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Sep 20
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492: Making Meetings Work with J. Elise Keith

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J. Elise Keith says: "Every meeting is an opportunity. Seize it."

J. Elise Keith shares what makes meetings succeed vs. fail.

 

 

You’ll Learn:

  1. Signs of an ineffective meeting
  2. How the best organizations approach meetings
  3. When and how to opt out of a meeting

About J. Elise

Elise Keith is the co-founder of online meeting management platform Lucid Meetings. Known as the ‘Meeting Maven,’ Elise offers unprecedented expertise that inspires audiences, proving that meetings shouldn’t be fewer or shorter—but better and more effective. She is the author of Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization, which contains eye-opening strategies companies can use to structure beneficial meetings, create a healthy workplace culture, and propel overall team momentum.

Resources mentioned in the show:

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J. Elise Keith Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Elise, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

J. Elise Keith
I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I’m excited to dig into this. And I want to get your take, you know, often the first question I ask is an icebreaker of sorts, and you’ve seen a lot of icebreakers, I imagine, in your day. Could you share maybe an all-time favorite or least favorite icebreaker and story that goes with it?

J. Elise Keith
Okay. So, I have two for this one. The kind of icebreaker you should use really depends on the kind of meeting you’re having and what’s going on in your culture. So, there’s all kinds of really good icebreakers that are also really different. But one I like to use when I do, like, say, workshop where I’ve got a group and maybe they know each other or maybe they don’t, but you’ve got to get them loosened up a bit, is, “What was your favorite band or artist in high school?”

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun.

J. Elise Keith
It is fun because you get a chance to get a sense of people’s culture and sort of their inner id when you find…I did this with a group of librarians recently, and to hear the number of them that were, you know, deep hardcore punk funs than old-school hillbilly rock was kind of enlightening.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun. Well, and what was yours?

J. Elise Keith
You know, I was a big Midnight Oil fan in high school which I grew out of, but at the time it seemed appropriately edgy and world-saving and different enough to be special, yeah. How about you?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny, I didn’t own a lot of CDs, because that’s what we had at the time, but I do remember I think that Blink 182 Dude Ranch was the album I played again and again. And I also went to a number of punk rock shows myself. I remember the band 15 with Jeff Ott was something in vogue with my people and myself. And then, yeah.

J. Elise Keith
See? I mean, like all of a sudden, you know, I like Midnight Oil. My first album was Pour Some Sugar On Me, Def Leppard.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you. Well, I think we’re going to have some extra fun here talking about meetings and so meetings are often such a huge pain point for professionals. So, I’d love it if we could maybe you could start us off by orienting us to kind of the state of meetings today. Like, any hard numbers you have in terms of how much time professional spend in meetings, what proportion of those meetings are effective, how do you even define effective. Kind of where do we stand today?

J. Elise Keith
Yadda, yadda, stats, stats, right? So, in terms of the overall situation with meetings, our most recent and best research shows that there are somewhere north of 65 million meetings per day in the US alone. And a lot of us are not working just in the US, it’s an international economy now so that’s millions and millions and millions of meetings every single day.

Now, it’s a huge number so that’s not necessarily relevant to each of us personally, which brings you to the second question, right, like, “How much time are individuals spending in meetings?” And that’s kind of all over the map depending on where you are in the organization and what0 kind of organization you’re in. It can be somewhere as low as like, say, half an hour or less for some people.

But when you get farther up the chain, when you get into middle management, or C-suite, or VP suites in collaborative organizations, that’s going to be typically somewhere between 60% and 80% of their day they’re going to spend in meetings. It’s a ton of time. It’s a ton of money that we invest in these.

Pete Mockaitis
Right, because every one of those hours has dollars associated with it. All right. So, that’s kind of the time load. And how often are the meetings working? How do we even define working from a numerical perspective?

J. Elise Keith
That’s a really good question, right, because a lot of times the way that, there’s a fair amount of research into whether meetings are effective. And often the way that research is done is people would throw out a survey, lets a Survey Monkey surveys, which are like, “Think of your last five meetings and estimate which percentage of them were effective.” And there you get a number where people who say, “Half of them were effective.”

But when you dig into that research a little bit deeper, you do some actual investigation with the companies and people, talking about the specific meetings they’ve attended, “So, how was your last meeting? Would you rather have that been a giant series of email?” that kind of thing, what you find is that the equation flips. And it turns that folks, by and large, think meetings work a lot better than the alternatives.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s good to know. That’s good news.

J. Elise Keith
The thing about effectiveness is that what is that word even mean, right? And that’s where you get into sort of the more interesting tactics and tools because for a meeting to be effective, you have to be asking yourself, “Well, what is it effective at? Can you use that effectively to do?” And in that case, you’ve got to look at both, “Are the people in the room enjoying it? Do they feel it’s a good use of time? And then, is it producing results for your business?” So, those are the two angles on effectiveness that you can pull together, and then you can start to see, “Okay, now, regardless of what the big stats say, what’s happening in my world here?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. And so then, I’d love to get your take then, so what do some of the best in class versus worst in class organizations look like with regard to meeting performance on these dimensions?

J. Elise Keith
So, it’s often easier to start with the worst because that’s probably where a lot of people are. Meeting performance isn’t something that most organizations have taken seriously. And so, what they do is they wing it. Essentially, you leave it to each and every manager and project manager and leader and whatnot to figure out how to meet as they think best for what they’re trying to do.

And that kind of approach sort of assumes that, “You know, everybody’s been in a lot of meetings. They ought to know what they’re doing. Let’s get them in a room. Off they go.” So, that’s what most people are doing and it’s deeply, sadly ineffective most of the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And in what ways?

J. Elise Keith
Well, it turns out that meetings are different than conversations, right? And meetings are a skilled activity that you can learn how to run and then design to achieve specific goals. So, there really isn’t any such thing as a generic good meeting. There are really good sales calls, there are really good interviews, there are really good ways to keep a project moving, and each one of those is a different kind of meeting that should be designed to achieve that goal.

So, in the best organizations they do that. They get training for everybody and they design systems. So, they take their meetings and they stop them being habits and they turn them into systems that are designed to achieve the goals that they support.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, now you lay out 16 types of meetings that work and you’ve mentioned a couple there. I guess I’m curious to hear what types of meetings don’t work?

J. Elise Keith
So, the types of meetings that don’t work are the ones that are basically, you know, kitchen soup. Do you ever do that? Do you ever do like a kitchen-sink soup or a casserole where you’ve got a pot and you just kind of throw everything that you own in there before it goes bad, and that’s the soup you’ve got? Which sometimes works great but most of the time it doesn’t.

So, that’s what a lot of folks are doing with their meetings, “I’ve got a time block on Tuesday. We always meet on Tuesday. My whole team shows up and we decide, ‘Hey, what is it we have to talk about today?’”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, there it goes. So, it’s kind of like I’m hearing some telltale signs there. One, it’s recurring and, two, there’s not a plan in advance and, three, there’s multiple people as opposed to like the one-on-one. So, there are some ingredients, I guess, that may have a higher risk perhaps of not working out optimally in the course of having that meeting. So, everything is just sort of like, “All right. Here we all are now. So…” as opposed to a proactive, thoughtful, upfront design of, “What are we hoping to achieve?” and kind of planning from there.

J. Elise Keith
Yeah. So, it’s really about clarity of purpose, right, and what you’re trying to accomplish in the room. And if you walk into the room and you’re not entirely sure what you’re trying to accomplish or why everybody needs to be there, so you’ve invited all of the people because you’re not entirely sure who should be in and who should be out, then you’re likely to waste your time.

And, certainly, even if you do know what you need to accomplish, there are some things that just psychologically we’re not designed to do at the same time. So, let’s take, can we do a couple of examples?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

J. Elise Keith
So, the project status update. It’s a meeting most people loathe, right, but it’s designed to make sure that everybody working on the project knows what’s happening, gets an update about anything that’s changed that they need to know about, and has a chance to raise any concerns, like, “Hey, here’s a red flag. We need to work on this.”

But the underlying psychological thing going on there is you’ve all agreed to do something together and you’re going to make sure that you continue to trust each other and execute on that so that you can keep the work going. You’re doing momentum and energy and trust, right?

In a meeting like that, when we have already made promises in the past and we’re showing up to recommit to those promises and show that we’re good for them, it’s not a great moment to say, do something like, “You know what, let’s just go crazy and think of some wild ideas about what we might do now,” right? Or, “Hey, here’s a great problem. Why don’t we explore all of the different kinds of creative out-of-the-box thinking on how we might tackle this problem?”

The whole point of the project status meeting is to say, “Yes, we’ve defined a box and we’re in that box and we’re moving this box down the road.” When you ask people to step out of the box, right in the middle of that, you’re having them break from one mode of interaction to a completely different mode and you get the worst possible ideas ever because everything people raise is safe, right? And you don’t want safe when you’re doing brainstorming. You don’t want safe when you’re doing problem-solving. You want innovative, you want effective, so you got to break those conversations into distinct conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. So, you’ve got a clear purpose and a design, and that’s what you’re running with, and you’re not kind of mixing and matching in there. Understood. And so, I’m curious, with the project status update meeting, let’s talk with that example, so people often don’t like it. And so, what are some of the other things that they’re going wrong? Sometimes folks are sort of wildly go off script and enter a different phase. And what are some of the things that are going that also can go awry or indicative of, “Hey, this project status meeting is great”?

J. Elise Keith
So, what you’re looking for in terms of signifiers of great are energy, right? You’re looking for energy, you’re looking for some amount of dynamic, and in the case of a status meeting, which is probably one of the worst meetings to be using as our example, but in the case of that meeting, that energy and that dynamic might come from just keeping it really crisp and short and being very, very respectful of everybody’s time.

But in every case, one of the things that keeps these meetings from being particularly successful is that whoever is in charge of that meeting is probably frantic, they’re probably running from one thing to another with very little time to prepare, and they walk into the room believing that it’s their job to make that a fabulous experience, or an effective experience, or an efficient experience, or whatever it is that they believe for everyone else, and they do all the talking, and they set the agenda. And then they basically demand reports from everyone else. Well, that’s deadly.

It’s like you’ve shown up to the soccer match and you’ve got a sense of what it means to win the game so you get your team together and then you run the ball up and down and tell them what you’re doing. You don’t have anybody else participating, you don’t have everybody else bringing something to the field and helping you get that goal together. So, the best meetings are ones where everybody has got a job to do in that room, and they’re team sports. It’s not the leader’s show.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s a good thing to talk about right there. So, if there are folks in the meeting who say nothing, does that suggest that perhaps they ought not to be in the meeting?

J. Elise Keith
It either suggests that they shouldn’t be in the room because meetings are not a spectator sport, right? Or, they need some training, they need some education. So, they need education and the person in charge needs education because if you have people who are in that room who should be contributing and they are not, that’s broken. We don’t hire and have people work on our team so that they can absorb oxygen in the space. They’re there to contribute their perspectives and their ideas and the information they have that we don’t that helps us collectively get to a better result.

Pete Mockaitis
And would your view then be if they are just sort of receiving information that we should use a different format to convey the information?

J. Elise Keith
Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, sometimes that’s not practical, right? Like, sometimes you just can’t count on everybody to have done their homework in advance, so there are practices that companies put in place to help with that. Like, there are ways to get around that that are respectful of the fact that people don’t necessarily have time to proactively prepare. And yet you still don’t want to lead to them like they were in kindergarten because that’s disengaging and a little insulting, frankly.

So, one of the really famous ones is Amazon, in their corporate headquarters. They begin all of their meetings with 10 minutes of silent reading where whatever it is that they’re going to discuss, “Is it a proposal or the financial reports, or whatever it is?” it’s distributed in paper and everybody at the table has 10 minutes to read it through right there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You know, I really like that maybe because, you’re right, as opposed to people just trying to fake it and not look dumb and sort of say expansive things, it’s like, “No, just do this right now.”

J. Elise Keith
Let’s just do it, yeah. And it’s also kind of a wonderful way to acknowledge that, like, you need people to come prepared but you don’t control their calendar outside of that meeting, right? So, that prep work is part of the work of the meeting, why not just build that time into the meeting itself?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And especially if it’s 10 minutes, because that’s something that can be handy in the sense of you’ve maybe looked a lot of those bits and pieces over time, and, “Oh, here it is collected,” and you’re kind of up-to-speed or on the same page and we’re moving. I’ve actually had a couple of guests before, they’ll ask me, “So, tell me about your audience.” And I’m thinking, “Okay, this means you didn’t read all the things I sent you.”

J. Elise Keith
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Well, hey, how about this? Let me send you this link and we can just sort of read that quietly for a moment and I’m going to go sort of get a glass of water, and we’ll reconnect?” So, I try to do that as respectfully as possible.

J. Elise Keith
But it’s maddening, right, because you only have so much time.

J. Elise Keith
So, you asked me earlier about both an icebreaker and then about meeting research, right? Like, the stats behind meetings. But when you dig into meetings and you see that what’s going on there is you’re bringing together a complex group of people to talk about work, which, in and of itself, is probably pretty complex too. So, it’s this really dynamic system of things going on, all kinds of things that can go wrong.

So, one of the reasons the icebreaker is such a great tool and why Amazon’s 10 minutes of silent reading is also a great tool is that the first tip to every successful meeting is to help people transition into the room because we’re all – and this is coming out of like the neuroscience and the social psychology research. We’re all dealing with up to like six different levels of distraction in our brain when we walk into that room.

So, our first job is to clear all of that and there’s a technique called clearing that explicitly does that, but you can do it a whole bunch of different ways, and get everybody focused on whatever is going on in that room and not the email they need to still write, or the fact that their kids might call, or their hungry stomachs, or any of those other things. How do you get people into the room? That is the absolute first tip to any successful meeting. And silent reading is one way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it. So, what are some of the other alternatives and clearing approaches?

J. Elise Keith
Yeah, so clearing approach, and actually several companies use this, is it’s explicit, it is you walk in and everybody takes a moment to say, “Hey, today I’m dealing with this, I’m feeling this way, but I’m ready to put that aside and I’m in.” And everybody else says, “Welcome.”

Pete Mockaitis
In other words, “I’m in.”

J. Elise Keith
Yeah, I’m in. And so, you go around the room and everybody says, “This is what’s going on for me but I’m ready and I’m in.”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I imagine that could go quickly or not so quickly. Are there some guidelines there?

J. Elise Keith
You know, that’s really up to the team and the culture. So, in some teams they go real fast and they keep it fast and many people pass, right, because their values are about efficiency. In other teams, their values are about community. And this is another tip with meetings. Your meetings are absolutely the best place to design in the values you want to see your culture support and engage, right?

So, at lululemon, they do the clearing, and then they follow the clearing by the vibrations. And that practice is where they go around and they say, “Hey, is there anything you’re hearing that you think we should know about?” And a vibration might be like a rumor that’s going around the office, or something somebody saw in the news, or the weather, or it could be any of these things, whether just like, “Hey, we think the group ought to know about this.” And what they do in their teams is sometimes what comes up in clearing or in the vibrations is a big deal, and that’s what they talk about. And they take the rest of their agenda and they move it to another day.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And that is really handy because I think a lot of times there’s great information that just never has an opportunity to surface, and it’s like, “Oh, someone else launched a competitive yoga pant on Kickstarter that everyone is raving about.” It’s like, “Oh, I had no idea.”

J. Elise Keith
Right. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s so cool and we have a moment for you to share that with us because that could change all kinds of things and maybe we wouldn’t have noticed this for another five months until maybe it’s a lot later for us to respond effectively.”

J. Elise Keith
Yeah. Well, it’s a huge deal. Like, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the research that Amy Edmondson has done into psychological safety. It’s this bit where we feel like we’re in a group that cares enough about us that it’s safe to take risks. We can tell them things that may or may not fit the dominant narrative, right?

And one of the things that she points out when she explains this to people is that, you know, half of the time, people are afraid to speak out not because they have evidence that something bad would happen, right? There are people who are afraid to speak out in environments where “nobody ever gets fired,” right? So, nothing bad would happen to them, but just nobody does it, they’re not really sure.

So, one of the really important things we can do in our meetings is ask, just make time and space to ask the questions about what people are seeing and what ideas they have so that they know that those are welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, so I’m digging this. So, we said, hey, once you’re actually in the meeting, first step, transition into the room, could be some silent reading, could be some clearing, asking about the vibrations, what’s going on.
J. Elise Keith
Could be an icebreaker, all the things, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a second step?

J. Elise Keith
So, then you need to connect with the goals and the purpose of the meeting, So, purpose is a verb, “We’re here to do this, to make a decision, to have a podcast interview,” whatever our purpose is. And then, at the end, “We’re about to achieve this.” So, those are your desired outcomes, “We’re going to have a decision, a list of next steps, and extra pizza,” whatever those outcomes are.

So, you kind of affirm that upfront and then confirm what your plan is for getting from, “Okay, we’ve gathered for this reason, for this purpose. We’re trying to get out with those outcomes. Here’s the plan for getting between point A to point B.” And most times people express that as an agenda. You don’t necessarily need an agenda but you do need a plan.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And you’re saying earlier that it’s best to perhaps not be the sole person who has that all figured out.

