with you, make sure that you train in the dojo before fighting on the street, right.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Make sure you practice that courage and then step five, do it. You've done the homework, you set things in motion, you've practiced. And the cost of backing out now is too high. So just follow through and learn from it. Make sure you say, hey, how could I do that better? But those are the five steps

Steve Rush: Also of course, by just mapping out those steps and stages, as you've just described, will help unlock that growth mindset that we need to be effective in that moment.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah.

Steve Rush: So, we're going to flip the coin and turn the tables a little bit now Jerry. We're going to dive your leadership experience of which you've had, not only the ability of leading teams, but have had the opportunity to coach great leaders too. So, I want you to dive in, if you can, and just try and get to our top three leadership hacks from you, what would they be?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, great, great question. So top three leadership hacks. Number one. Kind of like what we were referred to earlier saying, hey, what's the cost of not doing anything, right. So, to do that, just to say, hey, 10 seconds of courage, you don't have to wait until you're ready. Just start doing things, right. Try something, learn, adjust, and then repeat the cycle, right. And yeah, what's the smallest amount of change I could do right now that I would feel okay with doing, right. Just shrink something down into a manageable step, much like Atomic Habits said, or David Allen said, you know, what's the next action? So yeah, the first leadership hack, what's the minimum viable action you can do, right. number two, leadership hacks. I mean, learning is big. And so, for me, I download audiobooks through an app called Libby. Let’s you rent audiobooks and eBooks for free through whatever library you have access to and then listen to them a on 1.2, five speed and learning right is the second leadership hack and then finding ways to make learning fun. And to be opportunistic with that, right. Because I haven't had as much time to read physical books as I used to, but the next best thing is to listen to books while in the car or I have other moments of dead time. So that would be the second leadership hack I would say. And then third leadership hack. Ask meaningful questions. Because questions are what helped me shine the flashlight on important things, I want other people to address, and it feels much less pushy when you're trying to motivate someone to think a little differently. And if you help people realize things for themselves, then it's a lot easier than me just telling them what I think they should do.

Steve Rush: A part of every great coach of course.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Rush: So, the next part of the show, we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is where something hasn't worked out well. Maybe it's been pretty catastrophic, but the event itself is now cause some learning and that learning serves you well, what would be your Hack to Attack?

Dr. Jerry Fu: I'll give a situation from my current job. When I first started, I brought on a technician from my previous company who was one of a lead technician, but it turns out was just because you have the title mean people respected her. And when I brought her on, we realized too late that she wasn't a good fit for the company basically. She was willing to undercut her teammates anytime she made a mistake because she was too afraid of looking incompetent and she didn't want to lose her job. And so even though she wasn't lead technician now, she was still acting like she was and just causing a lot of problems that she just didn't want to admit to. And so, you know, my attempts to write her up and discipline her didn't go well.

And this went on for like a year and a half before we finally said, okay, we can't do this anymore. Like, and so yeah, I mean, those failings, that was probably like, I don't want to admit how much we set our company back because I was just too afraid to engage. Because she knew how to deflect. She knew how to bite back and then we just realized, hey, you know, even if this is true, like we're still in charge. And if we're not happy with her performance, it's still up to us to push her out the door.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: And so, this set a tough precedent because we didn't entirely build up a bulletproof case, even though we had more enough evidence, we just didn't line it up properly. And so, when she filed for unemployment. The workforce commission ruled in her favor because we didn't line up all our ducks in a row. And so, I say this because was a good lesson because when it happened again with another employee, we just realized, okay, it doesn't matter how much this employee refute our story. It's still up to us to write her up. And so sure enough, after we, you know, hit the last straw with her, you know, we made sure that we had a strong case. And so, when she tried to file for unemployment, she was denied. And to say this, not out of like satisfaction, I'm just happy that we protected the company from people that were draining its resources.

Steve Rush: And the lesson learned, of course, otherwise you'd repeated the same mistakes.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Oh, absolutely. That was more satisfying, even though it was exhausting both times.

Steve Rush: I can imagine. It's never an easy thing to do, but it's a byproduct of managing performance and people, right.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah.

Steve Rush: So, the last bit of the show today is we get a chance to give you a of time travel. You get to bump into Jerry at 21 and give them some advice. So, what would your words or wisdom be to Jerry at 21?

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah, I would tell him three things. I think number one, it's okay for people to disagree with you. If you like something and they start to badmouth that you don't have to be the hero and prove them wrong. Like, if you like, what you like and you know, why you like it, it's okay if other people don't like it. So just be more secure in that regard. Number two would be, it's okay to say no, you know, don't people please. Like if you are honestly not excited about doing something, don't do it and it's a lesson to remind myself today, actually just say, hey, it's okay to say no to things. And then number three, I would say explore more. I'll tell you this, Steve, this was a funny moment. I basically got funneled into a German language learning program when I was in middle school. And so, because I'd already learned German in middle school, I just continued it through high school. I remember after going through a tough lesson, getting a bad grade on a test, I just said, oh my gosh, you know, when am I ever going to use this? Steve, I've met so many great German people like everywhere I've traveled.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: And the number of cute German girls I'll meet. And even if I have no shot of dating them, I could just see God just like, you know, talking to me and looking at me, going, I tried, like to expand your perspective and it took a while for me to really appreciate. Oh wow, global perspective is amazing.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Jerry Fu: And there's a big, great world out there to explore and learn from and really embrace. I would tell myself, hey, as much as you like video games, you know, maybe there's something better out there for you.

Steve Rush: And in the big diverse global world we have, we are so lucky that we have 94 countries that listen to our show and therefore we want to make sure we can connect you with those and that audience too, Jerry. So, when we are finished today, where's the best place we can send them.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Yeah. You can connect with me on LinkedIn but the best place to go to connect and where all the free goodies are, is my website, which is www.adaptingleaders.com. In addition to the free guide that you can download, you can schedule a complimentary 30-minute call. You can also check out the blog where I summarize useful and interesting leadership books and offer other life hacks that maybe useful to you

Steve Rush: And let the leadership hacking continue, and we'll make sure that we connect our audience with you. And all of those links, Jerry will be in our show notes.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Great. Thanks so much, Steve.

Steve Rush: It's been awesome talking. I'm absolutely convinced that the whole approach to conflict resolution is something that we are going to look back in 10 years and you are going to be one of those global experts because you bring a really neat and simple perspective on something that is really quite uncomfortable and challenging. So, I just wanted to say thank you for being on our podcast. Thanks, Being part of our community Jerry.

Dr. Jerry Fu: Ah, thanks, Steve. I'm so happy I stayed up till 2:00 AM to finally meet with you because I could have just said, you know what? Nope. I'm not willing to do that. And to have this meaningful conversation with you and to know that we're giving so much benefit and useful information to your audiences is humbling and exciting.

Steve Rush: Thank you, Jerry. Appreciate it.

Dr. Jerry Fu: All right.

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 there: @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.

Welcome to our first show of 2022. I’m delighted to kick start this year off with Omar L Harris. Omar is a former Executive Leader of GSK and Allergan with more than 20 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. He's the founder managing partner of Intent Consulting and author of The Servant Leaders Manifesto and Be a J.E.D.I. Leader, Not a Boss. This warm and insightful conversation is packed full of learning including:

• The greatest gift that diversity has presented to Omar.
• The difference between equality and equity.
• How inequality can so easily disrupt your team and organization.
• How to be a J.E.D.I Leaders and not a boss.

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

Find out more about Omar below:

Omar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omarlharris/

Omar on Twitter: https://twitter.com/strengthsleader

Omar on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/omarl.harris/

Omar’s Website: https://www.omarlharris.com

Be a J.E.D.I Leader not a Boss (BOOK)

Full Transcript Below

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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

Joining me today is Omar Harris. He's a former executive of GSK and Allergan, more than 20 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. He's the founder managing partner of Intent Consulting and author of The Servant Leaders Manifesto and Be a J.E.D.I. Leader, Not a Boss, but before we get a chance to speak with Omar, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: Although we can't predict the future. What we can say is 2022 will not be returning to business as usual. The pandemic, social unrest, cultural divisions, and new remote working, all but guarantee that leading teams and business in the coming year will be anything but business as usual. Leading in the hybrid world, digitalization, automation, all of which workers need to learn skills outside of our routines and our normal roles. Combined of course, we're getting used to that hybrid world. So how do we prepare for challenges as leaders in 2022 and beyond?

So, I'm calling the six themes as leaders we need to be focused on. Starting with using technology in human ways for human reasons. When it comes to embracing the hybrid workforce, embracing technology is a priority. Professor Roshni Raveendhran and completed some research and explored the integration of novel technologies into the workplace and where those technologies intersect with the psychology of human behavior. With studies, including the examination of monitoring technology in the use of virtual and augmented reality, Raveendhran focused on use of new systems to augment human life and how new technologies can be used responsibly. For example, the use of avatars may relieve that sense of social threat through psychological distance or how an organization's behavior tracking application may be used as a better means of collaboration rather than for people to be feeling that they're constantly monitored. As companies start to rethink about how remote working impacts on the workforce.

Raveendhran also said, “One key challenge pertains to the missing social connection, that feeling of being part of the same group. So, the use of things like virtual reality and other augmented reality is going to be a key critical part that drives the psychology for people to adapt some of those technologies too.” One thing in 2022, all companies will need to focus on and that's improving company culture. Darden Professor Laura Morgan Roberts is an expert human potential, diversity and leadership. And she notes that compassionate, responsive leadership is what every organization needs, whether face to face or screen to screen. She also sites learning as being a key element of that culture change as well as peer to peer support. A crisis is messy, and so too is innovation. Roberts goes on to say, “As organizations compete and grow, the successful ones were emphasized on a culture that is inclusive, authentic, and has development at the heart to retain talent.” Successfully leaders in 2022 will forge beyond diversity efforts and developing that minority talent, pushing that organizations to really embrace the importance of equity and intelligent inclusion.

Ultimately the impact of diversity equity and inclusion efforts. However well meaning, will depend on how well they're executed by its leadership. Decades of research in social psychology and organizational behaviors show that when individuals question the value of group identity, that social identity threats increase, they register, and they're massively damaging, not just to the individual, but to the organizational relationships. Professor Martin Davidson is Darden University global chief diversity officer goes on to explore how those organizations can design and Institute programs and policies that worked at eliminate inequality. He calls out in his studies that the biggest focus should be reducing the psychological reactivity that arises in response to any racial friction. And let's remember in 2022, we're all in the same boat. Friction can sink the boat, keeping team members out of sync. When in fact they should be pursuing the same meaningful goals that are aligned through all the organization.

Professor Lynn Isabella is an authority on managing teams and she likens a business unit to accrue rowing on the water. What it takes to row together with seven or eight people is true of the manifestation of teamwork in action, winning crews share common characteristics. Not only must every team member have the master with technique at a similar level but have different strengths that each can learn to row with the rest of the crew. Professor Isabella goes on to say in their recent studies. “As a member of the team, each row must learn to follow and lead simultaneously. Individual stars will only slow the boat down.” So, what about leadership capability? or to take their teams to the next levels of achievement. Successful leaders of organizations and teams will need a cohesive understanding of what leadership really is and what it's not. Having interviewed hundreds of great leaders and coaches from around the world.

What I know is true, is: Leadership is about influence and not power, it's more about inspiration than control. Power is based on the development and dependence of others and the authority based on the formalization of a simple hierarchy that we've become used to. Command and control approaches lead to burnout and disengagement. The thing is, working through influence takes more effort, but over the long haul. Leads to more engaged, purpose driven and productive teams. Until you create more leaders who are willing to provide their efforts in your direction, you're not really leading. And my final message to kickstart 2022 is business is human. While COVID 19 and the pandemic has accelerated the mass adoption of new technologies. The things we can rely on are human related. Leadership is profoundly human. We can't rely on AI and technology to replace the human traits of judgment, compassion, empathy, and ethics.

And in 2022 leadership will require a human touch now more than ever. So whatever new bold technologies you adopt and the innovative solutions you seek, let's just remember human centered leadership is what's going to make 2022 a real success for you and the teams that you lead. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Let's get into the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Our special guest on today's show is Omar L. Harris. He's the founder of Intent Consulting. He's an expert on business and servant leadership. He's a thought leader, speaker an award-winning bestselling author of five books, including The Servant Leaders Manifesto and be a J.E.D.I. Leader, Not a Boss: This is about leading in the Era of Corporate Social Justice, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. Omar, welcome to of The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Omar Harris: Happy to be here, Steve. Nice to be speaking with you.

Steve Rush: So, tell us a little bit about you and how Omar arrived to do what you're doing and how you're making such a great impact on the world. Where did it all start?

Omar Harris: I mean, it started early on, I think my parents, especially my mother really invested in my town talents early on in my life and kind of, you know, gave me something to aspire to in terms of telling me that she wanted me to do something great in the world with my life. I was enlisted into the gifted program in the third grade. It was kind of a funny story about that. I thought I was being studied for like mental disorder or something like that. And it turns out that it was actually an assessment for the gifted program. And you know from that moment on really kind of having extra time to invest in my intellectual acumen, having the best teachers, having the privilege of being able to expand my mind and learn in different ways. And I think that when I reflect back on it, I always thought I was a bit unfair that I was going to classes, getting access to, you know, information and, you know, different types teaching that other students were getting.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: And I thought it was fundamentally inequitable. And I think that, you know, this is what starts in Western Society. Specifically, around the fact that there are people that we see as elite or having certain pedigree or whatever it is. And you get that, you know, these privileges begin to happen at an early age. And then you have those who never receive any types of privileges who have to overcome constantly for the entirety of their life. And what I fundamentally believe is that everybody is uniquely special and talented, and that everyone needs the same kind of investment in order for them to unlock their true potential, which is what I do now is try to help every single person that I encounter, unlock their unique, potential, their unique purpose and help them connect that to their goals and their progress.

But I mean, I think that I evolved there over the course of a 20 plus year pharmaceutical career, living all over the world, you know, U.S., Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. And I've lived a life when I've been able to kind of do what I'm good at all the time. And I just want everyone to have the benefit of that.

Steve Rush: And I love the fact that you've raised inequity in this whole process, because it's the one thing that gets often lost between diversity and inclusion, because it is not about race. It's not about color. It's not about creed.

Omar Harris: No.

Steve Rush: It cuts across all of those lines, doesn't it?

Omar Harris: It does. It's a big intersectionality about inequity and people confuse equity and equality all the time, but they're not the same thing.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: And that's why it's very important to explain what equity is for people. So, they understand really. There's a famous cartoon that shows three children at a fence looking at a baseball game. Let's say it's on the soccer pitch for your global audience or the football pitch. And imagine looking over, trying to look at the watch match, and you have one tall child looking over the fence easily, and you have one kid who's basically can't even see over the fence, kind of get a glimpse of some things. And you have a little short kid who can't see anything, right? And so, this is fundamentally inequity that has nothing to do with anything. It's happened to be three different heights, right.

Steve Rush: And the treatment strategy for those three people in that case is different.

Omar Harris: Exactly. And the tallest person's also standing on a milk crate.

Steve Rush: Right, yeah.

Omar Harris: So, it has a little bit of a boost. So, you take the milk crate away from the tallest one, you give the shortest and the next shortest person, the milk create they need to be able to see over the fence, and then everybody can participate in viewing the match.

Steve Rush: It's a really interesting approach. And I'm glad you've highlighted, as I'm a visual, I can actually see these three characters actually stuck about the fence.

Omar Harris: Right, right.

Steve Rush: Now you had a wonderful, diverse career across full continents and had the experience to really firsthand learn and experience around the whole kind of diversity equity and inclusion genre. But from your perspective, is there may be a time or a moment or experience where there's been this kind of this moment for you where you went, ah, this is it?

Omar Harris: I don't think it was certainly a single moment for me. I think it's just being observant to your experience and the experience of others. I think that for me, one of the things that really affected me early in my career was the fact that I was one of the only African Americans in marketing, in my entire 30,000-person company. And asking myself the question, why are there not more of us in pharmaceutical marketing? At the time I was working in cardiovascular disease and cholesterol, and this is a disease that disproportionately affects you know, black and African American people.

Steve Rush: Right.

Omar Harris: Not only, you know, bring the solutions to market more effectively, but also have more effective consumer messaging and messaging to doctors around the disease modality, you should at least be representing the demographics of your primary patient populations.

Steve Rush: Absolutely.

Omar Harris: High blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, you should have a higher propensity of people, of African descents in those teams. I think just because they're going to have a personal connection to that story. I mean, both my parents have high blood pressure, everybody you know, every person that I have, that's a friend of mine, or over 40 has high blood pressure in our community. So, we have a connection to it, an emotional and intellectual connection to this that others may not have that would give us an advantage in terms of messaging and marketing and all the things we're trying to do. But at the time I was the only person of color on that team in the world.

Steve Rush: That's a remarkable stat in itself, isn't it? Did you find out what the reason was for that?

Omar Harris: I think it comes back to the fact of where they're sourcing talent. I think, you know, once again, there's this whole misnomer or myth that there's not enough of a certain type of group for certain position. We don't will have enough, you know, African American talent for marketing. We don't have enough women in tech. We don't have enough, blah, blah, blah, whenever you see scarcity, it's because you're not looking in the right place.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: Or you're not actually investing in planting seeds to create the crops that you need for your future success. So basically, intelligent organizations, it's sort of like going back to our football example, there's a reason why there are junior clubs, right? Right. So basically, the top, you know, Manchester United, scouring the world for the next stars, 15, 20 years before they ever become adults.

Steve Rush: Of course.

Omar Harris: You know, they're looking at seven-year-olds, ten-year-old, and they don't care where you're from. You could be from the middle of Sub-Saharan Africa, or you could be from Latin America, you could be from Timbuktu. It doesn't matter because they understand that they need a constant supply of stars, and that star base is not going to come from a single demography. And this is something that corporations, we don't understand yet, we're not actually building a pipeline early enough. Pre-College, right? You know what I'm saying?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: Like looking at where the talents are. There are talents all over the place if you create a wide enough net early enough to find these individuals and groom them, which is why all the work in stem is so important and trying to encourage, you know, African Americans and women and immigrants to get into that space. Because now we're trying to build a pipeline of future engineers, entrepreneurs, or whatnot. That same philosophy needs to be applied to regular. Business, finance, HR, you know, marketing, sales leadership, all these different functions. You do the exact same thing. There's no difference in those approaches. In my case, I think that I was only there because my particular organization happened to be sourcing at least one or two African Americans from my school, which was a historically black college and university every year. But most corporations were not using HBCUs as a talent pipeline source. And that's why the demography were so bad. And even with them actually having a pipeline, you know, you're one of ten every year, I was one person brought in and given a chance every year.

Steve Rush: And that in itself just feels wrong in today's society that you were brought in to be given a chance. I mean, how disrespectful to your education and your future talent is that just that notion almost right?

Omar Harris: Yeah. So, you know, you understand that you recognize that you know it's not right. But then you have to basically try to change things from the inside while you're in there.

Steve Rush: Right.

Omar Harris: So now my job is to, first of all, perform and demonstrate that, you know, they didn't make a mistake with the hire. And then second of all, which creates an immense pressure actually, by the way, that you know, other people don't understand the pressure that, you know, you're female or your different demographic talents are putting themselves under because they realize that there's not a lot of them and that if they don't succeed, they carry the bag for everybody else. Which is different than some other racial groups don't have that same baggage.

Steve Rush: That's very true.

Omar Harris: Coming in. Like, basically we're carrying the bag for everybody else of our type.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: You know, they didn't speak concerned about themselves. I'm worried about me, I'm not worried about everybody else who looks like me or from the same ethnic group or racial group as I am. But I know that at least in the U.S., and I know this exists in a lot of people from African nations is that when we get these chances, we're thinking of them not only for ourselves, but we're thinking about everybody else who could potentially be coming in behind us. And so, we take it very seriously. And we put ourselves into, an enviable position of having to be perfect to succeed.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and I was very fortunate. I was brought up in the outskirts of West London, a very diverse community. But I get white privilege. Most people have to actually really give themselves a nudge to consider that it is actually a privilege being a white, Caucasian male, in most cases in the workplace until recently where things have really started to change.

Omar Harris: Right.

Steve Rush: And we've got higher profile, that's making people think very carefully about that. I've always been acutely aware of that from a young age. That's not as frequent as you bump into you, right?

Omar Harris: Well, no, I think it's an interesting point you bring up. I think that we all talk about capitalism, and we believe in capitalism, we believe in these society. The capitalism, the free-market economy is based on competition, right. The more competition there is, it basically brings the best out of everyone, right. But when there's advantages in the system that prevent competition from happening, then we all stagnate. So, what we're seeing today is finally, we're seeing the ideal competitive landscape where basically, you know, for a given job, you have women, you know, immigrants, different ethnicities, different genders, different gender identities, all competing for the same positions that only makes everybody better at the end of the day.

Steve Rush: Of course.

Omar Harris: The issue however, Steve is that leaders have no idea how to lead these diverse teams now. That creates a whole different problem, which is, you can bring in the talent, but can you manage them?

Steve Rush: Well, that's a really interesting notion. So, I run a coaching group, a volunteer coaching group. And, you know, for the first time we put this whole white fragility on the table. As coaches have been, do we talk about it? And how does it hold us back if we don't? And it's really interesting that still in today's community, there is this sensitivity that still sits around race and sexuality and diversity, but people are still or still a bit nervous of bumping into, in fear of doing the wrong thing.

Omar Harris: It's prickly. I think people would rather avoid the conversation and assume that everybody thinks the same way. And that's where the issue comes out to.

Steve Rush: Right.

Omar Harris: You can't assume. Assuming, you know, gets us all in trouble. And I think that having structured dialogue is important. But for me, more important than the dialogue and I guess some of the recognition of biases and beliefs is the point, why are we doing this? Are we doing this, trying to be become better people? Are we doing it for moral imperative? Okay. Those are really good reasons to make change happen. But for me, fundamentally, this is about business risk. And this is about, you know, what higher executive level executives are paid to do, which is to mitigate future business risk.

And the best way to mitigate future business risk today is to have an environment where injustices are consistently eradicated, and inequities are consistently eliminated. Diversity is consistently expanded, and inclusion is consistency enhanced. And so, I believe that when you approach it from the position of business risk and the need to create an environment that fosters a culture where your diverse talents, whatever you have, whatever your demographic mix is, can actually provide the innovation that all the statistics state are available. The teams that are more diverse than those are homogenous. This is when you begin to see the real benefits for business. And when you can begin to finally add value to not just shareholders, but, you know, customers, the community, the environment, and your employees

Steve Rush: Yeah, hallelujah to that, love that. So, you've created some great products working with your team Intent Consulting. You have TYMPO, which is an innovative solution for enhancing employee inclusion. And you also have Equity Pulse. Wonder if you could maybe just tell us a little bit about how you use them and how, as a leader listening to this, I might think about using some of that methodology?

Omar Harris: So, I'll start with TYMPO because basically when I was writing my most recent book, Be A J.E.D.I. Leader, Not A Boss Leadership in the Era of Corporate Social Justice, Equity, and Diversity and Inclusion. I was thinking about what solutions exist to highlight in the book, basically, what can you go to as a leader who's trying to do this important work within your organization. There's a system them I roll out around in justice in the book. And then the diversity, there's a lot of work and great solutions around hiring diverse talent and, you know, making sure you capitalize diverse talent, but I realize that the equity and the inclusion pieces where areas where it's more difficult to quantify for business leaders, the impact of these two areas, right.

Steve Rush: Right.

Omar Harris: So, what do we get when we invest in these areas and what is the outcome for our business? And so, I began challenging myself to think about, how I can come up with solutions. And I think about technology a lot in turn, how can we leverage technology to make things more transparent, make things more equal and make things more visible to everyone. And so, the idea for TYMPO was basically thinking about the corporate all hands meeting, the town hall, where you have your senior leadership coming together to talk about, in all the companies, you know, employees coming to together to talk about performance, initiatives, benefits, whatever the topic dejour may in that quarter. And what happens is you have the CEO and their leadership team talking at the employee base. There may be some Q&A that happens with employees, but it's not really an inclusive event. It's really a one-way conversation, right.

Steve Rush: Right.

Omar Harris: This is what I want to tell you. And so, I thought about how I could transform that into not only a two-way conversation, but in a fully inclusive conversation where we can lean into the difference that we have in our organization. And so, TYMPO takes the idea of audience response systems, where you have a polling function, and you're allowed to basically poll the audience at different moments. And specifically turns that into an opportunity to allow your employee base, to include themselves in the three most important questions leaders should be asking. First of all, when I communicate, what do people understand? Of what they understand, understood, what do they agree with? And of what they agree with, what do they align to do?

So, these three questions, Steve drive business. Understanding agreement and alignment. And so, in TYMPO, the type of polling you ask is related to those three questions, understanding agreement, and alignment. What we can visualize, basically the percentage of our population that agrees, understands it is aligned with whatever we're talking about, right. We can also drill down by demographics for the first time in real time. So, we can see, you know, but let's say Boomers versus Zoomers on a given issue of agreement or understanding or alignment. And then we can allow people to ask questions directly linked to understanding agreement and alignment. My job as a senior leader is to present strategy, but also to make sure you have high understanding, high agreement, and high alignment. Makes me work harder as a senior leader, which puts me in the position of a servant leader. I have to serve and support you in order to get your understanding, your agreement and your alignment. And I have to include you in the conversation in order to move the organization forward. And that's what to take me designed.

Steve Rush: Love it.

Omar Harris: Yeah. So that's TYMPO. In the U.S. in 2019, this organization called the business round table, which is comprised of the top 200 U.S. corporations across various industries changed the definition of a corporation away from shareholder capitalism, which is the profit motive for shareholders to what they call stakeholder capitalism, which is a more benefits for more stakeholders like employees, customers, communities, and the environment in addition to shareholders, and basically they committed to transform capitalism in this direction. The question I asked myself was, is who was holding them accountable?

So, I created Equity Pulse as a service, similar like glassdoor.com where employees can actually rate their employers on their progress related to J.E.D.I. issues. And it's fully anonymous, and employees can come from any company, go to equity polls, fill out our brief survey. And what will happen is, we're going to create company profiles based on their J.E.D.I progress through the lens of the employees of the organization. So, the most powerful feedback you can possibly have is, your employees telling you how they think you are doing based on this survey that we've put together,

Steve Rush: It's a really neat approach to getting people to focus on what really matters, which is subtly different to most employee surveys. It kind of focuses on that inequity, doesn't it?

Omar Harris: Exactly, exactly. And so, it's kind of a third party, external accountability tracker that hopefully will get into the zeitgeist. So, people will begin to reference it and say, okay, before I make a, you know, before I decide what company I want to go work for, let me check out the equity pulse on that company. Let me check out the, you know, let me see if their walking the talk, and that's what I was trying to do. That's the intention of Equity Pulse.

Steve Rush: So, when you came up with the notion of Be A Jedi Leader, Not A Boss, how much star wars influence was there actually involved there?

Omar Harris: Zero. Well, I won't say zero. I won't say zero. So, in The Servant Leaders Manifesto. I had a throwaway line where I said that servant leaders wield influenced like Jedi wield the force.

Steve Rush: Ah-huh.

Omar Harris: And so that was a throwaway line, which is very much linked to Star Wars, if you think about that line.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: But as I thought about, you know, Jedi, the acronym, because when I wrote that line, I didn't know there was an acronym for Jedi that was just as equity, diversity and include, I didn't know, this was a thing, a real thing in this zeitgeist. The Jedi acronym was actually created by a man named Marcella Bonta who works in the environmental advocacy space, right. And so when I learned that there was an actually an acronym for Jedi, I took the same idea and flipped it on his head and said, this is a compelling, it makes a great title, but also like, there are some parallels between if you think about the Jedi and you think about, you know, the Knight at a round table, and you think about the people who are forces for good in the universe. And so, although I don't really make explicit Star Wars parallels in the book, you cannot with, you know, they're very litigious.

Steve Rush: I can imagine.

Omar Harris: The idea pervades subconsciously, which is, being a force for good in your team, department, division, function, organization, community, what does a force for good look like today? And a force for good means, we can't allow the stuff to persist. We can't allow bad actors in our systems to just go walk around willy-nilly. Not being, you know, with no retribution or no justice for them. We can't allow these pay gaps; gender pay gaps to persist. We can't keep trying to make, you know, everyone conforms to a particular style of working in today's day and age. And we can't exclude people if we want to be successful. I wanted to give a language, but also a methodology to what it means to be a force for good in the corporate setting.

Steve Rush: And as part of that force for good, you manage to call out those business sins of employee equity so that we can get rid of some of that toxic boss behavior, and then you've overlayed some principles as well. Maybe we could just spin through those?