J. Elise Keith
Right. So, as the person in charge, there are multiple roles that you can bring to bear in a meeting. There’s the titular head of whatever that piece of work is, the leader, but you can have other people facilitate. And a facilitator’s job is to design that process part and then be the guardians of that process. You can have people assigned to take notes, you can have people assigned to be the vibes watchers, or the norms enforcers where they’re keeping track of everybody else, all kinds of different ways in which you can get other people involved in making that successful.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that’s handy. And then what’s the third step?

J. Elise Keith
So, then the final thing you have to do for any meeting to be effective is you have to wrap it up, and that’s five minutes, maybe more, maybe less. At the end of every meeting where you stop and explicitly say, “Okay, let’s make sure we actually know what we did here, what decisions did we make, and what are our actions that we’re going to take away,” Like, who, what, when. “Specifically, this is going to be done by this date by this person.”

And, ideally, you want to do those in writing where everybody can be looking at them and committing that that is, in fact, what they thought the decision was because, way too often, people walk out the room all thinking they made the same decision but five minutes later you’re in another meeting, you’ve completely forgotten, it gets fuzzy. So, you want that in writing and you want to confirm it before you leave.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we’re talking about some form of like projection is present, or we’re visually looking at this wrap-up piece.

J. Elise Keith
Absolutely, yeah. And there are a bunch of ways to do that, there’s a lot of different software platforms you can use that are about taking collaborative notes on meetings in real time. You can do it on a whiteboard. There are a lot of different ways you can do it but you want people to be able to explicitly see that. And by having it be written, not only are you making it easier to get the notes out afterwards, which is a bonus, you’re engaging multiple parts of the brain, right?

We process information differently when we read it versus when we hear it versus when we speak it. So, you put all these things together and, from a geeky perspective, you’re encoding these promises deeper into your team, and that’s critical. And then, the last, last thing I think you should always do before you leave any meeting is to say thank you. Take a moment and express some appreciation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, just say it like with their time for investing themselves, for thinking, for contributing, for not blowing it off. I guess there’s a lot of things in there.

J. Elise Keith
For something fabulous someone did. You can have people thank each other, “I really appreciate Sandy because she brought up that point and I wouldn’t have known about that Kickstarter yoga pants. She has saved our bacon,” right? The appreciation not only show people that you care and respect their time. It’s also a fabulous way to help everybody learn what the group values by being very explicit about what you’re acknowledging.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so in between the second step of connecting with purpose and the third step of the wrap-up, are there some particular practices that ensure that the actual conversations we’re having are effective, that they’re bringing us to where we want to go during the course of the meeting?

J. Elise Keith
Absolutely. There absolutely are. And the challenge is that they’re different depending on the type of meeting you’re in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Gotcha.

J. Elise Keith
Yeah, which is why when you get into an organization that’s got really, really high meeting performance maturity. Basically, in our research, when we look out across the board, we found a number of practices that organizations establish as they’re putting their system in place from very basic, “We don’t have a system,” to, “We have this system that’s really locked and solid and really helping us drive our business forward.”

And one of those, as you get in there, is that as we’re talking about this, right, there’s the purpose and the outcomes and the different types of meetings and special ways you have to run each one. Well, that’s an awful lot of stuff to learn and have to try and apply in around the rest of what you’re doing. So, what these organizations do is they have standardized ways they do each of the different types of meetings that matter to their business that people are expected to learn, and then iterate and adopt and work with, but they’re not starting from scratch.

So, when you go to Amazon, you don’t just get to just guess how you’re going to start your meeting, right? They have their 10-minute thing. And when you go to an organization that’s practicing open-book management, you don’t guess how you’re going to run your weekly leadership meeting, “It works like this,” and you review the books. So, they have codified practices that shortcut the learning for all of those different things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you maybe give us an example of a meeting type and some practices that are overlooked but make all the difference in the world when you’re having that meeting type?

J. Elise Keith
I think there are a whole series of meetings, we call that the cadence meetings. They’re the meetings about keeping momentum going on a project or keeping the team together where they can build trust, right? And a lot of the practices that are key in those meetings has to do with who speaks, who’s setting the tone, and how rapidly, how frequently you’re doing it.

So, let’s take a look at one-on-ones for example. So, the traditional approach in many companies is that managers know they better have one-on-ones so they schedule them once a month, maybe once every 90 days, something, because they know they have to, and they have the employees come in, and they say, “Okay, let’s look at your  30-, 60-, 90-day goals,” and the employee sort of reports on what they’re doing and they all check the boxes and off they go.

Well, Cisco just did a big study with 15,000 teams on how to run effective one-on-ones. And what they found was very, very specific and it was this. First of all, you’ve got to flip it. So, the manager doesn’t go in and ask the employee to report to them. Instead, the employee says, “Hey, here are my priorities and here’s where I need your help.” So, the employee is driving the agenda, and they used those two questions, that’s the way they start it.

And the second key thing they found is that it has to be at least every week because, otherwise, they’re talking about work that isn’t related to what they’re actually doing on a detailed basis. And the idea that the manager could possibly care about what you’re working on when they only check in on how they can help every 90 days, nobody buys it. So, once a week, employee-driven, and engagement on those teams goes up pretty dramatically.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, that’s striking. So, that’s what Cisco does, and then one-on-ones every week with every direct report, that could really add up.

J. Elise Keith
Well, so that’s where they’re looking at team sizes. So, one of the questions people get asked all the time is, “How big can your team be?” And the boundary of the size of a team that you can lead is your capacity for those touchpoints, like, “How many people can you dedicate time to showing them that you care and helping them out every week?” That’s the number of people that you can lead.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, so I guess I’d love to hear then, you talked about norms at one point. What are some of the norms that tend to be helpful across all meeting types?

J. Elise Keith
I think it’s really awesome when a company or an organization finds norms that are meaningful to them and their values, right? So, in some organizations that’s going to be things like every voice is heard, everyone speaks before you speak twice because diversity inclusion and voice is really important to them.

In other organizations, it’s going to be things like, “We start and end on time and the agenda sent out two days in advance,” because efficiency is really their thing. In some groups, something like Chatham House Rules, or Vegas Rules matters a lot, right? Like, what happens in the room stays in the room. My favorite that applies to all meeting types and that I think applies in every organization is a norm around having every meeting be optional.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so nice.

J. Elise Keith
Well, if you think about it, they already are, right? You’re a grownup, you don’t have to go to any meeting. But when you make it explicit, you’re saying that opting out of meetings won’t have “Hey, you’re fired” consequences.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I actually want to talk about opting out of meetings. I think that it’s a common occurrence that folks, when they are inviting people to a meeting, they don’t want to be rude, and so they want to include folks, and so there’s a miscommunication that happens often. So, someone invites someone to a meeting, and the recipient thinks, “Oh, they expect me there so I’m going to show up,” and then they think, “Why did I even come here?” So, do you have any preferred scripts or verbiage or master ways to diplomatically decline the meeting?

J. Elise Keith
Well, first of all, you need to know that you deserve to have your time respected. So, it is both respectful for you and for the people doing the inviting to speak up when you think that you can’t contribute well to that room because every person sitting in a meeting that isn’t contributing is dragging down the energy and the potential for everyone else there. So, you are doing a service if you opt out of a meeting that you shouldn’t be in.

And the way that we approach that is we just say, “Hey, I actually am working on some other things that day. I don’t have much to contribute here. I’d be happy to send in any information you need in advance and will look forward to seeing the notes afterwards.” And you just opt out.

Pete Mockaitis
There you have it. I’d also want to get your take on what are some of the best means of accomplishing some meeting goals that are not meetings?

J. Elise Keith
Oh. Well, let’s take brainstorming. Brainstorming is something that we often pull a lot of people into a room for, and we say, “Hey, we’re going to come up with a whole bunch of new ideas for next week’s marketing campaign,” or whatever it’s going to be, tends not to be the most effective way to do it. That’s something that is really well-handled asynchronously, which means you post up the question and you ask everybody to contribute their ideas in advance.

And there are a lot of technologies you can use to do that. And, frankly, you can also have a box in the office where people throw in sticky notes. So, brainstorming, getting that first blush of original ideas out, much better handled outside of the meeting most of the time than it is in. Same thing for anything where they’re digesting large pieces of information, so reading reports, coming up with strategies.

One of the tactics we recommend and that we use ourselves quite a lot is we’ll have a meeting to make sure we all understand a problem. We’ll get together and we’ll say, “Okay. Well, what’s going on here? And what are our options?” and start to get our heads around it. And then we’ll schedule a follow-up meeting within a week to talk about what to do about it so that that time in between where we’re processing it has some bake time.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, Elise, I’m curious, are there any sort of final thoughts you have with regard to meetings or overlooked master strategies or tactics that could make a world of difference?

J. Elise Keith
You know, I think the real key is to understand that every meeting that you walk into is an opportunity. That’s the place where your culture becomes real, where the team understands what everyone cares about, and the value that you can bring. It’s the place where you get an opportunity to provide and show care for the people around you, and where you get to be a part of making the decisions that make your business or your organization really successful.

So, once you shift to that mindset and you look at meetings as the opportunity that they are, then you can start to be in a place where you can learn about the different types and the skills that make it so that you can take advantage of that opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

J. Elise Keith
So, I have two. I’m not a huge fan of favorites and to key to just one thing because there are so many wonderful things out there. But there are a couple that I put together that work for me, and one is, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” which is from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” I love that.

Like, what is your plan for your one wild and precious life? And then when I look at it from a business perspective and from a personal performance perspective, I pair it with another quote, which is, “Discipline is simply remembering what you really want.”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

J. Elise Keith
My favorite book, holy moly. How about “Time and the Art of Living” by Robert Grudin?

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And a favorite tool?

J. Elise Keith
You know, time blocking and scratch paper.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

J. Elise Keith
A favorite habit, hmm. You know, listening to audiobooks while cooking large batches of food.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And is there a particular nugget you share that you’re known, people quote it back to you and re-tweet it often?

J. Elise Keith
The one that gets re-tweeted the most, beyond the basic stats and things, is that, “You can’t have a meeting of the minds if the minds aren’t in the meeting.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

J. Elise Keith
They can visit us on my company’s website which is LucidMeetings.com and on my personal website which is JEliseKeith.com depending on what you’re looking for.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

J. Elise Keith
You know, we’ve kind of covered it but my challenge to you is this. Every meeting is an opportunity. Seize it. Your challenge is to shed any negative beliefs you’ve got about your meetings and step into those opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Elise, thank you for this meeting, and I wish you all the best with all you’re doing in meetings.

J. Elise Keith
Hey, thank you so much.

Apr 03
0

421: Why Great Leaders Have No Rules with Kevin Kruse

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Kevin Kruse says: "If we think our boss cares about us as individuals as opposed to cogs in a machine, our engagement goes way up."

Author Kevin Kruse offers wise–yet contrarian–pointers  for leaders.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Arguments for closing your Open Door policy
  2. Why to set guardrails instead of rules
  3. How to be likeable without striving for being liked

About Kevin

Kevin Kruse is Founder+CEO of LEADx, the first and only AI-powered executive coach and leadership success platform built with IBM Watson.

A successful entrepreneur, Kevin has won both “Inc 500” awards for fast growth and “Best Place to Work” awards for employee culture. He was previously the founder or co-founder of several companies with successful exits.

Kevin is also a Forbes contributor and a New York Times bestselling author of nine books including Employee Engagement 2.0, Employee Engagement for Everyone and We: How To Increase Performance and Profit Through Full Engagement.

Kevin’s next book, Great Leaders Have No Rules: Contr arian Leadership Principles to Transform Your Team and Business (Crown Publishing) will launch on April 2, 2019.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Kevin Kruse Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kevin, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Kevin Kruse
Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to be awesome level, but I’m going to do my best and it’s an honor to meet you and finally here live.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thanks Kevin. Yeah, it’s funny, we were talking before I hit the record button, how we see each other’s logos and faces in all kinds of places and here we are talking live at last.

Kevin Kruse
I like that phrase you said. It could be a song, “logos and faces in all kinds of places.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, it seems like it has to be country with a slow tempo. You do a lot of things at the opposite of a slow tempo in terms of founding companies and having great exits. I want to hear about your company Leadx, and in particular, you have the first and only AI—as in artificial intelligence robot style—powered executive coach. How does that work?

Kevin Kruse
Well, thanks for asking on that. My mission is to spark 100 million leaders in the next ten years. That’s a big number. Certainly I can reach some with a podcast, with a book, with speeches or those kinds of things, writing, but not that many.

When I saw what AI was able to do now, especially in the area of mental health and therapy and coaching, I said well, hey, leadership is about behavior change, changing thoughts and identity to change behaviors, let’s apply it.

For two years we’ve been training IBM Watson in all kinds of topics related to how to be a great boss, how to be a great manager, how to be a great leader. We call our coach Amanda. We released Coach Amanda in November of last year. Basically, you download the app on your Android device or smartphone or you log in and Coach Amanda will teach you about management fundamentals.

But she diagnoses your personality. She knows your personality. She’s teaching you management principles, leadership principles, but tailored to your personality. There’s sort of a new mode we just released. You can ask her questions like, “How do I handle an employee who smells badly?” or “Comes in late?” or “How do I communicate with a Myers Briggs INTJ?” You can ask her all kinds of questions.

Then the new mode, which is really cool, it’s like what a human coach does, is Coach Amanda will help you to pick a developmental goal and a deadline like 12 weeks from now. She’ll help you to create an action plan. Every week she’ll check in with you and she’ll buzz you on your phone or send you an email that says, “Hey Pete, your friendly reminder, your goal is,” I’m just making this up, “become a better public speaker by this date.”

Your next activity is watch some TED talks. Did you do it or not?” If you say you did, then she’s going to ask you to jot some lessons learned from that activity. If you say you didn’t, she’s going to ask you to jot some notes about what got in your way.

Pete Mockaitis
She scolds you.

Kevin Kruse
Yeah. Well, what got in the way of you getting to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Why have you been so naughty?

Kevin Kruse
That’s right. That’s right. Shut the power off on the spaceship if you don’t behave. That goes in a coaching journal. She becomes your accountability partner, who also can give you resources. You’re all about action, things to do at work. She will give you every week a new activity to do at work to get better in your goal area.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so wild. I guess I wonder about these things in terms of just how wide a breadth of questions can I ask because I know like Siri there’s some things she can nail, like “Hey, Siri, wake me up at 6 AM.” She’s all over it. But other questions are a little trickier for Siri. If I were to ask Amanda something like boy, let’s see, “How do I-“ okay, let’s just say, “Amanda, I’m trying to figure out which business initiatives should be my top priority right now.” Could she handle that? What happens?

Kevin Kruse
No, she can’t, is the short question. But you’re raising a really important issue with all these devices and these chat bots. The best chat bots out there, Siri, Alexa, Google Home, they’re at an 85% accuracy level. Out of everything that they get asked in any given day, they can get about 85% of that. That’s where it’s sort of maxed out for now.

Now for Coach Amanda, when we first released her two years ago she could get 11%. Then all the wrong answers, you feed it back in. She gets smarter. She was then at 44%. Right now she’s at about 65%. We think that we’ll get to 85% by the end of the year. You need, in general, about 10,000 unique questions for the bot to then kind of know 85% or better. But the thing is, it’s in a given area.

If we saw that you had asked that question of Coach Amanda, we would say, “Okay, she’s teaching people to be better leaders. Is this a leadership question?” We might say, “Eh, evaluating what business to do isn’t our definition of management leadership and she’s just going to say ‘I don’t know. Would you like to hear what kind of things I know about?’”

We talk about training AI to understand humans, the other half is to train humans how to speak to the AI. I’ve got an Alexa device. I noticed a while ago, a few weeks back, the ring was glowing orange. I didn’t know what that was at the time. I said, “Hey Alexa, why are you glowing orange?” She’s like, “I can’t help you with that.” “What does the orange light mean?” “I can’t help you with that.”

I had to Google it and it said “Oh, that’s when you have a notification from Alexa.” Then I said, “Hey, play me my notifications,” and it told me like, “Oh, UPS is going to deliver a package today.” You think it would know this. If I say, “Alexa, play me my messages. Play me my alerts. Why are you orange? Do I have a package?” She cannot answer any of these very similar things.

Alexa trained me. Now when she’s orange, I say “Play my notifications,” and then I’ll get it. But it took me a couple of days before I got that.

That’s with Coach Amanda, most people just don’t wake up and say, “I’ve got a question about management today,” but if you’re a manager at a company that’s used let’s say the DISC personality survey. It’s kind of a popular personality survey. You know everybody’s done that and you know that your boss is high in D, which is dominance or driver.

You would then know that you could ask Coach Amanda before your next meeting like, “Hey, how do I persuade someone who’s high in D,” and then Coach Amanda would answer it. But you wouldn’t just naturally think of that kind of question on your own. It’s sort of a two-way learning.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Thank you. My curiosity is satisfied. Now I’m curious about your book, Great Leaders Have No Rules. What’s the big idea here?

Kevin Kruse
Well, the big idea is that most of the conventional wisdom around management is wrong. I’ve now had 30 years of being a serial entrepreneur. I crashed and burned my first company because I had no concept of leadership. Then my next couple of companies, they did okay, but it’s because I had outdated ideas of leadership. Better than no ideas, but they were outdated.