Omar Harris: Yeah. So, there's five business sense of employee inequity. And I think these are relevant to your global audience, Steve. The first one is privileged hiring. So, the problem begins right from the start, which what we just talked about, which is, you are only looking at a certain area for your new hire. So, you're basically looking at, you know, pedigree or what university person went to or where they previously worked, or how many years of experience they have. None of these things are proxies for success. None of them guarantee success.

Steve Rush: Right?

Omar Harris: The reason why we have these filters, and these criteria is because managers are lazy, and they don't want to onboard and train people. So basically, the justification is, the pace of work is too fast to have to onboard and, you know, help people come up the learning curve. But anytime you do it in an organization, regardless of how much pedigree you have and how much experience, you're going to have to go through a learning curve regardless. And people fail all the time, they come from the best institutions, with the best education and the best background. It's not a guarantee for success. So why not cast a wider net. So basically, the solution to privilege hiring is hiring for behaviors and not pedigree. So basically, the behaviors I recommend are. I call up the whom, work ethic, heart, optimism, and maturity. When you put a team together, people who work hard, have shared passion are solution oriented and mature enough to overcome inevitable conflict. That group of people will trump, you know, your high IQ, elite, intellectual talent, every time. That's the first that equity, the second employee equity is sink or swim onboarding. So, as I mentioned before. You come in the door and your first day you're working, and no one is giving you the keys to the kingdom, telling you how to navigate this new system, who you should be talking to, answer your questions about the who's, what, when, where, why, how's everything works in the organization. You basically are given 90 days to sink or swim. And if you don't make it, we're going to kick you out the door, which makes no sense if you think about how much money companies invest in recruiting, right.

Steve Rush: And people don't perform well when they're into that kind of pressure either do they?

Omar Harris: Exactly. So why would you not just do what I say in terms of going overboard on onboarding? So basically, onboarding is not HR job. Onboarding is the hiring manager’s job. And when I onboarded people from my organizations, I spent a minimum of three hours with each new employees, making sure we aligned on expectations, on trust builders and trust breakers, on communication styles, on our collective strengths and how we're going to work together and what our mission was together. And so, at the end of that section and making sure I make myself fully available to them to answer all their questions in their first 90-day period and building a robust 90-day plan for them. That transformed not the trust that we had together, but it transformed the success rate and the hit rate for people that were bringing into the organization, right?

So, get rid of sink or swim onboarding, and go overboard on onboarding will be the second thing. The third thing is, okay, so we bring you in, we onboard you, but then we basically want you to be like everybody else. We whitewash your talent. We just basically say, forget what you're good at. You get to go through this process. And how many people who are young coming into an organization are told, like, put your head down, just do this thing for five years. When you become a director, then you can change stuff. We're not going to listen to you or give you any airtime or let you speak to us until you have been here long to be worthy of speaking. It's ridiculous because young people coming in today know a lot more than young people, maybe 20, 30, 40 years, did, coming into business.

Steve Rush: Totally.

Omar Harris: So, you are doing your business, a disservice by not giving these people some room to run when they come in the door, because they're going to do things in a different way. That's going to transform how your business connects with what's current. What's happening now in terms of business. So rather than whitewash your talent, you should look at every individual and try to extract the maximum talent they have for the benefit of your business. What I call, turn talent industry, and build everybody up who comes in the door to be their most productive and engaged self. The fourth inequity is corrupted compensation. So basically, nobody can understand in organizations how they're being paid, like ask group people, you know, explain to your compensation system to me. Explain why certain people get certain bonuses, explain why certain people get certain options, explain the variable compensation element of your pay. Explain this to me.

You talk to 10 people in a company, 10 people will give you 10 different answers. Because companies don't compensate consistently. There's all this bias and subjectiveness in compensation. I'll give you an example, you know, I've been in talent conversations where the most passionate manager in a room is able to justify someone getting a 15% pay raise to keep them in the organization, just because of their skill of arguing for that person's compensation, right. Whereas someone who's not as good at arguing, their employee basis stays 15% lower. Just based on the ability to argue.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: And debate, not based on objective matters of performance.

Steve Rush: There lies a problem as well, right? The measures of performance are also inequitable, often.

Omar Harris: They're inequitable and they're more subjective than we would like to admit.

Steve Rush: Right?

Omar Harris: If there's anything that needs to be objective, it needs to be compensation. And you make your conversation more objective. HR does these market surveys with Mercer and companies like that, where they come up with their benchmarks and their goal is to basically have the majority of their employees at the median or a little bit above the median number, right. For that particular function. However, they don't do internal equity audits to understand the variability of compensation within their own organization. So, I'll give you an example. I was the youngest, senior marketing director in the history of my company at the age of 31. And there were senior marketing who were making $200,000 more than me and the inequity there was ageism.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: Because I was young. They could get away with paying me less. And because other person had basically had the benefit of, you know, pay raises, annual raises, whatever it is, or they came in at a higher level. So, you have this gigantic range of pay between me on the low scale and someone else from the high scale, right. But I'm aware of this. You think this is not going to affect my performance in terms of how much I give you, because you're not giving me what you could give me.

Steve Rush: Right.

Omar Harris: Right. So clearly you can pay that amount of money for this role. You're just choosing not to and justifying and saying, because I'm young. Well then don't gimme the job. If I was too young to get the job, then don't gimme the job.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: You gave me the job, which means you believe that I can do the job. And by the way, I was leading the company's flagship division. So basically, you had senior directors who were managing, let's say 700 million to dollars. I was managing 5 billion, getting paid $300,000 less than the next person.

Steve Rush: Doesn't seem at all fair in this.

Omar Harris: Like, is that fair? I don't know. I don't think it's fair. But you know, that's either here or there, I'm over it. So, last one we go to is, targeted termination. I literally comment on this, my local area now because there's a company called Better.com who just yesterday fired 900 employees over a Zoom call.

Steve Rush: Wow.

Omar Harris: They invited 900 employees. And if you were on this call, you're being terminated, being fired over Zoom by the CEO. Oh, that is horrible for a number a reason, and even worse. They eliminated their entire diversity equity and inclusion recruiting department.

Steve Rush: It sounds to me like a recipe for disaster.

Omar Harris: First of all, from an investment perspective, why would you invest in this company? Second of all, the managers who made the bad decisions that put the company in the position to have to downsize are never terminated. They made the calls, the bad investment, the bad forecast, the bad whatever that led to this moment. And they're the ones who get protected time and time again. And it makes no sense. It's fundamentally unfair and inequitable. And so, for me, I say, you know, employee termination, like the broad base employee, base your frontline employees should be the last resort. We should terminate everybody before we get rid of the frontline employees, because that's your connection to the customer, that's your connection to the market. That's your connection to the actual productivity center of your organization. Your CEO is very far away from productivity of your organization. Get rid of the CEO, get rid of the leadership team. Once again, they're the one who steered the ship into the iceberg. Why don't they get terminated when things go bad?

Steve Rush: It's often because they control, unfortunately rests with those people protecting their own positions, right?

Omar Harris: It's fundamentally equitable, right? So, you're getting paid more and you get to protect yourself. I'll give you an example. Let's say, when I was a general manager in Indonesia. I was making, let's say 300 times more than a frontline sales rep in the marketplace, right. So, my salary could pay for a hundred reps, right. You should get rid of me if I do something wrong.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: You know, versus getting rid of these individuals who are at the frontline and, also not being compensated enough as it is for what they do.

Steve Rush: Really interesting spin on things. I'm glad we went there with that conversation. Thanks So much.

Omar Harris: No problem.

Steve Rush: So how is the future of work? The hybrid work that we find ourselves in now, following the pandemic, and as we come out of it, how do you think that's helped or held back quality?

Omar Harris: I think companies that embrace it are actually going to create much more equality and equity. As long as you have managers who are equipped to properly manage this, right. So, you know, one of the biggest issues is that when you become a manager, there's no training to become a manager. There is no guidebooks to becoming managers. You have, you know, some type of training programs that come into play, but largely it's kind of like learn on the go, learn on the fly, right. And that's just regular management when you're going into an office together, think about the managerial skills and communication skills and abilities you have to have when half your team is working virtually. Some people work it hybrid. The skill set, the ability to manage and lead has to go up several notches.

And so, for me, this is only going to work to the degree that we have. We're improving the quality of management and leadership, which is why I have a lot of work today. Because a lot of people are calling me saying, how do we do this? You know, how do we elevate the skill of our managers? People are recognizing that if the managers don't improve, then this great resignation trend that we're having, and all these types of things are going to continue and they're going to continue losing talents. Everyone's going to be saying, we have the same ability to let you work from anywhere, if I can work from anywhere, imagine now I can work for a Chinese company from North Carolina or I can work for anybody. So, the hiring pool is in the competition is greater than ever before. You've got to really have your standards up to par, to not only bring in, but to keep your talent and develop them and keep them happy. So, it's going to be quite challenging.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it is. So, this part of the show, we typically turn the tables a little bit and I get to hack into your leadership brain.

Omar Harris: Sounds good.

Steve Rush: And having had the vast diverse experience you have; I'm really looking to get into your top three leadership hacks. What would they be, you think Omar?

Omar Harris: So, I mean, top three leadership hacks. I think that the first leadership hack is one that I call MHT, and this is for mindset habits and tracking. And the reason why MHT is important is because in order for you to evolve from a toxic boss to a servant leader to a modern leader, is you have to minimize your ego. And the way you minimize your ego is by making sure you're taking care of yourself in other areas. So that basically you don't require the ego boost that come from having power over other people. So, when you have that product mindset, meaning that you are focused on what you can control and influence and not focused on managing things like corporate politics, or who's going to get promoted when that you have no power over, you have the habits, high performance habits.

So, you are taking care of your mind, your spirit, your personal development, you’re learning, and your exercise, your fitness. That allows you to be able to power through and hold yourself accountable, but also hold other people accountable based on the way that you hold yourself accountable, right? So, I think that's the tracking the T of the MHT. So, that's three-leadership hack, the mindset, the habits, and the tracking are things that I advocate for every manager to upskill on today, in order for them to reduce their ego and show up as the brilliant leader that they actually can be.

Steve Rush: It follows a regular thing we see on the show actually, where the great leaders, the great entrepreneurs put themselves first, and there is this strange notion of some leaders don't feel that's a value investment, but actually if you don't put yourself first and get you fit to lead, you can't then be in service and be servant leader to others, can you?

Omar Harris: No, because you need their service to you for you to feel good about yourself.  

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Omar Harris: And then nobody gets anything done, because everyone's worried about trying to meet, you know, take care of your ego needs and your ego needs have nothing to do what the customer wants.

Steve Rush: Next part of show, we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something hasn't worked out in your past and your work, maybe you've been quite catastrophic in its outcome, but as a result, the experience you've learned from it and, you know, use it as a positive, what would be your Hack to Attack?

Omar Harris: So, I think that in this instance, it's basically going back to what I said earlier, so basically coming up as the only whatever, only African American in my team in marketing, then becoming the only, you know, African American business director, general manager, and several different organizations, you know, this idea that I had to be perfect led me to have, you know, horrible panic attacks, be taken to the hospital, have nervous breakdowns, all these horrible things. And the key learning from it was just be yourself. Like, don't put that pressure on yourself. You're not responsible for everybody else who looks like you, even though you may think you are, do your best, be the best version of yourself and that'll take care of itself and have healthy habits. I was working, you know, 20 hours a week.

I was not sleeping well, I was drinking too much, you know, I had all these horrible things that were happening because I was trying to show up as perfect for my organization. And I learned later on that I could be just as effective, more effective working half the time by being a lot more focused and taking the pressure off myself. The thing about it is that the perfection doesn't exist, right.

Steve Rush: Right.

Omar Harris: And the thing that I've learned is that we get paid in organizations to increase our success rate when it comes to good decision making, right. And not right decision making, good decision making. And there's a difference, right and wrong decision making is a function of time. You never know when you make a decision, whether it's right or the wrong. Only time will tell you that, but you can definitely leverage process to make more good than bad decisions.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I agree.

Omar Harris: And so, I think that for me, it was, you know, focusing on making quality decisions for myself and for how I was going to work versus trying to control the right outcome, which I don't have any control over ultimately.

Steve Rush: Yeah. Some very wise words. So, Omar, the last thing we want to do with you is do a bit of time travel. You can get to bump into yourself now at 21 and give yourself some advice. What would it be?

Omar Harris: I wrote an article about this actually a couple years ago about 42-year-old, me talking to 22-year-old me.

Steve Rush: Right.

Omar Harris: I think the advice would be the same. I think I would tell him, run your own race. Don't worry about perfection. It's going to be okay. As long as you run your own race and don't compare yourself to other people, don't worry about what people have that you don't have. Don't worry about these types of things. Those things fundamentally fade away over time and all that matters is becoming the best version of yourself. And I think that's the advice that I would give myself at that age versus trying to achieve some unattainable standard. Just be the best version of yourself.

Steve Rush: Yeah. That's great advice too. So, Omar, we are running to the end of our show now, but I don't want this to be the end of our audience listening and working with you. So how can we best connect them when where done?

Omar Harris: So best place to reach me is my website, www.omarlharris.com. If you're on LinkedIn, you can follow me, Omar L Harris. We can connect there. And that's probably the two best places for you to reach me.

Steve Rush: And of course, they can get a copy of Be A J.E.D.I. Leader, Not A Boss, pretty much anywhere. And all your other books are available on Amazon. We'll be make sure all of those are in our show notes as well.

Omar Harris: Wonderful. Thank you, Steve. It's been a great conversation.

Steve Rush: I've loved the conversation. I love the fact that you bring such a lot of experience and diverse thought leadership on the subject, and you are making an amazing difference to the planet. So, I just want to say thank you for the work you do, but also thank you for being part of our community now, Omar, as well.

Omar Harris: I love it, Steve. Hopefully we can talk again soon.

Steve Rush: Yeah, thanks Omar.

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.

Eddy Badrina is the CEO of Eden Green Technology,  he was previously the President and founder of BuzzShift. Eddy shares some amazing entrepreneurial insights and leadership hacks including:

• How to adapt in a changing world, during and post pandemic?
• What does sustainability means for leaders?
• How he keeps innovating in a world that's already innovating at light speed.

• Why we should treat our teams generously to evolve a great culture.

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

Find out more about Eddy below:

Eddy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eddybadrina/

Eddy on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eddybadrina

Eden Green Website: https://www.edengreen.com

Eddy Personal Site: https://www.badrina.com

Full Transcript Below

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 Eddy Badrina. He's a CEO of Eden Green Technology and AgTech company, which is changing the way people grow food and people. He was previously the president and founder of BuzzShift, digital strategy agency. But before we get a chance to speak with Eddy, you got it. It's The Leadership Hacker News

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: With the great resignation, still looming. Employee engagement is key for any successful organization. So, employee engagement is based on trust, integrity, two-way communication, commitment between the organization and its team members. And you will know, as I. Great engagement leads to increase productivity, performance, wellbeing, and can be measured in a number of different ways. And organizations have taken to a number of different methodologies to measure employee engagement. As a leader, and as an employee, what does employee engagement really mean? For me, it's about getting up in the morning, thinking, great, I'm going to work. I'm going to make a difference. And I'm going to make a change. Employee engagement is about understanding individually what that means for each person that works with you and be really clear and sight and energized where that fits into the whole organization and aligning it to its purpose and objectives.

And alignment to that core purpose. and objectives is really important in fulfilling the organization's longer-term goals and purpose and objectives too. It's about being inclusive, fully inclusive and included as a team member with clear goals, trusted and empowered, receiving regular and constructive feedback and feed forward support in your development and innovation and opportunity. So as leaders, how aware and how engaged are you in unlocking your employee engagement? Are you regularly and restlessly, always looking to draw out deeper commitment from your team, finding new ways of working, drawing on their experiences and their backgrounds for innovative ideas, are you helping them make parallels to the organization's purpose by connecting the dots to their own purpose and experiences? And it's sometimes helpful to think of employee engagement about what it's not. Employee engagement cannot be achieved by a mechanistic approach, which tries to extract discretionary an effort by manipulating employees and commitments and their emotions. It's not about the number you get once a quarter, once every six months on a scorecard around a load of measures. And it's not something that you tactically do.

Our employees are hardwired to spot that kind of behavior and when they do spot it such attempts will fall quickly and become vain and create cynical and disillusion behavior across your workforce. So, the leadership hack here. Allow employee engagement to be a behavior, not something that you do. Provide the opportunity for development, inclusion, and innovation, aligned with super leadership years. Your teams will be engaged. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Please get in touch with us if you want us to feature anything on our show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Our special guest on today's show is Eddy Badrina. He's a successful entrepreneur. And now at the CEO of Eden Green Technology, a leading vertical farming business and AgTech company, Eddy, welcome to The Leadership Hacker podcast.

Eddy Badrina: Hey, thanks so much. I'm happy to be here.

Steve Rush: We delighted your here and I'm really intrigued to get underneath how the business is growing and, in more ways, than one, excuse the pun, but also, we'd love to find out a little bit about the background of our guests before we get into that. So perhaps you can tell us where it all started for you?

Eddy Badrina: So, I was born here in the states to Philipino immigrants. And so, I think that's important to note, because I think it really developed my work ethic. My parents started from scratch here in the United States. So, I had a very, very high work ethic, resourcefulness and just this sense that there was no safety net, if you will that others had to rely on. And I tell that to entrepreneurs and folks that, you know, just ask me, like where does the drive come from? And I tell them that, you know, the risk to jumping out on your own or the risk to do something big here in the United States is actually not that risky at all.

If you think about, you know, what's the worst that can happen? And I'll ask folks who are jumping out on their own or starting up businesses, what the worst that can happen? And they say, well, you know, I'd lose my house. I would have to go back; I'd probably have to move in with my parents, right? You think about that, like, oh, man, that sounds devastating. I said, well, stop there because most of the world already does that. That's just their normality, right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Eddy Badrina: And so, when you can put it in that context, and I have family in the Philippines that four generations under one roof. And when you look at it like that, then you understand the the risk that we have and the safety net that we have is actually normal in everyday life for everyone else in the world. So, it puts the element of risk into context. And so, it just gives me confidence, like, hey, what's the worst that can happen? Right. So, that's important to note. Just my background of how I grew up. And then, you know, spent a couple of years in DC. I got my undergrad and masters, and then went up to Washington DC. I was an analyst at the State Department for about four years, both pre and post 9/11. So really got to experience what it was like to work. I didn't know it, but I was right in the middle of history.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: And work under extreme pressure on some really high-profile subjects when I was, you know, at the old age of 24. So that really helped me cut my teeth on what it means to work under pressure. I think a lot of folks think they're pressure, but contextually, it's not that much pressure compared to what other folks around the world are doing in industries and in topics that, you know, one, I think all consuming from a world point of view, but also two, the stakes are just so much higher.

Steve Rush: Very similar to the whole principle, isn't it? That you talked around with regards to risk.

Eddy Badrina: Yes.

Steve Rush: People's context and perspectives are sometimes skewed by comfort, right?

Eddy Badrina: Yes, absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: I think it’s also important thing to do from a leadership perspective is to always gain more context about the world that we're living in. And look at other people doing other remarkable, you know, things in high pressure situations, because it does give you context for the work that you're doing. And in a lot of senses, it gives you a little bit of relief, like, okay, this isn't world crushing what I'm doing here. I can work a full day and go home at night and sleep well knowing that I gave it my all for the day and then wake up tomorrow and start all over again. And nothing's going to fall apart if I don't get that last email done.

Steve Rush: Right.

Eddy Badrina: Right. So, there's a lot of benefits to having that context. So, you know, worked again, four years in the State Department then actually got to work at the White House. I was President Bush Asian American spokesman for about two years. And that was a really, really wonderful time in my career. I couldn't have imagined doing that. And I was 28 at the time. So, I couldn't have imagined that in my wildest dreams coming out of college. Those six years in DC from a leadership perspective really showed me instances of great leadership and instances of bad leadership. And because of all the pressure that was in there working at the highest levels of government. Your strengths and your weaknesses are very amplified in that setting.

So, I got to see some leaders that because of the pressure just came out to me, at least in my eyes, came out golden. And really my respect raised for folks like Colin Powell, who I was able to work under for a bit, Condoleezza Rice, and then both Presidents Bush, senior and W. The things that I learned just the viewing them from a very near point of view, I think have shaped my leadership acumen up until this point, for sure.

Steve Rush: And it's interesting, because most people can only ever really see the exterior perspective of how they operate. And those of you have the opportunity to work very closely, get to see a different dynamic I suspect.

Eddy Badrina: We do. I think for the good leaders it's very cliche and again, you can usually only read this in books or hear it on interviews, but the great leaders are separated from the good leaders in that. They always remember the personal side of things. They look at the people around them, the team around them, and they remember that they're humans. And that they have lives, they've got families, they've got their own things that they're going through on a very personal level. And they take that into context when they're making decisions. Those great leaders are ones that ask about how your family's doing, and they want to know how your family's doing because it helps them as they interact with you, and it helps them coach you and mentor you. And that's what great leaders do, right? So, I think that was probably the key takeaway from my time there, noticing what made great leaders different from just good leaders. It was that personal attention to the humanity of the folks working around them.

Steve Rush: And I remember from the last time that you and I met, that's still really cool for your leadership style today, isn't it? That's something you carried forward and there's still a real core tenant of how you do things.

Eddy Badrina: Yeah, I do. I really try to do that and not just do that on a personal level. I try to do that honestly, on a company level and it’s a part of how I've built my companies. As much as I can advocating for the person. I follow this creed of redemptive framework for building companies. Leaders are sacrificial. It's where employees are not just treated fairly, they're treated generously and it's where culture and society around the company are not just advanced, but they're actually redeemed and restored.

And I had a, you know, an audience member asked just, hey, how, how practically do you apply some of that redemptive framework? And I said, well, when it comes to employees, treating them fairly is giving them, you know, and this is a real practical application. Treating them fairly is looking around at the market and saying, okay, what does maternity leave look like? You know, maybe it's eight weeks, maybe it's, you know, even 12 weeks. Okay, so how do you treat that generously? Right. How do you think about that generously? Not just treat them fairly in relation to the rest of the marketplace. Well, generously would be saying, okay. I know personally that I've got three kids and that my wife was able to bond with them. Three months was really the minimum time.

And she could have gone back to work, but man, if she had only just had that extra two weeks it really made a difference. And I don't know what that three-month mark is, but it just is. And so, to treat employees generously, then my response is, well, gosh, what would it cost the company to give four months of maternity leave, right. Is it really all that much? Is it a difference between 12 and 16 weeks really all that much? And the answer is it is, but it isn’t, right? Can we do that and can that scale?

Steve Rush: And it's also investment, isn't it?

Eddy Badrina: It absolutely is an investment.

Steve Rush: It's an investment in people.

Eddy Badrina: That's what we do. We give people 16 weeks of maternity leave and then we think broader, like, okay, I value adoption and I value my friends that do foster care, okay. So can we provide adoption, same as pregnancy, right. Can we give 16 weeks for leave for adoption? Can we give an amount of time for foster care? Can we give paternity leave? That's more generous? Right. There are just practical things that I don't think a lot of folks, you know, care to think about and expand just a little bit that make a world of difference to the employee, a world of difference to my teammates. And so that practically is how I take the personal care of my employees to a corporate level. And does it, you know, affect margins in operating margins? Yeah, it does. But is it totally defensible to, you know, the world outside, whether it be investors or capital partners? Absolutely.

Steve Rush: And also, I remember in the conversation, you and I had last, that was a real key pivotal moment for you when you once sold BuzzShift, the successful marketing agency that you created and founded, but then bought it back for the same reasons.

Eddy Badrina: Yes, and that's a, you know, that's a really remarkable chapter in my life of taking a company from scratch, bootstrapping it with my business partner and then getting it up to the size that we were able to sell it. It's about six years later. So, we started it in 2010 and then sold it in 2016. And when we sold it, I think everyone was on the same page, the acquiring company and us about vision and mission. But I think really quickly as with a lot of M&As, actually the vast majority of M&As, I think the visions just get sidelined by practical realities. And so, we had one party I would say that was focused on using the agency as Bizdev and the other party, including us, were focused on seeing it as a business unit, a profitable business unit.

And so, when those two diverged at a point in time, I think everyone looked around and said, man, this is not working the way we intended it to, and maybe it would be better if you guys just bought the company back. And so, we did and, you know, I'll just say we sold high and bought low, so that was really good. But the main reason that we bought it back was because we saw our team just kind of falling apart and really going through some painful just merger type scenarios. And I think on both ends, we were just like, this is not the best for the teammates that are in here. And would it be better to go our separate ways and to rebuild these business units.

And so that's what we did and, you know, that was the driving force for me, was the relationships and those people in there that I just didn't want to leave high and dry. And then two years later, we were able to sell it again actually for a second time. And I told my team on the last day, the CEO who's, my business partner stayed on, and I left. Actually, I had been gone. I had taken a step back to run Eden Green, but on the last day, just as an owner I was able to talk to the staff and I just said, hey, here's the reason that I feel confident about the sale the second time is that the whole time that I've been running BuzzShift for the last, you know, call it 10 years or been an owner for 10 years, the point of it was to be a good steward of that, which God had given to me, it wasn't really my company to begin with.

I was just tasked to be a good steward of it. And when I could find someone who could steward it as well or better than I could, then it made sense for me to let that go. And so, I just told them, I think, you know, this acquiring company who is fantastic by the way that they can be a better steward than I can. And so that why I'm selling my portion of the company and, you know, I think it was well received because one, it was authentic. It was actually true. And two, because they knew my stance was consistent with what I was saying at the very end. I think everyone knew from the very beginning that man, I just wanted to grow a company, but do it in such a way that my identity is not tied up in it and more importantly do it in such a way that they can thrive those employees and those teammates can thrive because it's growing.

Steve Rush: And therefore, it becomes a sustainable business that you can confidently leave behind in good order knowing that that's going to continue in that spirit too.

Eddy Badrina: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: Yeah, absolutely. And they've done a fantastic job of stewarding it and helping it grow.

Steve Rush: And you're now on a new journey with Eden Green and Eden Green technology for those that aren't familiar are leading the way really of this whole kind of farming ecosystem that you've managed to create. Tell us a bit about the journey so far.

Eddy Badrina: Absolutely. So, to two years ago I became CEO of Eden Green, and we'll call it greenhouse's infrastructure, but it's a vertical farming inside of a greenhouse, which is remarkable in and of itself and it's a platform that allows us to grow really efficient efficiently and really profitably a large quantity of greens that is safe. It's season agnostic and it's really quite accessible to the consumer. And we're able to do that because of my COO who invented the technology back in 2011. And they have a remarkable personal story as well. That was really the Genesis of Eden Green. They were engineers and they were handing out food and actually candy in South Africa where they were born and raised.

And a kid came up and stuffed his pockets. Five-year-old boy came up and stuffed his pockets and they asked like, hey, why is he stuffing his pockets? Like there's enough food to go around. And the response was that, well, it's actually for his three-year-old sister at home. It's not his day to eat, it's hers. And so, he's bringing the candy back to her and for them that really struck a chord. And both of them said, man, this is not right. Like, we've got to find a way to fix this problem and, you know, kudos to them. They were engineers, construction engineers, and they just turned their minds. Both of them turned their minds to figuring out a way to grow greens really efficiently in an economic and an environmental scenario that is South Africa.

And so, it was very resourceful. They invented it out of their garage actually, and it was very resourceful. And after about six or seven years, they took it to the United States for expansion of capital and commercialization. So probably, you know, a couple years after they took it over, took it here to the states is when I came on board as CEO. And I was just tasked with providing vision. The mission remained the same, which was to change the way that we're farming food and change the way that we're feeding people, but the vision of what it could become and then taking it to market and providing product market fit and taking it to market was something I was tasked with. So, I came on four months before the pandemic hit.

Steve Rush: Exactly, yeah. Timing's everything, isn't it?

Eddy Badrina: Yeah, timings everything, right. And so, a lot of teams and organizations have suffered because of the pandemic. And I think because of the flexibility and the adaptability and the grit of our team. We were able to not just survive it, but really thrive in it. The pandemic hit and we realized, man while capital drying up for now, we can really focus on what we do best, which is the technology. Can we use this time? And obviously with patient investors, can we use this time to up our yields per plant spot, which is kind of the going metric in our industry. It's how much produce can you yield in a year from a square foot? So can we use that time to work on our tech? Work on our operations to get that yield per square foot, to a point where it was not just competitive with organic, but it was actually competitive with conventional produce.