It was only when I really rejected the conventional wisdom, thought about how to make things work better from a management leadership perspective for the modern world, that’s when the last couple of companies have really taken off and done well.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, so could you give us an example of an outdated rule or principle or approach to management that is still a common practice that ought to be rejected?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah. Well, let me do the one – it’s the first chapter, which is close your open door policy. Most people – I made that as chapter number one because most people have heard that idea of having an open door policy. Of course, this day and age, Pete, we don’t all have physical doors.

It might be we’re in that open office environment, someone taps us on the shoulder to ask a question or even working alone, but someone messages us on Slack and kind of – it’s some digital form of “Got a minute.” It’s never just a minute.

Now, of course with all these management things, they come from a good place. The idea of the open door policy is it facilitates communication, it’s fast problem solving, it’s a flat organization, everybody can leapfrog each other’s bosses and go right to the top. All sounds good. But in this modern day world, there’s a lot of problems.

First problem, of course, is as the manager who’s’ getting interrupted all day, it’s almost impossible for us to do deep work, to do focused work, to think strategically. But Marshall Goldsmith writes about, it’s also a problem for the person coming through the door for a couple of reasons.

Because if someone’s coming in with unscheduled meetings all day, you’ve got to ask yourself did you hire the wrong person, did you not train them well, or do you have a culture that is not supportive – it’s not a culture of psychological safety. Are they so scared to make a decision, to solve a problem on their own, that they’ve got to run everything by you? Maybe you’ve got a delegation problem or a perfectionism problem. It’s a sign that maybe things aren’t well from their standpoint.

I put a lot of comments from readers in the book. As one person pointed out, they’re like, “I don’t want to talk to my boss if I’m interrupting her and it’s a bad time and she’s stressed out or whatever. I’d rather it be, ‘Hey, let’s schedule 15 minutes or 30 minutes. Here’s the topic, so you know in advance what it’s about.’”

I don’t say close your door completely. The idea is – I say, “Close your door, open your calendar,” meaning set office hours. To each their own. For some people it might be like, “Hey, in the morning if my door’s closed, that’s my deep focused work time. I invite you to focus on your work as well. But in the afternoon if my door is open or not, just tap and come on in because my office hours will be in the afternoon.”

Or maybe it’s, “Hey, Monday and Friday are open door policy days and in the middle of the week it’s all about making stuff. We’re not going to do the open door.” You can figure it out, but the idea is hm, if it’s getting abused, there’s something wrong going on, so how can you set some ground rules and then support your team members in a way where they don’t have to come through as often?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m digging that a lot. When you talked about making stuff versus managing, I think that came from the lean startup world somewhere, the makers’ versus mangers’ schedule. It’s really resonated with me in terms of there are some days where that’s all I need to do is I need to coordinate with a bunch of different people and a bunch of different little things and make sure everyone is equipped, empowered, informed, guided, raring to go and rock and roll.

There are other days where I need to enter deep isolation and creatively give birth to things.

Kevin Kruse
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And having one-, two-, three-minute interruptions just disrupts everything in terms of I was having a brilliant idea, or it felt brilliant at least, and I was in the throes of writing it up and now where did it go? I don’t even know anymore because I replied to a message along the way.

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. You say that you are making some boundaries, if you will, associated with “Hey, these times are open office hours. These times are not so much.” That almost sounds like a rule. You say great leaders have no rules, how are you thinking about the term ‘rule’ here?

Kevin Kruse
Let me say, the time where rules make sense is if it’s a law. Your company has to have a rule that follows the law or if it’s a safety issue. You don’t want people working on railroad tracks wearing headphones or something like that. If you’re really horrible at hiring, if you’ve hired a bunch of knuckleheads, rules might contain them a little bit.

But the problem with rules that aren’t the kind of required rules is that every time I bump into a rule, it takes away the chance for me to make a decision, for me to make a choice. When that happens, it becomes more your company than my company. Rules get in the way of conversation, rules get in the way of contemplation, and they disengage workers.

Pete, I’ll tell you, I stumbled on this 20 years ago. It’s a story I tell in the book, where I had sold my company. I was 30 years old and as part of the deal they acquired my company. I was going to become a partner, vice president, report to the CEO. He gave me a big speech about he’s not my boss. We’re just partners. We’re going to build the dream together. Each one vote. All this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m inspired.

Kevin Kruse
Inspired and feel good. I’m engaged. It feels like my company. Then 30 days in, I had sent my first expense report in. The check comes back. I happen to notice that it’s short like four dollars. It’s not a lot of money, but I thought maybe I filled it out wrong or something.

I emailed our CFO, “Hey Don, it’s not a big deal, but did I fill out the form wrong?” He says, “No, we don’t reimburse for Post-it notes.” I emailed back, “Why?” He emailed back, “Wasteful expense.”

A buddy of mine, who had come into the company the same way, vice president, partner, all this stuff, he told me that he was shorted three dollars because while he was traveling on business he had ordered a beer with dinner and they don’t reimburse for beer. They said, “Look, you could have ordered a six-dollar milkshake and we would have paid for it, but we won’t pay for a three-dollar beer.”

This became what was known as the Post-it note wars. You could imagine I was feeling so good and then 30 days in when I’m told I’m not allowed – the rule is no purchases of Post-it notes. That’s it. It was like, “Wasteful expense.” Black and white. It’s a rule. How engaged did I feel? Did it feel like my company or their company? Did I feel like a VP or did I feel like someone with no power at all?

Then here’s the funny thing about it though, Pete. The second half of the story is I went and fought with the CEO. He said, “Kevin,” he said, “I had no idea that this was bothering people.” He said, “I don’t care about Post-it notes. All right, that rule is overturned. You win. Everybody can go buy Post-it notes. But,” he said, “Let me explain.” He said, “I don’t care about Post-it notes. I care about being frugal.”

He said “One of our values,” and it was an official company value, “was growth and profits.” It wasn’t the mission to be profitable, but it was like the air you breathe. You need it to go chase your mission.

He said that he used to walk through the office and see that everyone was buying Post-it notes and they were doodling on them while they were on the phone or in a meeting. They were writing phone messages on them when they could have used any other kind of paper.

He shows me this stack of ripped up squares of paper. He said instead of Post-it notes, he uses all the scrap paper from the printer and stuff, rips it twice and now he’s got these squares on his desk that he uses. He says, “It’s a symbol.” He said, “The no Post-it notes is a symbol of frugality. It’s a reminder about the culture and the value of being frugal, that profits matter and we care about it.”

The funny thing is even though he overrode that rule, I never again bought Post-it notes. It’s because now we had a conversation. We had a relationship. I understood, okay, the value of the organization is frugality and profits. The acceptable norm is rip up little pieces of paper and use those. Don’t be wasteful with Post-it notes and other kinds of things.

It totally changed my view on it even though I then had permission to do it. I wanted to support our values. I wanted to represent our values. Now that I realized it was a symbol, I wanted to have little pieces of ripped up paper on my desk, so the team members would realize I’m being frugal. But none of that would have happened if it had just been the rule.

This is where I get in a lot of trouble, Pete. If people already think it’s crazy. I’ve had several companies over the last 30 years. We’ve never had a dress code. We’ve never had a vacation policy. The employee handbook is always a page and a half long of the required legal stuff.

You do get people making mistakes, the people that will travel and order eight beers instead of one. But, to me, that’s a time for some feedback. That’s a coachable moment. Sometimes you’ve got to coach people out of the organization.

But all of the sudden, you’re not having people bump into a rule and then feeling disempowered, disengaged. It’s, “Oh, I did something that’s out of line with the agreed upon principals, the agreed upon values of our family. I get it and I’m going to be more likely then to conform.”

I think this goes in all areas of our life. People have rules in their marriages that I hear about all the time. I don’t think we should have rules in marriage. Again, I’m saying a rule is like that black and white thing that’s been imposed on you rather than something you’ve thought about and are deciding to do based on values.

I don’t think we should have rules for our teenagers. Me and my sisters had curfews growing up and it was a disaster. It wrecked the family dynamic. I’ve got three teenagers. I’ve never had a curfew. I might just be lucky. They’re model kids and everything.

But it’s not that I’ve ignored the issue of what time you’re coming home, but instead of saying, “The rule is 11 PM,” and at 11:02 we’re now shouting at each other and they’re grounded, it’s more like, “Hey, when are you going to come home tonight?” They say, “Well, I’ve got this really big party and it’s kind of far away.”

I said, “Well, you know I love you so much. I am not going to be able to sleep until you’re home and I have to get up early to take your brother to his basketball game, so what time are we thinking?” It’s a whole other thing that builds relationships, builds culture, and increases compliance.

People can get around rules really easy, but if they’re bought in, they’re less likely to abuse it. Then whether they get home at 10:55 or 11:05, who cares?

Pete Mockaitis
That is interesting because right now it’s sort of like your teenager’s on your side. It’s like he is helping you and the family by getting home on time as opposed to – and maybe even a little early.

Kevin Kruse
Yes, right.

Pete Mockaitis
He’s helping you out even more because you’re able to get some sleep extra versus when it’s just a rule, it’s like, “Well, I’m going to try and get every last second out of it because I can and I don’t feel engaged or bought in or like I’m on the team.” That’s very intriguing how you say rules disengage workers because it deprives them of an opportunity to make a decision, to have some free agency.

It was so interesting as you were talking about the Post-it note story and I heard that, “Hey, frugality is a value here.” I guess my thought is when it comes to values is like, well, the value I find much more empoweringly resonant is that we have rock star employees and we give them the very best tools they need to do their work with excellence.

So by golly, Kevin, you get the most fantastic Post-it notes that you can conceive of if they make you feel 2% more creative, engaged, empowered, supported. I want you to have the world’s finest Post-it notes. That’s kind of what gets me more fired up in terms of value, but-

Kevin Kruse
You and I think alike. Right. Because a discussion, a really important one around value.

Pete Mockaitis
But at the same time, when you see that what it means, it’s like, “Oh, okay,” and you can support that, especially I suppose at a higher level of VP. You’re like, “Well, yeah, profit is important and yeah, waste is not cool, so I can get excited about that.”

Kevin Kruse
Not to go too deep just on that one chapter of having no rules, but here’s the thing. Instead of rules, think of guardrails because I’m sure if there’s any chief financial officers out there, they’re like, “Oh, everyone’s going to be wasting on their travel budget,” or whatever. Well, fine, but instead of having a rule that people are going to bump into and circumvent or do stupid things to try to comply with the rule, give guardrails.

It’s like, “Hey, when you’re traveling 100 bucks-ish a night on a hotel is going to be normal and fine. If you’re in a major city, that might be 200. If you’re in the Midwest in a rural town, maybe 60. But spend the money like it’s your own and I just gave you some milestones for not staying at the Ritz Carlton kind of a thing.” Guardrails are okay.

It’s like, okay, I’ve still got some of that – I like what you said – like some free agency, some decision making, some choice. Do I stay at this hotel or that hotel?

Because otherwise the other thing is people will do the wrong thing to stay in the rule. They’ll say, “Well, I can’t stay at the hotel that’s right next to the client office because it’s 10 dollars too much over the rule, so I’ll stay farther away to save the 10 dollars, but now I’ll spend 100 dollars on a rental car.”  They just ended up wasting the expense to stay inside your hotel rule.

Pete Mockaitis
And the time. It’s like if I’ve got to truck it out another 20 – 30 minutes each way-

Kevin Kruse
No matter what that rule is, that’s the thing. They can circumvent it on purpose or just do more harm by trying to stay in it. That’s why they’re so imperfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Yeah, that’s nice. Replacing the rules with guardrails and a value. It’s so funny, I guess no one ever told me when I was an employee to spend the money like it was my own because I was super frugal. They would have benefited. But I was like, “Well, hey, I would never pay for a 280 dollar a night hotel if it were my money, but apparently none of you mind, so I’m going to do that.”

Kevin Kruse
That’s exactly right. As soon as you tell people they have a whatever it is, 50 dollar a day meal budget when they travel, all the expense reports come back at 49 dollars and 79 cents. Everybody is spending up to the rule because they think “Well, that’s like free money. That’s fine. Let’s get that second beer or let’s get the appetizer.” If you just say, “Hey, here’s kind of the normal spending patterns. Please spend our money as if it were your own,” you’ll save money that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Kevin Kruse
Absolutely. And move faster. I had Gary on my team just the other day. We’re doing software development. He’s like, “Hey, listen, I need like a backup Android phone to test the-“ I’m like, “Gary, just go buy it.” He’s like, “But I don’t know which phone to buy.” I’m like, “Spend the money as if it’s your own,” and boom conversation’s done. He’s empowered and we’re all good.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, awesome. Well, hey, while we’re on that note, so instead of issuing rules, you have a guiding principal there, spend the money as if it’s your own. That’s just a great sentence that can offer a lot of clarity and empowerment. You’ve got some more?

Kevin Kruse
I don’t know if I’ve got them as pithy as that. But the thing on the rules is kind of overreaching. That’s a big one, but that’s just one example of the many different kind of accepted management things. Here’s the rulebook. Here’s the employee handbook and all that. We talked about open door. It’s time to close the open door.

Another one that is resonating with a lot of people is this idea of being likeable but not liked. Now people don’t view that as normal management wisdom, but often we have this need as especially the younger managers, this was my big fault early on, is that we have this kind of need to be liked and so we’re the poplar boss, the nice boss, people like us.

It’s okay to like to be liked. It’s nice. It feels good to be liked. But if you have that need, that is going to get in the way of you making tough decisions, making tough decisions quickly, giving people feedback that they need to grow and prosper.

If I need Pete to like me and I’m your boss, it’s going to slow me down from giving you the hard feedback that will make you better. The reality is, Pete, you probably don’t need me as a friend; you need me as a leader. You need me as a coach.

This is one of those things where – and it’s the more current wisdom is like, “Hey, flat organizations and we’re all equal,” and all that kind of stuff. I used to tell people that. I would say, “Oh, I’m not your boss. I just have a different role on the team.” That sounds nice. Well, until I’ve got to either lay people off, give them tough feedback, promote someone out of the three people that are qualified. Well, now they know that I’m not just a friend and all the rest.

That’s just sort of another one that’s been resonating with people is don’t be a jerk. You want to be likeable. But don’t necessarily be liked. You want to not be attached to the outcome of whether you’re actually liked or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I think that’s great. If you need to be liked, I think it’s great to make sure you’ve got some people outside of work who like you.

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve got that need being fulfilled successfully and you can do what you need to do inside there. Then when you say being likeable, you’re just sort of talking about just general friendly and respectful ways of being or do you have any particulars there?

Kevin Kruse
Well, yeah. It definitely starts with that. There’s no need to, again – I think I’ve got another chapter that talks about lead with love. The old school wisdom would be purposefully put up barriers between you and your team members. You don’t eat lunch with them. You don’t socialize with them. You don’t talk about your personal life because you must remain objective and you must remain fair. You don’t want your emotions interfering.

Well, that’s too much in the wrong direction. One of the biggest ways that people will feel engaged at work, so engagement is just how we feel – how committed we are to our organization and its goals. 70% of this engagement, how we feel about work, comes from who our boss is. Now if we think our boss cares about us as individuals as opposed to cogs in a machine, our engagement goes way up.

It’s okay to get close to your people. It’s okay for me to ask about your weekend, to know the names of your children and what they’re up to, to know that you’re training for a marathon or something, even to know when you’re struggling at home or you’ve got a parent who’s ill. You don’t want to put up these artificial barriers.

It can be down to these little things, where you’re walking through the hallway of your organization, are you going to keep your head up, make eye contact with everybody, smile and say good morning or are you going to keep your eyes down and hope nobody stops you because you really don’t care. You just want to get back to your desk and get some work done. It’s like be likeable, be sociable, don’t put up these artificial barriers.

Remember when I say lead with love, you don’t have to like someone to love them. That sounds a little weird and it’s weird to talk about loving your team members in this whole Me Too era. I’m not talking about inappropriate love or anything like that. I’m talking about this greater love and compassion for fellow man and woman. It’s about this higher level. The Greeks had a word for it called agape love. It’s like this universal love that you see in all of the major religions.

If I am going to serve my team members, if I’m going to lead my team members, even if I don’t like somebody, I can still hope for the best. I can still care about them. I can still realize if I had lived their life, maybe I would be just like them. That’s where it gets into it. Don’t be a jerk is a good starting point. Then actually connect and care with your people is how you really activate that.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m right with you there. Loving in terms of willing the good of the other as opposed to liking just like, “I enjoy your presence and want to hang out more because it’s fun.”

Kevin Kruse
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice distinction there. I’d love to get your take when you talked about the manager leader walking around and holding their head up, I want to get your input on and a couple of guests have cited this Harvard Business Review study about how the majority of managers are uncomfortable talking with their colleagues for any reason. I just think that is so striking. What’s your take on what’s behind this?

Kevin Kruse
Well, I’m not familiar with that particular study, but similar ones I have come across. There’s a couple of things that are going on. Pete, just recently, last year or two with this AI coach that we’ve been working on, we’ve been going deep into personality theory. Personality is the number one driver of behavior and we’re talking about leadership behaviors.

The interesting thing is, especially in large organizations, managers are supposed to be focusing on results, business results, but also relationships. How do you attract and retain great talent? But that relationship part generally falls to the side. People are profits. People chase the profits. These managers get promoted for getting things done – things, tasks. The more task focused they are, the more they get promoted.