And we're just about there. And so that's really exciting for us. Someone once asked me like, hey, what's the best piece of business advice you learned? And really, the biggest competition that you have is who you were yesterday. And so I tasked my team to say, hey, every day, I just want us to get better than we were yesterday, whether that's the yield going up 0.1, you know, 0.1 pounds or operational efficiency going from a 96% cleanliness rate, is rated by you know, third parties to a 97% or from sales and marketing, let's go from 24 leads a month to 25 leads a month, right, whatever that is, if we can just be better than we were yesterday it really sets the tone for a company, even in the pandemic where we looking for positive improvement day to day.

And I think as we added that up over, you know, the past two years, I think what that's resulted in is the team is very confident about our product. We're very confident about the numbers and the quantitative data that we're putting out to back up what we're saying. And more importantly, we're very confident about the team itself because we're all on the same page and we're all working towards incremental improvement.

Steve Rush: Yeah

Eddy Badrina: So, that's what the pandemic did for us. And, you know, again, I would be nothing without my team. I just had a good team that responded to the call of self-competition every day. And I think it's proven to be just a winning recipe for Eden Green.

Steve Rush: One of the other things I loved about the mission of Eden Green is, it's not just around sustainability from a produce perspective as well as its great eco centricity that comes with it, but also the sustainability about the communities that you're in. So, I know one of the core tenants you have is making sure that if you're going to build a business or a location you do so by employing the neighbors, tell us a little bit about that, how that's disrupting the marketplace you're in?

Eddy Badrina: Yeah, you know, from a broad point of view, the parameters that you set on a business are really the values that you instill in the business. And so, if you say, hey we're going to try to make this as profitable as possible. That takes a business to its logical end. And that logical end is just, eking out every bit of margin that you can out of the business. I'm not going to say whether that's a good or bad thing or healthy or unhealthy, but I'm saying that's not where we're at. One of the parameters that we put in is we want to employ as many people as we can while maintaining a good margin, positive economic margin, because if a business is not profitable, it's not a business, it's a hobby, right?

So that's one of the parameters that we put in and it is really a core value of saying, hey, how can we care for the community around us? Well in practical terms, what that means is, hey, we've got to make the rest of our operations so efficient. The rest of our greenhouse is so efficient that we don't have to rely on robotics. We definitely use AI to assist our growing methods, our nutrient mixes all the way that we handle air and water and the environments inside the greenhouse. But when it comes to planting and monitoring and harvesting. We love the fact that human hands are touching that and are monitoring it and are looking at it. We never want to take the humanity out of the feeding other people.

Steve Rush: Right.

Eddy Badrina: So, because we have that core value and I'll even call it a parameter in place then we had to work. If that's just a part of our margin is up to 30 full-time people in one of our greenhouses, then what do we have to do on a technological and operational end to make sure that fits in healthy business margins. And so that's what we did.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: We're proud to say, hey, we actually want to be in the urban areas. We want to be in and around the communities that we're feeding. One, because it's just smart business. The geography of underdeveloped and under-resourced economic areas are the best and the cheapest places to put these greenhouses. But then also once you put them in there, we have the ability to hire our neighbors.

And so, our neighbors can work in these greenhouses. They're no longer migrant workers. It's full time with benefits living days' wage for these workers in these greenhouses. So, they're able to provide for their families consistently. They're able to partake of the harvests that are coming out of them. So, they're really changing their dietary and health lifestyle, not just for them, but they're or families. And then finally, they're in an industry that's on the cutting, it's one of the top 10 industries of, you know, technological growth for the next, you know, 10 to 20 years. And these folks are right at the base of it. And it's not a dead-end job for them.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: It's actually a career platform. So, because of that core value, all of those benefits can result, but it's only when you have that core value and you stick to it that you have to find ways to make, you know, the company profitable while sticking to that core value. And that's super, super important to me.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and sustainability is just that one keeps echoing in my minds. I'm listening to you speak Eddie around. It's not just about the sustainability of the produce, but the whole ecosystem of that organization and how it fuels itself by getting that core value, right?

Eddy Badrina: Yes.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: You know, when we talk about sustainability, we talk about economic and environmental sustainability because if it's not economically sustainable, then there's no scalability and there's no longevity to the business. So, we're very practical about it. About finding ways to be economically sustainable, but while also adhering to the environmental values that we've set.

Steve Rush: And sustainability's got a lot of press of late with COP26 happening, not so long ago with lots of focus on the environment that we're in and what's happening with global warming or not as a case may around the world. And sustainability is quite cliche at the moment, you hear lots of leaders diving into and using the word sustainability in some senses and having now clear ESG measures in their business, et cetera. What does sustainability mean to you personally when you hear that as a, business leader?

Eddy Badrina: That's a great question. I think for me, sustainability is, you know, if you break down, I took Latin as a kid. So, if you break down the word sustain, it really means to maintain a consistent level of wherever you're at to sustain energy for a period of time or to sustain success for a period of time, you know, really means to provide for long term presence. And so, when I think about sustainability for Eden Green, sustainability for the environment is how can we endure? How can we thrive for a long term without draining and exploiting the resources around us, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: And so, on an environmental level, how do we run a company? So that the operationally, we're not exploiting the environment around us, but we're actually adding to it, we're additive to it. And then from a company level, how do we continue to exist? How do we grow without exploiting the community and society around us? I think in very basic terms, that's what sustainability means to me.

Steve Rush: Good answer. I love it. So, one of the things that I'm keen to explore with you is this whole notion of how you keep innovating? In a world that's already innovating at light speed. Where do you go for that inspiration? Or how does that come about?

Eddy Badrina: I think it just comes about from that thing that I mentioned at the very beginning, which is, how do I get better every day? Right. And innovation I think for me, comes from when I start to sort of level out or the incremental gains in my own personal life are starting to become smaller and smaller. I just take a step back and I've afforded myself to take a step back and say, okay, how do I do things differently? If I had to scrap all this. I'm not saying I would, but if I had to scrap all of this, all the structure and the parameters in my life, how would I do things differently? In order to, you know, achieve a better life. And I really think, that's where my personally, my innovation comes from, but then it just goes to goals, right? Before I can say, you know, get a better life. Well define better, right? So, I think from a corporate, but then also from a personal level.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: You really have to know what you want. And I tell on entrepreneurs that all the time and folks who want to be entrepreneurs, but also just leaders in general, in order to be a great leader, you have to know what you want. And it's actually a part of my personal story moving from BuzzShift to Eden Green. BuzzShift was going really well. It was running quite well, so much so that, you know, I had a bit of time on my hands, but I'm not a maintainer. I'm a builder, I'm a creator. And I knew that as much about myself that I just became really impatient. I became, you know, honestly a little bit unhappy because I was just maintaining and incrementally growing this business, which was great. I think from the outside looking in, I had it all, but from the inside I just wasn't happy. And so, the first thing I had to do was, I had to define, and this required a lot of what I call heart work. Not hard work. It is hard work, but it's heart work. And in this heart work, I really had to define what I wanted. That took a lot longer than I thought it would.

Steve Rush: What was the reason it took so long?

Eddy Badrina: I think it as a type A in engram, I don't know if you're familiar with any engram. I’m a type three which is an achiever. And most of the folks who are really high up in business are achievers, engram achiever status or they maybe, what's called a challenger. We see a goal and we get it, we see a task, we hit it and we just go on to the next one and the next one and the next one, and we get caught up in sort of this task and performance. And at least for me personally, because when I just do that and I feel I have this temporary, like feeling or dopamine hit of success, I sort of lose sight. I can lose sight if I'm not careful of what I'm really about and what I want. And from a day to day to the level, I want to hit those goals, but from a year to year or a legacy type level, that just takes more thought work.

Steve Rush: Right.

Eddy Badrina: And you have to get off that cycle of success after success, after success, and really take a step back and say, okay, what is this success about? I'm climbing this ladder, but is it leaned up against the wrong wall? Right. I think that's why it took so long is because I was just used to getting the daily and weekly successes. And I lost a little bit of vision, my own personal vision because of that. Back to the defining what I want. After about nine months maybe even closer to a year. Three things emerged, you know, out of that time. One is, I had to define very clearly and succinctly and articulate what I wanted to others, but more importantly to myself, right? And those three things were, I wanted to run a hardware/software business. I had been there and done that gotten the M&A t-shirt for professional services.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: Two, I wanted to have an exponential impact on my level of effort. So, for every one unit of effort that I put out, I wanted to see it a 10 to 20 X return in community and culture around me. And then three is I wanted to run a redemptive type of organization. So, the fact that I'm able to articulate to you, those three things so clearly took a lot of work, but I was able to do that. Once I was able to articulate those three things. Then the second thing I did was I passed it before friends and colleagues and family. And she said, hey, tell me if this is coming from a healthy place, or tell me if this is coming from what the Bible calls a selfish ambition and vain conceit.

Steve Rush: Often also known as ego.

Eddy Badrina: It's ego, right. Great book by a guy named Ryan Holiday and he studies the Stoics, but he talks about the ego is the enemy, but two, I had to, you know, run it through a filter of friends and family who were going to be brutally honest with me. And that's another thing that most entrepreneurs don't have besides that they can't articulate clearly what they want. And then two, they don't have the courage or the wherewithal, or even the friends around them to say, hey, is this a healthy thing for me? And then for friends, to be honest enough with them and say, yeah, it's healthy, or no, you are being very, very arrogant, and egotistical. You should not pursue that. I articulated it, passed it to friends and family. And then the third piece that did. I let it go, and I knew that if that was supposed to happen and my friends and family approved of it. I just had to let go of striving so hard for it. And I worked towards it, but I also wanted to be diligent and excellent in my work at BuzzShift and to the team there. And so, I just had to release that and be mindful and hopeful that it would come back to me if that what's supposed to happen. And indeed, it did.

Steve Rush: And it's often the case, isn't it? When you strive so hard for something you don't necessarily see it or experience it, but when you do let go, you are open to natural occurring, coincidences, opportunity, higher spirit, call it what you will.

Eddy Badrina: Yeah.

Steve Rush: But that then find you in another way, right?

Eddy Badrina: Some people call it serendipity. I call it providence, right?

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: That was probably the biggest thing of it all. I was just talking to my wife the other day about what I've been learning over the past couple of years. And I think the loss of control has been the biggest learning for me, you know, the pandemic obviously heightened it. But really the core issue is one that everyone goes through at some point in their life of you realize even over your own body, you don't have that much control.

Steve Rush: That's very true,

Eddy Badrina: Right.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: Pandemic prime example, right. You can mask up or you can take the vaccine as much as you can, but the reality is you might still get sick and that's totally out of your control. And it's so frustrating for people. We see it right now. It's so frustrating for people who don't accept that they can't control everything.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: And that comes out in terms of the way it manifests. Mostly it manifests itself in terms of fear, and sort of a protective nature. But when you can understand and except for me, especially when I can stand and accept that I don't have control, it really frees me up. I don't even have control over, like I said, over that, which I articulated and was able to, you know, confirm with my friends and family. Like, this is a really good thing that's on your heart and you need to go after it. Even as I go after it, I realize I don't have a lot of control over the external factors.

Steve Rush: Very true. Wise words. I'm going to turn the table to a little bit now, Eddie.

Eddy Badrina: Yeah.

Steve Rush: And we are going to flip the conversation a little bit to focus on taking all of your learnings, which are in abundance. And we've had bucketloads of hacks already, but I'm going to try and distill them down as best we can to your top three leadership hacks. What would they be?

Eddy Badrina: Man, I think you would go back to top leadership hack one, know what you want, know yourself, right? That takes a lot of work. It's not a hack in the sense that you can get to it quickly but knowing yourself self and being brutally honest with yourself about your strength and your weaknesses is number one. Because when you know that you'll immediately hire for your weaknesses, right?

Steve Rush: Definitely.

Eddy Badrina: And that's a good goal to have, you know, the biggest jump for a lot of leaders and entrepreneurs is hiring that next person. Hiring the first person in your company, because that's a very real equation of I'm going to take profits out of my own pocket as a one-man band, and I'm going to give some of it to someone to short up my weaknesses. That's a crazy equation, but the equation actually works out in your favor if you're willing to do it. I would say the second big hack is have a circle of advisors who can be honest with you. A lot of leaders have yes, men around them and they'll just say yes to whatever. Is this a good idea? Oh yeah, sure it is, go.

Find that person that you can say, hey, is this a good idea? And they will say, no, that is a horrible idea. You are off your rocker, right? Or that is not healthy for you. For leaders and just for people in general, I try to get people away from saying right and wrong, and I get people more into the mindset of healthy versus unhealthy. And that changes your posture towards letting other people in, because if you can let other people in and say, hey, is this right or wrong? It's sort of, it can be offensive to you, but if you can say, hey, is this healthy for me? Or is this unhealthy for me? One that connotes that they know a level of health about yourself and two that they're able to say in such a way that is for your benefit. Yeah, that's not really healthy for you. I'd probably go in a different direction.

Steve Rush: I love that.

Eddy Badrina: And then yeah, I'd say those are the top two and then read a lot, read a ton.

Steve Rush: What would be your hack number three?

Eddy Badrina: Read, read all the time.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: And allow yourself the time and the space to read. So, I actually have a blog post on my own personal blog. I don't have many blog posts on there, but I have a blog post on there just on books and on how I read, when I read, what I read. And that for a number of folks have gotten back to me and said, man, that was a really, really, really useful framework to go by in terms of reading.

Steve Rush: Next part of the show we call Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something hasn't worked out as planned, and yet you've managed to use it as a force of good. What will be your Hack to Attack?

Eddy Badrina: I think the Hack to Attack has actually been the reading piece. I used read a lot of social and then thought I was reading the right types of social media or the right types of blog posts. And I was just doing it really inefficiently. And I think over the course of a number of years, I've really been able to dial in for me at least what has been a good intake of info information, why I take the information in, and then and then really, you know, the modes of intake, and it's helped me to focus more. And it's helped me to be more mindful and thoughtful about how I lead.

Steve Rush: Awesome. And it's an interesting notion actually, because many top execs that I liaise with, worth work, coach, one of the core foundations is often just consume knowledge as much knowledge as you can, because knowledge is power.

Eddy Badrina: Yeah, but it's also the type of knowledge, right?

Steve Rush: Right.

Eddy Badrina: Long form books are the result of long form thinking.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: And as a leader, that's what you're tasked to do. You are tasked to think critically. People don't get paid the big bucks or the mediocre bucks in my case to just fire off emails, because anyone can do that. The good leaders, the great leaders are ones who have to think through five emails in a day, right? And think really, really critically before they hit send. And that type of deep thinking is critical to good leadership. And you can't do that unless you're intaking deep knowledge and deep knowledge comes from books.

Steve Rush: Wise words. The last thing we wanted on the show, Eddie is to give you a chance of time travel now. So, you're going to be at a bump into you at 21 and give yourself some advice. What do you think it might be?

Eddy Badrina: Oh man. I would tell my 21-year-old self, keep your eye on the prize and the prize is relationships.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: I try to think with the end in mind as do most good leaders. And when you think about the end in mind, the end-end for me is when I die and when I die and they're reading my obituary, they're reading the homily, you know, in the church, they're reading my tomb, my tombstone. I think it would be a total failure if they ever mentioned the words, Eden Green or BuzzShift. That would be a failure in my life if the companies actually came up in my obituary. What a waste if your corporate success is the thing that people remember about you, what I want them to remember is, he loved people, he loved his wife well, he loved his kids well, he loved his friends well, he was a good friend and honest and a faithful friend. He loved others, even folks that he didn't know, he was generous. He was winsome. He spoke truth in love. He was bold, right? He was adventurous. That's the stuff I want people to remember me by and more importantly, that's the legacy that I want to leave with my kids and the folk around me. And so, as you think about generational legacy, you think about legacy at the end of your life. None of that involves the names of my businesses necessarily. Those are just means to an end.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Eddy Badrina: It all involves the relationships that I pursue all along the way. So, beginning the end in mind, I would tell my 21-year-old self to focus on the relationships.

Steve Rush: Great advice too. So, Eddie, how can we make sure our listeners from all over the world are able to tap into your blog and the work you do, and to find that a little bit more about Eden Green Technology?

Eddy Badrina: Sure. So edengreen.com is the best way to find out. We've got a treasure trove of information just about hydroponics and about what we do, about the industry, edengreen.com and then on the socials, it's all Eden Green Tech. In terms of my personal it's badrina.com, it's my last name, badrina.com. And either one of those have ways to get ahold of me if they really want to ask me questions.

Steve Rush: And we'll also make sure those links are in our show notes. So, folk can head straight over once they finish listening to this.

Eddy Badrina: Absolutely.

Steve Rush: Eddie, thank you, my friend, it's been a great opportunity to talk to you and have you on the show. And I'm really excited to see the trajectory that Eden Green on and in future. So, congratulations and thank you for being on our community here at The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Eddy Badrina: It's been my pleasure, my pleasure. Such a great way to have a part of my day to talk to you and to be able to share some of this.

Eddy Badrina: Thanks, Eddie.

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 there: @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.

Punit Dhillon is the chairman and CEO of Sky Bioscience. He's an entrepreneur, keen athlete, an author of the book, Catapult: How to Think Like a Corporate Athlete to Strengthen Your Resilience. Learn about how Punit’s athletic approach to live has helped catapult his business including:

• Growing up as an athlete he noticed the parallels in corporate life,
• The components of a corporate athlete.
• What mindset has to do with growth as a leader?
• How to live by true accountability and be purpose driven.

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

Find out more about Punit below:

Punit on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/punit-dhillon/

Punit on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/PunitDhillon

Punit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/punitdhillon/

Sky Bioscience: https://skyebioscience.com

Catapult (Book) https://punitdhillon.com/book/

Full Transcript Below

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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

Our special guest on today's show is Punit Dhillon. He's chairman and CEO of Sky Bioscience, and also author of Catapult. But before we get a chance to speak with Punit, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: It's easy to get caught up in the great resignation craze of quitting. Its human nature that makes us see where millions of people are doing something we follow along with that herd mentality that is millions of years old, and it's quite understandable after almost two years of enduring a pandemic and seeing loved ones, get sick and pass away. It changes our outlook on life. And that realization that life is actually quite short. We're all going to go through a collective thinking what we should do with the rest of our lives, finding a new job with purpose. Meaning more money is alluring, especially when you're stuck in a going nowhere role with a boss who micromanages your every move. Here's the leadership hack.

Before you follow the crowd and make the big leap of going after a new shiny job, take the time to think deeply about why you're doing this in the first place. There's an overwhelming narrative when it comes to searching for a new job and its deep within you, the default is it's usually your boss and often is by the way. And you often will be giving yourself some internal dialogue that it sounds like it's their fault. You've got to move on. You've got to get away. Sometimes this is the case, but actually it could be you. It's really convenient to blame everyone else, but there may be other issues involved as well. So consider this. If you're just running away from a problem, when you secure a new role, will a problem repeat itself? Will you be happy? Will you still feel dissatisfied? Most of us are too self-critical. We dwell with that short come are, our inner coach gives us negative thoughts that play around in our heads. And while we're all grown up adults, we still carry around the burden of past trauma, failures, insecurities.

And if we're fortunate enough for learnings, there is the desperate hope that by quitting we'll magically become a new and different person. And with a new job, everything will fall neatly into place. The new environment will be our cure and make us happy. So while it may be an answer, it may not be. Switching jobs may not make the difference at all. You might end up just as miserable and thinking and behaving the same way. It's similar to when you travel or you move. That initial feeling of euphoria being in a new world or a new house can be really alluring and great, as time goes by it becomes normal. And why? We are the same person. As time goes by you realize the same person with the same challenges is now just in a different location.

So my hat to you is think before you make that great resignation greater, because your opportunity could be just under your nose if you looked hard enough for it. We love sharing stories that you bring to our attention, so please keep doing so. That's been The Leadership Hacker News, let's get into the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Joining me today is Punit Dhillon. He's the chairman and CEO of Sky Bioscience. He's an entrepreneur, keen athlete, an author of the book, Catapult: How to Think Like a Corporate Athlete to Strengthen Your Resilience. Punit, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Punit Dhillon: Thank you so much for having me, Steve, it's a pleasure

Steve Rush: Looking forward to getting into your story and was particularly inspired about the stories that you shared when we first met. So perhaps for those that have not been familiar with your work or your company, just give us a little bit of your back story?

Punit Dhillon: Yeah, basically been an athlete growing up, but then as of the last 20 years been focused on the life science space. So happy and very lucky to be regarded as an entrepreneur in that area in terms of what the different work that we've done. I've been developing a couple different technologies in my last 20 years. My most recent company that I was involved with was working on a cancer immunotherapy drug and presently we're working on a novel class of molecules for an ophthalmology application or various ophthalmology applications. So I think by working in the life science industry, it's been very rewarding and I've had a wonderful set of teams that have been a part of and lucky to be continuing to work with some of them over the last two decades. So it's been quite a pleasure.

Steve Rush: Yeah, so if we peel that back a little bit. There are a couple of things in your early life that set you on your journey, if you like into becoming an athlete and indeed how that then transferred into your ways of working at business. Tell us a little bit about that?

Punit Dhillon: Yeah, so the discipline of growing up as an athlete really has stuck with me and it care into my professional career. And that's what I kind of have written about, but I started as a competitive swimmer and then moved into rowing at university. And then after that, I had basically an opportunity to move to the U.S. where I started in life science industry. Actually didn't do anything competitive at that point. I was still working out regularly, but then I became pretty comfortable as a runner and sort of participating in different like half marathons and marathons. And in my early thirties, or like, as I was turning 30, I kind of had a bucket list thing that I wanted to accomplish.

And there was doing an Ironman. And I basically got hooked on triathlon. So I've been competing in triathlons over the last 10 years on and off. And I still enjoy endurance sports. So essentially that has been a very interesting parallel for me. That relates really well to the professional work. We were talking about this earlier, leaning into what it takes to complete an ironman or any triathlon for that matter, or even just endurance training itself. There has a real connection in terms of the component of drive. There is mental aptitude involved. I think it's really helped me in terms of being able to process a lot and it's really shaped my approach to life and the approach I take into work and in a border sense.

Steve Rush: And we're going to dive into this and we're going to have a look at some of those parallels in a little while, but for again, those who have not bumped into Sky Bioscience. Tell us a little bit about the current areas of work and how that's evolving for you?

Punit Dhillon: Yeah, it's very exciting. I had the opportunity of seeing what evolved in the cancer immunotherapy space. I started my last company in 2010. Well actually it was formed in 2011, but kind the business plan was being written in 2010. And when I began that company there was only one kind of new drug launched in the current era of cancer immunotherapy. So over the last decade really saw what has transpired in terms of anyone that is diagnosed with cancer. They have a lot more options. There is a lot of success in terms of these immunotherapies being highly personalized to have that response that patients are looking for. In the current company I’m working in. It earlier stage, but it's similarly tackling a very interesting opportunity where the endocannabinoid system, which is a network of receptors is linked to a whole range of different diseases from kind of neurological disorders to central nervous system disorders.

And then there's also, you know, this link to the ophthalmology applications. So we've tried to kind of narrow in the field here, see if we can change the biology in the eye by utilizing this unique mechanism that's at play with these different receptors. And we're developing our initial drug for glaucoma. And what we've been able to demonstrate to date is that it's showing a really good activity biologically. And were about to start our first clinical trial. So this now is about recapitulating the data that we've seen to date in animals, in humans. And we were quite excited about that. That I think for the entire industry in terms of the area that we're in, really lays the bedrock for a lot more opportunity in terms of utilizing this side of human biology.

Steve Rush: It's such a fascinating subject, as you're talking it through, I can see that actually what you're doing is really groundbreaking. It's fundamentally shifting the outcomes that people can expect to receive, right?

Punit Dhillon: Absolutely, and that's the fascinating thing about life sciences. I mean, there's one frustrating side of it that it takes a long time to develop drugs, and there's quite a process. It's not like you, you know, you come up with an application and all of a sudden you utilize. Technology companies are notorious for being able to demonstrate kind of proof of concept to something you're holding in your hand relatively quickly. In life sciences there's definitely a longer lead time. However, there's certain science, you know, that's underway today that is truly groundbreaking and necessary. You know, unfortunately what's happening in ophthalmology applications, patients develop tolerance to some of the existing drugs, they become ineffective. So there is a need for having disease management or you know, change to be available for these patients or options to be available for these patients. So this is what I think we accomplish with the technology that we're developing right now. And then on the business side of the equation, it's also exciting because Big Pharma who will ultimately be where, you know, we will try to exit the last company I was involved with. We had an opportunity to partner with Merck, similarly Big Pharma has the need to have new intellectual property and new drugs.

Steve Rush: As a serial entrepreneur in such a really niche area of business, how do you just keep innovating? Where did these ideas come from?

Punit Dhillon: So there's a huge amount of patience from the teams that we're working with. I think the ideas are always there. There's so much inspiration around us, right. In my particular case, I feel like I have this very good creative bug about me, but then it's also balancing that with the reality check, you know, you have the important people around you that can make it pragmatic in terms of the way that things can be developed. So in life sciences, there's no sort shortage. I think of similar types of creativity and opportunity that we can explore. It's just trying to be pragmatic about the resources in order to deploy it. I've been in the industry now for 20 years, I actually started on the healthcare fund side.

I worked on a venture capital fund and then moved into the operational side and been in operational roles for the last 20 years. But the great thing we're seeing today, I mean, compared to 10 years ago, is the intersection of these different industries now. And I even touch on this in Catapult. My last chapter is called like Mavericks and, and it's really a call to action, there's very important themes that are still underway today, macro level. You can take that and apply that in any industry. I see intersections between AI and life science happening right in front of us in terms of opportunities we're looking at. We see opportunities of deep learning, you know, being applied on being able to rapidly scale up drugs.

You look at what happened with the COVID 19 vaccines, you know, they were able to see sequence the virus and then come up with several solutions and rapidly move them through development. And you saw entire industries kind of come together in order to make it happen from the manufacturing that's necessary to the science, to the scale up, to the distribution. You know, everyone was talking about, you know, taking five years before you can get a vaccine and we saw it unfold in front of us within a year. That's quite impressive.

Steve Rush: I would imagine that also gives you the permission as an organization to think that you can scale quicker than you may have done in the past. So having had that experience around you, it unlocks different thinking as well, doesn't it?

Punit Dhillon: Absolutely, yeah. I benefited from coming from the corporate finance side and it's a very regulated industry, life sciences, but understanding operations, understanding kind of the governance side, and then these international components, business building, licensing, there's so many moving parts. So I've really enjoyed as much as there's a component of life sciences that sometimes sounds like it's like, oh, it moves like molasses, you're actually running super-fast. It may not always seem fast on the outside looking in but inside it's been amazing to see that growth. And there's always an inflection in required in early stage companies, early stage industries. And we're in that right now. I mean, I'm working in an area that is truly kind of a novel area. There's not many companies in this space. There's a limited amount of data, but there's an impressive set of data as well. And there's been a few companies that have already proven, you know, how this is an effective development space. So, I expect there to be like any industry, like there's going to be literally a hockey stick style growth that happens eventually once you prove that efficacy.

Steve Rush: Yeah, fascinating stuff I will watch with absolute closeness.

Punit Dhillon: Thank you.

Steve Rush: You wrote the book Catapult, which really you talk around is that parallels earlier from your training in resilience as an athlete and the application at work, what was the moment that you thought, right. I've got something here that I could share with others. I'm going to write it down?

Punit Dhillon: Well, didn't happen until after I wrote, like what a hundred thousand words

Steve Rush: For the case, right?

Punit Dhillon: I didn't originally plan to share this outside. This was a function of what happened. What we all went through in 2020, right? The pandemic, you know, forced us to be in indoors and slow down and take stock of kind of our lives, right? So there was a definitely a component of me having that opportunity. And then the other side of it, I was also hitting a personal milestone. I've always wanted to kind of sit down and write down what I believe in, in terms of my own principles of what have I learned over the last 20 years and what would I have told myself if I had the opportunity, tell myself 20 years earlier, what, you know, what would be the way to do it?

I talk about this sometimes with my wife and in the last 10 years, I've been living in San Diego. I've only appreciated the lifestyle in San Diego brings, really in the last 5 to 10 years. And maybe it's partially because as the kids are older and so forth, but the other aspect of it, reality has been that, you know, I didn't take advantage of that beautiful lifestyle that Southern California brings in the early part of my career. I was very focused on working hard, you know, working those long hours and putting in that time. And as you get to a certain, you know, stage in your life, you're able to kind of look past a lot of those type of things and be a bit more reflective of how to be not only efficient, but at the same time more purpose driven in terms of how these other aspects impact our lives. So Catapult was an opportunity to do that. In one respect, I feel very blessed with the opportunities of working with several different people. Having the chance of building these different companies and the technologies, and truly it's been rewarding because you're seeing, you know, you're seeing that these drugs actually save people's lives. I have to pinch myself in terms of the opportunities that we had. So that was an opportunity in a period where I was just really focused on saying, well, I don't know if I'm going to be able to have that same definition of success in the next phase of my life. You know, there's a certain trajectory that comes with going into your forties.

Steve Rush: Right.

Punit Dhillon: A different trajectory afterwards and it's nothing to do with age. There's an author, David Brooks, he kind of talks about it in two mountains. In terms of the first mountain of your life. It's basically a checklist, right? You have to finish your school and you maybe do higher degree. And then you established your career and then you want to start a family and stabilize your life with the things that are necessary, the food, shelter type of equation. Like the basic needs, Maslow's hierarchy.

Steve Rush: Right.

Punit Dhillon: And then once those things are in place, then you're really moving on to your second mountain and your second mountain ends up being a lot more about self-fulfillment. And that's the thing I think that I was wrestling with as an individual. I believe I've had a wonderful opportunity in this first segment of my life, but how do I define that same success going forward for myself and you know, whatever quote unquote, what does that trajectory look like? It may not mean that it's like, you know, it's not the same definitions that were very prescriptive, I guess, in the first 20 years.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I like it. And also, I guess, whilst it's not about age.

Punit Dhillon: Yeah.

Steve Rush: It is definitely about experience though, isn't it? So, you know, some people get over that first mountain really quick.

Punit Dhillon: Yeah.

Steve Rush: Some take much longer to get over it, but I think all of us can recognize that at some point we go, okay, where is this all heading? And in order for us to really tap into that, that's where that corporate athlete can really help us. So you talk about this corporate athlete with having some core foundations, some themes behaviors that are associated with them. I wonder if you to share those with us?

Punit Dhillon: So as a corporate athlete, it's really this aspect that strengthening resilience can help you attain the success that you want to achieve. So I believe there's so many similarities in behavior and training in approach that both the athlete and call it a corporate athlete face to really realize their dream and then lead to whatever breakthrough or, you know, sometimes it's an innovative breakthrough, sometimes it's just a personal breakthrough and that's really the underlying premise of the book. And I feel I use this word blessed a lot, but I have to kind of state it because I wouldn't take kind of re redefine anything or redesign any component of what my experience has been. I was raised in India. I grew up in, in East Vancouver in Canada, and then had an opportunity to move to the U.S., to work in a career and had the opportunity to also work with companies that not only were incredibly successful, but they also had their own challenges along the way.

Probably been at the brink of like insolvency. Working in startups half a dozen times in my career, which is interesting in itself. So all of those aspects I think have a definition of resilience. I believe that I'm kind of wired to go through the hard stuff in order to experience the positives and the benefit out of it. I don't know how often your wife's making you train for the iron man, but, you know, when you go about training, you know, like a bike a bike session. You usually want to work that hill and do what's required to get up a steep mountain climb or whatever. And then the reward is usually coming down fast or it's the fun part of the session. So I enjoy that climb because I like enjoying the satisfaction of the feeling on the other side of it.

Steve Rush: That's interesting.

Punit Dhillon: And a lot of people just don't take enough stock or notice of that important part of that climb.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Punit Dhillon: In anything.

Steve Rush: She absolutely loves climbing hills but I absolutely hate it and we have different perspectives of it. So, you know, she gets this real rush.

Punit Dhillon: Yeah, and we all hate it.

Steve Rush: Yeah, she gets this rush of energy. It gets her up there. I do the opposite. I have the rush of energy of, I got to hold it in and get to the top of the climb. And then boy, I can fly down the hill, the other side.

Punit Dhillon: Yeah.

Steve Rush: And therefore mindset has got a massive part to play in this too, isn't it?

Punit Dhillon: A hundred percent.

Steve Rush: Because people will come from it from different perspectives.

Punit Dylan: That's the thing. Whenever anybody gives me a challenge, I'm in the happy place. Like that is something that I've lucked out in terms of being able to really take advantage of seeing these difficult situations and having a half glass, half empty type of attitude about anything. So it's not always pretty, but I do really well in that situation. And partially what I do well in is visualizing what that outcome looks like on the other end.

Steve Rush: Right.

Punit Dhillon: I already am picturing what the success looks like at the other end of that. And I try to kind of recapitulate that to the best of my ability on the completion. So yeah, this book was about encapsulating, a lot of that. And I believe as an athletes, they go through a lot of that. They go through visualization techniques, they go through a lot of rigorous training. They go through a lot of pain in order to reap the rewards and have the discipline then to compete at the world stage. So I haven't had the same, you know, same level of success being able to compete at the world stage, but I've also benefited from training at a pretty elite level throughout my career. So I've tried to apply those things into day to day in terms of even working with my team.

Steve Rush: So if you think of the component parts of being a corporate athlete, you've got things like mental aptitude, holding yourself accountable to the things you commit to, making sure that you've got a real strong regime of training that is not just regular training, but its endurance, which means it gets stronger and deeper. And then of course you have this focus drive element that you call out in your book. Of those kind of four things, is there one that's more important than the other, or do you think they're all interrelated?

Punit Dhillon: I believe they're all interrelated and each one of them stands, you know, capable of being on its own. You just have to recognize that there are a big part of it. I mean, I've looked at this trapezium situation many ways, and I purposely designed it in a way that it has an openness to it. So there's no closure to it. So a big part of it is the fact that, by defining your purpose or defining you’re, like kind of understanding of what's that engine in that's in inside of you, and what's leading you that is a big part of the source of motivation and the source of determination. So if we were to prioritize, that is a very important part of it. The other components like accountability, the physical capacity, the emotional intelligence and the mental capacity, those are all helping really support that and really achieve that impact that you're looking for.

Now that this book has had a bit of time to breathe, even kind of reflecting on it further is like, is my message coming across too harsh in terms of, does everyone have to make some sort of significant impact or dent on the planet? I don't think that has to be the case. It has to be kind of your own personal definition of what that dent is. So sometimes people get lost and trying to make a connection with whatever their purpose has to be something that's, you know, too lofty or not communicating enough to themselves in terms of what is maybe right in front of them. I really am challenging people to go and spend the time to understand your purpose and define what that means for yourself. And don't try to compare yourself to, you know, Oprah Winfrey's purpose or whoever else, you know, everyone has a different definition of that. And in order to help you achieve second mountain, it's the underlying, you know, these underlying components.

Punit Dhillon: I wonder how many people who don't end up feeling like they've had this impact on life, get stuck because they perceive the journey to be too big. The second mountain is too big. Rather than actually looking at themselves internally versus looking at external events happening around them.

Steve Rush: Yeah, absolutely. That's why I think it's a really important question you asked about what are these things or most important because everyone has to take a very holistic approach and that why this joy component that's emphasized in this book is another important lens to that equation. This proverbial balance in life doesn't exist for anyone. Most often we're working towards our professional goals and we're working towards our personal goals and we're working towards our individual goals. So finding joy in work, in yourself and in life is part of the necessary thing that helps you continue to have that nuclear engine inside of you as well, that keeps spinning so that you have that source of motivation. Joy is a hundred percent linked, I believe, to giving somebody that intrinsic motivation to actually do what they ultimately want to do.

Steve Rush: I like that. There's so many people you bump into who hate getting up in the morning, going to work.

Punit Dhillon: Yeah.

Steve Rush: They go around in these routines, they get stuck almost. And it's because they can't find joy, because joy is emotionally and locks, everything else, right?

Punit Dhillon: Yeah, and I hate like when people get stuck, trying to define what other people's routines and other people's definitions for themselves. I guess the health industry does this really well. Everyone's always hawking the next plan and whatever the next diet regime or, you know, or workout regime or whatever. So people try to implement their model onto someone else. And I tried to avoid this in this book because I was trying to be very clear that these are my principles that I believe that help. And what it is? It's giving you a framework, but please spend the time to identify your own set of principles that work for you. And that this takes time and effort, you know, how often are people sitting down and writing down what their principles are.

But the point that you raise is really important. We don't have to follow, you know, anyone else's routine, if it brings you joy to wake up at nine o'clock and start your day with, you know, a quant rather than starting your day with a, you know, 30 minute run, then I don't see anything wrong with that. You got to really navigate for yourself what it may means to get to wherever you're going in terms of your motivation, of course, underlying that there are still things like you have to take good care of your health, and you have to take good care of your mental health and being continuing to be accountable to yourself to be a high performer. But the definition of high performance is different for everyone. And it doesn't need to be like what first images that come to mind when we say the words high performing. I think that's what's unfortunately, you know, gets very frustrating for people and then people lose that joy and that energy that is pretty intrinsic in everyone.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it's a hundred percent. And for anybody listening to this now who are thinking, I can never run an ironman, or I never perform in an ironman or run a marathon or take up a new sport. That is absolutely just a mindset. Now, respectfully, there are also some physical things that might be going on around them, but it doesn't have to equally be an ironman. It could just be a personal best in something. It could be starting something new, it could be leading a different team, getting different results. So it's absolutely about personalizing some of those principles and behaviors. Isn't it?

Punit Dylan: Absolutely, 100%. I think that philosophy of that mindset is where we all need to continue to focus on. I'm very happy that, you know, like my nine year old, you talk to her any day and she'll always quote somewhere along the line about having a growth mindset. And I don't know where she picked it up, obviously she's got some strong influences around her, but it reminds me to always also have that growth mindset.

Steve Rush: It does, yeah.

Punit Dhillon: We sometimes get caught up with all of the other noise in our lives and we forget the simple things like that. And sometimes just starting something different, maybe try your routine different or work with your team differently.

Steve Rush: So our folks listen to this will be familiar that this is where we start to hack into your leadership brain, start to get all of those experiences and shortlist them into your top three leadership hacks. What would they be?

Punit Dhillon: My top three leadership hacks? Okay. Well, I definitely use the lists. I talk about that. So that is a big part of my daily routine is checklist. So I'm a big list person. I use a top three, I use a longer list of 10 things, but every day there's three things that have to get done and it's regarded as a top three, otherwise, you know, I do use lists often. Number two has been really being myself. I find that that's a constant reminder in terms of everyone that you're around is just to be yourself. And that's big part of the first part of this book is called true accountability and kind of try to define a formula around that. And the third has been try to enjoy Friday nights.

As long as I can think, you know, I try to have a lime margarita or something like that, or, you know, just remind myself that there's you know, a lot to be thankful for, you have to find joy and sometimes really make room for it. In the book, I talk about different routines so people can, kind of dive into that, but sometimes it's a Sunday on Sunday nights and other times margarita on Friday nights.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and some reward too.

Punit Dhillon: Oh, yeah, right.

Steve Rush: For all of the disciplines and that you apply in your life and work, we all still need that reward don't we?

Punit Dhillon: Yeah, and by the way, there's the obvious ones that I have to wake up in the morning and start my day with working out. So I guess one of the biggest leadership hacks that I can emphasize is that I really take pride in owning the morning. So if you get the morning, right, it really helps you set yourself up for success the rest of the day. So by really taking the time to own that morning and on a organize yourself, and that means, you know, starting the time that allows you to do that, it really helps you be successful throughout the day without being feeling flustered the rest of the time.

Steve Rush: Great advice. Next part of the show, we call it Hack to Attack. So this is typically where something hasn't worked out well, but as a result, we've learned from it, and it's now a force of good in what we do. So what would be your Hack to Attack?

Punit Dhillon: Lack of planning. There's definitely been a couple situations in my career where not having a plan has basically been, like a plan to fail. When we're developing different drugs. And there's quite an extent a process involved and most often clinical trials is kind of your measurement point along the way. So there's different stage gate decisions that lead to a clinical trial, but once a clinical trial is underway. I think many people get kind of caught up, for different companies have get caught up with just getting to the on inflection point and not properly planning for the success of ensuring that the trial can go smoothly. Sometimes that's linked to enrollment and sometimes it's linked to the appropriate resources. And I've been through a situation where both of those were not properly sought after, in terms of the resources and the bandwidth that was required in order for us to really succeed in the time that was given.

So what it ended up leading to was over budget, not being able to complete the trial and the amount of time that we've had had allocated. And we didn't get to our end goal in time, a very basic example, but it's a, very important one in our industry.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Punit Dhillon: Because I think sometimes entrepreneurs or just teams can get caught up with just feeling like, okay, we just got to get there. And once we start that it'll happen, but it's not anything like that. You're always having to think way past that. Talk about this, about thinking past the finish line. This is a very important takeaway for this, is that in, in anything that you're doing, sometimes your mind is only set on achieving that goal that you had set and it could be lofty or important or whatever it is, but it's most often getting to that is usually not the problem it's actually following through and finishing whatever, you know, is required after that. And so thinking past the finish line is a critical one. And in my case in that clinical trial, we ended up getting to the end result, but it wasn't pretty in terms of getting there. We almost ran out money as a company. It took too long. The number of patients that we had to enroll in the study had to get larger. And then we had to go to more sites around the world. And a lot of those things could have been avoided earlier on.

Steve Rush: It's an old cliché, but the whole failed to plan, plan to fail philosophy, isn’t it? Exactly right.

Punit Dhillon: Yeah.

Steve Rush: So last part of the show we get to give you a chance to do try and travel, bump back into yourself at 21 and give yourself some advice. What would it be?

Punit Dhillon:  I think my advice to myself, would've been to take more time soaking it in. In terms of the different experiences. Oftentimes we work with some really wonderful people and we fail to kind of recognize that in the moment. And I think each one of the interactions that we have in our careers is super critical in terms of building those experiences. So just enjoying those moments and treating every single interaction. Sometimes it's with your boss, sometimes it's with your team as great opportunities for learning. That would be my big takeaway and part of that, I wish I spent a bit more time writing about those experiences sometimes like you're so in the midst of doing these transactions, like I pulled All-nighters and I've done these complex deals, raising capital for companies and licensing deals and we're talking like mega million deals. And I wish that I had taken the time to kind of journal around some of those experiences because.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it would be another couple of books written.

Punit Dhillon: It's not even about that, but just in terms of appreciating, like what you get out of those things.

Steve Rush: Exactly.

Punit Dhillon: You're dealing with all of these complex, you know, legal terms and all of these things that are great learning experiences, but it's all in our head now. Like, you know, I can recall it vividly in terms of the pain points that we've experienced in those things. But I just wish that I had taken more time to really appreciate those moments because they went very rapidly.

Steve Rush: And that is thinking past the finish line, right?

Punit Dhillon: Yeah. What I've learned from my boss is a responsibility that I expect, like my team to be able to share with their teams and so forth. So I think it's like a cycle that continues to evolve, but it's an important one because that's how innovation happens.

Steve Rush: It certainly does. It certainly does. So for folks, listen to this, who'd like to get a copy of Catapult. Would love to learn more about you, the work that Sky Bioscience are doing, where's the best place for us to send them?

Punit Dhillon: Yeah, you can send them to my website and its punitdhillon.com and there are several tabs on the website that can lead you to the book as well as contacting me if you have any questions. I would be happy to respond.

Steve Rush: Brilliant. And we'll make sure they're in the show notes as well.

Punit Dhillon: Thank you so much, Steve.

Steve Rush: So thanks for ever so much for being on the show, Punit, and thank you for sharing some stories and we very much look forward to having you a part of our network.

Punit Dhillon: Thank you so much, Steve.

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 there: @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.

Colin Hunter is the author of Be More Wrong,  he’s a mentor, entrepreneur and coach and the CEO of Potential Squared. Colin shares an intimate journey of how his career developed and led to the work he does now. We can learn some great lessons in this weeks’ show including:

• Why being more wrong helps us unlock great learning.
• How creating “virtual playgrounds” can provide the perfect environment for development.
• Colin’s three enablers of leadership: Purpose/Identity & Presence.
• A new take on leaderships styles.

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

Find out more about Colin below:

Colin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colinhunter

Colin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bemorewrong

Potential Squared Website: https://www.potential2.com

Be More Wrong (Book) https://info.potential2.com/en-us/bemorewrong

Full Transcript Below

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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

Colin Hunter is a special guest on today's show. He's an author of Be More Wrong, a mentor, entrepreneur and coach. He's also the CEO of Potential Squared, but before we get a chance to speak with Colin, it's The Leadership Hacker.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In news today, we explored the world's top female friendly companies of 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic is taken an especially heavy toll on women around the world. It's estimated more than 64 million women around the world, lost their jobs with at least 800 billion in earnings lost last year in U.S. dollars alone. And that's a result, the time it will take to close the global gender pay gap has increased from 99 years to 135 years, according to the world economic forum. And these issues are achingly familiar, inadequate childcare, managing work, home stress, lack of opportunities. And in many cases, COVID may amplified the burden to the point where many women just left their jobs.

Forbes Magazine recently teamed up with market research company Statista to help identify companies leading the way when it comes to try and support women inside and outside their workforces with an all-girl ranking of the world's top female friendly companies. So which company clinched the number one spot? Well CEO Michelle Buck became the first woman to lead the chocolatier in its 127 year history, you've got it? Hershey. Today women make up 42% of the Pennsylvania based businesses board. By 2025, aims to increase the percentage of women working in its workforce to 50%. And then this leadership population to 42%, that's up from currently 48 and 37% respectively. To reach its goals, Hershey launched a five-year plan called Project Pathways and it's to help its workplace and communities become more inclusive. And the project is run by collaboration of human resources and The Women's Business Resource Group and provides their teams with resources, such as, childcare, transportation, tutoring, and eldercare resources.

Another firm to meet the top 10, Zoom. Video Communications Team, Chief People Officer, Lynne Oldham said that the Silicon Valley tech company had redesigned this recruiting and hiring strategies, diversifying its pipelines, revising job descriptions that they feature inclusive language and introduce uniformity across its interviewing process in an effort to reduce bias and increase the number of female hires. Zoom has also sought to support women through partnerships with charities, such as, If Chloe Can, a UK Organization that hosts workshops and connects teams with mentors to prepare them for the workforce. When admitted stay at home orders were unable to continue with its usual impersonal operations. Zoom stepped in, offering to facilitate their programming through services free of charge. And there are many other organizations who are demonstrating great diversity equity inclusion principles when it comes to hiring female employees in their workforce. If you want to get a full list, go to Forbes and look for the world's top female friendly companies and Statista surveyed over 85,000 women in 40 countries to curate this great report. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. Please let us know what you'd like us to feature in the news on our Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Colin Hunter is a special guest on today's show. He's an author of Be More Wrong. He's a mental, entrepreneur, coach and the CEO of Potential Squared International. Colin, welcome to the show.

Colin Hunter: Thanks Steve, it's a pleasure. Real pleasure.

Steve Rush: So how have you been?

Colin Hunter: Yeah, well, good. Life is, and I hate to say this sometimes nowadays, but life is good. It's busy, but the new startup business which we're working on at the moment and yeah, we've got a lot of things, but I'm struggling to deal with sometimes with this new hybrid world. I'm sure everybody out there is. But starting to work with the new norm.

Steve Rush: It's kind of ironic. We've tried to have lunch for six months and we're like ships that pass in the night when it comes to London these days, because we're in that hybrid world, right?

Colin Hunter: And I'm sure it's nothing personal. It's nothing personal from my side.

Steve Rush: Sure, likewise. Yeah. So Colin for the listeners that haven't had the opportunity to meet with you, just to give us a little bit about the backstory and how Potential Squared came about?

Colin Hunter: Yeah, so if I go back, so I've been in leadership since 1996, but before that, if I go back, I was brought up in Newcastle, Northeast of England. Father was a pediatric cardiologist. And part of me telling you this, because there's a story that I grew up with him working on looking at ultrasound for baby's hearts and was an amazing doctor, saved many people's lives. And I had a grandfather was professor of Theology. So my early part of my life was wondering how the hell do I actually compete and match up to my father and my grandfather. So I spent most of that time working, trying to be somebody I'm not. And then around about 30, 31. I had a moment which I'm sure we'll talk about, which redefined my career. And since then I've been working in the form of leadership consultants, working on leadership, looking at leaders and how they work.

And more luckily I've started to recraft my career and our business around creating playgrounds to disrupt the way people are led. I started to realize I wanted to have some fun, Steve. I wanted to, to play with our work and I started one to experiment. And since 2007, I have set it out, whether it's about the use of actors or VR, virtual reality. I've started to look at how we do immersive, but real experiential workshops and training for leaders to shift the way and disrupt the way they think about leadership. And that is where I am now. And I'm still experimenting, still learning, but there's still suffering a bit from what I went through up to the age of 30 and how that's impacted my career, yeah,

Steve Rush: Yeah, you comfortable? Let's go in there, if we talk about that time. Because I think it's a really important lesson for many people listening to this story because it really defined who you were at that time, but also how you ended up where you are now. Tell us about what happened that defining moment that you called it?

Colin Hunter: Yeah, So I spent my childhood exploring experiments, having loads of groups of friends and I loved my life. I was out, my mother and father used to say this, you know, many forms of communication, but one was, “go tell Colin” and he would go tell somebody else and then I'd have conversations, a startup conversations. So I spent up to a probably the ages, 17 of loving my friends, my life, and even despite school, enjoying the rest of what I was trying to do. But in the background, my father being what he was and my grandfather being a professor of Theology and, you know, I was known as AM Hunter grandson. Pardon he was an author a writer in the New Testament. And therefore I spent my life what I would do to reach the levels that they'd got to?

Steve Rush: Did that happened at quite an early age for you as well, that awareness of who you were and the indeed unconscious pressure that you felt from that. Happened at quite an early age, right?

Colin Hunter: Yeah, it did. I mean, if I go back to when I was 11, my grandfather sat me down and said, for those who know, Robert Burns. He said, Tama Shanta, I want you to be able to learn this and re-slate Tama Shanta. And I want you to do this over Christmas and I want you to learn. And so therefore I started learning. I realized I couldn't, firstly I couldn't learn it by road,  Secondly, I didn't know why I was doing it. And thirdly, they seem to be some sort of tests that I was going through and I don't criticize my grandfather for it. He was an academic, he was looking for me to show that I could be logical. And that I could work in a principle in a way that could have constructed arguments in the right way.

All I cared about was relationships and emotions. I was in that space going, you know, I sat at his feet and I looked up at him. I thought, wow, this is great, but in no way could live and breathe what he was doing. He was just brilliant at constructing an argument. And I felt that in my depth. So that was at the age of 11 and 12. And then my father was in that space and he was working on ultrasound. Looking at how they diagnose and the baby's hearts. So I used to go in and see him in the hospital's saving baby’s lives and that tiny, small babies and how we had this care, but this ability to teach others. And I thought this, I can't do this either. So, therefore I thought, should I be a doctor?

Should I be an academic? Should I stretch myself? And therefore, I always looked at others from an early stage with a degree of imposter syndrome and said, I'm not worthy. And I wouldn't call it in those days, but what it meant was, I searched out areas that I could play in, but they tended to be away from my family. They tended to be away from those areas of logic and academia. And therefore I fought school, fought and in some ways, literally out a major argument with one of my teachers who suggested the age of 17. I leave school and go and get just a job in retail because that's all I want to achieve in my life. So, therefore when it comes to how I started off my career, I took everybody's advice. I joined and became a tax consultant. And I spent my life sat in a cubicle doing hand written computations attacks and wondered why I wasn't happy. And then, so I went to Procter & Gamble and had a great career there, but I was doing a job where I hated it. I mean, I was successful, but the cost of my energy in that role was huge. So I ended up having a breakdown basically at the age of 30 where I went back up to my parents' house in Newcastle in the Northeast of England from Nottingham. And I spent two weeks in tears. And I'm happy to talk about it now. And for many years I wasn't, but it was this clash where I was walking in a house where my father only cried once that I can remember when our dog died and therefore I walked into the house and I was crying. And it was almost like, they knew how to deal with it, but they didn't know how to do with it.

Steve Rush: So how were you received by them at that time? Because I suspect having that strong veneer of professional academia around success doesn't come with showing much vulnerability. So how did that play out?

Colin Hunter: I was lucky that he was adopted and, you know, bless him. He passed away earlier this year and I've done a lot of soul searching and he dealt with it in the way he knew, which is he suggested that I go see the doctor, a local GP, a general practitioner. And so therefore it wasn't a case of they weren't unsympathetic, but they were looking for a cure for it. And my mother has laterally suffered from mental health issues herself. And therefore there's more understanding in that space from that side, but I was lucky. They sent me to Gusto Silver, a GP and he canceled the appointments ahead of me and after me and he sat down and he did this brilliant thing, Steve. He told me the story of when he was in a car accident and how this card flipped over.

And he remembered in slow motion, the car sliding along on its roof. And he remembered the music going slowly on the radio, but he saw his life flash in front of him. And he said something which has always stayed with me. He said, I have a gift then to learn about my life and what I needed to change. And he said, you've been given a gift, might not seem at the moment, but you given a gift that life is about energy systems and your energy is at zero basically. And your mind is telling you, you can't cope with it. And now is the time to think about your energy systems that feed your life and how you use them and be much more intentional about how you feed them and how you spend them in your life. And that was the most powerful thing somebody ever said to me in my life. And it's changed the way I work now.

Steve Rush: When you look back on that time, do you see that as a gift now?

Colin Hunter: Oh yeah. I mean, it's interesting when I was writing the book and I was thinking about it. I suddenly realized I had never gone back to see Gusto Silver. I'm not even sure if he's alive now and I feel guilty about that. Because that was a transformational piece for me, but I also think it's taught me, if I look now and how I'm bringing up my daughters who are 17 at 16, it's taught me to realize that real connection with them is so, so important. But as a leader, it's taught me so much more.

Steve Rush: Yeah, indeed. And one of the things that astound me about you, Colin is, you are incredibly successful, incredibly well presented, strong courageous leader, as I see you today, but you still suffer with this nagging imposter syndrome from time to time. And I knew that of you, but how do you deal with that?

Colin Hunter: I think the first thing is sharing it.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Colin Hunter: So I was doing a keynote last night to an American audience, and these are all my competitors, the learning and development professionals globally, we meet each year at this conference. And I was sharing in this webinar with them, this story, and said about the imposter syndrome. And what was amazing for me is that however many people suddenly started to share that they had the same thing. So I used to walk into this place, center for creative leadership, vital, smartest, crucial conversations, and just feel I wasn't worthy, but so many people in that same space have the same feelings. And so therefore by telling that story, and I think this is where the humility and the humble nature of leaders. If you tell your story of where you have struggled, it's amazing how many people suddenly go. Yeah, I'm the same way.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Colin Hunter: And that's what's happening now, but there's other things I've been possibly to work on, but sharing the story has been one of the biggest, first steps.

Steve Rush: And I don't know about you, but I think just having the label imposter syndrome, which, you know, wasn't there sort of 10 years ago, it helps us to actually recognize that it's a thing and that we can actually deal with it. Whereas before we might have dealt with it as something else.

Colin Hunter: I think the senior leaders, you know, work in this space, we work with senior leaders. I'm amazed how many of them senior leaders have imposter syndrome, one version, or the other, you know, wondering how the hell they got to the top of the organization. Secondly, wondering how the hell they're going to lead this organization, because whether it's intellect. I was chatting to a client friend the other day, and he's been dyslexic diagnosed probably later in his life, but he's been very, very successful in this career, but he's always worried that somebody's going to find them out. However, he's used that positively because he leads with a humble nature because of that, it's been a powerful piece. And I think that's what a lot of people need to hear about the imposter syndrome is it starts you from a humility in a humble space, which is a powerful places that you needed to start rather than an arrogance and a belief in your own power and ability, that can be worked on. But listening to that voice in your head, not removing it, sometimes I described this as it's the loudest voice at a dinner party. And all you've got to do is dial it down and dial up the other voices in your head and the other neural pathways that allow you to be successful.

Steve Rush: Yeah, great words. I often use the same analogy, but help people to think about, it's the one voice you wake up with in the morning. It's the one that you go to bed with and it'd be the last voice you hear before you die. So it needs to serve you well.

Colin Hunter: Also, my meditation headspace in the morning and my exercise in the morning is a powerful piece of me. As Jamie Smarter wrote a book, clarity said, when you fall out to your thinking, it allows you to come up with inspired action. And I find that really heavy in the morning and within my head space and something pops into my head and it's just, oh, yep. That's the answer. That's the answer. But how often do you do that?

Steve Rush: Thanks for sharing that story. And I think it's really important to help people understand you actually as a character, because you are incredibly successful now, and you're running a successful business with Potential Squared. And I think it just gives people some insights that we all come from different perspectives to arrive at where we've arrived at. And that journey is really important, isn't it?