Once you get up to a certain level, you’re really good at the productivity stuff, at tasks, you’re not so good at the people stuff. I think that it doesn’t help when the traditional wisdom is that that is okay. That it’s like hey, don’t get close to your people. That’s where I think people start to get uncomfortable.

This day and age, we know that, again, trust drives engagement. What drives trust? Authenticity. If Pete comes out and says, “Hey, you know what team? Here’s what I’m really good at. Here’s where I’m not really good at. I’m going to tell you when I’ve got the answer. Ask me anything. If I don’t know, I’ll just tell you I don’t know and I’m going to go find out. By the way, here’s the three things I did wrong last year.”

Well, when we hear that from Pete, all of the sudden it’s like, “Oh wow, Pete’s like a relatable person and he’s not going to lie to us. He’s not lying to us. If I mess up, I can go to him and let him know. If I want to try something, it’s not like, ‘Oh, this experiment goes wrong and I’ve derailed my career.’ It’s ‘Oh, we were innovative. It didn’t work out. Now we’re going to try something else.’”

The old school was not taught – I had mentors tell me when I was in my 20s, “Kevin, leadership is acting. Kevin, wear your leadership mask when you arrive in the office.” People would talk about that. Thankfully I think that’s changing, but when you’ve been drilled into that and you’re task focused anyway, you’re not going to be too comfortable talking to people at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. Thank you. Well, Kevin, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Kevin Kruse
No, again, you can hear in my voice and I can hear it in yours, Pete, I geek out on leadership. This is a leadership book, but to me, leadership is a superpower because leadership just means influence. When you learn to lead yourself, influence yourself, you can get to health, wealth, happiness. When you learn to lead, influence, your marriage, your children, you have a great family life. When you learn to lead, to influence at work, your career takes off.

That’s why I’m so geeked out about it. Thanks for the opportunity to really have some fun with some of these concepts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure thing. Absolutely. Good times. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Kevin Kruse
Well I like “Life is about making an impact, not an income.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Kevin Kruse
I don’t know if it’s a favorite, but one that stood out from one of my earlier books was this study they did at Princeton showing that taking notes by hand is far superior than writing them on a laptop keyboard or a smartphone. It’s called The Pen is Mightier than the Keyboard. That’s the name of that study.

It’s because when we can type, then we tend to just be an automatic recorder of the word of the sounds without processing it. When we have to write them, we have to think about what we’re hearing, quickly analyze it, shorten it, put it down and then it anchors it in our memory.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes a lot of sense. I always prefer to use typing for notes just because I can type so much faster than I can write with a pen, but that’s kind of the idea is because you can write slower, you must do some prioritization.

Kevin Kruse
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And capture fewer words. That process is powerful. Okay. Thank you. That’s helpful. It’s all connecting for me over here. How about a favorite book?

Kevin Kruse
I’m a huge reader. I probably read more than 50 books a year. A classic favorite is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. It’s a great one. Well, since you’re reading so much, let’s ask. How about a favorite book or two released in the last five years?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, Daring Greatly from Brene Brown really gets – again, you don’t think of it as a classic business or leadership book, but that helped me to understand issues related to self-worth, external validation, which gets you then to be more authentic. Very practical book from Kim Scott is Radical Candor on how to give feedback. Zero to One is an entrepreneur book about startups and positioning. Peter Thiel. Those are more recent ones.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah, I don’t have anything novel or unique. I’m a live for my calendar guy. I just use Google Calendar. Again, I like writing notes by hand. Sometimes I will then transfer them into Evernote. I use a Moleskine notebook or some kind of paper notebook. It’s just classic tools.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I’ve got to ask, when you are taking notes by hand and then get them into Evernote, are you just taking a photo or using a scanner? How do you make that happen smoothly?

Kevin Kruse
Yeah. They have, of course, tools now, including notebooks, where you write in the notebook and it automatically goes into Evernote. Then there’s ones where it’s special paper, you write on it, and then it scans and it does the OCR into Evernote. I don’t do anything that fancy.

What I tend to do is I write notes through – I fill up these books fast. A lot of it is not worthy of sending to Evernote. But if something is worthy of sending to Evernote, I’ll just snap it on my phone, upload it as a photo to Evernote and then I’ll just write a couple of words that I know will match if I’m looking to do a search. That’s just sort of a poor man’s version of getting it into Evernote.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure. Yeah. How about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Kevin Kruse
It’s great you ask everybody this question. This starts before I get to work, but every morning I start – I’m a big believer in having an attitude of gratitude. I always just try to think of three things that I’m grateful for. Every morning I try to think of something different. Just changes my mindset in an abundance mindset. It destresses me. Maximizes my world view going into work.

Then at work the first thing I do, highly recommend it, is I just consciously think of what is my most important task for the day at hand and I’ll scrawl it on top of my printed calendar for the day, again, by hand just to kind of anchor it there.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Kevin Kruse
Well, the one that is the most controversial is – I wrote a book called 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management and one of the things I found – it wasn’t my idea. I interviewed 300 highly successful people, self-made billionaires, millionaires. None of them used a to-do list. They only worked from their calendar.

The phrase is ‘schedule it, don’t list it.’ If you really want to do something, pause and think what day, what time and for how long are you going to do it. If you’re not willing to do that, then maybe you shouldn’t plan to do it. That changed my world. That was a couple years ago. I don’t use a to-do list anymore.

Every day I get ten emails telling me I’m a stupid, crazy jerk for telling people that. I get ten emails from people who say I’ve changed their life because they learned it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Kevin Kruse
The book Great Leaders Have No Rules available on Amazon.com, all bookstores, wherever they want to buy that. If they want to get free trial and check out Leadx with Coach Amanda, that’s at Leadx.org, O-R-G.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Kevin Kruse
Well, in the theme of the book, I would say challenge the rules. Even if you believe you should have rules, challenge them. Make sure you are asking the team members that you’re working with, the higher-ups, quote/unquote, “What is behind this rule?” Again, once I asked about the Post-it note rule, my view of it changed.

I would invite you to do the same thing outside of work. Even if you say, “Kevin’s crazy. My teenagers need a curfew.” Okay, but ask your kids why do they think that curfew’s in place, why is it the time that it is, how do they feel about it. At the very least, even if you keep the curfew, you will have strengthened that relationship and strengthened their commitment to compliance.

Pete Mockaitis
Kevin, this has been a blast. Thanks so much for sharing the good word. Good luck with your book and all your adventures.

Kevin Kruse
Thanks Pete and thanks for you doing your work and spreading the word out there too. You’re helping a lot of people.

Aug 31
0

340: How to Be a Chief Even without a Title with Rick Miller

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Rick Miller says: "Real power is clarity. Real power is confidence."

Rick Miller outlines what power really means and the five components needed to build it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Where true power comes from
  2. Five ways to create insight and energy
  3. Why supporting other people’s success grows your influence

About Rick

Rick Miller is an unconventional turnaround specialist, a servant leader, and a go-to Chief. He is also an experienced and trusted confidant, an author (Be Chief: It’s a Choice, Not a Title, September 4, Motivational Press), a sought-after speaker, and an expert at driving sustainable growth. For over 30 years, Rick served as a successful business executive in roles including President and/or CEO in a Fortune 10, a Fortune 30, a startup, and a nonprofit. Rick earned a bachelor’s degree from Bentley University and an MBA from Columbia. He currently lives in Morristown, NJ.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Rick Miller Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rick, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Rick Miller
Great to be with you Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think there are many things that I’m excited to discuss with you. One of them that is chief among them – get it – is your—

Rick Miller
Well done.

Pete Mockaitis
Is your experience training at a professional wrestling school. What is this about?

Rick Miller
Well, you asked for something that was a little different. Back in the early ‘80s when WrestleMania I came out – showing a little date here – it was a couple of wrestlers: Mr. T and Hulk Hogan. I was running a sales organization at the time and I wanted to do something fun for our sales kickoff, so I went to Killer Kowalski’s Wrestling School in Boston, Massachusetts.

Now Killer Kowalski’s at the time was still the famed six foot six inch 325 pound monster that he was years earlier. Let’s just say, Pete, that the 325 had settled differently in his body.

I went with a couple of other folks. We learned to throw each other around and worked with Killer and a professional midget wrestler and were there for a couple of weeks and put on one heck of a kickoff for our sales team, one they didn’t expect.

But at the time WrestleMania was all the discussion. Again, I know they’ve had a bunch since, but back in the day it was fresh and it was new. No I didn’t garner the tights, but it was interesting to be thrown against turnbuckles and coming off ropes and things like that. I have a real respect for learning how to fall the right way.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah. So you went through all of this to put on a show for the sales team?

Rick Miller
I did. I did. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s amazing.

Rick Miller
Oh yeah. I mean listen, you’re trying to get people motivated and have some fun and frankly show kind of a fun side of yourself. You’re going to spend the rest of the year trying to work with the team to perform miracles in terms of generating numbers that you’re trying to build up. But at the front end of most sales years is a fun kickoff and we thought that year that was the way to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Who were you wrestling in your exhibition?

Rick Miller
I was wrestling Killer Kowalski. I had a-

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the Killer himself. Okay.

Rick Miller
Yeah, I was – yeah, yeah. It was great because it was funny. You grabbed them by the hand and a little tug and of course he launched himself into the air as if you did it. I got to tell you, the sounds of 300 and some-odd pounds landing the way it did, I can’t even express to you.

But the real fun was the way the skit was set up is that I was going after Killer and I was beating him for a while, but then he threw me once and I stayed down. The way the skit was set up, I reached up and said just loud enough for the audience to say, I said, “I need help from headquarters,” and in came his partner, a professional midget.

The size difference between the midget and Killer and then obviously the midget who was the headquarters, at the time it was the computer company I was working for, and he had our logo emblazoned to the midget on his chest.

He starts throwing Killer Kowalski around in a well-choreographed dance, if you will, that they had done many times. At the end, the midget holds my hand up and we’re standing on Killer Kowalski’s chest and the crowd is going crazy because obviously with headquarters’ help you can defeat – I think at the time we had Killer Kowalski with an IBM shirt on. It was really sappy, but I tell you what, it really had the sales force pumped up.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my gosh. That is so fun. Wow. Thank you for sharing and really painting a picture there. That’s really cool. Well now I want to hear a little about your company. It’s called Being Chief LLC. What’s this organization about?

Rick Miller
It’s the organization that I set up when I left the last big company job that I had ten years ago to give me a platform to do what I like to do, which is I do some speaking, I do some writing, and I work really as a confidant, an advisor, to business leaders who want to work together on personally and professionally being more powerful.

That’s the umbrella term. I’ve long since lost the need to run large organizations. At one point I had 10,000 people when I was at AT&T that were under my direct kind of area of responsibility. I’ve really enjoyed over the last ten years having an employee base of one. It’s working out just fine for me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Yeah. I dig it. You have articulated many of your kind of core beliefs or messages there at Being Chief in the book, Be Chief: It’s a Choice, Not a Title. What are kind of the main pieces of this?

Rick Miller
Well, the central element of the book is about power. I was fortunate enough to do a TED talk a number of years ago. The line – I thought later on about the book – but the line in the TED talk that got the most resonance was people have an awful lot of interest in the term “chief,” but they frankly have a lot more interest in the power associated with the word “chief.”

Back in the day when I got out of business school, there was a chain of titles that you tried to move up. You become a vice president to a senior vice president to an executive vice president to a president to a CEO. That was the path that many of us took. Now, the term of the day is “chief” as in chief fill-in-the-blank officer. There are chiefs everywhere.

But the reason that the term “chief” is being thrown around is because people want the power associated with the word “chief.” The book – a central element of the book, again, the subtitle is It’s a Choice, Not a Title because I believe that power, as some people define it, conventionally is kind of yesterday’s newspaper to be honest.

Power, in many people’s minds, still if they’re thinking in an old paradigm, is about authority and control that comes from a title or a position or some element of superiority. That’s an old way of thinking about power.

The book offers that real power is energy. Real power is clarity. Real power is confidence. With those, that anyone can have independent of where they are in any organization, that’s where they can have influence and that’s where they can make a real impact.

The book is all about redefining power, giving you a way to measure your power, to increase your power, and then have your power spread to other people, other parts of your organization.

Because as an unconventional turnaround specialist, which is the label that I sometimes get – although my favorite label, honestly Pete, is professional nudge – but the turnaround thing is about walking into tough organizations and organizations having a tough time and putting a plan in place not only to turnaround performance and develop growth, but to sustain it.

I think the key to sustainable growth, and this is the net of the book, the big idea is that people and the way that you deal with the power that is in a workforce has everything to do with your ability to sustain growth.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, got you. In terms of the definition of power, it seems like you’re still thinking about it in terms of influence or the capacity to do work, which is sort of the same as the old or not? Could you correct me there?

Rick Miller
Yeah. Influence no question.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Rick Miller
Power is about influence. The question is who has it and how do you get it because in the old world you needed to wait for someone else to give you the promotion. You needed to wait for somebody else to say it’s time for that next rung in the ladder. As you went up in an organization, you got more powerful.

The key change is that power doesn’t come from the outside, it comes from the inside. Allowing people to find their power their way, we’re all different, and to make sure that you can become the fullest version of who you are, certainly increases your engagement. That’s one of the business topics that’s out there these days. According to Gallup, only three out of ten people are all in or fully engaged at work.

Well, some companies say well the managers aren’t doing their jobs. Blame it on the managers. Eh, you probably want to take a look at the people who you’re hiring and creating environments with them to allow them to be the best versions of themselves. That’s what I focus on.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Now we talk about energy and clarity and confidence being sort of the core underlying forces from within that turn into this power.

Rick Miller
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you tell us a little bit, you say you measure it and you increase it. How does that work?

Rick Miller
Well, there’s a – this is the best part. We’re happy to talk a little bit about the book that’s coming out where all proceeds are going to charity. We’ll talk about that later. But the best thing I have to share with your listeners is there is on my site right now, BeChief.com, a free assessment tool.

Take you five minutes. And allow you to answer some very simple questions and get a baseline of how powerful are you defined in those terms, Pete, that we just talked about. How clear are you? How confident are you? How energized are you? What is your influence score and what is your impact score?

From the way you answer those questions, you have an opportunity to say “How do I feel about the choices that I’m currently making and make those tweaks?”

I find that the language of business is numbers. The language of business is numbers. We can talk – my dad is a human resource professional. I used to call them personnel guys back in the day. But I’ve always believed that human capital is the area that we need to focus on. The challenge is the metrics aren’t there. You can’t measure it by zip code, by shoe size, by time of day, which you can financial capital.

I designed this tool, this very simple tool, to give people a quick snapshot of their power and that obviously opens them up to choices to what they choose to do about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’d love to dig into a bit of each of these in terms of how are your defining energy, clarity, confidence, influence, impact and then what are some of your sort of best practice pro tips for boosting each of them?

Rick Miller
Sure. Where do you want to start?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s go with energy.

Rick Miller
Okay. Energy is – we talk about power comes from the inside not the out – the core of this thing is inside actually because being chief, I’ll give you another way of looking at it, kind of pull these together.

Being chief, being the most powerful person you can be is connecting what you do to who you are, connecting what you do to who you are. If you think about who you are, who are you, really requires you to develop some insight, insight into – self-understanding and insight to me are synonyms. That’s where I think energy comes from.

Talk about five different ways that you can build insight and create energy. I suggest that part of it is being present, being focused on the moment at hand. You’ll see Pete, that many of these things are well-discussed in many different ways in many different forms by other people. My focus is not to supply you with a new piece of information, it’s to help you apply it. Supply and apply.

I’m a business guy; it’s got to be simple. I’ve got to be able to retain it. I’ve got to be able to use it. When it gets to energy and insight, first off, be present. Learn how to focus.

Second, be still. Learn how to develop your own voice. All the voices that are yapping at you from the media to a well-intentioned spouse, to your kids, to your neighbors, everybody around, everybody’s got a voice that’s in your ear. How can you develop the energy that comes from hearing your own voice and knowing it well?

Third one is being accepting. Don’t fight what is. You want to fight for the future, that’s fine, but conserve your energy. Don’t needlessly waste energy by fighting a current truth. Accept what is. The energy that comes from being generous and the energy that comes from being grateful.

I offer that there are five ways to actually measure how present are you, how still are you, how accepting are you, how generous are you, and how grateful are you. These are all your own self views, but my observation is the more you are any one of these, you can absolutely increase your level of self-understanding, your insight, and the benefit to you is the energy of knowing more who you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s a great sort of subset there being present, being still, being accepting, being generous and being grateful. Do you have any thoughts in terms of a particular action step one can take that really takes you far in terms of being more of one or more of these things?

Rick Miller
Well, the question is how much are you doing it? Let’s take being present. I know that many people take great benefit from the time they’re being present, but even the most accomplished, enlightened, even people who are very much focusing on the mindfulness movement, which you’ve very familiar with I’m sure, would say that there’s a percentage of their day that they aren’t present. We’re human beings.

The objective is always to can you – if you are present every once in a while, can you be present more often. Then can you be present consistently. It’s all in the small tweaks.

If someone is never present and they’re always scattered, are they going to take a step from being scatterbrained and all over the place to mindful all the time? Of course not. I’m not advocating that anybody try and skip steps, but just try to move a little bit on the scale of one to ten.

If you’re a five on a one to ten in terms of being present, what benefit, what power, what energy could you get if you became a little more present than you have been. That’s the advocacy. The advocacy is don’t ask people to do what they can’t do, ask them to make slight tweaks in what they can do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so you’re not suggesting a particular regiment or series of exercise to boost presence, so much as you’re just saying, “Hey, get some awareness and some focus and do more of it.”

Rick Miller
Exactly. Exactly. Again, there are wonderful places to go. I view Be Chief, Pete, as an integrated piece. I’m not trying to go – there are volumes and volumes and volumes on how to be present. I’m not trying to outdo the present movement, the mindful movement. Go study Jon Kabat-Zinn. There’s plenty of places to go.

My – as I work with executives and leaders at all levels, chiefs at all levels, the idea is how do you integrate all of the stuff that’s out there to make it actionable. You can go in any particular vein, but the idea of connecting what you do to who you are is the central premise.

I’ll take the next step with you. One real powerful practice that I’ve used with a lot of my clients, and, again, it’s on the free survey, is my belief that values, understanding your values, are the key to confidence.

Here’s why I say that. When I work with great groups of people, I will generally put up a list of – or talk about a list of 30 or 40 values that are all very positive things. I’ll say to a group, I’ll say, if you had to pick four – because you can’t stand for 50 things. You can’t take a stand for 50 things.

But in the compass, which I use, north, south, east, west, if you were to choose four and you were very conscious about those four, you spoke about them, you wrote about them, you took actions that were very consistent with them, not that you’d ignore the other 46, but the observation I make is that confidence comes when you can take a stand. Once you figure out what you stand for, you can take one.

For me, I’ve done a lot of work on this as you might imagine, my four are truth, service, equality, and connection.

Those – the test that I use and I advocate this, if you think you stand for something right now, ask the ten people who know you most, know you best, family, friends and say, “What do you think I stand for?” You might be surprised, maybe four – five, three, four, five answers, you might be surprised that there might not be any commonality. You may be okay with that. You may be okay with the fact that the ten people who know you best would describe your values differently.

The only question I would ask is if the ten people who knew you the best described your values in a consistent way, does that in fact make you more powerful? I would advocate that it does.

Yeah, there might be a difference between – I mean if someone says you’re kind and someone says you’re empathetic, okay that may be a difference without a distinction. But if you got a wildly different set of things, they could be all positive, but it’s like it is the same topic of focus.

If you know what you stand for, you can take one and then I think those people around you resonate with the confidence that you have that you stand for something. As just an example, but as we talk about connecting what you do to who you are, the two parts of the compass that are who you are, are your insight, which we talked about the five ways you can build that, and your values.

Insight and values and the study of those or the thinking about those gives you more clarity about who you are. When you take actions knowing who you are, you’re taking actions that are yours, on your voice and your values, not on Uncle Sam’s or Aunt Sally’s or a cousin or a boss or something else. I do believe it makes you more powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, it sounds like then we’ve got clarity and confidence there or is that – or are you distinguishing clarity in a different way?

Rick Miller
I am distinguishing. The confidence is there. The clarity I believe in having studied it and worked it in business situations from a start up to a multi-national, I link very much the topic of clarity to the topic of discipline. I believe that clarity, again, when you think about who you are, which is insight and values, then what you do has to do with discipline and support.

Discipline I link to clarity because I believe that if you plan the work and work the plan, if you have a vision and a strategy and tactics and you adjust, the more you reinforce where you’re going, that clarity comes through to the people around you and also reinforces it to you as well.

I think the vision and the strategy, which you identify, followed by planning tactics and implementing and adjusting, those all lead to clarity. Again, that clarity with discipline if it’s built off your insight and your values, it gets stronger.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example or story of the clarity and discipline piece coming alive for somebody?

Rick Miller
Sure. Well, I’ll give you for an organization. When I have had the opportunity to walk into an organizations as a turnaround guy that things are pretty muddy. I walked into – I’ll give you an example. I was the first outsider in AT&T’s 100 year history to be recruited from the outside to come in and run a piece of a major division back in the day. First one, 100 years.

I walked into AT&T, great company, but they had all kinds of messages, all kinds of, all kinds of high potential programs or leadership attributes. You couldn’t crystalize any – it was all good, but there was too much of it.

I came into an organization, this is the one that had 10,000 people in it, and I said “Guys, we’re going to focus on one thing.” Forget everything else. Forget everything else. We’re going to focus on something I used a symbol to encapsulate it called R3, R to the power of 3, R to the third power. We had symbols made. It was on hats. It was – that’s our focus. Forget everything else. The discipline was—

Pete Mockaitis
What’s R to the three mean?

Rick Miller
It’s results for three important groups of people: customers, employees, and share owners. That’s the what, but the how was about teamwork, innovation and speed. It wasn’t R times 3; it was R to the power of 3.

It was taking – again, AT&T, back in the day, Pete, there was a rule in the consulting industry about AT&T, which means if you did – at the time, if you didn’t have a consulting contract with AT&T, it just meant that you weren’t trying hard enough because it was consultant’s galore, everybody with a different – all good stuff, by the way, but no focus, no clarity because it was all over the place.

I came in, 10,000 people all around the world, and I said, “Guys, this is the focus. The discipline that we’re going to have around this clarity.” We developed strategy and plans and implemented systems and took measurements and adjusted based on that’s all we’re focused on: results for three important grounds of people, focusing on three attributes: teamwork, innovation, and speed.

At the time we were growing at 5%. The market was supposedly growing at 10%. We tripled the growth rate and held on to that growth rate for three years before we changed organizations. I – it was a lot of things we did, a lot of things we did at AT&T that turned around that situation, but the focus on clarity and discipline to stay focused on an area was a big part of the success.

Pete Mockaitis
When you says discipline, you mean it’s about saying no to some things. What are some of the things that you said no to because it doesn’t quite fit into exactly what we’re focused on here?

Rick Miller
Well, a great definition of strategy, as you know, is defining what you’re not going to do. The best story I remember about how that strategic element came in an organization, where I was running a government unit and we wanted to go at all parts of the government: the civilian, the defense, all parts of it, but we didn’t have the resources.

Our strategy was to optimize one part of the government, so we actually said no. We actually pulled back selling to the civilian portion of the government unit at that time because we just didn’t have the resources. Strategy at that time was to focus on Department of Defense.

By the way, in that particular situation, different company, once again we tripled the growth rate. You’re right, strategy is key and often strategy is saying no. Couldn’t say it better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very cool. All right, then let’s talk a little bit about influence and impact.

Rick Miller
Yeah. Influence to me it comes from the word support. Influence comes when you support other people. People say, “Isn’t influence when you have kind of an influence over others?” No, it comes the other way. The more you support other people, the more you make choices to support other people, that’s when your influence grows.

If you are able to listen and enable someone else’s success, your influence grows. If you’re able to model the way you’d like things to be, your influence grows. If you’re able to question people about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and help them think through it if they need it, that helps your influence grow. You can inspire them by what you do and how you do it.

There’s also this – a good friend of mine, Chester Elton, wrote The Carrot Principle. You just can’t recognize people enough. It’s such a – the word is encourage. Reinforcing what other people do, whether it’s a formal program or an informal, “Hey, well done,” encouraging other people, it’s just an incredibly powerful way to build influence by supporting other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say that the supporting of other people results in you having more influence, is it because these individuals are like, “Wow, Rick has been just so awesomely good to me, I will follow him to the moon,” or, “I’ve got his back and I will help him in any way can,” kind of sort of like a reciprocity instinct or kind of what’s the pathway or mechanism by which that support turns into influence?

Rick Miller
Great question. But it starts with listening. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. The point is if I’m listening to you, if you are my boss, Pete, and you’re going to invest time with me to say, “Okay, I want to enable your success. I want to support you,” the first thing you’re going to do is ask me what do I need. You’re going to invest some time.

The benefit of truly listening – all people want to do is to be heard. You know that. If you take the time to really find out, not to come in with the “I’ve decided this is what the answer is,” and you come in with a plunger and you’re trying to ram it through an organization.

I can tell you when I joined AT&T as the first outsider, first thing I did was ask a lot of questions. Ask a lot of questions. Don’t think – ask questions. You don’t know. More often than not, the higher you go in an organization, the less you know about the subject matter which is critical to your success. It’s an inverted pyramid. Taking the time to ask questions, to learn from the people who know it best, create a bond of influence that can be incredibly powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very cool. Let’s talk now finally about that fifth element when it comes to impact.

Rick Miller
See this is where it comes together. Think about where we’ve been. Think about who you are: insight and values, what you do: discipline and support. It comes together with an ability to be creative.

Now when I say creativity, I’m not talking about some artistic ability to put colors together and be creative on a canvas. When I say creativity, I’m talking about an ability to manifest the future. That’s my definition of creativity. If you’re going to create the future, you’ve got to understand a couple of things.

First off, there’s something called internal creativity. That’s how you feel and how you think. You are in fact creating when you start thinking. That’s how the whole thing starts. People are very familiar with external creativity in terms of how you act, less so how you speak and how you write.

But if you understand that there is internal creativity, you understand there’s external creativity, and the power comes when you align all five. You’re feeling something, you’re thinking it, your actions and the way you write, and the way you speak are all aligned.

We all know the quickest way to lose credibility is to say one thing and do a different something else. We just lose all credibility. You lose all power. But your ability to understand that your thoughts lead to your actions, it should be your thoughts lead to your words. Your words to your actions. Your actions lead to your habits. Some would say your habits lead to your character and your character leads to your destiny to steal from Gandhi.

There’s a power in the alignment and the way those things flow. If you’re fully creating, again, connecting what you do to who are, I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t matter what title you have, you are powerful. The organizations that do incredibly well with turnarounds have more and more people operating in what I call an all-in way of being.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. We’ve got one more point I want to dig into in the book. You talk about the wisdom of letting go. What exactly does that mean and how does one pull it off?

Rick Miller
It’s interesting. In our culture we have taken a good idea and kind of taken it to extremes. We’re all familiar with terms like ‘whatever it takes,’ ‘nothing’s going to stop me.’ We’ve got these ideas that you work through adversity all the time. That’s not a bad idea. The problem is we don’t know when to stop.

There’s economic law called the Law of Diminishing Returns, which means from a pure logic standpoint at some point, ‘throwing good money after bad’ is certainly a phrase that we’re familiar with.

But I find that many of the great leaders that I have the privilege of working with understand the first part of it, which is okay, never give up. Drive, drive, drive. But sometimes there’s a time when you are best served, your organization is best served, to let go of an objective that may have made sense 6 months ago or 12 months ago but now no longer makes sense.

The ability to, and some would say discipline, to adjust. But some people, and you know them, are manically focused, “I’m going to do this just get out of my way.” At some point diminishing return sets in.

The idea of letting go is a very important topic and one that doesn’t get as much traction I don’t think in our culture as it needs to because I find an awful lot of people are burning themselves out going after an objective that has shifted.

I talk in the book about examples and how to do it and the focus is on first recognizing it, accepting what’s going on, investigating new opportunities to do it, and not identifying yourself with the objective. Many times this is ego driven. I am not the person I want to be if I can’t sell that next contract or can’t achieve this goal.

Separating the person from the goal, I find with otherwise very high performing individuals, it’s really important you are not that quota. You are not that objective. You are who you are. The wisdom to understand when it does make the most sense to let go of an objective that isn’t serving you is really important.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Thank you. Well, Rick, tell me any final points you’d like to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Rick Miller
No, no. I think, again, we’ll go to favorite things, but if – if I could I would just like to mention that BeChief.com is the website. BeChief.com is where you can find about the book where all profits, author profits, are going to charity. We’ve got a wonderful charity partner down in Austin, Texas called Sammy’s House, which is an educational and a rehabilitation opportunity facilitate for kids with severe special needs. All author proceeds are going there.

They can learn about Sammy’s House. They can learn about the book. They can also, by the way, take the free quiz. This is what I’d ask everyone to take a look at. The book – I’d love to sell as many books as possible because all the money would go to the kids, that would be great, but for your audience that wants to be more powerful, the compass, the survey, if you will, is a free tool on BeChief.com.

You can also read a chapter of the book and see it floats your boat, but most importantly, take a baseline, measure your power, understand how you feel about it and how you can help others. That’s the most important thing that I’d like to share.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Rick Miller
No, the one I like, it might not surprise you, but “Power is never given; it’s only taken.” That’s one that I live by because I did spend 20 years of my career waiting to be given power. I’ve been okay. I moved up the corporate ladder pretty well. But I was waiting. For people who want to take power, I just think it’s a wonderful quote because it encapsulates everything I believe.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Rick Miller
Well, the research, actually I’m going to go back to the book. There’s some wonderful research done by a researcher named Segal Barsotti out of Yale. Segal’s work builds on the work done by Christakis and Fowler on the happiness effect.

Now the happiness effect is a well-known study that talks about the impact of introducing a happy person into a group. The surprising – a 20-year study by the way – talks about the a fact that if you introduce a happy person, not only is a next door neighbor likely to be more happy, but the next door’s neighbor’s friend and friend’s friend, it’s like two or three degrees of separation, will statistically be more happy.

Christakis and Fowler did a wonderful piece of well-reported research on the happiness effect. What Barsotti did was take that great work and bring it into the workforce and proved that introducing a person with positive emotions into a workplace, affects the productivity of all workers in that work place.

That’s really the fundamental element that we talk about in the book. I use the term viral engagement. It’s great when you try to do things to enable the engagement of someone who’s working for you, but viral engagement is when you’re constantly taking a look at the impact that everybody can have, that really anyone can influence everyone. Once you understand that, the opportunity for growth is great.

By the way, that makes sense intellectually, but Barsotti did the research that proved it.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, thank you. How about a favorite book?

Rick Miller
Right now I’m reading When by Daniel Pink. I love When. I’m a big Dan Pink fan. But I’m reading When right now and I love it because it talks about how to bring out your peak performance when it matters most.

I’m an avid reader. I’m fascinated by this one because, again, well-researched, as Daniel’s stuff always is, but the idea of professional athletes, professional musicians, what are the tips, simple tips. I won’t go any further because it’s Daniel’s book and you want to read it. You don’t want to listen to me give you the tips, but it’s a really good read.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite tool?

Rick Miller
A tool. I would tell you the tool – the app that I’m having a lot of fun with now and I’ve got lots of company, so I’ll just add my log to the fire, which is the Calm app. I’m a big meditator and have been blessed with the ability to meditate, but even when things get going so quickly that it’s a little harder to slow down a little bit, the Calm app does a wonderful job. I know there’s many fans, so I’ll just add my log to the fire.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure. How about a favorite habit?

Rick Miller
The habits – I am amongst other challenges, I’m a type one diabetic, so for 40 years I’ve been giving myself four shots a day. I think this habit has probably come out of the necessity to manage blood sugars and health and numbers and things like that, but actually my favorite habit is a combination of sometimes I do the meditation in the morning, followed by some really rigorous exercise, sometimes I’ll flip it.

But my morning routine, getting up and starting the day with a combination of exercise, getting the blood flowing and mediation. It seems like gear yourself up and calm yourself down, that little kind of sweet and sour, if you will, first thing in the morning works really well for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, gets them retweeting, etcetera?

Rick Miller
I don’t – not so much honestly because, again, I do draw a distinction between wonderful people who supply those kind of nuggets and those who apply them. I’m an applier. I’m a business guy. I work in organizations and I’m on the front lines.

I don’t probably generate the kind of quips and thoughtful little musings that are on the tips of people’s tongues much like most of this book is taking and always giving credit for the great stuff that’s out there, but my focus is on how you simplify and – first you have to retain it if you’re going to apply it.

I rely on others for those inspirational moments. I just try to help the people I work with apply them so that they can have a great day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Rick Miller
I would point them to BeChief.com. Whatever you can find there, whether they connect with the power compass, if you will, or develop your own. But there’s lots of stuff on the website and wherever it takes you. If it takes you to the book and you can see fit to make that purchase, know the money is going to Sammy’s House and that’s terrific. But whatever you find there, I hope it’s helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Rick Miller
I think it’s about power. Really think about who you think has it, who really has it. More often than not, the powerful people in your life, the most powerful, the most influential, are probably a family member who doesn’t have a title. It’s somebody in the community who doesn’t have a title, but they make choices that consistently show you who they are. You can’t get enough of them because they’re the people you admire.

I think that’s what power means to me. I think the more people open themselves up to that definition of power and make the choices to be the best version of themselves, it spreads and the world’s a better place.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Rick, thank you for all you’re doing to make the world a better place. This has been a whole lot of fun. I wish you and Be Chief tons of luck, massive sales and massive impact.

Rick Miller
Appreciate it Pete. Thanks so much for the time.

Jun 29
0

315: Leading with Speed with Alan Willett

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Alan Willett says: "Go beyond mad good skills."