Colin Hunter: Yeah, it’s massive. Hero's journey as they say.

Steve Rush: Yeah, so tell us a little bit about the work that you and the team are doing at Potential Squared at the moment?

Colin Hunter: We're having fun, and I think that's a key sense. Because we're in a startup on one area of business and anybody who's been involved in a starter, we'll say it’s fun, but at the time it doesn't feel like it’s fun quite a bit at the time. We're doing a couple of things. One is, we are restlessly dissatisfied about our work. So we've got our P2 leadership side of the business, which is leadership development and working. We've got VR, we've got virtual reality in there. We've got the use of The Actors, which is a powerful piece. And the always gets most positive feedback about the work we do, bringing in actors to explore conversations, getting people to have a, almost a who's line is it any way, if you remember the comedy program interaction and we find that that immersive experience of getting the conversations in leadership is the same as now, as the VR is allowing us to do where people are in the headsets, they are in this virtual reality.

And they suddenly find that they're being themselves, you know, their true behaviors are coming out. So we're doing a lot of good work in there, but there's always been something missing from that work. And so therefore our new project is something called the 500 where we're looking at saying so biggest challenges in this world at the moment is equity. Increasing equity for people when they're young in terms of moving up in their careers. And if you look at where organizations are facing challenges at the moment is finding new talent, they're all fighting for talent in the same pools, is costing them more. Most of them can't afford that extra cost. And then we've suddenly realized that we're probably only tapping into 25% of the talent pool. And the other 75% is set in places, either places where they've had a very difficult backgrounds.

So they've had a life story that's, you know, I wouldn't recognize even despite my stories, I'm telling you. Mine is trivial in some ways, compared to what others are experiencing. And therefore they've got newer diversity side to that where they're challenged by that. So we're, doing some work to say, so how do we train leaders and develop leaders to think with a wider view of life? To explore into different areas of the community? Exploring different areas of society and have a wider vision for that? Which benefits a couple of things Steve, which I'd never really thought about before. One is design thinking. You look at Procter & Gamble. You look at all the different types of organizations I used to work for. And you look at how they are trying to design for the different needs of different people and whether its disability or whether it's [Inaudible 00:20:01] or whether it's age or gender, all of these things need to come into play.

But then you've got this talent pool where suddenly people are realizing that in that near diversity pool, you've got some brilliant thinkers and brilliant ideas, so how do we tap into that? But you've also got these people, they come from those places that you're trying to sell your products into. So why wouldn't you tap into that? But the third thing, I think the most important thing for me is that if you look at where most leaders are now, and particularly with the pandemic, that said, most people thinking, how do I give something back? How do I tap back into society? How do I do some good for the wider population? And I see so many who are willing to spend their own money to go and do something for others. And this new project works along those lines. So that's what we're working on at the moment to get people into a wider space.

Steve Rush: Sound fun.

Colin Hunter: Wider vision, it is.

Steve Rush: And when it comes to your work, one of the things that I particularly like about what you do is, you called it at the beginning of the show actually. You have these equal playgrounds that you create to really tap into helping people unlock different behaviors. From your experience, by just having the notion of creating playgrounds, what behavior does that then unlock?

Colin Hunter: There's two things, you can't tell people to have fun. The old saying, well go have fun.

Steve Rush: That’s right.

Colin Hunter: It doesn't help. But if you think about some of the best times you've had, it's that stepping out of where you are now. Stepping out of the front door. And for some people, playgrounds is going off into the wilds and just taking some time by itself. Scotland for me has been through the pandemic because looking after my father at the time as allowed me to go on these coastal walks and experience nature, and that's a playground for me, I gets inspired and some great thoughts. I have had an old collogue who used to work when they were doing the Marks & Spencer turnaround, his idea was working 14, 15-hour days doing the night shift in the marble arch store of Marks & Spencer. And his playground was discovering new ways of working.

But the idea in my head was, how do we create a place where it makes people think they're going to have fun? They're stretching themselves, but it's almost like they've got a safe place with a soft landing if they fail to try something different, rather than sailing their ship around the Harbor, as we describe it and doing the same thing safely all the time, why not seek rougher seas? Why not get barnacles on your butters as I described it and go and stretch yourself. But if it's in a playground where the highest risk is that you might get it wrong and somebody who's going to give you feedback, you going to learn. And why don't we do that? And just take a simple thing, like having a conversation now about race, skin, color diversity, wouldn't it be great to have a safe place, to allow people to have conversations, to learn and grow, but as soon as you say something wrong, you're hammered for it. So that's what we're talking about. Playgrounds, safe places to land, where people can explore.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it's a great metaphor and the reality as well, I guess, if you were allowing yourself to think that way.

Colin Hunter: Yeah.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and did that help you then start to think about using that notion to write your book, Be More Wrong? Was that kind of a trigger that led you that way?

Colin Hunter: Yeah, it's ironic that the title is be more wrong and it took four years for me to be comfortable to publish it.

Steve Rush: So, let's talk about that because actually I recall when we had a conversation about this before the whole notion of calling a book Be More Wrong is an oxymoron for most people, isn't it?

Colin Hunter: Yes, the title was probably the first thing I put down because I was starting a thing. So I've had so many screw ups in my life, but I'm still here and being successful. So surely there's something rich in this. But I think the biggest thing that helped me was in writing the book was I was introduced to IDEO through a Canadian company experience point where the whole principle of failing early, failing fast and learning first was introduced to me. And I started the think that all the work we do is around that. So to write the book, I suddenly realized we need to find using the hero's journey, metaphor, stepping out of your house, going on a journey, gathering your team together, carrying your followers together, having an inspiring story, a quest, a purpose, going and failing, facing good evil and failing and succeeding in equal measure, but learning and having a guide to do that was what we'd be doing for years. And actually the only bit that was missing was this design thinking piece, which is getting out there and experiencing and having a go at something, observing people in the real world. So therefore, the be more wrong philosophy is embedded in that fail fast, learn fast philosophy and give it the juice for the book, yeah.

Steve Rush: And of course, if you reframe being wrong and failing to actually that's a learning experience, it helps you to grow from it. Doesn't it?

Colin Hunter: It does. I mean, it is fascinating in our culture, that one failure and make somebody a bad person. Whereas actually, if you look in many different aspects of our life, these failures are learning and they are spaces where people can start to work on different ways of living. I still a big fan of Mandela and the sessions he had, the conversations he had after apartheid and he didn't let it go. He brought those people who had diminished the rights of people to understand and work on. So you could learn. And there's a classic example of a mistake of failure in many people's eyes that had to be learned from rather than just finishing it and getting on. We had to learn from the lesson. And some cases, some days, I actually feel that we haven't learned from those times or those mistakes and therefore, how do we create that environment to do it more again?

Steve Rush: And do you think there's a lot to do with mindset and how people have perceived the event? So if you take Mandela as a perfect example, right? This is a guy who was imprisoned in Robben Island for decades, who could have been really bitter, twisted, and angry, and the people that imprison him. He then subsequently taught, educated and encouraged to think differently. And that's got to be down to mindset and other behaviors. What's your experience with that?

Colin Hunter: I think it is. I think it is mindset. But I think it's a gift of mindset because I think if he hadn't that experience, a tough experience and he hadn’t had the time to reflect and be really, really clear. And he was very intentional about his learning from that. And he was very intentional, but how he treated people around him, even his wife in terms of how he works in there. And I think there's leaders who, you know, they almost celebrate failures in the workplace as learning pieces, as long as there's learning and there's movement forward.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Colin Hunter: What is a mindset?

Steve Rush: One thing you said that specifically kind of, I think, was also being intentional.

Colin Hunter: Yes.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Colin Hunter: I think purposeful practice is a classic piece. You know, I'm not a sportsman, but I love my sport. And when you look at all the workers in here, having a purpose towards something whether it's being a top tennis player or competing at a particular level. And then there's purposeful practice, intentional practice of small, small things that can be. So, what we call practices. So how do I make a practice to become a habit habitual that feeds the system that makes me successful? And Brailsford with the Sky Cycling now, and he did it with British Cycling. Now critics always have these things, but if you look now in all sports, soccer, you look at American football, the small incremental gains that people are making intentional failure towards something, stress testing, working with exactly what this is about

Steve Rush: Exactly right, yeah. And ironically purpose is one of your three enablers of leadership. So you have purpose, identity and presence. And I thought it'd be useful just to kick that about.

Colin Hunter: Yeah, again, it's funny when you put something out there and Simon the snake put his work on purpose out there, you know, his Ted talk, which has been watched by many people and I loved it. And then you look at other people like Tom Peters, who said, well, purpose, it's great to say, you can just find it. But a lot of us don't find our purpose immediately. We stumble across it. But there is an intentionality about what motivates me. What is my passion? What do I want to do? And even when somebody says, well, my purpose is to be a good father, a good mother. There's that question afterwards, what type of a father or mother do you want to be? And so, for example, if I take the person identity for me, my purpose is to create playgrounds, to disrupt the way people are led.

That's the mantra that I worked on to do that. But my identity I also have, and I hold as a father of daughters. So, my whole being and the identity of father of daughters is to start to think about how I disrupt the way that people lead and recruits and give opportunities so that women and my daughters have equal opportunities in the future. And therefore, my personal identity, then every day when I'm looking at things, not only for gender, but for race, and I'm starting to say, so how do I get more equity in society from that? So that purpose and identity. Now for most people, it's a tough one to establish a purpose. And that's why we do a lot of work on stories, getting people to tell their stories and working out their stories. When she listened to your stories and you realize, how have you crafted your life, what you've hated and what you've loved, you normally can find an underlying purpose that you can work on, but it's an experiment. In my work, it might be rejected. And then you move on to the next one. So, purpose and identity and the identity piece, I love this, which is, do I cycle or am I a cyclist? That's the classic piece. And if I'm a cyclist, I suddenly take it professionally. And I take it with great importance. So if I'm a father of daughters, I've suddenly put an identity. I need to work at it to be proud of. So those are two elements we've got. But I think the bit that I love the most is the presence piece that we have. In which if you think about it, we have to learn to dance to the music as a leader. We need to be agile. We need to go on a crazy train through the pandemic, and we're on an even crazier train next year. So how do I dance to that music?

But the piece I love is, why not dance to other people's music and learning to do that? So rather than bringing the music I would have as a leader, how do I learn to be agile in the moment with other people's music? We'll be able to adapt and move to that music. And therefore we do a lot of work around gravitas, prominence, executive presence, and teaching people from an early age, how to have more impact in the vocal, physical, and also mental in terms of how they come across. So those are the three things. Purpose, why we do stuff, how we do it, and then the presence is how we show up.

Steve Rush: I love it, yeah. Really simple. But actually, they're all aligned, aren't they?

Colin Hunter: Yeah, if you get one of them wrong, it has a knock-on effect, like all systems on the other ones.

Steve Rush: Coming back to your identity piece, that kind of sits in the middle because it gives permission, I suppose, to delve into purpose and also permission to how you show up. And we can change that identity by the shifting label that we wear, right?

Colin Hunter: Yeah, I'd love that. I mean, it's a bit of,  “Tonight Matthew”, Matthew, for those, you know, there's a program in the UK where people go on and say, tonight, Matthew, I am going to be, but actually with the use of the Actors is given me a lot of work to say, how do I adopt an identity and how do I live and breathe it? And how do I learn to be authentic in that new version? And I think that's one of my other biggest challenges is authenticity is normally given as an excuse by somebody who say, well, this is how I am. I'm not going to change, but authenticity, Herminia Ibarra, London Business School says, authenticity is something that adapts and dresses, different circumstances you face. And therefore tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be this to try and develop something. That's going to be my future identity and my authenticity.

Steve Rush: Yeah, very much so. So, one of the things I've seen about the work that you've had is that you're not afraid to challenge some of the traditional status quo of how we perceive leadership and leadership styles has been written about and quoted about for many years in different guises. You've reframed some of those, and you have your own full leadership styles now. And I wonder if you could share those with our listeners?

Colin Hunter: Yeah, and I love this because it fits into the hero's journey. So, whether you're a Lord of The Rings fan or everything else that goes into Harry Potter, whatever your choices is. We talk about leaders, need followers, followers need leaders. So, the first system is, we describe it as how do I get engaged connections? How do I get followers to follow me? And how do I be impactful in that? And we call this the host. So, if you imagine a host at a dinner party or a host in terms of relationships, most of us only worry about our relationships on networks, our teams, either we've lost a job or we need to recruit, we need to hire and we don't pay attention to them. So, the first one is, about how I creates psychological safety? And how I create real difference diversity, inclusion, in my network? So that I'm not sitting in an echo chamber listening to my own thoughts.

So that's the first one, the host. So, if you think about Frodo and Sam, a dwarf and an elf and Aragon, there was real diversity and different thinking and different views that came to that. And once you've your followership and you've got your hosts and you've got your team together, then the second system is the Energizer or what I call inspired energy in there, which is, how clear is your story? How clear are your inspiring stories that allow other people to see a part of your story as the leader? And therefore, we talk a lot around storytelling. We talk a lot about points of view around how we work and crafting that story and crafting the future story you've got is important in that, but the other part of energy is personal drive. So how resilient are you? How anti fragile, and a lot of my work at the moment, particularly in the pandemic is about poaching people to be more resilient, to put systems, whether it's meditation, fitness, diet, breath, other works in there, to have the energy by osmosis, give it to your team, but also spend it on the right thing.

So that's the Energizer. And then the third area is disruptor. And this was given to me by IDEO, but how do I get fresh ideas through experimentation, but also how do I get ruthless and narrowing choices in there? So, we always believe that 80% of your experiments will fail, 20% be successful. Every day, I'm thinking, what are the two to three experiments I'm going to start running that could succeed, could fail. But as long as feeding, the system of fresh ideas, we're going to run in the team. And then when you think about Gandalf, you think about Dumbledore, there's always a guide. So as a leader, how strong is your mentoring and coaching and growth of capabilities? So the final style we talk about is catalyst. So as a mentor, having points of view and almost lighting fires under backsides for people to get them in the right direction, giving them points of view and direction, and then the coaching, which is lighting fires in their bellies by coaching and spending time. So, host, Energizer, disruptor, and then the catalyst of the four styles that have been use.

Steve Rush: Great. I love the descriptive nature of them as well and brings it to life for folks listening to this, hopefully too.

Colin Hunter: It's good. I love it.

Steve Rush: Next part of our show Colin, we get into turn our leadership focus and hack into your leadership mind, which has enormous experience, not only leading the businesses you've led, but also having worked with some of the best leaders around the world. So first place I'd like us to go tap into your top three leadership hacks.

Colin Hunter: So, the first one is pay it forward. So I was given a gift by a gentleman called Mike Taylor. And this is about network. For the last probably seven, eight years. I've practiced the principle on that for a leader, which is, I work my network, not wondering what I can get out of them, but by thinking about what are the three things I can do for people that I have connections with? So, I very rarely say no to a connection, very rarely. I'm going to a great club. That's celebrates massive mistakes in lives. And it's called the Cock-up club in London. I've never been to it, but I got an invite. And it's about leaders who go in and celebrate that. But I'm already going into that meeting by saying, so what are the three things that I can give to people I'm meeting there that night? What are the three things that I take? So that's my first leadership hack.

The second thing is a very simple one. I don't know if you've ever heard of Churchill's prayers, but during the war, Churchill did something very simple with all his leaders every day. He got them together for a very short space of time. We now call a pulse, a daily pulse. And in that daily pulse, we talk about what did I do yesterday? What am I doing today? What am I doing tomorrow? And we started to do that in our business. And it gives a really clear idea about what people are working on, what gaps we have, but it's amazing how we identify resource issues and work in there. So, it's a very simple hack to give people, 9:50 in the morning, till 9:45 each day, we meet as a team for half an hour and we do that. And it's a breath of fresh air in terms of communication.

Final hack. I was going to put something down here, but I'm going to change it. It was one given to me by an ex special forces gentleman. And he talked about brief back, check back and brief back, check back is the most simple thing in some ways, but we avoid it. So once I've given a brief to somebody and I've said, this is what I'm expecting, this is the project. We very rarely asked the question, which is what we tend to ask the question is like clear. And everybody goes, yeah, yeah, that's fine. Go away. But what we tend to not do is ask the question. So repeat back to me, please, if you could, exactly what you've heard. And in that brief back, it's amazing how often the articulation of the idea is different from the receiver than it was from the giver. So that's the first bit, what that allows you to do is correct any miscommunication or misguidance of the expectations you've given, but it also allows you with confidence for them to go off and just allow yourself to check back in. So it's a core part of empowering people and giving people accountability in there. So that's the final one

Steve Rush: Love that last one. And we've had a couple of major generals on actually. This has come up in the conversations we've had with them too, because it's rooted in when you're about to send somebody off to war.

Colin Hunter: Yeah.

Steve Rush: Asking somebody, if it's clear, it's just not enough. Asking somebody if they really get it and understand it is absolutely essential, great hack. Next part of the show we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is where your be more wrong principle starts to play in really well. So, this is definitely where something in your life and your work has it worked out at all well, but there is an overall learning experience form them. You shared one that was a pivotal moment for you, but what would another Hack to Attack?

Colin Hunter: So that the act for me is the need for a business partner. I've spent most of my life and it's probably related to the imposter syndrome, worried that if I didn't have a business partner, my business would not be successful because my level of capability and intellect and decision-making was not enough to drive it. So, you know, I had probably more business partners than I would care to admit, but when I look back, it gave me an insight that what I needed was less of a business partner and more of an advisory board. And so, I took on an advisory board in the last two to three years, three people, different skills, one in innovation and design, the other person more on the sales side. And the third one tended to be around more of the strategic direction and what are summarized by getting their noses into our business. But in most cases, fingers out, you know, as an advisory board, I had all the benefits of a business partner without needing to end a relationship that certain points, they could do that. And that's been my amazing Hack to Attack that I've deployed. And now we're seeing it as a proving ground, a playground for some of our advisors have never done advisory board roles before, never been non-execs. So they get to play and practice with us before they go on to bigger and better things afterwards. So that's, my Hack to Attack.

Steve Rush: That’s a great attack because what I'm hearing is exactly that and non-executive director role, who provides you with the counsel and direction. And then there's not that awkward. You know, this isn't working out for us when we have the tie, you know, equity, stakes and all the mess that comes with partnerships.

Colin Hunter: Exactly.

Steve Rush: Yeah, great.

Colin Hunter: We pay them.

Steve Rush: Yeah, of course. And the advantage, I guess, in doing so still is that when that time has served and the mutual value has got to its natural kind of capacity, you can switch them in and switch them out as the business starts to pivot and change directions as well.

Colin Hunter: Yeah, and it's interesting on the latest business venture for the 500, we started to think that the advisory board we're going to have for that is I've got a contact who runs a business mentoring ex-convicts coming out of prison. And I'm starting to think, so that would be a great person to have it as an advisory board member and maybe somebody of your diversity area. So you can play with this in a good way to get different voices in your head and different points of view. So, it's a great process.

Steve Rush: Definitely, yeah. So, the last part, the show Colin, you get an opportunity to go back and bump into Colin at 21 face-to-face toe-to-toe and give him some advice. What would your advice to Colin be at 21?

Colin Hunter: It's interesting because I struggled with this at 21 because I look back to 21 and I struggled to work out what it is. And I had one thing that goes through my mind, but just mentioned before, but I would say to him, go find your own music to dance too. Find out what the music is that you want to dance too and then go dance with it, but also find other people whose music interests you to go dance with. And the key thing here, and I think Amazon web services have, this is one of the core values, which is natural curiosity, be curious enough to explore other people's music as well and find out what you like and go with it.

Steve Rush: Super stuff. So, Colin for folk, listening to this, wanting to get a copy of, Be More Wrong, or learn a bit more about the business that you lead and the work that you do, where's the best place for us to send them?

Colin Hunter: So, Be More Wrong, @bemorewrong on Instagram, be more wrong on Twitter. Website is bemorewrong.com, go explore that. For the business itself, potential2.com and go find out more about that. I'd love to connect with any of the listeners and explore more with you, but they can find out more information and connect with us there.

Steve Rush: And they have to jump into the show notes and find all of that information in there as well.

Colin Hunter: Lovely.

Steve Rush: Colin, I've loved chatting and always do and wanted to say, thank you ever so much for being vulnerable, sharing your stories and being part of our community on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Colin Hunter: It's been a pleasure, Steve, looking forward to that lunch when we can finally get it right.

Steve Rush: Indeed, yeah, exactly. Thanks Colin.

Colin Hunter: Cheers.

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 there: @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.

Timothy Bradshaw is former British Army Intelligence Officer and graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. His work as a Covert Human Intelligence Officer and Target Acquisition Patrol Soldier saw him recruit and run foreign agents worldwide and influence the outcome of extremely sensitive and dangerous situations. Recently, he’s been running aid missions to the Ukraine. He’s a keynote speaker and author of the book, “Because I Can”.

This is packed full of leadership lessons including:

• Leaders need to make decisions under pressure, how different was that in the military and what can we learn from that.
• The secret sauce to resilience and overcoming challenges.
• Why wanting to quit is normal and how can we overcome that.
• Why is the military approach to leadership is a good blueprint for business.

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

Find out more about Tim below:

Tim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-bradshaw/

Tim’s Books: Because I Can

Tim on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TimBecauseICan

Tim on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/timothy.bradshaw/

Tim’s Website: https://www.timothybradshaw.net

Full Transcript Below

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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

Our special guest on today's show is Tim Bradshaw. He's a foreign British Army Intelligence Officer and recruited and run foreign agents worldwide as a Human Intelligent Officer. He's also the author of a great book, Because I can, but before we get a chance to speak with Tim, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: Leadership is about us everywhere. And I wanted to dive in to find some funny, and innovative ways of us, bringing some of those leadership lessons to life. So, if ever you've watched a movie Star Wars or any of the Star Wars Trilogy, you'll find loads of leadership lessons packed within there. Yoda is one of my favorites. He has this great saying that said. Do or not do, there is no try. And I'm often using that lighthearted analogy with any of my coaching conversations, but a long time ago in a galaxy far away, the leadership lessons were created amongst this epic series of films.

So, here's a few, it's been proven that being born with talent is not enough. As we all know, Luke Skywalker is born with a natural talent to be a Jedi. Yet when, we watch the movies. We know that was not a given. He had to work hard at that. We watched Luke come to grips with putting himself in challenging situations and homing in on that force. And there are traits of good leadership, but true leadership takes place, self-reflection and mentoring, which we also saw through their relationship with Yoda. Adaptability is also a key leadership lesson throughout the Star Wars movies, all of those Star Wars movies demonstrate that life does not always go to plan. And if you are rigid in your plans are stuck in your ways, you're not going to win. From Han Solo, adapting, a broken hyper drive by hiding by the rubbish shoot instead of a surprise alliance along the way. If you're able to adapt and think quickly, you're able to lead a team through any surprises. We know it's okay to ask for help as leaders. Sometimes you can't get yourself out of a situation without calling on someone else. When Princess Leia was in a bind, she'd always know the right people to call and ask for help without hesitation. Some good leaders need other good leaders to advise them on their journey. And the one thing that is really true across all of the movies that chasing power is the path to the dark side. Leaders undeniably have power and authority, but leadership is much more than that. Once you begin to be at attracted to power and to chase power, you are heading to the dark side. Good leadership is all about sharing power and authority and creating more leaders. It's about people with good ideas and evolving those good ideas so that everyone becomes more powerful. So, the next time you hear yourself saying, I'll try, just think you've been Yoda. Do or don't do, there is no try. Let's get into the show.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Timothy Bradshaw, is a special guest on today's show. He's a former British Army Intelligence Officer and graduate of the Royal Military Academy of Sandhurst. His work as a Covert Human Intelligent Officer and Target Acquisition Patrol Soldier saw him recruit and run foreign agents worldwide and influence the outcome of extremely sensitive and dangerous situations. Recently Tim's been running missions to Ukraine, delivering really, really important aid. He's a keynote speaker and he's also the author of the book, Because I can. Tim, welcome to the show.

Timothy Bradshaw: Thanks Steve. Thanks very much for having me on.

Steve Rush: Really looking forward to getting into the diverse world of Timothy Bradshaw. And remember from the first time that you met and how you described what you did in the army and in your work as an Intelligence Officer, I think I might have called you the James Bond [laugh] at the time.

Timothy Bradshaw: I mean, that's very flattering and unfortunately every time somebody says that I caught so much flack off all of my friends, but.

Steve Rush: [Laugh].

Timothy Bradshaw: I'll take it Steve. I've definitely been called worse things.

Steve Rush: I think your response to me at the time, Tim, if I remember rightly was, and you might have had the work of James Bond, but you certainly didn't have the dinner suits and the expense account.

Timothy Bradshaw: No, absolutely not. And I'm still waiting for the Aston Martin as well.

Steve Rush: That's it, yeah. So, tell us a little bit about you Tim, your early backstory and give that listens a little bit of a spin through to how you've arrived to do what you do.

Timothy Bradshaw: It's not that exciting, Steve really, which I think is almost kind of the point. You know, we talk about resilience and all this sort of stuff and actually I haven't done anything that essentially anybody else couldn't have done if they wanted to. I did my A-levels. I finished school. I kind of looked at university alongside everybody else and realized that I was doing that really, because that was kind of what everybody else did. Not really what my sort of passion was, and maybe there's a bit of a theme there that'll continue. So, I was offered a place to go to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. I literally just turned 18 in the October and went in the January. So was really very young. I quite often laugh when we talk about leadership.

My first ever job out of school was sort of leading 37 soldiers aged 19, by the time I got to that point. And frankly probably wasn't very good at it. Who's very good at their first ever job out of school, but I had a lot of training, and a lot of backups. So, made the best I could really. I've kind of never really done anything else. So very much experienced based career, I guess. And I did that and that was the kind of the mid-nineties. And I went out to Germany. Ironically, it's really funny looking back now, I say funny, slightly tongue in cheek, but obviously we were very much kind of the end of the sort of cold war doctrine and everything we were looking at was very much basically about the Russian Army coming across the Eastern German planes which with what's going on now, obviously out in Ukraine, seems a little bit surreal, to be honest.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: But anyway, and I sort of did that for a bit and it was bit of a lull really, an activity, certainly for the sort of regular army at the time. And then I pursued a career in training after I served out my commission and subsequently once sort of Iraq and Afghanistan kicked off, I looked to go back to the military. I felt as though I had kind of unfinished business and hadn't finished serving yet. I've always had quite a strong desire to serve rightly or wrongly. So, I decided to go back and a friend of mine had said to me, oh, you should look at, you know, look at reserves and I said, crikey you’re joking. You know, to me, the TA sort of, as was, was dad's army. And, you know, that's absolutely not the case anymore. So, I went through a patrol selection course, which is a particularly arduous sort of running over the Hills, big ruck sacks, small teams, very much becoming self-reliant, self-sufficient, relying on your teammates in small groups as a buildup, really to go towards Afghanistan. And then I kind of thought to myself, well, if I'm going to do this, I want to do something that perhaps my interim years as a civilian brings something to the party rather than putting me behind the curve. So Human Intelligence is, is exactly that, it's about building relationships and influence. And actually, you know, we always sort of joke, but if you having to use the cars as the guns, you've kind of got it wrong, essentially. It's absolutely about building relationships and influencing people. So, bit of a sucker for punishment, really, I put myself through yet another grueling selection process.

Steve Rush: [laugh].

Timothy Bradshaw: Its theme isn't it, really. And we did that. I passed a course and then what ensued was a fascinating few years working with some truly inspirational people on all sides of the divide, really. Some of those obviously worked for essentially terrorist organizations. Some of those were people that absolutely keen to help their communities. But the theme was always the same. It was always about relationships and influence. And I was doing some keynote speaking the other day and I sort of laughed and somebody ask, how could you sum it up? And I was trying to think of a sort of corporate analogy. And I said, well, imagine trying to lead or influence somebody that not only do they not work for you, but in fact they work for your biggest competitor. And that was about the best I could come up with really. Obviously trying to persuade somebody who has very strong views of their own that actually there might be a different way or a better path and to give you, essentially feed you in intelligence.

So yeah, so that's what we did. Did that for a few years, which was truly fascinating. Couple of tour Afghanistan. I did point out to somebody recently whose head went down a little bit talking about lockdown. And I think I calculated that I have actually spent more time in Afghanistan than I have in lockdown.