Alan Willett shows how to lead with speed by measuring and tracking yourself, working smarter rather than longer, and having purpose. All the things that are need to stay competitive.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to work faster and smarter rather than longer
  2. Approaches to accelerate the decision making progress
  3. Why and how to let people “add an egg”

About Alan

Alan Willett is of the rare species who is an expert international consultant, speaker, and author. He has worked with companies ranging from 1 person to some of the giants such as Microsoft and NASA. Alan says that his passion is helping people and organizations transform their friction points into profit points. Alan defines a friction point as “the space where the business needs and the implementation reality collides.” There is always heat generated! Alan is the expert who transforms organizational friction points to produce positive results for the business and the people.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Alan Willett Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alan welcome back to the How to Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Alan Willett
It’s awesome to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m really looking forward to digging into some of your latest thinking. It was way back in episode 114 that we had you. It seems like you’ve had a few new thoughts since then.

Alan Willett
Indeed I have. What episode are we up to now?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh boy, we are past 300, which is wild.

Alan Willett
Wow. Congratulations Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Yes, it’s been a fun ride. People are into it. Yours was one of the favorites. It seems sensible to come on back.

Alan Willett
Really, it’s great to be back. It’s a lot of fun before. I look forward to fun today.

Pete Mockaitis
First, I need to hear, speaking of fun, you have a Guinness World Record to your name. Tell us all about this.

Alan Willett
Okay. Well, yes I do. I did end up in the Guinness Book of World Records. It was called that back then.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it different now?

Alan Willett
Yes, now called the Guinness Book of Records.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Alan Willett
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t know that.

Alan Willett
Yeah, it’s a recent change I believe.

But yes, so I remember back when I was at Rochester Institute of Technology. In my sophomore year two weeks before Thanksgiving break, two weeks before finals, our cross country coach came to us and said, “Hey, I have a great idea. For RIP’s 150th anniversary let’s run across the county.” Being 19 and young and vigorous, I said “Sure, let’s do that.”

Two weeks later I finished my last final after my last all-nighters getting ready for finals we drove non-stop to California, dipped our feet in the Pacific Ocean, turned around and started running all the way back to the Atlantic Ocean.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. The record then is the distance or you were the first or what’s-?

Alan Willett
Good question. Well, our goal was to beat the Pony Express, which I’m told we did which is very cool. We also beat another team that had set a record previously of 20 days. We did it in 14 days.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh boy.

Alan Willett
14 days 4 hours and 8 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well that is quite – does it stand to this day or did someone have to get up on that record and shatter it themselves?

Alan Willett
Oh somebody – actually subsequent RIT, Rochester Institute of Technology, team did it I think for RIT’s 170th anniversary. They beat us. Shame on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Everyone wants to surpass the previous generation.

Alan Willett
Yes, ….

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s recap for folks who didn’t catch it the last time, you’ve got your company is called Oxseeker, Inc. What’s the company about and where did the name come from?

Alan Willett
Well, that name came from – two things. One is when I looked for names five years ago, six years ago, all the ones I thought were great were already taken, so I went back to an old standby which I coined the word oxseeker back in the ‘80s.

Zen poetry has ox has a symbol of enlightenment. I always thought seeking enlightenment was a cool concept, so I used that word to really now mean seeking excellence because what I really have been doing with my work all along is trying to make organizations constantly better, constantly seeking a higher level of excellence. That word really just sort of captured what I was about.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so interesting. I did not know that the ox had that association prior to chatting with you.

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of an ox in the context of intellectual stuff is I think Thomas Aquinas, his nickname when he was doing his studies was called like the ox because I guess he was just really big and didn’t say much and they kind of made fun of him, like he was dumb, dumb ox.

Then one of the teachers scolded his pupils the legend has it, like, “When this ox bellows, the whole world shall hear.”

Alan Willett
Ah, oh, I like this story as well. That’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, add some layers to it. That’s good.

Tell us your latest fascination has been the need to lead with speed. I added the ‘need’ myself. I had to triple the rhymes there.

Alan Willett
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Why is it so important to you right now?

Alan Willett
Well, I realized a lot of my whole work has been about that. For example, my previous book, which we talked about before, Leading the Unleadable, was really about how to unwrap the gifts of those magnificent people who sometimes cross the red line, like the mavericks, cynics and divas because those people can really propel an organization forward at great speeds.

If you just fire them, you lose that fire. If you let them run rampant, they destroy the organization, so you’ve really got to manage them well.

As I keep going into organizations, I keep hearing about the increased need for speed. This almost feels cliché because around the 1990s seems like things were picking up. Now they’re really picking up speed.

To stay competitive, you’ve got to constantly be learning, constantly upping your game, constantly providing better value to your customers or to your organization and you’re just working more. Regardless, you’ve got to be there. To me it’s even more than speed, it’s acceleration.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so you’re saying just because in the nature of competition and globalization and sort of technology and these forces that we hear a lot about, is that kind of what’s behind it to put the extra necessity these days?

Alan Willett
Yes, absolutely. There’s a second part too which is I have seen too many people just burn out, really creative, smart, fun people that couldn’t take the pace.

What I’ve really been trying to help a lot of people do and organizations do is not just survive, but thrive, to learn to love how to handle this pace and how to handle this pace in a sustainable way so that they get plenty of rest, have plenty of fun but are still setting the beat, setting the pace that is right for today’s competition.

Pete Mockaitis
Then that sounds like a little bit of a tension there in terms of being speedy and also not burning out, so what are some of the pro tips to accomplish both?

Alan Willett
Ah, well, here first let’s talk about that balance. If I may go technical for a minute, do you know I was also a software engineer for a while? I actually wrote software.

Pete Mockaitis
I do. The software people love you because you sort of speak both the languages that connect with the software developers and those who love and manage them.

Alan Willett
One of the things – here let me put a couple things together here with this story. This is about the balance and learning from this.

Some of the things that I mean by leading by speed for example is one, we really want to hit speed to value. It’s not about just furious activity signifying nothing, the sound and the fury. It’s about speed to value. You’ve got to have a purpose, a place to go, something that you want to provide.

In the next part I want to note is that you want a speed dashboard. In other words, like a car has lots of different odometers, speedometer, is it overheating or not, all those kind of warning lights. That’s what you need too. Meaningful, useful set of data that answers the question, “Am I going faster?”

One of the things I did as a software engineer when I was writing code is I learned some techniques to really track my own data so I had that useful data. One of the things I did was tracked how fast I was going, how many objects per hour I was producing of good quality code. The other one I was tracking was how much rework I was doing, how many defects.

I stayed up late one night until like 4 in the morning to finish a program. It sounds like a good idea, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Pros and cons I’d say.

Alan Willett
Well, I thought I put in this extra 10 hours, I’ll be farther ahead.

Here’s what happened. When I tested the program the next day, it was full of errors. I repeated this exercise a few more times just because I was a scientist, curious. I found out when I worked extra hours late at night, my defect injection rate went sky high. I made way more mistakes.

Those defects took me longer to correct than had I went to bed and came up the next day and just wrote a couple of hours of code the next morning when I was well rested. Really, working harder actually made me dumber. Working longer made me stupider.

One of the really things I really kind of worked with organizations and people is not about the long hours, it’s about really smart hours. It’s about making sure you have this major set of data so you actually know you’re going faster and know how to go faster. You have the data to improve.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. I’ve read some studies along those lines with regard to a number of different environments and industries.

I think it was similar. It was video game development. They talked about when they have rush mode or whatever the term they use in the industry, like when they work real hard because they’ve got to make sure to deliver the thing on time as the deadline is coming in. They saw a similar pattern across. It’s not just you, but it’s many folks who are doing intricate knowledge work.

When you push hard and sleep less, sometimes your – it’s really quite disheartening to put all that effort in and discover you would have been better off having enjoyed some sleep and rejuvenation and being sane and actually getting a better result on the other side.

Alan Willett
Absolutely. Now there’s exceptions to this, I’ve got to note. But really when you’re doing that type of work, the intricate things where little mistakes cost you a lot of time, be well rested. That simple.

But let’s scale it up. Overall what I’m talking about when I talk about the sustainable speed of leadership, it’s really looking at this as a more of a marathon than a sprint or a series of sprints. It’s really looking at yourself and saying how do I continuously improve and I stick to it for the long term.

I’m planning – I grew up on a farm. We don’t retire on farms. We just keep working. I’m in this for the long term. I want to keep continuously improving and I don’t want to get burned out, tired out while I’m doing it. What’s my engine for improvement? To stay relevant, to stay competitive. How do I keep that balance?

One of the things I’m working on in the book I’m working on is called the four-dimensional balance, which is really about four key concepts: the center of speed, how to keep your eye on the true prize, owning the speed of the game clock, and four-dimensional balance.

Those are some of the big concepts I’m playing with of how to really keep people focused on how to achieve this intricate balance as you put it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now so how does one keep the eyes on the true prize and what are some of the distraction prizes that tend to lead us astray?

Alan Willett
Oh, that’s easy. For example – great question though. Your eye on the true prize. First, true prize for me is a lot of things, like just simply doing good in the world, making sure that you’re really truly providing value to your customers. Some of the false indicators can be, “I need to make a profit for this quarter,” “I need to have double digit growth.”

I know actually some CEOs for example that really focused on this double digit growth. They focused on it so hard that they started to fire people that weren’t achieving it. Later that CEO was convicted for keeping two sets of books. I actually believe he didn’t actually know that people were keeping two sets of books but the only way to stay employed was to have double digit growth, so they gave it to him.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. That’s kind of pushing it so hard that you’re cheating and then in a way it’s kind of like, well it’s so intriguing in terms of the details, that juicy, scandalous situation. But I guess it’s my understanding that people really do feel a great sense of temptation toward cheating when it’s kind of absolute, the only way this must be or it’s just … everywhere.

Alan Willett
Right. I forget the exact quote, but one of the quotes I really like is something that was along these lines. “Chase wealth and it will flee from you. Chase wisdom and wealth will follow.”

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds so wise. Chasing wisdom.

Alan Willett
I believe it is. Back to the true prize. It’s really, really being focused on what you really want to achieve for yourself in your organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. When it comes to dashboards, can you give us some examples of all the more precisely great metrics or things to track versus suboptimal things to track? You mentioned quarterly profits can lead one astray. What are some superior things to track?

Alan Willett
Here, let’s talk about an individual for a minute because I know your audience is mostly individuals. Then we can talk about the larger one.

Let’s look at individuals and just say you’re doing knowledge work like many of us have to do these days. Well, a couple of things I try to track is how much value we provide for the effort we’re putting in. Now that’s a really tricky thing to do, but it’s worthwhile doing.

Like you noted in software development, some of the things people use is function points or they can even use lines of code per hour, things like that. Those can be tricky but what you really want is a good proxy for value that makes sense.

Another thing you can measure actually is how much cost equality it takes to get something out the door.

Quick definition of that. Basically you do two weeks of development and eight weeks of testing before you can free it. You have 20% cost equality. If you have eight weeks of development and two weeks of testing and it works great and your customers love it. You have a 20% cost equality.

Productivity is inversely proportional. The better your cost of quality, the better your productivity. That’s a couple things personally one can track to really keep an eye on the prize. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Alan Willett
Absolutely. For a business, what you really want to be tracking to me I believe is customer loyalty for example. Are you keeping the customers that you want, the ones that you truly prize? Are you growing in the right direction, bringing on the customers you also want and really want to grow in that space?

I don’t think it’s about how big you grow, but I think it’s about having enough and being able to sustain that growth in a way that’s good for your organization.

I know an organization that I work with that was very happy being at 50 people in the organization and sustaining that. When they grew up to 350 people, which the leader at the time said he never wanted to do, they ended up blowing up. He got distracted from his true mission to go after something bigger.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s helpful. Thank you. You mentioned you had four – is it four part would you call it? Four part balance?

Alan Willett
Four-dimensional balance.

Pete Mockaitis
Four-dimensional balance. Can we unpack these components?

Alan Willett
Sure, I can give you another example. Owning the speed of the game clock. I love that when – I like sports. You watch some of the greatest athletes. In my day it was Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, folks like that. Today it’s LeBron James, Steven Stephen Curry for the National Basketball Association.

But you watch these people, the best, they seem to be playing on a different pace than everybody else. I don’t mean faster. It seems like everybody else is kind of has frenetic energy around them and they’re just walking down the court and hit the right person at the right time. They just seem to be playing in a slower pace than everybody else with more results. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Alan Willett
Another one – there’s a lot of elements to that, how you can own the speed of the clock as a leader. Part of that is the center of speed.

One of my favorite Superbowl stories is where Joe Montana, San Francisco, they’re down by a few points with a few minutes – just a minute left on the clock or something like that. He’s in the huddle and he says to the whole – his team, he says, “Hey, isn’t that John Candy on the third row there?” Everybody looks up and says, “Yeah, yeah, I think it is.”

Joe was so cool, calmed everybody else down and then just calmly threw a touchdown pass to win the game. To me a lot of the center of speed is really this inner calm that everything will work out.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. Now inner calm can be easier said than done. What are some of your perspectives for arriving at such a place?

Alan Willett
Learning that failure is seldom fatal and that you can learn a lot from it. If you’re not afraid of failure, you’re not afraid of winning either. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Alan Willett
That’s one of the things I think really people have to overcome. I go on a whole rant about our school system, but I believe our school system sort of embeds fear in people, fear of getting a bad grade, fear of getting something wrong, things like that. Really what we have to learn or unlearn in some ways is to overcome FUD.

Pete Mockaitis
FUD?

Alan Willett
Fear, uncertainty and doubt. One of the questions I’ve often been asked is what slows leaders down. There’s a lot of things that can slow leaders down, but the number one thing is FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt. That’s what makes people for example, set up a committee to bring … to answer a question that should have been obvious.

Pete Mockaitis
The fear of I am scared to look really dumb and get this very wrong and have my sort of name and reputation attached to it, therefore I will go about sort of dispersing responsibility by assembling this committee and in the process of having the committee you’ve got all those extra people and decision steps and meetings that kind of slow it down.

Alan Willett
Right. There’s time and places for doing things like that. But too often that’s just a delaying tactic to avoid making a decision. Fear causes people to delay decisions until it’s obvious what the decision should have been.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to talk about decisions there when it comes to decision making rules or approaches or what are some great ways to accelerate decision making. One is I guess being courageous and not convening a committee when it’s not necessary. What are some of your other approaches?

Alan Willett
I would say there are three critical things to accelerating your decision making process. Number one, and these are, by the way, before you start the decision processes what you should be doing. Be clear about who’s going to make the decision, how the decision is going to be made, and what risk level is acceptable. I’ll unpack that a little bit more if that’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Alan Willett
There’s actually basically three – four decision making styles. Leaders that are really clear about this at the start do far superior.

They can say this, “I’m going to make the decision. I’m not taking any input. I just want you to know that.” It’s clear. Or, “I’m making the decision. I would like everybody’s – I would like these people’s input to make sure that I have all the data I need, but I’m going to make the call.”

By the way, if there’s a crisis in the cockpit in an airplane, that’s the number one decision making style. You don’t have time for consensus. Somebody’s got to decide, but collecting input greatly improves the effectiveness of pilots.

Number three is we are going to decide together. We’re not going to do this unless we have consensus. We’re all holding hands and leaping together.

Number four is you can delegate and you can say, “It’s up to you. Here’s your budget. Here’s your timeline. You make the decision. Here’s my input.” If you’re clear about those things at the start, you’re really going to accelerate the decision making process.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think where things really get fuzzy and so annoying and unpleasant is when it’s very unclear in terms of the decision making process. Like, “Okay, we all know this thing needs to get done.” It’s a proposal or a product or an initiative or something. “We all know this thing needs to get done. We kind of know the players sort of who are involved,” but then beyond that it gets a little fuzzy.

I chuckle sometimes because I’ve heard listeners ask for clarification associated with decision making and the answer they get in terms of who has a decision is, “Well collaborate,” which is really a non-answer.

Alan Willett
It is a non-answer. I’ll give you a situation even worse than that, where the leader implies however vaguely that it’s up to the group to decide. Then the leader themselves makes the decision without any input.

Oh, that slows an organization down for weeks or longer because the level of anger is worse than if they said, “Hey, my decision. I’ll take input maybe, but I’m going to make the decision,” so much clearer, so much better, no anger.

Pete Mockaitis
This reminds me. I had a situation where I was trying to help out with a committee that just sort of planned some of our fun in terms of, “Hey, a few times a year we’re all going to get together. We’re going to have some camaraderie, some team building, some good times, so here are the activities.”

I thought, “Okay, this sounds like an interesting project.” I talked to some people and gathered a bunch of ideas, like, “Hey, what do you think would be fun for everyone to do.” We come up with all these ideas. “Okay, perfect. Now we’ll do a survey and see what everyone’s thinking.”

I recall one of the options was sailing. I was like, “That sounds really cool. I haven’t done much sailing and that might be really interesting. Heck, we’ve got some budget. Let’s live it up.” Then I presented it to sort of the senior person in charge of the committee who really did make it kind of seem like, “Oh yeah, you know what? Just see what everyone wants to do and yeah it’s just fun so go do it.”

He just – I said, “Hey, looks like the results are pretty strong on the survey for sailing.” It was intriguing because he didn’t admit to it but he kept saying, “You know what? I have a hypothesis that if you segment the data in this way, we’ll discover that in fact sailing is not the optimal choice.”

It was like, if you were committed to this activity why did you kind of say that we were going to do it this other way? It is like and what do you have against sailing is what I really wanted to know. It just didn’t seem honest.

Alan Willett
No, absolutely. That’s really problems come. By the way, if that leader really wanted to do that activity but wanted people to really be committed to that activity just say this, “Hey, this is the activity we’re doing. I want the group to figure out how to get people really involved, how to make this activity really sing, how to make it better.”

Absolutely leave people room to add an egg to that cake, but you can point the direction and say what cake we’re going to bake.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a nice metaphor there ‘add an egg to that cake.’ Is that the legend? Was it Sara Lee or one of those companies that they had the cake mix and they could have had it all encompassing but they wanted to make people feel like they had a part in the cake making process so they said, “And you add an egg,” so it’s like, “Oh, I did this.”

Alan Willett
Actually the legend is this. It’s true actually. That they were selling a cake mix without adding an egg. This is at a time when people made cakes from scratch. It wasn’t selling at all. As soon as they had people add two eggs, which changed the taste not a bit, people started to buy the cake mix like crazy because people really need room to add an egg.

I really believe that in my consulting work as well. I have learned over and over again that when leaders hand you something that’s done, they do not get the same level of involvement or quality when they leave enough room for people to add their own creative juices to it. When they do that, it gets better and people are more committed ….

Pete Mockaitis
What’s really cool about that notion of adding an egg is it’s really not all or nothing. You have a whole continuum of things from you figure out the activity to this is the activity but you figure out the food before or after or the snacks during or the refreshments or how we’re going to promote it.

There’s any number of ways that folks can have some decision making authority and involvement in doing that. It’s kind of fun that you get to kind of choose hey, how much is mine versus how much is others and what are kind of the ground rules.

Alan Willett
Absolutely. Going back to what I said, your question, “How do we improve the speed of decision making?” Let’s also say how do we improve the impact and results of decision making.

This is where leaders can constantly learn. They have to learn which of these styles to learn when because sometimes you may have a group of people that you really want to own the outcome and to be committed to it for the long term.

Perhaps this group of people, they need to go plant the wheat, grind the wheat, and all the steps to make this cake. If that’s the case, you should send the people to do this. Have them make it from scratch. Again, you point the direction, you say, “I want a cake,” but you let them figure out how to make it.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny. I’m imagining from sort of like a corporate speak perspective. Another way that there can be a misalignment there is either you’re using jargon like, “I need you to craft a baked solution that will be a culinary delight.” In a way there are many baked items that could fit under that purview but if a person really has in mind a cake, they should probably say a cake just so that that’s what you get is a cake.

Alan Willett
Absolutely. That’s where I say really to me leading with speed is really about constantly learning how to have the best impact not just for yourself but for your whole organization. It’s learning, if you will, the best language to present these things, the best style to get people on board, and what style is appropriate when.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious if we are talking about individuals in a workplace and this person wants to see some more speed right away, what would be some of your prescriptive tips and tactics for right here right now do these things and you should see a speed boost happening promptly?

Alan Willett
Okay. The quick answer of course is to listen to Pete’s Being Awesome At Your Job or reading my books. That’s fun to say. Actually that is true.

But my real answer is I encourage people not to look for immediate speed pumps because to me it comes back to what I said before. This really isn’t a marathon. The running metaphor kind of breaks down because you can’t constantly accelerate when you’re running. You hit these limits very quickly.

But from a leadership perspective, a self-leadership perspective, I really believe what people should focus on is creating their own, if you will, leadership acceleration engine. That is how do you constantly improve, not necessarily every day, but can you improve 1% a day.

Alan Weiss, one of my mentors, said if you improve 1% a day, you’re twice as good in 70 days. Just think if you keep that going, you can hit light speed leadership.

I think of leaders that had such great impact without any political power or position. Gandhi, for example, Martin Luther King, these are leaders that really had a dramatic impact without being paid for it, without being given a title. They’re able to constantly improve, constantly learn, and constantly improve the impact of their leadership force.

What I really encourage people to do is figure out what is the best methods for them to learn how to learn how to accelerate their ability to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely, thank you. Well, Alan, tell me anything else you want to make sure to cover before we hear some of your favorite things?

Alan Willett
There’s one big thing I wanted to mention, which is this. This is one of the new things I’ve been working on, which is we’ve coined the word ‘embrace friction’ at embracefriction.com. Let me explain what I mean by that. Have you heard a lot about the frictionless workplace? Things like that?

Pete Mockaitis
I know about your take with friction points and collisions, but I’m not quite sure I know precisely what you’re referencing here.

Alan Willett
I’ve seen a lot in books and podcasts etcetera talking about how to reduce friction at work or how to make the frictionless workplace. I think that’s rather silly because friction is natural in nature. Without friction you’d skid off the road. There’d be like an icy road, you’re in the ditch. Friction, you need it.

What I’m finding is too many organizations are actually trying to manage friction away, trying to get rid of the conflicts.

What I really believe is one of the biggest boons for speed we can have as leaders and people in organizations is figure out ways to embrace friction, to take those points where the heat is really hot and it’s like destructive and be able to transform those destructive friction points, the heat of those into the heat of innovation. How can you take those boring ideas and make a better idea out of them.

That’s one of the big things I’m working on now. I just want to encourage people to think about is when you hit those hot points, how can you change them? How can you change the way people are talking about it, engaging in it to put it to a higher level of better value.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alan Willett
One of my favorites comes back to Winston Churchill, “Do not do your best, do what is necessary.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right, thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Alan Willett
One of my favorite experiments that I encourage people to do is help people. Just see what happens. By the way, you should follow the Red Cross rule: don’t help people that don’t want to be helped. But do help people. Do good in the world and you’ll be surprised about how much good karma it does for you and others.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Alan Willett
One of the books I have really been liking lately is called The Essence of Value by Mario Pricken.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s that all about?

Alan Willett
By the way, I believe you can only get it in hardcopy. It’s fairly big, sturdy book. It’s because it’s well-designed. It’s really about why do people pay extraordinary money for some pieces and objects. How do you actually determine what is valuable of a thing, a service, etcetera? I find it fascinating on a number of levels, both historically and for running my own business.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Thank you. How about a favorite tool?

Alan Willett
My iPad with my Apple pencil has been delightful lately. It has showed me new ways to take notes and to really do art.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. How about a favorite habit?

Alan Willett
One of my favorite habits now is when I go on long trips with one of my kids we listen to audio books and that’s just been a delightful way to connect.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me, is there a particular nugget that you share when you’re teaching some of this stuff that really seems to connect and resonate and get folks nodding their heads and taking notes and retweeting?

Alan Willett
Oh that’s good. Absolutely. Go beyond mad good skills. It’s great to have good skills, but one of the things that we really work on is that good skills is nothing without other element, like the ability to make other people better, the ability to give feedback to other people that makes a positive difference and have them say thank you and you don’t get shot in the process. Mad good skills are great technically otherwise, but having a whole picture is dramatically cool and it takes you to the next level.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely, thank you. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Alan Willett
You can go to AlanWillett.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Alan Willett
Absolutely. Learn to own the game clock, which is if you’re feeling panicked and stressed, learn how to look up in the stands and say, “Hey, isn’t that John Candy?”

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Thank you. Well, Alan, this has been fun once again. I wish you lots of luck as you’re continuing to illuminate and expand upon these ideas and just keep on doing the great things you’re doing.

Alan Willett
All right. Thanks Pete. A pleasure to be here.

Jun 22
0

312: Leadership’s Tough Questions with Vince Molinaro

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Vince Molinaro says: "Once you're in a leadership role, that's got to be your main thing."

Vince Molinaro diagnoses recurring problems in leaders today, the mindset of a great leader, and what it really takes to deliver accountable and  transformative leadership.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four key terms of the leadership contract
  2. Why having tough conversations is so important
  3. Steps to being an accountable leader who gets the best out of people

About Vince

Vince Molinaro experienced a defining moment early in his career when he saw a respected colleague and mentor succumb to a cancer she believed was the byproduct of a stressful, toxic work environment. As a result, Vince vowed to teach business leaders how to build successful organizations by increasing the accountability of their leaders. He’s a leadership adviser, speaker and an author of The Leadership Contract(Wiley), a New York Times and USA Today bestseller now in its third edition, and The Leadership Contract Field Guide, published in January 2018.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Vince Molinaro Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Vince, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Vince Molinaro
Thanks so much, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, I’m looking forward to getting into your wisdom here, but first I have to hear the back story of you playing at the accordion as a child. Why this instrument?

Vince Molinaro
I didn’t have much choice. I wanted to play the guitar and the drums but that got kind of ruled out. My parents were Italian immigrants, so the accordion is what most kids like me learned early on in their lives. That’s what I started with. Lasted about seven years of lessons every Saturday morning. That’s part of who I am. It’s part of my heritage as well.

Pete Mockaitis
The accordion, the first thing that comes to mind when I imagine an accordion is Steve Urkel. I believe he also was an accordion maestro. Was he not?

Vince Molinaro
I believe he was. I believe he was. It had at that time, certainly when I was growing up, a little bit of that geeky brand. Now actually I find that certainly among some Millennials, it’s a pretty hip instrument to play.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. You sound super hip in terms of your content that you’re sharing. I’ll give it to you. Tell me, did you have any tremendous accordion performances or highlights of your accordion career?

Vince Molinaro
You know what? My problem was that I very quickly learned to play by ear. I would listen to music and I could kind of figure out how to play it on the accordion. Instead of practicing all the music that I was told to learn, I would spend all my time at the time figuring out how to play The Eagles and Supertramp on the accordion.

That took over my interest. I was a pretty mediocre accordion player. There aren’t many memorable experiences as a performer.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m wondering, do you think you’d be capable of playing the accordion today or is it long gone?

Vince Molinaro
I could play at a very rudimentary level. I did when my kids were younger and they were – we gave them piano lessons. I did take some piano lessons. There is that musicality inside me that I still maintain a little bit.

I think if anything the benefit is it really introduced early on a love of music, a good ear for music and the discipline that it takes to practice something every day consistently though I didn’t practice what I was supposed to practice, I did spend a little bit of time on that instrument every day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. I also want to hear about you’ve got a great title, the global managing director of leadership transformation for Lee Hecht Harrison. Can you tell us what is that role and this organization?

Vince Molinaro
The organization is a part of The Adecco Group, which is a global Fortune 500 company. LHH is one of the world’s leading talent and career development firms. We operate in 65 countries. We’re the world’s largest provider of career transition and outplacement services.

When companies are needing to reduce staff, we’re able to come in and provide really valuable services that help people through the transition, help them kind of find new work, better jobs faster.

Then we also have our talent and leadership side where we work with companies helping them develop their leaders so they can be effective in dealing with all the change and transformation that’s happening in many sectors around the world.

I’ve got sort of a small consulting unit and we’re responsible for driving the thought leadership for the company and helping really senior leaders think about how they need to kind of help their leaders get to the next level so their companies can be successful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. You put some of these concepts into your book, The Leadership Contract, which is now in the third edition. Is that right?

Vince Molinaro
That’s correct. It’s just come out in its third edition as well as a field guide companion book that allows the leader to kind of apply all of the ideas in their own leadership role.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. What’s sort of the main idea or thesis behind The Leadership Contract?

Vince Molinaro
It really started – I spent my career in the whole leadership industry. I’ve done it through consulting with hundreds of organizations over the years. I’ve done a ton of research and writing as well as I’ve held a lot of senior level roles myself and built businesses and whatnot.

In the last little while, we kept hearing a real problem by a lot of our customers, which was we’re investing more than ever in leadership development, but we’re not seeing it translate into stronger leadership. We’re trying to understand what’s kind of behind that.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on the industry, what I saw my clients doing. It came down to this idea of I think what’s missing is leaders not understanding that when they take on a leadership role, they’ve actually signed up for something quite important. But a lot of times that is not made clear or transparent.

It’s largely because we have a history of kind of promoting strong technical performers into leadership roles. We throw them into those roles, don’t give them a lot of support, don’t give them a lot of guidance of understanding what it means to be a leader. They try their best, but they’re never really performing as effectively as they can.

That’s where this idea of a contract in that I believe it’s kind of human nature for us to hold anybody we deem to be a leader to a higher standard of behavior. We expect more from people in leadership roles than I think we should. To me that implies a contract. When you take on a leadership role at any level in your career, you’ve actually signed up for something important.

I think that idea is not necessarily new. I think it’s always been there, but today the role is so demanding that we have to understand there’s a leadership contract and then the terms that go along with that contract. That’s essentially the big idea of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. What are some of the key terms of the contract?

As you talked about contracts I’m thinking – I recently became a landlord. We’ve got leases. It’s so funny with tenants. You discover maybe every few months, there’s another thing to put in the lease. We didn’t think of it last time. Not to put that in the sink. I guess we’ve got to spell that out. What are some of the key terms that show up in this contract?

Vince Molinaro
Well, there’s really four when I try to really distill it down to how to help individuals in leadership roles really think about their role. It’s really about the mindset of the leader.

The first term is that it’s a decision. You have to make it. What that means is you’ve got to really think about yourself and define yourself as a leader.

I have found in my work and my team has as well in developing thousands and thousands of leaders worldwide that you find that I can kind of take on a leadership role. Let’s say I’m an engineer and I’m a great engineer. They kind of have a split mind. They still think of themselves as engineers and the leadership part of their job like their part time job.

They kind of all get to that leadership stuff Tuesday afternoon where I’ve got a window between 2 and 2:30. What I’m saying is, “No, no, the decision is you’ve got to define yourself as a leader.” Yeah, you might be an engineer or an analyst or an accountant by training, there’s nothing wrong with that. But once you’re in a leadership role, that’s got to be your main thing. You’ve got to define yourself in that way.

If you know yourself well enough, you kind of say, “You know what? It’s not for me,” then that’s a very noble decision. I think we need more people to be honest with themselves in acknowledging when leadership isn’t their thing. That’s the first one.

The second one says that okay, once you decide then you’ve got to understand that it comes with responsibility and obligation. You have an obligation to shareholders, your customers, your employees, the communities in which you do business. The fundamental obligation is to leave your company in better shape than you found it.

You look around the world today. You see leaders involved in scandals or corruption or other bad behavior and you kind of go, “Well, they’ve clearly missed this point somewhere along their career as a leader.” Obligation is the second one.

The third one that often surprises leaders is I’d say leadership really is hard work. You’ve got to get tough. You’ve got to have the resilience and resolve to tackle some of the challenging things you’re going to face.

A lot of it always has to do around people, managing poor performers, giving candid feedback, making tough calls that might make you unpopular with your team but are critically important for your business.

Sometimes people come in with a fallacy of, “Well, now I’m the manager. I can just kind of put my feet up on my desk and everyone else does the work.” It’s like, no, no, no, you’ve got a lot of work to do as a leader and some of it is pretty tough. If you don’t do it, you actually – and if you avoid it, you don’t appreciate how much you weaken yourself and weaken your team.

Then the last one is really the new motto of leadership that’s emerging in companies is that leadership as a community. It’s about leaders working together in a very unified way, where in the past it was a very centralized, key decision makers at the top. They dispensed the order. The rest of us did our jobs.

Today we’re working in more networked models. It’s cross-functional work. We’ve got global matrix structures. You’ve really got to be thinking about all the leaders and the relationships they have with one another and how effective they are at working together.

There’s a leadership contract and the four terms that I think are really helpful to think about our role as leaders today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I’m right with you there. I want to sort of talk through each of these a little bit. With the first point in terms of deciding that you’re a leader. I guess as a youth I went to many leadership conferences. It was sort of beat into my head that everyone is a leader. We’re all leaders.

Maybe could you contrast that a little bit in terms of the difference between we all exercise to a degree leadership and influence and self-management, and all that stuff, versus what you mean by the decision to be primarily a leader.

Vince Molinaro
Yeah, I kind of probably would phrase that a little differently. I would say we all have the potential, leadership potential within us. Then I think you’ve got to make the decision to fully commit to say I’m going to be truly accountable and work really hard to be as great a leader as I possibly can.

I don’t subscribe to the sense of there’s a few of us that have been blessed with these special traits of a leadership and the rest of us don’t have them.

Like you, I do believe everyone has the potential to be a leader, but I think that potential has to be honed and in order for it to be honed, you’ve got to be pretty deliberate at the decision you’re making and make that really firm commitment to yourself to be really deliberate as a leader. That’s kind of my perspective on that one.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you paint a picture for us with regard to the cost or the commitment or the time investment that is really necessary to lead effectively.

Vince Molinaro
I’m not sure if it’s as much about a time commitment as much as really how you think about yourself. If you think about yourself as a leader, then you realize that in many ways there are different expectations of you, to know that you’re always on.

A good example is someone I write about the story in the book. He was a team member, this was in a technology company, … team. Then he got promoted to be the leader of the team.

Now all of the sudden, he found that the nature of his relationships changed, that he couldn’t behave in the way he did when he was a team member, where they would go out for dinner and for drinks and party and have fun. He realized, “No, no, now I’m the leader. I need to behave differently.”

It doesn’t mean that I bring a sense of authority to the relationship. The expectations are different. There was an example of how he realized he needed to step up in different ways in order to lead that team. He still had strong relationships. He just wasn’t one of the guys and the gals as much.

That’s sort of that it’s kind of more how you show up, what you pay attention to, what you’re being deliberate about and obviously that commitment to develop yourself, to be open to feedback and to invest in your own development. I think those become fundamental.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood there. When it comes to the leadership is hard work phase, could you share a couple of examples of the hard work that is often dodged and how to engage in it all the more effectively?