Steve Rush: Wow, yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: And I don't actually know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, to be honest with you, but it is a fact. And then I think having left the military. Again, I have a very low boredom threshold Steve, which I think is, probably the theme. But actually, for me, I've always been quite a big advocate of mental health. I've always struggled a little bit with sort of depression and anxiety. It's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's just the way my brain works really. And you know, it's a bit like a bank account in some of the respects. You take out, so therefore you have to pay back in. Anyway, we decided as a team must that we try and climb Mount Everest and shout from the highest point on earth that it was okay to ask for help. So, we did, we picked the wrong year. We did it in 2015, which those of you that into mountaineering or the region will know was when all the sort of major earthquakes hit. So, we found ourselves in the middle of one of the biggest natural disasters sorts of ever to happen, certainly in that region, really. So again, it kind of turned on its head our whole outlook on what was going on and certainly tested our resilience in a very different way to the one we perhaps spent two years planning and training to do.

Which again, I think we talk about leadership aren’t we Steve really. For me, that's one of the themes is, it's that ability to flex, adapt and overcome actually, rather than when it's all going perfectly.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: And then, yeah, and then having done that, we've transitioned into doing this and we do all sorts of wacky stuff. And then we now run a company. And for me it's about, can I share my lessons as accurately as possible? We were joking, weren’t we Steve, just before we went live that there's a lot of self-help stuff around, you know, and it's like, yeah, get a growth mindset, do this and do that. And you kind of think, yeah, I'll do that, how?

Steve Rush: Yeah, exactly.

Timothy Bradshaw: And that's really what the book was about. The book was a kind of user guide almost to dealing with some of these problems. So rather than a kind of conceptual you know, big yourself up and feel better, it was right, do this. When this happens, do this [laugh] and I guess that then led, I was sitting on the sofa, we were watching what's happening in Ukraine. And my now wife looked at me and said, you could probably do something to help that couldn't you. And I said, yes, I can. And she said, well, then you should. So, we put a team together and we've now delivered three quite successful aid missions. But I would think the point I'd like to make is, that we've built a network of people inside Ukraine. So, we've got live communications almost on a daily basis. So, we know exactly what people need and what challenges that they're facing. And we are taking that aid specifically and delivering it directly to the people that need it. So, we met, appreciate we're not going to share their names here, but we shared directly, we drove out to Kyiv, which is where we were last week. And we met with these groups, and we hand over exactly what they need. And fortunately, that's captured the imagination of a number of large corporate businesses that have really helped us out actually.

Steve Rush: Right.

Timothy Bradshaw: But I think that's because again, it's not faceless.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: Steve, I think that comes back to our theme of kind of leadership and relationships, right?

Steve Rush: Does Tim, yeah. And homage to you genuinely. One of the things I know about you Tim, is that you see danger very differently to other people that I've, you know, come into contact with specifically in the business world. You almost see this as an opportunity, it's alluring for you. And I just wondered to, I wanted to unpack a little bit about that with you, because it seems to me that you are almost attracted to that danger and ambiguity that comes with things like running an aid mission to Kiev.

Timothy Bradshaw: I think, I'm not I’m necessarily attractive to it, but I certainly see opportunity in it. So, we often at the moment sort of voker is quite a big thing, right? Vulnerable, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and we can use all the analogies you want. But for me, there's always then opportunity because if everything is absolutely, you know, tickly, boom and perfect and jogging along then we often joke that's the point that you need effective management rather than necessarily an effective leadership. And I think if you look at sport as an example, you know, if you look at rugby in offense, you're trying to create a break in the back line, right. Or if you see a break in the back line, then there's the gap that you need to get through for your Canadian and American listeners, that's a real sport where you don't wear armor and helmet and stuff.

Steve Rush: [Laugh], nothing like a little bit of counter finishing in the mix there.

Timothy Bradshaw: [Laugh] But by understand that the theory is probably very much the same, you know, you are looking for that break in the back line, right, to go through the gap. And I think that the same is true. I'm sure it's true in ice hockey. But I think the same is true in business. If everything is the same, then you are unlikely to either improve or get a different result. And for me as an effective leader, really, you should be seeking out the change or the opportunity, but of course that's uncomfortable for people. So, if you can create a toolkit that enables you to initially deal, I guess, with like the biological reaction to change and stress and then see clearly and find the opportunity. So yes, I mean, Steve, I do see it as an opportunity, but that's because if something's changing, then maybe it's a chance to get in front, you know, if anyone watch the Formula 1 that was on at the weekend, the minute it rains, the teams down the back of the grid a little bit, see an opportunity, don't they?

Steve Rush: Yeah

Timothy Bradshaw: And it's the same theory.

Steve Rush: Absolutely, yeah. So, in terms of your experience of diving into Ukraine recently, you talk about resilience in your work a lot. What have you noticed about the resilience of the people in some of those war tone areas you've met recently?

Timothy Bradshaw: Oh, I mean, Steve. It's phenomenal. I was trying to describe this to somebody the other day. It’s both harrowing and inspirational in the same breath. You know, you're talking to people, some people have lost their whole homes, their families and everything else, but then those same people have a look in their eye, and they are not taking a step backwards. They are refusing to take a backwards step. And that would be enough for me to want to support them regardless of any benefit to the UK or anybody else anyway. Because I just always think that level of courage should be at least supported if not rewarded. But again, you know, when we go into businesses and we talk about clear communication and perhaps more importantly, a unifying purpose, you know, a focus and outcome that we're trying to achieve, then that's the ultimate outcome isn’t it, right? When somebody invade your country.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: That defense of your home or your family. I mean, that has to be the kind of ultimate unifying purpose I would think.

Steve Rush: And I suspect, and you'll know this more than most. In war tone situations, period, you find a deeper, more meaningful resilience than you'd ever have anticipated in the world of business. I mean, the things that we get stuck up and worried about and stressed about in our world of business, pale insignificance in those situations, don't they?

Timothy Bradshaw: Well, there's no way-out Steve, which is what I think's interesting, okay.

Steve Rush: Right.

Timothy Bradshaw: So, I remember talking to somebody about special operations, special duties, special forces, selection processes, and the theme all over the world different, you know, every country has its own variance, but the theme is always one the same, it's adapted and overcome and adapt and overcome. But actually, if you talk to the selection teams, a lot of them will tell you that the biggest dropout rate is in fact, not on the course, is the day before because people get the jitters the day before they go, because they are anticipating what's coming. And they have an option. So, they don't turn up, they talk themselves out of it or believe it or not, the vast majority of people that go through all these processes, they don't get failed. They what's called VW, they voluntarily withdraw. In other words, they quit because they have an option to quit.

Steve Rush: Right.

Timothy Bradshaw: And I think when we work with businesses, there is always an option to quit. And I think when we, you know, implement something new, push ahead with a new process or a system or a change, whatever that might be, there's always the option to go back to where we were before or to opt out. And I think when the pressure comes on and when you get nervous that kind of opt out to your comfort zone becomes more alluring, right?

Steve Rush: Right, yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: When somebody has invaded your country [laugh] and it's your home, you just don't have that option. So, you have to keep marching forwards almost at all costs. And that's why I think in these situations you see such, all inspiring levels of sort of courage and resilience because the option to sort of take the easier routes gone, is it's been removed. So, people dig really deep and they find whatever it is that's, you know, inside themselves.

Steve Rush: I love the whole notion of there is no get out. There's no plan B philosophy. And that forms mindset that we talked a little bit about earlier. So, there's an example where you can't teach that, you have to experience it in order to shift and create the right set of mindsets. But I do wonder if we apply that level thinking, can that impact on our mindset, do you think?

Timothy Bradshaw: Yeah, because I think once you've done it once or twice and you've proven to yourself, you can, which is for me where the sort of, title for the book came, Because I Can. Then what happens is, you kind of build confidence and it's almost like any new skill you pick up, you know, whether that's a sport or learning to drive or whatever. You go, oh, I can do that. And then you do it just once and you go, I can. And I always say to people, not enough people debrief the wins, you know, we're very quick to debrief the losses, but the problem is, we still don’t know what good looks like. Whereas actually I mean, you know, I've been a ski instructor and stuff like that in the past. It's a passion of mine.

And if you're teaching something to ski and they get it right, and you go, wow, that was amazing. Do that again, that was excellent. They can repeat it. And they have the confidence and the courage almost to repeat it, if that makes sense. And I think that's super, super important. And then you can start to instill that mindset in somebody. So, we have this expression that if you can reward the behaviors that you want to see again, that is ultimately how you change a mindset. And I think certainly professional services businesses at the moment, we have this impression that performance is this kind of perfect thing all the time. And somebody does something 95% correct but we jump on the 5% that they got wrong, and you know, we call them out on it. And then we're surprised when that person doesn't come back to us for more feedback.

Steve Rush: Yeah, so what was the inspiration for the book, Tim?

Timothy Bradshaw: I think it was an idea I had in my head for ages. I'm certainly not academic in any way, shape, or form. For me, it was probably the furthest I've ever been outside of my comfort zone, to be honest. So, I kind of started it and therefore had to finish it. And I just wanted to have a little bit of a user guide for people. You know, you do seminars and you do keynote speaking and you kind of hand out notes and PDFs and it's all bit old hat, isn't it? So, I just sort of let's do something a bit different. So, a lot stuff I talk about is in the book, but in terms of, don't do that, do this type of a way. So, I guess a bit sort of, I don’t know, user guide, that was the idea

Steve Rush: And the whole notion of because I can, is that self-talk almost to say that anything is possible, right?

Timothy Bradshaw: Yeah, absolutely. The whole thing, because I think sometimes you just have to remind myself, I can do this. I can do this. You know, I've been through various selection processes. We've talked about before, down various big mountains and on a number of occasions, I've found myself having to remind myself like, you've got this, you can do this. And I think it's also, it's about finding ways to do something, finding ways to make something happen. You know, we were talking in the past about leadership and taking decisions under pressure. And how does the military impact on that? And I don't think that the military necessarily guarantees somebody becomes a good leader. But it does guarantee that you become a kind of a good decision maker.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: But the one thing that is really interesting when you work with the military is there is never any question that we are going to do anything other than achieve the task, if that makes sense.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it does.

Timothy Bradshaw: So, the whole theme is focused on achieving the aim. And that's probably the biggest takeout and and that's a theme that runs through the book is, this is what we're going to do. So how do we make it happen? Accepting we're perhaps going to change course a couple of times and you know, it might evolve a little bit, that's okay. But fundamentally, how do we make it happen?

Steve Rush: I'm pretty sure it was you in the past Tim, actually, that taught me that in the military, the first thing you get to learn as a leader is, you have to make a decision.

Timothy Bradshaw: Yeah, that’s right.

Steve Rush: Tell me a little bit about that because I think that's a really interesting frame of mind that, you know, when you are still in a relatively young leadership position or indeed you're running a global organization, is that making the decision is key, right?

Timothy Bradshaw: So, yeah, I think it wobbles. It's really funny. It's a great analogy, right. We've all done it. Imagine you are driving your car and you approach a big roundabout. And I live quite near the A9, the key roundabout, which is, anybody's ever been here near Scotland will know, because they'll have sat there for 40 minutes trying and get across it. And you approach a roundabout and the person in front of you kind of half goes then stops then goes to go, then stops.

Steve Rush: [Laugh], yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: And chaos in ensues, right? Because you kind of go then stop. And then you hit the brakes, believe or not. It's the most common cause of accident, people hitting the back of each other and what's caused all that chaos is indecision. Now, if that person was either waiting for a huge gap, it's frustrating, but you can see what they're going to do, so you work with it. If that person, I swore then, says, I'm going for it anyway, drops a gear and goes for it. Scary as that might be, you can see what they're doing, and you can react to it. It's the indecision in the middle that causes the problem. And certainly, my experience at Sandhurst was, you don't fail Sandhurst to making a wrong decision. If you make a wrong decision, you learn from it, you evolve, but it's the indecision, it's making no decision that will make you fail. Because when you have sort of this sort of wobbly indecisive, that's when the wheels come off, that's when morale drops. That's when the good ideas club get together, that's when people start going off and doing their own thing in opposite directions. And me certainly, one of the biggest things I've learned across everything that I've done is, in high pressure situations, particularly when you're working with educated people is, you can need to provide reassurance and then direction. And that direction is where, you know, the decision-making is, part of giving that direction because you then get forward momentum. And to me, if you can gain forward momentum, then actually, everyone starts to move in that same direction together. And sometimes it'll be quicker than others, but essentially it does work.

Steve Rush: Yeah, now you'd have been faced with a bunch of challenges throughout your careers. And I say careers because they've kind of, whilst it is still one career, there's been number of different facets to what you do. What's been your secret source to overcoming those challenges and turning it into a positive outcome?

Timothy Bradshaw: I think sometimes firstly, understanding it kind of all things must pass, you know, at various situations throughout my life, I've, made mistakes, I've been impetuous, I've done stuff. And I think, oh, why did I do that? And you think the world's kind of ending around you, but as you get older, you kind of realize that actually, okay, it's mistake. It's going to be okay. And these things have a tendency to write themselves somehow and you come out the other side of it. So, I think, you know, accepting that you're going to make mistakes and get it wrong, take whatever lessons you can out of it. It is super important. I think at the moment, particularly we're quite vulnerable to people having huge opinions about things that they know very little about. And I think that's largely down to the ability for kind of social media, for people to kind of take a swing at you, if you like, actually without, you know, people you've never even met [laugh] essentially, and I think that can be quite damaging. So, I think accept the fact that you're going to make mistakes, focus on the bits you can control which is, which is your own performance and the way you react to staff and take feedback from the people you trust. But don't worry too much about the kind of naysayers or the people almost. I think we sometimes come across people, and I think it's a bit of a UK disease at the moment where we almost want people to fail and I think I find that a bit strange, but you see it quite a lot.

Steve Rush: You do, yeah. Where do you think that comes from?

Timothy Bradshaw: I don't know really. I honestly, for me, it's a bit of a complete anathema that is really, I don't really understand it, but whether that's a kind of jealousy thing or whether that's just, I think it's very easy. I can't recite the whole poem off the top of my head, but it's Roosevelt's poem, isn't it? Where he says, it's the man in the fight. You know, don't chastise those that try and fail. And I think sometimes people just, when we're outside of comfort zone or perhaps people are attempting something that somebody else hasn't wanted to try, they almost don't want them to succeed. I personally find that a bit strange, but yeah. Try to override it and get past it.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I think business is becoming more receptive to failure in the old world of what failure might have been and most businesses that I certainly work with and know of, recognize that it's part of success, making those steps and pivoting to something else.

Timothy Bradshaw: Yeah, no, Steve, I actually agree with you and actually if you want to push the boundaries, if you want to learn a new trick, so to speak, you're going to get it wrong a couple of times first, right. But if you want to adapt to overcome, and if you want to grow process, then by definition, you've got to develop and change. And if you're going to develop and change, you're going to do stuff differently. And sometimes that's not going to go quite to plan, I think, sort of accepting that and then also creating a structure within a business so that when that happens, we are supportive of each other. Yeah, we have this expression, covering each other's blind spots.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: You know, so actually we are supporting each other rather than kind of going, oh my goodness me, look at that. Steve made a right mess of that. You know, we should be thinking to ourselves, actually it was brilliant that Steve had to go at that and actually that bit were quite successful. So, if we take those two bits out, support Steve, make sure he's okay. And then let's build on those two elements that work really well. To me, that's much healthier.

Steve Rush: Super, now you mentioned a little earlier on you'd suffered with depression and anxiety in the past. Are you comfortable? Let's go there Tim.

Timothy Bradshaw: Yeah, I don't mind at all Steve. I think it's important that we do talk about it.

Steve Rush: Thank you. So, I know that this is a driving force for you now and you use it as a force of good to push you into other activities. But I wondered if you might just share with our listers a little bit about the journey you've been on and what some of your coping strategies are?

Timothy Bradshaw: Yeah, I mean, for me, it's interesting, right. So, my brain works at speed, as you already know, rightly or wrongly, and I have an ability to latch onto something to focus on that, to not necessarily see some of the boundaries that perhaps other people see and to therefore drive towards achieving that. And that enables me to think very laterally, to get to a location that we need to get to. But that same way my head works if you like comes with a price and the price is that occasionally I then latch the things that I don't need to latch to, or I overthink people's reactions or I overthink the way people come back to me, which then causes me to go into a, we call it, like a negative spiral, sort of catastrophic thinking spiral which is not uncommon with other people. And I face people. I don't suffer from it. I live with it. I don't particularly want curing if that is a thing. Because I am me and the bits of that that make it very challenging. And my wife's amazing at helping me also made me really good at other stuff. So, to me, you kind of can't have one without the other.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: But what I've tried to do, in 2018, we did a year of challenges, which was another terrible idea. And we essentially did an endurance challenge a month, every month for a year. We did like a half iron man triathlon. We climbed the Matterhorn amongst other things. I cycled L'Étape du Tour, which is a terrible idea for any people, in your audience that are mammals, middle-aged men in Lyra and who have push bikes worth more than their cars that they perhaps haven't told their other halves about.

You know, it's the ultimate challenge. You get to cycle the mountain stages like Tour de France. And I was definitely not ready for it and not prepared for it. And it put me to a really dark place. But one of the reasons that we did all these challenges was almost a bit of an experiment on me for me to try and work out, you know, how'd you get through these things and how'd, you cope with it and kind of consciously deal with it. And I think for me, it's about momentum. So, the first thing, we have this expression, it's in the book actually, called fear, false expectation appearing real, and any bits ever suffered with a bit pressure anxiety, one often leads to the other will find the clouds kind of roll in and you start to think, oh, this is going to happen and that's going to happen.

And Steve's thinking this off me, and if Steve's thinking that of me, then this is going to happen and now that's going to happen. But the reality of that is, although that feels quite real to me at the time, the reality is actually not real. It's a perception of what's going on around you. So, what you have to do or what works for me, I've never tell any what they have to do. What's worked for me is, focus on what's real. So almost list the facts. And our company strap line is intelligence, not information. So, list out the facts. This is what's real. This is what I know. And what you'll find is, I find is, that starts to then sort of push the clouds back because now I'm dealing with the reality of a situation, not my perception of a situation. And once that started to happen, you start to gain a little bit of traction.

And then I have this other expression, which is, remember for your big goal. You know, why did I get out of bed this morning, essentially. Ignore the dangerous middle ground and get there by taking small steps. So, in other words, using the tour as an example, two mountains in terms of two of the four we had to cycle up. I was, you know, flat out, done, finished, couldn't do it. But I reminded myself, I was doing it for mental health charities. So therefore, I wasn't going to let them down. That was my big picture.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: On mountain two, if I tried to think about mountain three or mountain four, I would've talked myself out of it, if that makes sense. So actually, what I did was then focus on the next aid station, the next peak, the immediate target in front of me, and we call it micro goal setting. And at one point I could have told you how many lampposts [laugh] were up the final street to the final climb because I was literally going one lamppost at a time.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Timothy Bradshaw: But it's quite a good analogy. So, when that starts to happen, you set yourself a micro goal. So, it's like, okay, can I get this done? Yes, I can. Can I get to the next one of these? Yes, I can. And then gradually that builds momentum. And it sort of starts to take you forward. And I hope that, you know, I hope anybody listening, if that helps just one person, it's not easy. But for me, that's made quite a big difference. And the more times I do it, I now go into a little bit of a routine, and I can find myself start to deal with that

Steve Rush: Amazing insights. Love it. Thank you for sharing that, Tim. I really appreciate it. So, this is where we get to turn the tables a little bit now. So, you've been a army officer, you've led businesses. You now run a really successful consultancy business. So, I want to tap into that leadership mind of yours. So, I'm going to first off, start by asking you to choose and pick amongst all of the lessons that you've collected on your journey and narrow those down to your top three. What would be your top three leadership hacks?

Timothy Bradshaw: Have a toolkit, not a process. Everyone loves a process, right. Everyone, except me. Processes are designed to make sure you get the wing mirror on the car, in the right place at the right time on a production line. They don't work with people. And I'll argue that with everybody all day, so build a toolkit of skills and experiences and in the same way that if you had a problem at home, you'd go to the toolkit and go select the right tool for the right job, rather than blindly following a process, think to yourself, which tool is going to work, you know, for the job that I'm trying to. So, my first one would be, have a toolkit, not a process.

Steve Rush: Nice.

Timothy Bradshaw: The second one as a leader will be, pull not push. Somebody once said to me, always try and be a warrior, not a mercenary [laugh] so, and by that, what I mean is, empathy is an interesting concept, but try and put yourself in the shoes of the people that you are trying to lead and ask yourself, what is it they want out of life?

What is it they want to achieve? And you know, the motto Sandhurst is, served to lead. So, in other words, the leader serves the team, not the other way around. And I think at the moment we have a tendency to go, well, I've made it, I'm the partner, I'm the CEO and whatever. The millions will now run around after me and doing my bidding. Whereas actually, if you can create a pool so that you have a company full of warriors, rather than mercenaries, that are working for a check, then to me, you will achieve far more. And certainly, when crazy stuff happens, like the pandemic or whatever else, that team of warriors are much more likely to rally round and find a way out, rather than sort of simply take the paycheck out, if that makes sense.

Steve Rush: Love it.

Timothy Bradshaw: And then I think my final one would be of the three would just be simply sort of, don't stop and keep reevaluating all of the time, keep reevaluating the situation. I'm a massive believer in John Boyd. The new Top Gun film is out, right. So, I'm about say it's brilliant. I was very skeptical, but no, it was brilliant.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I'm with you.

Timothy Bradshaw: But a lot of people don't realize is that the actual place, fightertown in Miramar came about because a guy called John Boyd who's a Colonel in the American Air Force came up with OODA loop thinking which is, observe, orientate, decide and act, and it goes round in a loop. So, in other words, what happens is, you gather intelligence, you interpret that intelligence, you take a decision, you carry out that action, like your life depends upon it. But then what you do is, you instantly start to observe the reaction if you like that you've carried out and is it working and adjust accordingly? And what that does is it means, rather than having this kind of linear decision-making process where the outcome is, be all an end all. In fact, any decision is simply part of this kind of ever rotating process, where you're constantly adjusting the course. And the best analogy I can think of is sailing. You know, you don't kind of set the course sail for 10 days and hope for the best, then check the compass again. You know, you're constantly checking the compass and constantly adjusting the course. And for me that would be it.

Steve Rush: Great lesson.

Timothy Bradshaw: So, that you're always adjusting.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I love that. I love that last one as well, because the world isn't as linear as people think it is, people are not as linear. Processes and organizations are changing intraday. And having that ability to be fleet of foot is, is really powerful, isn't it?

Timothy Bradshaw: Yeah, totally agree Steve, absolutely. And we're proving that more and more, you know, we kind think coronavirus, and thought, that's done. And then the Ukrainian thing happened and there will be another one, you know, when this is sorted, there will be another one.

Steve Rush: Yeah, exactly. So next part of the show, Tim, we call it Hack to Attack. So, this is typically where something hasn't worked out as you'd intended, it might be something that's gone quite wrong, but you've actually taken that as an experience. And it's now positive in your life and work. What would be your Hack to Attack?

Timothy Bradshaw: I think you've got to; you've got to seek out the positive outcomes from anything you can find to take the lessons out of it. And I think, you know, using an analogy and I guess this is not everybody can use it, but we can use the lessons that come out of. It was, we spent two years trying to pull off the Everest expedition and we got it all sorted. And we got to the mountain, and we thought, wow, this is it. We're going to do it. You know, we all joke sort, you know, book, deal and TV show. And then, when all the earthquakes happened and everything else happened around you, I think the first thing that happened is you kind of feel quite sorry for yourself. And you think that this is outrageous. I put all this time and money and effort, and now this has all gone wrong.

And then you suddenly realize that the people around you have lost their homes and their families. So, whilst you can't help the way you feel, it puts it into context, and I think you have to accept that. And at the time, I kind of walked away feeling like a little bit like of a failure really. Even though they were situations so far out of my control, you know, it's not even fathomable to think you could have controlled that situation. But actually, now we use that experience to help school kids. So, we've spoken to over seven and a half thousand school kids about what it's like when it doesn't quite go to plan about how you adapt and overcome and about how you refocus and how you keep working the problem regardless of what's going on around you. So, in fact, that very negative situation, what was that 2015? So, the best part of 10 years later. Now is providing a very positive input and outcome to schools as to how to overcome the challenge that they faced over the last couple of years. So, I think, like I said, to take out the positive lessons, you know, wherever you can.

Steve Rush: Yeah, definitely. And that was an extreme example of where learning happens, but sometimes the evaluation of the learning is sometimes afterwards, right?

Timothy Bradshaw: Mm

Steve Rush: Mm.

Timothy Bradshaw: Absolutely, yeah.

Steve Rush: So last part of the show, Tim, we get to do some time travel with you. You can bump into Tim at 21, probably just finishing or midway through Sandhurst. I suspect at the time, what would your advice to him be?

Timothy Bradshaw: I think [laugh] when we take decision making or when I teach critical decision making now, which I do a lot of with big corporate. The first thing we tell people is take a tactical pause, which is just take a deep breath for a minute. You know, when you in an airplane, there's a reason why they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first. And I think it would be, take your time, you know, just pause for a minute and respect the experience of those people around you. And kind of let it happen a little bit, let it come to you rather than necessarily instantly try and force every situation. So just take a minute, take in what's happening to you and have faith that whatever is, you know, is going to come to you at some point, don't necessarily sort of instantly try and force it

Steve Rush: Very wise words. Indeed. So, then Tim, what's next for you?

Timothy Bradshaw: So, we are busy at the moment with keynote speaking and we are currently talking to companies about kind of mindset development programs. I think we are really passionate at the minute. I think there's a huge opportunity at the minute for businesses to really reevaluate how they lead, how they make decisions, how they motivate their workforces and make a change. And I think probably now more than ever, there's a window for people to seize that opportunity and go, we're going to take lessons out of this. The workforce is up for it, we're up for it. And let's see if we can make a difference. So, we're quite keen to kind of be a part of that wave. And then the next mission, we're planning our next trip to Ukraine. The boys and girls that we were talking to the other week have got a massive problem. They haven't got enough vehicles to bring casualties back from the front line to the hospitals. So, we are talking to a few people at the moment, we've set up a charity called the Sandstone Foundation, and we are working to try see if we can't get some four by old fours out to these guys to help them and bring back casualties. So that's the next project, I guess.

Steve Rush: Awesome, brilliant news. And for those folks that listen to this, Tim, I'm pretty certain, they're going to want to know how they can get a copy of, Because I Can. Find out a little bit more about the work you do with Sandstone Communications. Where's the best place for us to send them?

Timothy Bradshaw: Two things, really. The book is on Amazon. Just simply search either for me or for Because I Can or Waterstones, I think have it as well. And the best way to find out or get in touch is via LinkedIn. So, Timothy Bradshaw on LinkedIn and I would love to hear from anybody. I love learning. I love talking to people. And particularly as I said, if you've got a lot of listeners across, you know, further up field, America and Canada and all over. I'm always fascinated to hear how, what we think resonates elsewhere. So please, yeah. Drop me a line on LinkedIn and then I'll always do my best to respond.

Steve Rush: We'll make sure those links are in our show notes as well, Tim, but I'm just delighted that we've managed to get you on our show. You're an incredibly inspirational guy. You've got such a lot of experience that we can learn from in lots of different parts of our lives and work. So, Tim, thanks for being part of our community on The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Timothy Bradshaw: No, thank you very much, Steve. Really enjoyed it.

Steve Rush: Yeah, thanks Tim.

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.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter is a globally renowned leadership and career coach. He's a speaker, podcast host, author and founder of Live for Yourself [LFY] Consulting. In this great show find out about:

• Ben’s eureka moment that sent him on a path from Healthcare into research and to follow his life’s passion.
• Why leaders struggle with leading themselves.
• The Three “C” of self-leadership.
• If we are stuck how we can break free.

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

Find out more about Ben below:

Ben on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritterbenj/

Ben on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ritterbenj

Ben on Twitter: https://www.instagram.com/ritterbenj/

Ben’s Website: https://benjamin-ritter.com

Full Transcript Below

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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

Joining me on the podcast today is Dr. Benjamin Ritter. He's a leadership and career coach and founder of Live for Yourself Consulting. But before we get a chance to speak to Ben, it's The Leadership Hacker News.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, we explore careers that are taking off in the post pandemic world. We've been contacted by a number of our listeners asking us to explore, what are the next best places to work? And what are the sectors that are rising stars in amongst the post pandemic era? When it comes to the future, uncertainty is the only certainty. Think about remote work way back in 2019, it was slowly gaining acceptance that most managers would allow people to maybe work from home on a Friday or a Monday. 2020 companies and their employees were forced to adapt. And today many workers have traded that long commute for a casual stroll to their home office or to their lounge or kitchen or wherever they work from.

So when it comes to predicting which careers will flourish in a post COVID world, that's not easy, but there are some definite trends. Of course, if you're already loving your career, I'm not suggesting any radical change or course of action here. However, if you are considering a change, here are the top five growing fields that perhaps could lead the way to a new future, maybe unsurprisingly, but healthcare leads their way. Those working in healthcare have really promoted, demonstrated the abilities that they have and the impact that they have across our communities. Perhaps weren't visible before the pandemic and careers, such as nursing are getting huge amounts of interest. And of course now you'll have to earn a bachelor's degree or a science or associate degree in nursing. Then you'll need to be like licensed in some countries. It's truly proved that nursing is a professional and respected career.

And many people are attracted to that level of rigor and indeed impact on society. And with many responses being passed to the nursing community, introducing roles, such as nursing practitioners who are responsible to do as many things as many GPs do has elevated their reward and recognition that comes along with it. But despite this, many people still see this as a purpose driven role. One that people can make it impact on communities and society. Second on list is information technology. And of course IT has been a growth feel years. What's different, of course, is the increased focus on remote work and smart technology has increased the demand for things like software development and app development. Organizations are pivoting their recruitment strategies to hire people who can code online and who can work remotely that tap into infrastructure. That office for national statistics in the UK seen this increased by 18%.

And the bureau of labor statistics in the U.S. has seen this grow by 22% this year. And with the average income over six figures, it's definitely pulling people into this space. Supply chain management comes in at third, and you probably aren't surprised to find that this is a growth field. The panic buying that began before last year's lockdowns shifted the focus away from that just in time delivery methodology that many retail long relied on. Jobs in this field include things like purchase agents, logistic analysts, distribution managers, procurement, and although many start out with having to have a degree. Many top earners in this field are often coming from an engineering or a practical background where they understand the supply chain. So if you're skilled with math’s and statistics and have good sound engineering principles, then supply chain management might be a career route for you.

Financial management is next. Careers in this field are expected to grow by over 15% in the next 10 years, financial advisors, financial managers are hired to examine a company's spending and income, looking for ways to maximize profitability. Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies often seek candidates with an MBA. Although smaller organizations now are hiring managers with a simple degree or bachelor's degree, or even offering modern day apprenticeships in the world of finance and accounting. This means there's a really great pipeline with young talent growing world of the financial accounting space and the financial advising space. And remember apprenticeships in the UK are not about age. Many organizations are hiring senior people in their second or third career who are looking to apply their life skills with a new approach to work. And the last one that's on the list is Actuaries and Statisticians. Now Actuaries enjoy enormous income relative to their peer groups in accounting. And it's also expected that this is going to grow by another 20% in the next 10 years. And with the average income of way over six figures, what we're seeing is quite an often stuffy and introverted role and job is now attracting great new talent. If you enjoy data and statistics, it could be the perfect high growth field for you. And of course, we've looked at some high paying and growing and trending careers. And the best job for you might not be about being highly paid nor the fastest growth. The key thing is it leveraging your skills, achieving the best possible outcome and finding your purpose within it. And besides how many of us would've guessed that the number one fastest occupation, according to the Office of National Statistics is Cinema Projectionist and in America, Motion Picture Projectionist. So it turns out, we are returning back to normal. We are getting out there and we are consuming more movies than ever before. That's been The Leadership Hacker News. If you have any stories or you want us to talk about a certain topic on the show, please get in touch.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Dr. Benjamin Ritter is our guest on today's show. He's a globally renowned leadership and career coach. He's the founder of Live for Yourself [LFY] Consulting. He's a speaker, podcast and author. Ben, welcome to The Leadership Hacker Podcast.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: I am ready to get hacking. Let's do it.

Steve Rush: Good stuff, and me too. So first hack then Ben, let's get to explore what you do now, because I know there were lots of twists and turns on your path. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about it?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Yeah, there are a lot of twists and turns. I think most importantly, I was working as a healthcare executive and I was promoted into that role from a position that I really enjoyed, which tends to happen to high achievers. I felt my work was meaningful when I was initially working in healthcare as group systems analyst and my official title, but basically I was in process improvement. I was improving clinical outcomes for patients. I did such a good job. They made me manager of business operations, which basically was kind of the right hand of all the executives. I was on the executive team, but I was a doer and things done. And so I worked as a financial manager. I worked in business development. I mean, you name it. I did something for it. I worked with everyone on the team, but I didn't do any of the stuff that I used to like before that. And so over time I started to resent my position and resent my organization because I didn't feel it was giving me meaning anymore. I blamed it for not giving me direction. I mean, like there's a certain positive aspect of having autonomy. But it becomes a negative when you don't have clarity.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: In terms of what you are actually supposed to achieve, what you're supposed to do and why that matters to you. What's meaningful about it? And so I got into this place in my life where I was bringing negativity home with me. And when I went into work, I wasn't really trying to work. I was really trying to avoid doing anything because I didn't see the point in it. I was like, why am I here? This is pointless. All these people, like, why should I invest in them? I was like digging my own grave, to be honest. And they still thought that I was a high achiever because I would do the work that they wanted me to do while I was just getting more spiteful and resentful as every day went on.

Steve Rush: And did you notice the parallel before? So you mentioned the fact that it didn't give you that sense of purpose and it did from the work you did before. What was the kind of the moment when you recognized that was the case?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Well, luckily that came to me one day when I was walking to work, when I was kind of seething that I had to go back into work again, and I kind of had two feet out the front door and it wasn't really that I knew what it was that brought me meaning. I didn't have the sit down and reflective moment up to that point. I just knew that I didn't feel the same way. And so luckily though I had this little epiphany moment when I was going into work and kind of looking around me and I sensed that everybody was feeling the exact same way that I was walking by. Like these zombies walking into a work that they hated and that was so dreadful to them. And I remember thinking, you know, I'm doing this, it's not my employer.

I'm creating this for myself. I am the curator of my own environment, my own mindset. And that's when I actually woke up. And I started asking myself the tough questions. Like, why do I feel this way? Why did I feel that my work was meaningful before? What is it that I really want to accomplish right now at this job? What skills do I want to learn? Who do I really enjoy working with? How do I invest more time in them? And that led to me finally, pivoting from what I was doing to having a little bit more direction. And I get it, we tend to be very reactive in our careers. And up to that point, I was very reactive, you know, I didn't mean to work in healthcare. I fell into it because I was networking my butt off because it was the middle of a recession. I couldn't get a full-time job or two and a half years. I’m out of grad school and I had two graduate degrees and experience in public health. And every job offer that I got during that time was actually canceled after I signed on a dotted line, this happened four times. And so I was just looking for something, anything, and you know, how you got to the job you were in today is very much reflective how you think about it and how you think about your career and how you think about work. And so as a leader, you know, if you're working with employees, they all have their own backstory. And at that point in my time, my backstory was, you know, you didn't do what you wanted to do. You took what you could get and the organization was the one responsible for creating your job.

Steve Rush: Right, so what you're really talking about is, you were asking yourself a series of questions. And for me, that sounds a bit like coaching? Did you recognize that, that's actually, perhaps what you were doing at the time, was coaching yourself?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: That's why I pivoted towards this industry. So at the time I was side hustling as a coach in a different area, more like life, dating and relationships. I was an avid passionate kind of personal, you know, thought leader in terms of personal development and professional development. I lost who I was when I was younger and we can touch on this, but I became interested in the field of personal professional development because of it. And so at the time I'd spent a lot of my free time on reading, studying, and learning. Now I'm doing it as a side hustle, but then I also was selected for 16 months of leadership training. So I had my own coach per se in the organization. Director of people, we met like once a month, maybe less, but it was something, it helped me become aware of the fact that this existed.

And so very much though when I was going through this transition, I think mentally, you know, when I was waking up, I knew that I had to coach myself and I coached myself in every other area of my life. From confidence, to interpersonal dynamics, to dating. I mean, I studied business, how to be persuasive and what worked in terms of marketing and sales in just how to walk into a room and create friendships. But I kind of forgot that we needed to do the same for our career. And I think we're taught that, you know, throughout our lives, we're taught that you don't choose what you do or how you do it. You find some place to do it and you do it there. I kind of had to wake up and change my mindset and relationship to work.

Steve Rush: I had a really interesting conversation just this week, actually with a guy I was coaching who was a senior executive for a firm. And what he was describing to me is, his challenge of that work and life balance. And for me, that's where the problem was. Because he was trying to segregate activities and behaviors at work and at home, and actually they're interconnected, that's just life. But he was giving himself these completely different set of rules to how to behave at home and how to behave at work. And then he was neither genuine in either position. What's your take on that?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Well, it sounds like such a separation. I was two faced for the majority of my career. You know, when I was working in public health, I was going to school full time and I was bartending full time and working odd jobs and like promotions, like as a brand ambassador to pay for it all, even though I was still working for the school as well. And then when I was working in healthcare, I was side hustling as a, you know, as a coach trying to get a business off the ground and also of having other income streams, still working in hospitality and bartending. And I never brought my full self to work. And, you know, I had experiences that I think created. When I first interviewed for the job in healthcare, I got to the final round. I got the interview by networking as a bartender.

Like I met someone across the bar and he got one of my friends, a job as an RN, and then ended up getting me an interview. I found out that the CEO didn't select, well not the CEO, the VP at the time didn't select me because he found out that I was a bartender. And, you know, they brought me back a year later. Exactly a year later when that person transitioned to a different site, a different hospital to get trained, to be the CEO, by the way, for the current hospital. They brought me back and hired me and, you know, there are certain experiences that I've had that kind of taught me not to bring my full self to work, which I think is very detrimental to our own health. Because I tell you today I am who I am. I am my full self and it is so freeing and I don't want to work for an organization that doesn't allow me to bring my full self to work.

Steve Rush: So, really interesting perspective. And I just want to explore it a little more for you. So in bringing your full self to work, how do you know that you're not hanging onto some of that baggage of the past?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Well, we're in a day and age and I think directly answer your question indirectly. We're working in a day and age where a lot of us are remote and virtual. And so now there are cameras into our homes and into our lives. And we're also forcing connection because without having connection within the workplace, we need to create the opportunities to connect. So we're doing icebreakers hopefully, and we're doing happy hours.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: We're basically prompting questions that we normally might not have even have answered in the normal in person environment. And there's this desire and need or movement towards bringing your whole self to work. And there are a lot of individuals that are afraid of this, especially new leaders on, am I really acting like a leader. If I share a certain issue that's happening in my life or I share how I feel about something in my life. And I think there's a fine balance between people who know who you are and what you care about and what you enjoy and what you're dealing with and what your story is to I'm really emotionally respond to this situation that I'm going to feel different about tomorrow. And I think there's a strong distinction there between, you know, who I am. So we build a relationship to, you know how I feel when I want to complain.

Steve Rush: Right.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Which I think is some people don't fully understand that separation.

Steve Rush: Yeah, one of the things I think is prevalent amongst most entrepreneurs and most successful leaders that I've spoken to on the podcast and indeed coached and worked with is this real focus around making sure that they are steadfast. They are well physically and mentally before they start thinking about what else is on their journey. And lots of great leaders attribute self-leadership as a real key tenant of their behaviors, as well as their approach to how they lead their businesses. And you developed something similar to that along the lines of self-leadership and you call it your three Cs. I wonder if you could tell us the story about how that came about and maybe spin us through the three Cs themselves.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Yeah, and just to, because I don't want to overlook your last question. I think they're interrelated. If there's something that you want to accomplish or feel like you want to say or do in your place of employment and you are not doing it, then it's probably due to a story or expectation or previous experience that you've had related to work. And so if you ask yourself, what do I want to accomplish? What do I really want? What am I of goals? Which people tend not to actually define, which is the first C of self-leadership. And you find that you're not taking action there. And there usually is something that you need to identify from your beliefs about work, about leadership, about organizations that you need to then challenge. And so the, the three Cs of self-leadership came about because I was working with clients initially with the live system, the live framework, and this was goals, intentions, values, and expectations. It was like a decision making process that I would take clients through for them to be able to feel more comfortable and more fulfilled about what they were trying to achieve. And I realized that some clients had a much easier way of doing it than others. And this is when I was also completing my dissertation. I was researching a bunch about leadership and about job satisfaction about motivation. And I started just really trying to analyze what was it about these specific clients? What traits did they have that led to greater success? And I discovered that there were three main pillars and components that led them to be able to take action. That led them to be able to lead themselves. And I coined this, the three Cs of self-leadership and there's a lot of three Cs out there. I luckily I don't think I've seen these Cs together, but a lot of models you'll tend to see.

And I think this is a Testament to the fact that it works. A lot of similarities between different models out there. After I created them, I was like, I really hope nobody has these because I'm going to copyright I, so luckily nobody did. The first C is clarity and this is clarity of, you know, what you care about? But really mainly why you care about it. So what is the motivation, the attachment? I think we've all heard the why is more important than anything, but then that why tends to also create, so you have your values, your motivations. You have, you know, the heart of what you're trying to achieve, but then you have the what, so what am I actually trying to achieve long term and short term?

And can I break that down to daily tasks? So I know what my priorities are on a daily basis. The, the second C is confidence. So when you have clarity in something, that is the foundation of confidence, if you know why you're trying to achieve something and what you stand for and what you're trying to work on, that tends to create a personal sense of belief in your, and what you're showing up as, so that you tend to actually have like, your inner critic has less of a voice because you're so adamant. And so sure of what you're trying to achieve in yourself. It doesn't change the fact that you need to go study and learn and get educated. So there's confidence is self-efficacy and self-esteem, so it's not just the belief and what you're trying to achieve in yourself will the belief in the skills that you have.

So that requires you to listen to this, you know, listen to this podcast, go sign up for journal articles. You go talk to people that are in the field that have already achieved what you want to achieve. And then, so when you have clarity and now you're confident in what you're doing and you have the skills for it, you more likely to take action, and so that's control. This is I am intentionally acting in a way that is in alignment with the why and what I'm actually looking to achieve in my life. And that control stays constant despite any sort of emotions or situations that you're going in through life. And also allows you to build a community around yourself that supports what you're interested in, the other two Cs.

Steve Rush: And it seems to me that they're absolutely interrelated as well, aren't they?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Very much so. So for example, let's say you know what you need to do, but you don't know why you're doing it. And don't feel confident in it. A lot of people tend to be in jobs where they don't know why they're doing something and they don't feel like they act actually can accomplish it. That is so distressful. That is a situation for burnout that is going to cause people and to leave your organization. Now, let's say you're very confident in something, but you don't actually take any action towards it. So again, you know, like these all need each other to be able to work. You need to have all three.

Steve Rush: What do you think the reason is that we struggle with the whole notion of self-leadership as a population? and I'm clearly generalizing, but most of the execs, I speak to do a great job of the leading teams and organizations, but often put themselves further down that pack in order.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Oh, there are so many reasons, but I'd say the main one is that no one's ever given us permission. No one's ever told us that we are more important than anyone else. Our health and our desires and our goals can only be define by ourselves. And if we don't take care of ourselves, then other people aren't going to be taken care of.

Steve Rush: Yeah, there's almost this perspective, isn't there? That if you do put yourself first, then that's somewhat selfish or even extreme narcissistic, but actually it's critical for the benefit of the people that work with you, isn't it?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: I love when people hear live for yourself and they go, that sounds selfish.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Because it is a magnifying glass into how they define self-care, how they define really trying to understand what they want to achieve. Because if you don't feel that you're important, you're never going to spend time figuring out what you want to do. And so if you don't figure out, you want to do, then can you imagine all of your actions are going to be based on other people's desires, where does that then leave you?

Steve Rush: So how do you get permission? How do you end up giving yourself permission and feel secure and safe in the knowledge it's okay to focus on you?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Well, I go out on a limb here and say that we both give all the listeners permission.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: To pause and figure out what is it that they really care about. And what's at the core of their attitudes and beliefs and how that translates to goals. It's the great resignation, everyone's leaving their jobs because they feel the solution isn't in the organization that they're at. When I first started in this field, my message was fix where you're at, craft the job you have to become a job you love because most of the time the solution is not somewhere else, the solution's inside. And then as being able to feel empowered and to have the permission to alter where you're currently at to be best fit for you. You see this a lot with leaders.

Steve Rush: That's where the adage, the grass isn't always greener comes from, isn't it? Because people have this perception that, oh, going to work for another organization, but actually the root cause often is ourselves.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: You go somewhere, you work for six months and you don't really have the opportunity to sit and think because it's a new job and everything's new and novel and you're learning. And so after six months you start noticing the issues. This isn't really what I wanted. This isn't the work that I thought I signed up for. These aren't the people that I really wanted to be around. I don't really understand why we're doing this, the impact. And so then you wait, you kind of coast around for another six months, you see maybe it will change. And then you spend the next year looking for another job and then you leave.

Steve Rush: It's so ironic, isn't it? And it repeats itself. I suspect.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: I'd love to see a career ladder within organizations. And I think there's a lot of people that are discussing it now, how do you career map, right? How do you retain your talent by giving them opportunities in the organization itself? Well, you can't do that unless the people in your organization actually feel like they have permission to do that. And you can't make that happen if the leaders aren't aware that they need to start looking for opportunities to develop and grow their talent, instead of just have them meet their expectations at their job.

Steve Rush: So you talked a little earlier around this kind of, almost epiphany that you had, which led you on this path now. Tell us a little bit about the work that you are doing with Live For Yourself and maybe some of the key areas of focus that you are helping others with now.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: It’s kind of split into two main areas. I'll work with organizations, I'll host, you know, ad-hoc corporate workshop, I'll create performance development programs, new manager training, go in and redo communication structures and Desi organizations, to coach one on one with leaders, group coaching and individual. But then it's also working just one on one with senior leaders, the senior managers up to the executive level on how to develop them else, right. How to feel confident in their role, how to show up, how to define their executive presence, how to lead manage teams in a way that leads to the specific outcomes that they want, but also how to find another job if it's not right for you. Like if, where you're at really isn't right for you, how to find the place to that, it can be right, because there is so much, you can do it in an organization.

Steve Rush: Right?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: And if one day you wake up and realize that what you want to do, isn't where you're at. Or you find meaning from different things and where you're at. Because you haven't thought about it before. It's okay to leave. It's okay to make that pivot.

Steve Rush: And how much of the great resignation that you spoke about that's happening and it's not just in north America and Europe, it's happening in pockets all over the world. How much of that do you put down to the global pandemic versus it's just the opportunity to cause people to spend more time being intro focused?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Yeah, think about the times that you've had major have change in your life like graduation from uni, moving, maybe to a new area, the end of a relationship, the start of a new relationship, the end of someone close to you, the end of hearing a certain story, right? That also highlighted the fact that life is short potentially, an injury you know, an injury potentially to yourself as well. Anytime that we remember right. Have reasons to that what we were doing was comfortable and that there are other options. Anytime there's disruption leads to growth and the world has been heavily disrupted heavily.

Steve Rush: Yes.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: And so, no matter what that's going to cause you to start reflecting on what you've been doing, why you've been doing it and what you want to do next. And at the same time, I think we've shown that there are more opportunities and options in the world than maybe we previously thought.

Steve Rush: Right, yeah.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Put those things together, and all of a sudden, now you have what we call the great resignation. What I would be careful of is, if we don't spread this message. And I think of what we're talking about today, that it's not where you are that matters more so than how you show up where you are, then this is going to keep happen.

Steve Rush: Yeah, and for many people, then not in the position to leave a role, leave a job, leave an organization, and go find another. And many of our listeners who are listening to this podcast from different jurisdictions and countries around the world, haven't got the luxuries of being able to just walk and find another gig. So re-engineering themselves is a fantastic way of creating a new job in the same organization almost isn’t it?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: And you can't do that without self-leadership. I tell people often when I work with them as clients and not as clients. Where you are, is not as bad as you think, and it might be. It might, it might eventually be, but have you done the work to figure that out and have you actually put the effort in to change where you're at, to be more suited to you. Now, sometimes you don't have a leader that actually allows that to happen. They block you, but have you tried, have you tried to have the conversation with them? And often, especially when I first start working with the clients, those conversations haven't happened, I don't know about you, someone comes on as a client and they go, I really want this to happen in my organization. I really want to do this type of work and great, what have you done so far for it?

Steve Rush: Exactly, it's the first question, isn't it? And you often find the responses. I've thought about it.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Yeah, and maybe, they've mentioned it once.

Steve Rush: And that knowing, doing gap, isn't it?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: The biggest thing that I've been seeing lately is that people get the courage, like leaders that I've spoken with, employees of all levels. If get the courage to say what they want one time. And the leader says, okay, but it's not the leader's responsibility to follow up. So reliability is a huge part of executive presence. If I was to list off those four keys to executive presence and reliability is one. A real executive would follow up, but that doesn't always happen. So we need to take responsibility for what we want. And so how are you following up on the things that you mentioned? You have to be that tripping faucet. That's what self-leadership is. It's I'm going to keep going until I get what I want.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I love it. So next part of our show. So this is where I get to hack into your leadership thinking, your leadership brain and keen to try and take all of that knowledge and get it down to your top three leadership hacks. What would they be Ben?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: So leadership hack number one would be communication. Maybe not so secretive to a lot of people, but weekly one-on-ones conversations with individuals. And so I'd say one-on-one communication. I can't tell you how many leaders I've worked with that say, I talk to my employees all the time. We have group meetings once a week, we talk about projects. Okay, you need to make space. You need to create a safe space to build trust, and get to know your employees, to be able to ask questions such as, how's work going? What are your priorities? How can I help with that? Where do you want to go in the organization? You need that information to be able to retain and develop talent.

So I'd say that would be number one. The second piece is that nothing is concrete when it comes to a job role. So let's drop this idea that the job description is everything. If you want to retain talent or also want to be happier at work for yourself, understand that there is flexibility in what you do each and every single day. And if it's not in the actual work where that flexibility is, the flexibility is in how you do it. So for example, if there's something that you really don't like doing, then can you buffer that with something that you really like doing? Or can you do it while you are at home if you are in the office or can you do it while you're listening to your favorite podcast, such as this, or in your favorite, you know, cafe. So even not even just not changing the work, but flexibility in how you do the work. So look into job wrapped.

Steve Rush: That comes back down to the control C as well that you talked about earlier because there is this fake notion of if you high levels of control, you haven't got space, but actually it's the control that gives you the space and flexibility, isn't it?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Very true.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: The third piece would be engage, engage, and engage. Can't tell you how often I work with individuals that want to move up and get promoted in the organization. And they think if they do their work, that is enough. People will know that they're doing good work. And I'd say that, you know, it doesn't matter how good you are at your work, if nobody knows about it. And if no one knows who you are, for any level of leader. And if you're a leader that has employees that have intentions for growth, then you should also be ping them in meetings and having them start speaking up. People need to know who you are. You need to develop a professional brand and the day where you will just automatically get promoted and move up in an organization without any knowledge or awareness of you, your work, you know, just even your personality. Those are gone.

Steve Rush: That last one particularly is so important for folk, but actually it comes back down to how I give myself permission. And am I feeling confident in order to be able to do that and put myself out there and be vulnerable?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: It's so scary for some people, and I understand that. One of the top three things that I've worked with clients on are fear with presenting and fear with speaking up in meetings, fear with even just asking for a skip level meeting for someone, you know, above your boss, someone outside of the organization, this is required. There's some pretty staggering statistics on people aren't promoted if they're not in office, right? If you're a virtual, if you're a hybrid workforce and that's because the FaceTime is missing. So this is even more important now than ever before. If you are working an organization, have plans to move up or want even opportunities to move up, you need to be dedicating a portion of your week to connecting, to engaging. I mean, I even say one more thing, make yourself a rule. And I do this with clients. Every meeting, you have to ask a question and make a comment period, no matter what.

Steve Rush: So tell us how that might go.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: You're in a meeting and any topic whatsoever. You have to ask a question to a leader or to a coworker. So you're obviously paying attention and you're engaged. And then you also have to make a comment on something that is being said throughout the meeting, no matter what. It's a pretty simple rule, I'd say. If you're only doing that, you probably will, at least, people will be aware of you. From now on, take a look at your meetings and see if you attend the meetings or you don't say anything. If you're attending a meeting where you never say anything, you shouldn't be in that meeting. So make it a point to be engaged in those meetings or don't attend them.

Steve Rush: It's a great hack because it simply just forces dialogue. It forces not only does it force you to listen and pay attention, because you're going to have to ask a question, but it forces that sense of connectivity across a team, really simple, but very effective, I would imagine.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Yeah, and those are the little things that matter.

Steve Rush: Yeah, totally. Definitely, so. So, next part of the show we call it hack to attack. This is where something in your work or your life hasn't worked as you planned, but as a result of the experience, it's now serving you well. So what would be your Hack to Attack Ben?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: I have so many twists and turns in my career. I just have to focus for a second. I wanted to be a professional soccer player growing up. I dedicated my life to it, I played D1 Athletics. I went overseas, actually played in the UK for a little bit, but not professionally, kind of like a feeder team. And when I gave that up, I lost who I was. I had no idea who Ben was, because I didn't do anything else. I didn't watch really anything on TV. I didn't have friends that were outside soccer and it was a very low moment in my life, but it brought me the realm of personal professional development. I took all of my energy that I dedicated to the sport and I said, let's go define who I am. Let's go build confidence. Let's go study, you know, social psychology, behavioral psychology. And without those moments, without that moment, I wouldn't have had all the others serendipitous like moments that came after that, but led me to today.

Steve Rush: Still play soccer? I do. I actually ended up hurting my knee about two months ago. So it's healing right now, but I'll be back at it.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Awesome, good for you.

Steve Rush: So the very last thing we're going to take you on is a little bit of time travel. Now we get you to have the opportunity to give yourself some advice when you are 21. And if you were now toe to toe, face to face with Ben at 21, what advice would you give him?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Nobody's opinion matters.

Steve Rush: Nice.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: My mind was my worst enemy as a kid, my lack of confidence in my myself, the fact that I'd hit the hit the field in doubt, every single touch I'd have on a ball. The fact that I would not give myself confidence to have a conversation with a stranger. The fact that I would wonder if people were laughing at me when I was walking down the sidewalk, like my mind held me back from so much in my life that when I finally grabbed, when I got hold of it, I was able to be the confident person that I am today. To be so sure of myself, to have the clarity that led the confidence and then be able to take actions that were matter. It was life changing. So if anyone doubts themselves today and you know that you doubt yourself when you go into a room and you say something and you look for people's reactions to see what they think about what you said, spend some time really figuring out what you care about.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Because then you'll be a little bit more confident in yourself.

Steve Rush: Awesome advice. Particularly if anybody's listening to this now who is experiencing that, that's going to be a real game changer for them. Question, bit of a side hack I guess. How do you keep on track? How do you keep focus? How do you keep that mind serving you in the way that you do today?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: You show up as the person that you know that you want to be. I know what my top values are and I show up each and every day in alignment with those values. When I don't, that's when I get off track.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: So what are the things that you truly care about and how are you doing them on a daily basis? So health is a big one for me, from nutrition to fitness. And then, you know, I care about talent development and personal, leadership development, career development. So if I get to show up each and every day, I'm blessed to the point that I've crafted a life where I can do the things that I truly care about. And that allows me to stay on track. Because that's what motivates me.

Steve Rush: Great advice. So Ben, if folk listening to this, want to fight a little bit more about the work you do with Live For Yourself and indeed tap into some of your broadcasts, some of your writing and maybe listen to you speak. Where's the best place for us to send them?

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Go check out, liveforyourselfconsulting.com, just liveforyourselfconsulting.com. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, So if you reach out to me on LinkedIn, tell me that you heard this conversation and say, what's on your mind. I'm happy to connect and continue the conversation.

Steve Rush: Great stuff. We'll also put those links in our show notes as well. It's important for us to keep that conversation going. And I just want to say, thank you, Ben. It was amazing talking to you. It's absolutely because of your work that you do today and your focus and dedication, and you can just hear the passion and energy you have for that self-centered approach to leading yourself. So I want to say thank you for being on that show, being part of our community.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Thank you so much for having me. And it's just so important and critical to how I live my life. The most important leader that you're ever going to meet in your life is the one that lives inside you. No one else is responsible or accountable for your own wellbeing and let's go live that way.

Steve Rush: Powerful words. Thanks for being here, Ben.

Dr. Benjamin Ritter: Thanks 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.

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 there: @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.