Vince Molinaro
Yeah, the two we hear a lot about is not being aggressive enough in managing a poor performer and not having the confidence to give candid feedback to someone on your team. If you take, let’s just focus on one of them.

If you take the classic story of the chronic poor performer. I’ve played this out wherever I’ve traveled globally. It tends to follow a same story or arc.

You’ve got a poor performer on a team. Everybody knows who the poor performer is. When employees and team members are off having lunch or a coffee, there’s a lot of gripping about the poor performer. “Why can’t she or why can’t he get his act together? We’re all having to kind of put in extra effort in order to cover that person,” and on and on and on.

As the weeks and months go by and you as the manager or the leader do nothing, the conversation shifts from the poor performer to who? To you. Now the gripping is about why aren’t you doing anything to help this person. Either give them training, either move them to another role or maybe they need to be exited from the company.

Finally you get the courage and you decide that maybe yeah, this person needs to leave the organization. You finally do it. The first thought that comes to your mind – into your head every time you do it is why did I wait so long.

That’s been a universal finding every single time I talk to a leader about this. It doesn’t matter whether they’re a CEO or a supervisor, a team lead. If we knew that, if we know why are we waiting so long, then why do we wait so long? We don’t appreciate there’s a price you pay as the weeks and months go by not addressing an issue like this.

That’s only one of many issues you’ve got to deal with. What I talk about in the book is the hard rule of leadership, but as leaders, when we avoid some of these legitimately challenging hard work, we don’t appreciate how we weaken ourselves, weaken our teams, and actually weaken out company.

But if you have the courage to address them in a more timely manner, you actually strengthen yourself, strengthen your team, and strengthen your company.

This one gets a lot of attention from leaders. They all kind of admit, “Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of relationships I’m avoiding,” I mean, “A couple of conversations that I’m avoiding. I’ve got some strained relationships that I’m not doing anything about because I just can’t get myself to approach that person.” We don’t appreciate day-to-day how it weakens us and weakens our performance.

Pete Mockaitis
To the answer to that then, you mentioned courage in terms of executing that. Any pro tips for pulling that off?

Vince Molinaro
Well, in the field guide I kind of talk about really learning how to have tough conversations. I call them tough conversations because number one they are legitimately tough. They’re tough on the person. They’re tough on you. We don’t necessarily like having those conversations, but we need to.

A lot of times people kind of confuse being tough with being rough, which is not at all what I subscribe to. You can be tough, you can hold someone accountable, you can kind of put their feet to the fire, without being abusive, demeaning, or a bully.

What I say is the place to begin is to think about how much you care about that person first. Because if you think about how much you care about that person, you realize then you have an obligation to give them the feedback. Maybe it’s something in their blind spot. They’re unaware of something they’re doing that’s undermining their performance.

I see so many times a person’s career gets curtailed because everybody knows a secret about them but no one’s ever had the courage to sit down and say, “Hey, you know how you do this? This is not working out.”

What I find is that the more you do this, the better you get at it, the more practice you have, the confidence increases and then people just know that you’re a person they can count on to give them the straight goods.

I find a lot of times in my work with CEOs one of the things they value is “You’re going to give me the straight goods. I’ve got no one around me that has the courage to tell me like it is. I need to know how it is.” That’s I think the real opportunity.

What our global research has found is one of the lowest areas in companies is peer-to-peer feedback. You’ve got leaders who are hesitant – so if you and I are peers in different departments or divisions and we’re not getting along, we kind of avoid each other, but we don’t have the courage to kind of sit down and hash these things out.

I think that’s going to be the future of leadership – otherwise we just waste a lot of time and things drag out longer than they need to. I think it just begins with having that confidence and courage and knowing how to have a tough conversation, but it begins with actually caring about the person and their wellbeing and their outcome, their final outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Then on the flip side of that I think that there are a lot of leaders who claim they want to hear the real truth, but their actions and demeanor, words in response don’t really mirror or reflect what they claim to want. Do you have any pro tips on how you can actually be encouraging and receptive to the real stuff, the truth that may be unpleasant to hear?

Vince Molinaro
I think you’ve got to be active in soliciting it, number one.

Number two I think a lot of scenario leaders often fail to appreciate how much people just naturally will tell you what you think you want to hear as opposed to telling you what you need to hear. You’ve got to kind of call that out and say, “Okay, are you telling me what you think I need to hear or are you sugar coating this or are you only giving me the positive side to the story?”

Jim Collins in Good to Great really talked about our ability to accept the brutal facts. I think that’s where it begins. If you can kind of set the tone that it’s okay to accept – to talk about the brutal facts, to not kill the messenger, then you will see people come to you.

Now, on the flip side, when you are that person speaking truth to power or having to raise a contentious issue with a senior leader, what I’ve learned that helps is if you don’t come across as you’re whining or complaining or blaming, because that’s what tends to get the backs up.

If you come at it with a place of maturity, you’ve done your homework, you’ve got the data, you’re being factual, that show kind of how you care about the company, then that also helps the message be easier to take as well.

I think it’s kind of a dual thing there. The leader has to set the right tone, has to challenge people to not make sure they’re telling them what they want to hear, not punishing people for doing that. Then on the flip side we need to learn how to kind of deliver some of those tough messages in a way that they’re going to hear it without reacting to someone who’s whining and complaining.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. In addition to delivering the tough messages, what are some of the best practices in terms of regular and daily communication to be inspiring and motivating and getting the best performance from people?

Vince Molinaro
It’s interesting. We did a global study on leadership accountability. We looked at – one of the things we found was that leadership accountability was a critical issue in over the 2,000 respondents we had globally. 72%, three out of the four companies, said it’s a critical issue, but there’s only a 31% satisfaction with the degree of accountability being demonstrated by leaders globally.

We found that pattern, it doesn’t matter whether we collected the data in North America, South America, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, it was the same pattern. It was quite stunning actually. I was not expecting that.

But one of the things we also found is that there was a difference, a connection between strong leadership accountability and company performance, where industry leading companies just surpassed the rest of the companies on a number of areas.

One in particular that was interesting is we asked the respondents, “Think about the leaders in your company that are truly accountable. What is it that they do differently every day?”

The first one is that they hold everyone to high standards of performance. They set the bar really high. I would say that’s one of the things you need to do.

Number two is they’re genuinely excited about the company and its future. To your point around the inspiration, that’s where inspiration comes from. If I show up as a leader and I’m dragging my heels every day, you can imagine what impact that has on the engagement me, of my team, and my employers. But if I’m truly and genuinely excited and enthused, that’s a huge motivator.

The third thing they do is they actually have the tough conversations, so people know exactly where you stand and there is that clarity. You may not like the conversation from time to time, but they always know you’re going to have their back and not withhold anything that could be getting in the way.

The fourth thing is they’re very good at communicating the strategy so that everyone has real clarity about what it is they need to do and how it contributes.

The last thing is that they’re always kind of looking to the future, anticipating trends.

The first four are really about how you communicate, how you inspire. Set high standards. Jeff Bezos Amazon just with most recent letters to his shareholders, talk a lot about how they set really, really high standards and how when you set high standards, they are inspiring to people because people want to excel, people want to do great.

To do that, you’ve got to set the bar high. That’s the starting point. Then you kind of show your enthusiasm. Then you bring strategic clarity. Then you have the courage to have the tough conversations when you need to. We can kind of define behaviorally what really accountable leadership looks like day-to-day and the impact it has on people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’d like to hear maybe a specific example or a case study where I could just get a crystal clear picture associated with “Ah, that leader is being very accountable,” versus “Ah, that leader is being very not accountable.”

Vince Molinaro
Well, you know if you think about what’s been happening in the world and you think about – I’ve traveled – in the last two years I’ve traveled to 60 cities around the world. It seems like wherever I was landing there was a significant leadership story unfolding, mostly on the political side.

On March of 2016 I land in São Paulo, Brazil. I happened to land on the day when millions of Brazilians are taking to the street to protest their corruption in government and corruption among senior executives. There I was that whole week there to talk about leadership. That’s all anyone wanted to talk about.

But you get to see the negative impact that has on people when the most senior leaders are not being held accountable.

You can kind of see it in corporate performance. The good examples, probably the example that is a good one right now is what Starbucks has done this week with the training. They shut down the store to provide that important training they needed to kind of get a core cultural issue.

That was a very strong message from the CEO to say, “We have a problem. We’re going to fix that problem. We’re going to address it in a pretty dramatic way.” What company does that? What company shuts down its doors to address an issue that need to be addressed?

That’s an example of that accountability. They didn’t deflect it. They didn’t deny it. They didn’t diminish that. They addressed it head on. That’s the kind of example to me that we need more of.

What you generally find is a lot of leaders as they take on new roles in companies, they come in and they always see a gap in accountability. That’s the biggest challenge that I find that they’re struggling to put in place is how do you kind of create that sense of accountability.

Then you see examples of companies that haven’t fared well where leaders get defensive. They make mistakes, but they won’t admit them. You can kind of go on and on and see those examples play out.

But that’s generally what it looks like whether it’s at the C-suite right down to a front line. It’s people not owning their role, not owning when they’ve made mistakes, not apologizing, and doing nothing to rectify the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
You say accountability. It’s really about the ownership in terms of this is my responsibility and I will do what is necessary to ensure that it is made right.

Vince Molinaro
Yeah. That sense of ownership is really important. A lot of my clients say, “We want to build an ‘own it’ culture. We want people to feel like, they feel like the company is theirs.” Because if you feel that, then you bring that sense of ownership every day. You bring that sense of urgency. You just are kind of operating at a higher level as a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hm. Do you have any quick pointers in terms of just immediate do’s and don’ts in order to be more of this transformational, and inspiring, and accountable leader like tomorrow, “Do this and stop doing that?”

Vince Molinaro
Well, I think right off the bat is if we kind of think about applying the four terms that we talked about earlier.

The first thing is you need to do – I’ve got a weekly blog that I call the Gut Check for Leaders. It’s always framed in the form of a question to inspire reflection.

I would think about really sitting down and saying, “Have I really made the decision to kind of think of myself and define myself as a leader. Am I all in and fully committed in my role as a leader?” Because you can’t do anything until that foundational question is answered.

Sometimes we let ourselves slip into a state of mediocrity or we don’t pay attention to it or we get so consumed by the day-to-day workload and challenges that we don’t pause and reflect. I would take a few minutes to think about that.

Then I would say, “Okay, if I’m all in, then what am I really here to do? What’s the purpose of my role? What are my key obligations? Who am I obligated to? What’s the value that I’m trying to create for customers, for my employees, for shareholders? How am I leaving my company in better shape than I found it?” Those are two pretty big questions that I think are foundational.

The other opportunity related to hard work is what one thing that you know you’ve been avoiding, and we all have our list of those things that we’re avoiding, they’ll come top of mind pretty quickly. Make some advancement on improving that. Stop avoiding it. Stop delaying.

Find a way to make progress because if you make progress, even in a small way, you are making things better. You are advancing things. You’re not going to be stopped. You’re not going to be spinning your wheels. That I think is critical.

What is it that you’re avoiding? Is it feedback I need to give someone? Is it a tough conversation you need to have with a peer or colleague?

Then the last one around community is research that shows in organizations today, the amount of collaboration that we’re doing has increased like 67%. Now we are more dependent on others for our own success.

There was a time when say 20 years ago when organizations were more hierarchical. I could be fairly independent as long as me and my team did our job in our own little silo, we were okay. Now you’re so dependent on one another.

I would sit down and think, how strong are my relationships with the people that matter most to my success. Where are my relationships strong? Great, maintain them. Where are the relationships strained and how can I repair them?

Those are the four things. You’ve got to decide are you all in, be clear on what you’re obligated to, start being more deliberate and tackling the hard work and strengthen the relationships that you need to be successful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Vince Molinaro
I think we covered everything. Probably the part that I would mention is I think it’s really important in today’s, in this period we’re in now with the disruption that’s happening in a lot of industries, with the advent of artificial intelligence, and the whole move of machine learning and robotics, it’s unclear what the future of work is really going to look like.

But I think what I’ve come to really know and understand for sure is that an organization desperately needs leaders and need leaders at all levels to really step up and be strong.

If you are that one person that maybe you’ve never thought of yourself in that way, but you feel you’ve got that potential in you and if you really want to start stepping up, you’ve got a huge opportunity to add tremendous value to your organization and to your success.

Leadership roles are difficult, but when you can build a great team, when you can drive strong, collective performance, I feel there’s nothing better and more rewarding in one’s career than that opportunity to be a leader. It’s a time when we need strong leadership and we need more people to step up and be accountable and help our companies be successful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Vince Molinaro
A favorite quote is my current favorite quote. I got it a couple of weeks ago from Tim Ferriss, I think it’s his Friday 5 Bullet email blast that comes out. It was a quote that he’s been mulling called the Hanlon’s Razor. It says something to the effect of ‘never kind of interpret malice, when stupidity is a much better explanation.’

Why I like that is I find many times in organizations, particularly in large, complex organizations, stuff doesn’t always work out. In fact, it feels like more things don’t work out than do work out.

I spend a lot of time talking to leaders who are really frustrated by things that don’t work out. They get really angry like, “Why can’t marketing get its act together,” or, “What the hell is going on with sales?” “Those folks in R&D don’t have a clue what’s going on.”

We kind of attribute malice, bad intention, where sometimes I think people are just overworked. They’re not always making the best decisions, maybe because they don’t have all the information. I find it’s an interesting way of reframing those things that cause a lot of stress and frustration. That quote is kind of resonating with me the last few weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it does me as well. I think about that in large part in relation to the media when it comes to stories just being incomplete or seeming like the word choice is full of bias in terms of “Well, we know how you feel about this issue,” is that I think that I think this journalist really just has too much on their plate in terms of budgets and workload and what’s going on.

I particularly think about when the story is about a document like a Supreme Court decision or papal encyclical, it’s sort of like none of you have just read the whole document, which seems like sort of the thing to do when you’re reporting a story on that and it’s all completely contained in one volume.

It’s like you could read all of that and then you can report on it and then you have the complete picture of what’s inside it. But it seems like they never do. I don’t think … work in the mix.

Vince Molinaro
Yeah. That kind of helps, right? It sort of helps because you could be sitting on what were they thinking. I think that is an important part of people’s realities today.

I think what it also means for leaders, and I’ve been thinking about this as well, is this ability to sort through what’s real and what’s hype because there’s just so much coming at us. I just want to be clear on what’s going on sometimes. It’s hard to do.

It’s hard work because there’s a lot of information, some of it conflicting, some of it biased. Then if you kind of assume there’s mal-intent, but then that just adds an emotional component ….

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Vince Molinaro
That’s a great one. I kind of stay on top of a lot of the science that’s going on. I don’t think anything specific that I would cite. I think what’s interesting is I am starting to see a pattern in some of the research in a number of areas where what we’ve long believed or long held to be true is being upended a little bit.

It’s early days in my conclusion, so I don’t want to be too definitive just yet, but I think it’s a kind of an interesting time where a lot of these things that we always took for granted are being changed. That I think creates new opportunities to think broadly about our future and what’s possible. That’s kind of how I would answer that right now.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. How about a favorite book?

Vince Molinaro
I’ve always had an interest in kind of Greek and Roman thinking and drama, so I’m all into the books on kind of the stoic way and how it plays out in leadership. There’s a lot of those books out now that are really meaningful to me.

That’s great in many ways. There’s a number of those. Ryan Holiday does some great work there. It just brings kind of an interesting perspective to life, which is in many ways really practical and in some ways also pessimistic, which I find interesting. It’s just a way of helping you reframe and be effective in a world where there’s so much complexity and change.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite tool?

Vince Molinaro
Well, I do the cooking in the house. I would say that the knives I use to prep and make meals, those are my favorite tools, particularly when they’re nice and sharp and you can do some great prepping. I would say those are my favorite tools because they help me cook the meals for my family.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Vince Molinaro
It would have to be the discipline of exercise and making sure I do that every day and keeping myself as fit as I can. I think that right now in terms of where I’m at is really important to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect, resonate, get Kindle book highlighted, retweeted, heads nodding when you share it from the stage?

Vince Molinaro
The one I think I stumbled on is something about ‘when it comes to leadership, good intentions are not enough.’ I find that one always captures people’s imagination.

I think it’s because I think that we have a lot of people in leadership roles who are well intended but don’t appreciate what it really takes to excel and be successful, so good intentions are not enough when it comes to leadership. You really need to roll up your sleeves and commit to the role.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Vince Molinaro
Certainly, LinkedIn is the platform I primarily use to share my blogs and whatnot, so they can find me there. Or at www.TheLeadershipContract.com. They can find out about the books, the blog and other work that I do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Do you have a parting call to action or challenge to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Vince Molinaro
Well I think being awesome at one’s job really takes that sense of commitment. I think it’s echoing what I said before. Companies need people to step up and be leaders at all levels. Like we discussed earlier, we all have that potential inside of us. It’s not a magical quality that only a few people have been blessed with. I think if people really want to be awesome at work, the way to do it is to step up and lead.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Vince, thanks so much for taking this time and sharing the wisdom. I wish you tons of luck and success with The Leadership Contract next edition and the field guide and all you’re up to.

Vince Molinaro
Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it and this was fun, some great questions. Thank you.