Major General Robert Mixon retired from the army after over three decades of extraordinary leadership success. He’s the founder of Level Five Associates, the co-author of Cows in The Living Room and author of the Amazon bestseller, “We're All In”. So many hacks in this show it’s hard to highlight them, here’s a few:

• The Big 6 Leadership Principles to building culture
• How as leaders we can be “All in”
• Learn about the leadership azimuth and how we work it
• How to drive successful strategies and sustain them

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

Find out more about Robert below:

Robert on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertmixon/

Level Five Associates on Twitter: https://twitter.com/levelfiveassoc

Level Five Associates Website: https://www.levelfiveassociates.com

Full Transcript Below

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Introduction

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

Today's guest on the show is Major General Robert Mixon. He's a retired officer of the U.S. Army. He's a public speaker, author of a few books, and he's the co-founder of Level Five Associates. But before we get a chance to meet with Robert, it's The Leadership Hacker New.

The Leadership Hacker News

Steve Rush: In the news today, we explore how many of our leadership characteristics and behaviors have changed since the global pandemic. And it turns out that empathy is the go-to leadership skill of the moment. Yes, it can be learned even if we didn't think that was the case. As a brand new fortune 500 CEO, Kirsten Peck of Zoetis, didn't have all the answers as to how a fast growing pet health company was going to survive the pandemic. She'd only ascended to the corner office in January of 2020. So when COVID 19 hit and revved up in the March of 2020, she was feeling quite nervous and anxious and frankly, little overstretched as to whether nearly 12,000 workers, I would imagine. So in one of her COVID era blogs on the company's intranet, Kristin Peck talked not about typical subjects you'd expect new CEOs to be talking around like earnings or sales projections, but something else entirely.

The importance of listening. The first step begins with slowing down and spending a lot of time, listening to the challenges people are facing personally and professionally she wrote. Later in a LinkedIn post, she shared her own personal story of raising a child with special medical needs to show it was okay for employees to talk about the reality of what life can be like outside of a tinted glass work window and ask for help if they needed it. She goes on to say what the pandemic did was make everybody realize that we were all the same and we were all in the same storm, but our boats were quite different. We had to become very clear about the importance of listening to people and understanding their needs and being flexible, practically that meant shifting her entire workforce to a different way of working. Largely working from a home model about 70% of Zoetis global workforce actually started working from home and it meant providing beefed up benefits like health care concierge services for caregivers, a student loan repayment program and improved mental health support food services, like an employee assistance program, and Peck efforts seem to have hit the mark. The company employee engagement metrics are higher than they've ever been. Now at 88% and eclipsing the pre-pandemic levels.

And who says being empathic is a soft measure? The hard numbers look like the stock price has done very well indeed; from the pandemic to November 8th, Zoetis stock price grew by 38% and it's currently bumping around at all-time highs. She's been recently quoted the saying, if anyone pretended they had all the answers, no one had believed it any way. Despite the crisis and the upheaval, Zoetis is an example of empathy being a core strong foundation and a real metric. And the leadership hack here is dead simple; it starts with just listening. Listen, to understand, not to que your next question. That's been The Leadership Hacker News, if you'd like to hear any interesting stories, we've got some things to share, as you've always done, please keep in touch with us.

Start of Podcast

Steve Rush: Major General Robert Mixon is our guest on today's show. After being retired from the army, he achieved over three decades of extraordinary leadership success. Not only including the U.S. Army, where he commanded the seventh infantry division and Fort Carson Colorado, and then subsequently he served in an executive leadership position in a number of non-for-profits and for-profit organizations before starting his own organization, Level Five Associates. He's the co-author of Cows in The Living Room: Developing an Effective Strategic Plan and Sustaining it and also of the Amazon bestseller. We're All In: The Journey to World-Class Culture. Rob, welcome to the show.

Major General Robert Mixon: Thanks, Steve. It's wonderful to be here with you and your listeners today.

Steve Rush: I'm incredibly excited to delve into your very diverse and extensive leadership career. And I thought it would be useful really just to start off where it all began for you?

Major General Robert Mixon: Well, it began for me, as growing up the oldest of six children in Georgia and North Carolina, and dreaming about being able to go to college. And as a result of a mediocre level of athletic ability, I was actually recruited to a couple of schools and one of those schools was the army football program at West Point. And I didn't know much about West Point and certainly didn't have any big dreams of being in the army, but I did have dreams of being a college football player. So I know football has different connotations in different audiences here, but I'm talking about the American tackle football.

Steve Rush: Sure.

Major General Robert Mixon: And I had good enough grades and things worked out where I got a chance to go to West Point and play football for a little while, until I got hurt to the level I couldn't play anymore, but I would entered a world that I'd never dreamed I would enter when I stood out there in the parade field at West Point in the summer of 1970 with about 1400 other young men. And, you know, in about 24 hours, we learned that our lives are going change. If we stayed with this adventure, it would change forever. And so from that experience, four year journey, about 40% of the group, didn't make it through. The 800 plus of us who did graduate in June of 1974, came into a military that was very conflicted. At the end of the Vietnam War, many Americans felt like, you know, the military was to blame for some of the policy decisions that had cause the Vietnam War to end badly. And as a result of the resources behind the military, the draft system went away and we went to a volunteer force, but we were under-resourced. And we struggle for a number of years until we came out of it in the mid-1980s and became truly a world-class military in every respect again, and because we had been before.

Steve Rush: Right.

Major General Robert Mixon: But I stayed with that journey because I met some men and women who really changed my life because of the leadership role models they represent it, despite the hardships. In fact, I think the hardships bring out the strongest leaders, you know, when things are tough.

Steve Rush: Yeah, develops that level of resilience as well, doesn't it?

Major General Robert Mixon: Yeah, you know, people who could learn from mistakes, who could underwrite others, who could develop trust and bring it to life. And so I found myself, you know, as a career officer, even though I'd never planned to be, and I was privileged to spend 33 years in uniform and command soldiers, you know, up to a division installation level, which was a wonderful privilege. And then as I realized, you know, it was time for me to open the next chapter. I went into the corporate career in the middle of the depression of 2008/2009, which was another tough learning experience. But again, you know, I was able to learn from others and grow and come out of that and then realized my dream, which was to have my own company, Level Five Associates and help other companies and organizations and leaders. Perhaps not make the same mistakes that I had made. And so that's been my calling now for the last seven years.

Steve Rush: Awesome. During your time in the military, you mentioned that there was this time where from the seventies to the mid-eighties, then there was a real shift. What role did the incumbent leadership, if you like in the military play in making that shift happen or was that more of a bottom up change?

Major General Robert Mixon: I think it was a two-edged sword Steve, and I say that because there were senior leaders who had to underwrite some of the fundamental changes in our culture. And I think basically in the military, you know, we had a very deeply entrenched culture of compliance, you know, in that mid-seventies timeframe, you know, do what you're told. We're not going to talk about why, you know, we want you to comply. Then with the senior leadership, and I think the junior leadership sort of coming together in a common view of what we should be, we began to develop a culture of commitment where people did what was right, because they wanted to do what was right. And they believed in the leaders that they were with and who they were working for. And that takes years to do, this is not something that happens in a month or, you know, six months, it takes years to do it. But with the senior support and the junior commitment, a level of energy, we were able to move our culture from compliance to commitment. And that was a very significant change in our army.

Steve Rush: And how would that manifest itself in today's military? Having evolved from compliance to commitment?

Major General Robert Mixon: I think in today's military, as a father of two, in fact, three soldiers. Now one who's on the career path, I have seen that the military culture of commitment is very strong and it's in fact more dependent now on the junior leader level of commitment because the senior leaders now were the ones who were in the transformative junior ranks in the eighties and nineties. And now they're the senior leader. So it's an even stronger movement, I think now towards the importance of why, the importance of commitment, you know, the importance of being an all-in, shameless book promotion.

Steve Rush: Yeah, we're going to get into that in the moment actually, because I love the whole philosophy of we're all in, but there is definitely something there isn't there about, if you fundamentally want to shift a culture, you do have to throw your entire self into this, don't you?

Major General Robert Mixon: We do, and it has to be from the top down, I think, and the bottom up, it's got to be a two way street where we are all in, because we believe in who we are and what we represent. And we're going to walk the talk and if we're willing to do that, then you can have a level five culture as I call it, where people believe in who we are and what we represent and they bring it every day. They're going to give all they can give to the mission to each other. And there's an element of selflessness here that I think in the military, I learned early on. The mission first, but I think in other organizations, it's not so evident unless the leadership really embodies it and nurtures it among the other leaders in the organization so that it has an enduring quality, you know, culture is never static. It either gets better, it gets worse. And so the culture of commitment is one where you live it every day and then tomorrow we're going to live it again and we're going to keep living it because we know what right looks like. And it's going to be our legacy that we grow leaders who are better leaders than we were at their stage of life. And I think that's a real a real opportunity for us as leaders to do that.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it's also a gift, isn't it?

Major General Robert Mixon: It's a gift.

Steve Rush: In so much as that when you're sharing and partying, encouraging other leaders to be greater leaders, then you're not only sharing your experiences, but you're also guarding their future.

Major General Robert Mixon: Yeah, I think so. It's really what I've seen in the companies I've been able to work with in my level five part of the journey now is that many companies and organizations don't have the persistence at the senior leadership to sustain a world-class culture. And it's important that we reinforce each other because this is hard work. Its adult work, one of my leaders used to say. The concept of creating an ecosystem where people want to belong too, takes a lot of effort. And there are sometimes, you know, you get tired. You say, well, shoot, this is too hard. Let me default back to being directive and we'll be compliant. And we'll just, you know, to quote the sort of famous guy, Larry, the cable guy, you know, we'll just get her done, right? And that defaulting back to the directive leadership framework, it causes the culture to erode and the culture can erode very quickly when that happens.

Steve Rush: Definitely, so. Now from your corporate career, having left the military and had some senior leadership roles, what was the pivotal moment for you when you thought, right? This is more about me coaching, sharing, and teaching others to come on this journey. What was the moment that made you look to grow your own organization?

Major General Robert Mixon: I know it's been so many years of my life working for someone that I had a lot of opportunity to learn from many wonderful people, you know, including General Colin Powell, who's one of the finest leaders I've ever known. And, we all, I think, are deeply saddened by his loss here recently.

Steve Rush: That’s right, yeah.

Major General Robert Mixon: But, you know, I had had the privilege of working with extraordinary men and women who helped shape me as a person and a leader. And I wanted to give back, you know, as I look towards the next chapter in my life, I said, well, where could I make a difference? Where can I give back? And I think the defining moment for me was, you know, once you've had privilege of leading executive level, a number of different organizations, you can take one to two routes in my thinking here. One is, you can sort of, you know, quietly fade away and, you know, turn the mantle over to others and wish them well. And I know a lot of people who do that, and it's a very graceful transition to do that, but I'm wrapped too tightly. And as a result, I couldn't do that easily. I wanted to still be engaged and involved in growing people in organizations. And that's why I went to the level five route, and why I come to work every day looking forward to the opportunity to help other senior leaders grow leaders.

Steve Rush: Excellent, I love it. And the fact that you're still doing that today, and this is part of that education and evolution, isn't it? Being on the show, I guess.

Major General Robert Mixon: Yeah, that’s great. Thanks Steve.

Steve Rush: And one of the things that I love about your work is that your writing is really quite innovative. And I love the first book that you co-authored, Cows in The Living Room, and I'm quite a visual. So I have this picture of this huge cow sat in my living room right now. And this is about developing effective strategic plans and sustaining them, tell us a little bit about the concept of where's the Cow in The Living Room Come from?

Major General Robert Mixon: Well, you know Steve, we had it, when we wrote the book, we were going to title it, developing effective strategies, sustaining them. And then we shared that idea with our families, you know, spouses, and we got some immediate feedback and the feedback wasn't very good. The feedback was, you got to be kidding me. You know, who's going to read that book, even mom's not going to read that book. And I said, okay, well, what else could we do? And as a result, they gave us great insight about a story about cows in living room. And essentially the story is that there was once a young farmer who wanted to find a wife. So he went to a nearby village and successfully courted a woman, married her and brought her to living home on the farm. As they began their new life together, raising dairy cows and winter began. One day, the wife came in and found that all the cows were the living room.

Astonished, she asked why? Her husband replied, well its winter and the barn has no heat. Since we depend on these cows for our living, they need to be inside. Slowly, very slowly, she became more and more accustomed to having the cows indoors. Then after a few months, a neighbor from her village came over to see how she was doing. When she came in the living room, she was shocked to find the dairy cows there calming standing around. What are you doing with council living room she blurted out? To which the wife replied, which cows? And the story here is that most of us have cows in our living room as leaders of organizations, companies, and organizations of all types. And we become used to the cows and we don't see them anymore. So if you don't effectively address your strategic planning process, then basically you're just tolerating the cow’s living room. You're not doing anything to heat the bar. And that's really where we got the idea for the title. It wasn't an original thought. In fact, I don't think I've ever had original thought, but in any case, you know, it was catchy and a lot of people have asked about it, and hopefully they liked the book too.

Steve Rush: It's a great metaphor, isn't it? Because particularly whether you're visual or auditory, actually in telling the story, it gets people to recognize that we're all creatures of habit actually, and it's dead easy to get used to our environment. And that's when we get comfortable. And when we get too much in control, that's probably when we don't focus on what we need to focus on.

Major General Robert Mixon: Well, you know, Steve, 50%, I think of the fortune 500 companies of 30 or 40 years ago no longer exist. And that's because many of them were absorbed in other companies, but also they became complacent and their business model faded and their competition, you know, ate them for breakfast, if you will, because they were more innovative and more driven not to allow their cows in the living room to stay there.

Steve Rush: And then your second book, which is not a shameless plug in any way, it's a real, it's an honor to plug it in your behalf.

Major General Robert Mixon: Thank you.

Steve Rush: We're All In is very much around that connect cultural habits and sustaining in the future. And I just wondered from your perspective, have you ever been party to, or observed an organization successfully lead a culture where they're not all in?

Major General Robert Mixon: I have not. I say that because I don't think organizations are truly successful unless they have a world-class culture. They can be successful in a temporal way. They can make a profit for a period of time by just directing the activities or micromanaging the processes, but there's a tipping point. The most successful companies don't allow that directive culture to dominate their way of life. They insist on engaging in involving all the members of the team in the future of the organization. And so I don't know if I addressed the question directly, Steve, but I do believe it takes both heart and mind to create a world-class company, a world-class organization.

Steve Rush: Totally buy it.

Major General Robert Mixon: And those that I have seen and been part of have had both. Now there are ebbs and flows, but I think that the development of your ecosystem, your culture to a level of where people feel as though they're engaged and they're part of it, they belong. That's where a greatness, the opportunity for greatness resides.

Steve Rush: Absolutely, and as part of that developing culture, you pull together what you call your big six leadership principles to develop that culture. And I just thought it'd be great for our listeners to maybe spin through them with you.

Major General Robert Mixon: Oh, great. Yeah the six principles again, I learned from basically screwed them up, you know, I have scar tissue from not following these principles. So, now I really believe that we can do better, you know, if we're willing to pay attention and commit to the journey and follow the principles. The first one is set the esbit. A lot of people don't know what an azimuth is. I took it from my military career, but basically the azimuth is the Cardinal direction of your organization. What's your mission? You know, who are we? What do we do? Why do we do it? What's our intent? And then I like intent more than vision because I think vision's kind of fuzzy. Intent is, based on that mission. What's our end state in three to five years? What does success look like?

 Then what are the key tasks we have to perform to reach that end state? And then what's our purpose? What's the why? And why are we doing all this? So you have mission and the intent, then you have your values. What do we believe in? And I think you have to define those values as a team because everybody doesn't understand what they are. And then fourth, what is our culture? What are the behaviors that we are going to demonstrate and expect from all of us to bring these values to life? So, setting the esbit is the first of the big six. The second one is listen. And as my mom said, God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Major General Robert Mixon: But I rarely followed that teaching from my mother. My mom's awesome, but I wasn't a good listener and we don't teach leaders to listen very well, you know, Stephen Covey talks about, are you listening with the intent to understand? Or are you listening with the intent to reply? I would say 90% of the leaders that I've met are in the latter category. We don't really listen with the intent to understand because we don't know how, and as a result we don't demonstrate to others the kind of behavior that really represents listing leadership. And so in the workshops that I do, we we've focus a lot on practical tools for your toolbox to bring these principles to life. The third is trusted in power, you know, empowerment is the manifestation of trust, but trust I think is one of the critical factors in creating this culture where we're all in and you've got to commit to it, and you've got to be willing to do things like underwrites of mistakes or empower others.

When the tendency, the powerful tendency is to go do it yourself. That's a learned skill, and I think the best leaders are those who can trust and empower very effectively. The fourth principle is do the right thing when no one's looking. And as we said, depending on this brief swell, but it is not easy. It's not simple and it's not easy. It takes a real commitment on the part of the leadership top to bottom that we're going to do the right thing. And whether someone's looking or not. Unfortunately, there are a lot of circumstances in instances over the past several decades, people, and most recent times when leaders in companies have not done the right thing and there've been disastrous results. The fifth principle is when in charge take charge. And that doesn't mean you have to be loud, profane, abusive. That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about here is when you're in charge of being the calm in the chaos of having the tactical patients to understand that the first report is usually wrong. To develop others as part of that, being in charge, have that presence. And then the six principles balance the personal and professional, which is not about time. Most people think that balance is about time, a time at work, time home, not really, that's not the case. And I think balance is a battery of energy. Balancing the four battery levels we have all of inside us. The physical, the mental, the spiritual, the emotional, and there are tools. There are ways you can do that in yourself and in others to create that sense of balance, which it's a way of being healthy in a framework here, healthy personally and professionally, and really creates the opportunity for people to, as we used to say in the army, be all, they can be.

Steve Rush: I love the six principles. They naturally feed each other as well. But the final one ironically feeds through them all and is always consistent, is that balance because without it, you end up either being overworked or stressed or not having the right levels of energy to perform sustainably for the future. And that for me is the one that kind of has the big core all the way through them. So I love the princess.

Major General Robert Mixon: Well, thanks Steve. They all are interconnected. In fact when I conduct presentations workshops, I use a gears as the six principles that they're all interconnected, you know, and the whole mechanism of the culture turns as those gears work together with the centerpiece having the right values

Steve Rush: And what you've described for most people listening to this would perhaps make loads of sense and be quite academically sensible, but it takes work, doesn't it? It takes real practice and lots of habit forming to make sure that this is part of everybody's routine. How might I start that journey?

Major General Robert Mixon: Usually I will go in with the senior leadership and we'll talk about you know, whether they have specific goals in line for a certain, you know, a certain element of the team or whether they want to take the whole organization and move the needle. And most of them want to do the senior leaders upfront, then cascade the big six throughout the organization, as the mechanism to grow their culture to that level five, and I'll be upfront here. I think it takes a couple of years to do this. You know, you can't have it in 30 days. Most of us want everything in 30 days, but you can't have it. You're going to have to develop your culture in a deliberate way. And I use a series of workshops, a small group interaction, and one-on-one executive coaching with senior executives and high potential leaders to help get all these gears in place and move them forward. And specifically we use a strategic planning process to set that three to five-year goal that we want to move the organization toward. So there's an interrelated set of tools that we bring to a team or organization to help them succeed in this journey.

Steve Rush: And I suspect the reason it takes some time is that of all of those six cogs moving at different times, we've all probably got some of them moving at different speeds and cadences than the others, right?

Major General Robert Mixon: Yes, we do.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Major General Robert Mixon: And typically, Steve, but saying yes upfront on, some people will push back a little bit say, well, I don't have time to the esbit. Well, I don't think you have time not to set the azimuth. So we've got to get through that part and, you know, establish our mission and values culture. Then I think the next hard part of the process here is developing listening leaders who really do listen to the intent to understand.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Major General Robert Mixon: And we bring some practical tools for them to help do this. One of my favorites that I'll share with you, Steve is the back brief.

Steve Rush: Tell us how that works? Yeah.

Major General Robert Mixon: There's and old saying about, I don't know what I told you, until you tell me what you heard. Quite oftentimes, I have made this mistake. I get a group of soldiers together, or team members in my corporate life together and say, all right, here's what we've got to get done. But you know, everybody should know what you have to do to make that happen. All right, everybody got it? And they all say, oh yeah, we got it. And they head out and do something completely different. Well, usually you find out that they did something completely different because they didn't hear what you thought you said. And the back brief is a way where they back brief you on what they think they heard before you go out and try and accomplish great things. I think that's a way of confirming that what was said was heard and that's where communication lives, sharing information, email, texts, that's not communication, that's just sharing information. You don't get confirmation what they read was what they thought you wrote. Same with what you said and heard. So I really liked the back brief or confirmation brief as a tool for your toolbox that gives people more clarity across the team as to what are we doing and why are we doing it.

Steve Rush: And saves huge amounts of time, retrospectively having to undo stuff that people have set off in the wrong trajectory.

Major General Robert Mixon: Yeah. You know, manufacturing companies, I hear that saying over and over, we didn't have time to do it right the first time, but we always have time to go back and do it again.

Steve Rush: That's true, very true indeed, yeah. So, given your experience of diverse leadership and teams, what can we really learn from the last couple of years, having gone through quite a lot of crisis, and that would be varied for different people in different organizations that will really help us be more all in.

Major General Robert Mixon: I think what the change in our world over the last couple of years has taught us is that we need to have strong fundamentals in order to endure and succeed in crisis. You know, many leaders that I've worked with have come back to me and said, Robert, we went back to the big six when things really got off the rails. We said, okay, wait a minute, let's have a tactical balls here. Let's go back to the big six and let's check our esbit as our esbit intact. Do we have people in the right seat, in the right bus, as Jim Collins said, good, good to great, you know, let's revert back to those big six principles and reaffirm them across our team and organization. And those that did said they were absolutely game-changing and enabling them to keep their team intact, to work through the anxieties and the stress to build bore inclusivity in their teams, despite the fact that they were in many cases in a hybrid world that was all virtual than it went to somewhat virtual.

And now, some people are back to being in person, but I don't think we'll ever go back to the way it was in terms of the overall environment. We're going to have to lead through change. We cannot prevent the changes from occurring. You know, our world has changed and it is what it is. It's up to us to effectively adapt to it. And I wrote an eBook here about a year or so ago called Who Saw This Coming? Now, What Do We Do? And you can get it on, on my website, but there I talked about what the crisis was doing to us and how the big six could be our bedrock, our touchstone to get us through it and grow and learn beyond it.

Steve Rush: And I guess the esbit for every organization will be different now than it was two years ago, because lots of things that are impacting on all of that purpose behaviors, culture, values.

Major General Robert Mixon: You have to check you’re esbit on a regular basis and you have to be willing to adapt it. You know, it's I was guilty as a young officer. You know, if I wrote a plan, then we were going to execute the plan. And if the truth changed, so, you know, I'm still not changing the plan. That kind of stubbornness was not healthy. My organizations did perform well when I stuck to the plan and I didn't adapt the plan to the reality that the enemy was out there and had a vote and the environment was changing and had a vote. And the characteristics of my team were changing and had a vote. And I had to be able to adapt to that framework. I was kind of stubborn, I was good at that.

Steve Rush: Great lessons. So I get the honor now to hack into your leadership mind, having had all of these leadership experiences and many, many different environments that you've gathered insights and experience from, I'm going to try and get you to get them down to your top three. So what would be your top three leadership hacks? Robert.

Major General Robert Mixon: I would say the first would be willing to listen to the ideas of others, try and dispense with your preconceived notions and do a lot more listening than talking. That would be my first one. And it's very difficult to do when you grow up in a world where the leader is expected to be transmitting all the time and not receiving. And I think the opposite is actually true. My second one is develop a perspective where you can have others take more ownership of the decision making. The idea here, trust and. I really had to learn to delegate, but I saw a huge return on investment when I delegated to others. One of the tools I use is called a decision tree. I write out the decisions that I must make in my position, and I tell my leadership team, then you've got the rest of them.

So don't come in here and ask me to make decisions that are yours to make. I may challenge you on some of the decisions you make, but you made them. And my job is to help educate you and support you so that you have the tools at your toolbox to make good decisions. So delegation would be my second hack and the first two I've talked about were not easy for me. So I'm not saying this is something you get, you know, in a week or two. I've learned over my journey about them. And the third one I'd say is that, you know, caring leadership has huge second and third order effects in our organization. There's an old saying about, I don't care how much you know, until I know how much you care and that, you know, empathetic leadership is not necessarily sympathetic. There's a big difference between empathy and sympathy.

Steve Rush: Huge, yeah.

Major General Robert Mixon: And I talk about that in the work I do with teams on emotional intelligence, it really was important for me to develop an appreciation for the value of caring leadership. So those would be my top three leadership hacks Steve.

Steve Rush: Great lessons. Thank you for sharing them. Next part of the show we call Hack to Attack. So this is where something in your life or work hasn't worked out as you'd planned, but as a result of the experience, you've now learned from it, and it's now force of good for you. So what would be your Hack to Attack?

Major General Robert Mixon: I would say that my Hack to Attack is that I really was not a patient leader for many parts of my life. And I made a lot of mistakes because I acted too much on impulse and instinct, and I didn't do enough of making an assessment of what decision would be the best for the organization at this point in time. Or in my lack of patience I think I sometimes failed to be as vulnerable as I should have been. You know, people need to know when you make a mistake and you need to step up and say that, admit it. It's not weakness. You know, vulnerability is not weakness. Vulnerability is being authentic. And that's what’s the essence of Level Five Leadership is. It's being authentic.

Steve Rush: Very powerful stuff. So the last thing we do today is give you a chance to do some time travel. So you get to go and bump into Robert at 21 and you get to toe to toe, give him some advice. What do you reckon it might be?

Major General Robert Mixon: Ooh, oh boy. Talk about a challenge Steve. This is really awesome here. Robert at 21 was a very driven young man. I don't know where necessarily I got it from, but you know, I was wrapped pretty tightly and I think what advice I would give myself at age 21 is think before you act. Use that, you know, two second pause or ten second pause to say, hey, before I jump off of my tank and go running off into the woods here. Do I really need to get off the tank right now? Or do we all need to, you know, as everybody needs to just be moving, is all forward movement progress, no it's not. All forward moves is not progress. And I'd say, Robert, you got to, you know, mentally slow down sometimes and take a step back and say, okay, what are we doing? What's our esbit here? You know, what's our mission, what's our intent? Don't just, you know, everything has to be in motion all the time, and it's hard. It'd be hard for Robert at 21 to take that because he was a guy in motion and he felt like leadership was, you know, motion, direction, guidance. You know, I was in that seventies culture of being directive. And I thought that's what right looked like because that's what many of my leaders demonstrate it.

Steve Rush: Yeah.

Major General Robert Mixon: So that's the advice I would give me, hopefully I would listen.

Steve Rush: Yeah, it's a really interesting one, isn't it? Because time and culture play out so differently based on historic events and you look at how the military has evolved. It has probably been the biggest evolution in the last 25 years that the military have ever had up until that point. It was pretty much kind of command and control, wasn’t it?

Major General Robert Mixon: Well, yeah, the command and control discussion is interesting. Steve, because control is the allocation of resources and time and space. And many of us believe that that's what leadership is. It's really not. That's sort of bandaging in my view. Command is presence. It's establishing an environment where people can be effective because they trust you and they believe in each other. Sometimes you have to have some control. I'm not downplaying that, but you've got to figure out where the balance is to go back to the big six of command and control. And I would say the more command and less control the better, but sometimes you've got to work very hard to get to that level of commanding and control.

Steve Rush: Yeah, I have this mantra, which is, only control, only the things that you can control and everybody else has got their own.

Major General Robert Mixon: That's good advice. That's very good advice Steve.

Steve Rush: So Robert, how can we make sure our listeners can hook into the work that you do, maybe get a copy of the books, find out a little bit more about Level five associates.

Steve Rush: Yeah, great. Our website is you know, HTTPS www.levelfiveassociatess spell out the five levelfiveassociates.com. I certainly invite any of our listeners to you know, come to the site and you'll learn more about me and the work that we do. And you can contact me by, through website or my email address is robert@levelfiveassociates.com. And you know, we'll circle back with you. If I don't circle back with you, you know, something seriously wrong with me,

Steve Rush: We'll make sure that we put some of those links in our show notes as well, Robert.

Major General Robert Mixon: Oh, thanks, Steve. It was wonderful speaking with you.

Steve Rush: And it's been a real honor having you on the show Robert. I love that the six principles, I think there are really great philosophy for leading teams and culture. So we'll do our best to help share this message with our global audience.

Major General Robert Mixon: Well, thanks, Steven. I wish you continued success with The Leadership Hacker program and the good work you've been doing.

Steve Rush: Thanks very much Robert.

Major General Robert Mixon: All right, take care.

Closing

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