KF# 37. Drives Vision and Purpose Archives - Page 2 of 4 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Daniel, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Daniel Harkavy
Thank you very much for having me. Looking forward to our conversation, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Me, too. Me, too. And I want to kick us off by getting right for the good stuff, Daniel. Don’t want to risk it. Can you tell us one of the most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about leadership, having spent over 25 years coaching business leaders?

Daniel Harkavy
That’s a good question. All right.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you got front-row seat coaching these folks.

Daniel Harkavy
Crazy seat. Yeah, crazy seat.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re going to hear some of these insights from your book, The 7 Perspectives of Effective Leaders. But, yeah, I imagine some of the couple aha moments in which you’ve discovered some patterns, like, “Wow, these high performers across the board, they all got this sort of thing going on.”

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah, and I would, you know, Pete, it’s a great question. I want to start off by saying that they’re really comfortable in their own skin, and they’re humans. I remember in my younger years, Pete, I was so intimidated as a result of the privilege I had. I earn some sort of privilege. It was this unmerited favor, where if you looked at my CV or my resume, if you looked at accomplishments in previous years, I would’ve questioned whether or not I would’ve allowed me into the room to sit as an executive coach to this leader.

And I find myself in that situation still. I’m 57. I find myself in that situation constantly. But I remember coming to a place, and it was mid-40s, where I just said, “You know what, I have a unique gift, and the leaders that I get to work with, they’re really comfortable with who they are and who they’re not, and they don’t need to fake it, they don’t need to act like the smartest person in the room,” which is going to lead me to another big aha, and I want to just add value to your listeners.

The best leaders, I said this on a podcast just a while ago, the best leaders don’t feel the need to have all the right answers. The best leaders feel the need to ask all of the right questions. You can tell a man is wise not by the answers that he gives but by the questions he asks. They’re intentionally curious. There’s just this insatiable appetite to learn and to understand so that they can make better decisions. And, in so doing, they gain influence. And that’s the premise of my last book, so it was a big one for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And I appreciate that they know who they are and they know who they’re not. And I’m finding more and more of that lately, just in terms of, “You know what, real estate investing, probably not for me.”

Daniel Harkavy
Good to figure that out.

Pete Mockaitis
It seems really cool, and my hat’s off to people, but it’s sort of like there’s only a very tiny sliver of what happens in real estate investing that I’m really good at and love, and there’s a whole lot of stuff that I’m not so great at. So, there’s that. But teaching, oh, yeah, game on. Let’s do more of that.

Daniel Harkavy
Oh, that’s great. What you do is, when you figure out which few lanes you’ve just got a lot of passion for, and you seem to win, and they create momentum for you in other areas of your life, they’re life-giving, stay in those lanes. And then if there are some adjacencies or different lanes that are just interesting to you, don’t hold back from trying. You have to try that real estate investing. If there’s something in you that says, “You know, I’m curious. I’m going to try it,” try it and don’t let failure do anything other than teach you.

If you come to a place where it’s like, “All right, I learned. I learned I don’t like that. I learned that that energy is not worth the result so I’m going to place the energy elsewhere,” – great. Keep taking           risks but really know where you can make that difference. For you teaching, you get to invest your time into making a difference and elevating thinking and belief and performance of all those that sit and who have curiosity and the desire to learn. It’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. All right. So, you mentioned in your book The 7 Perspectives of Effective Leaders: A Proven Framework for Improving Decisions and Increasing Your Influence you kind of mentioned the big idea. Could you expand upon it? What’s your core message or thesis here?

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah, a leader’s effectiveness is determined by just, only, just two things – your decision-making and your influence. And I have been having conversations with leaders of organizations here in the US, as well as leaders around the globe, and said, “Just challenge me. Like, tell me I’m wrong.” And I’ve had one in particular said, “No, Daniel, you have to have integrity. It’s not just decision-making and influence.”

And I said, “No, no, no, having integrity is what’s required in order for you to be a good leader. But if you want to then move from being a good leader to an effective leader, an effective leader makes fantastic decisions and they have maximum influence because leadership is all about mobilizing a group of people, leading them from a place today to a better place tomorrow. So, you have to make great decisions in order to create strategies and to align yourself with the right people, and then to empower those people, equip those people, and allow those people to do what they need to be doing, which is where influence comes into play.”

So, I take leadership, which is a huge topic, and I just say, “Hey, here’s kind of the connect-the-dots and let’s make it easy – decision-making and influence.” So, how do you elevate your decision-making and your influence? That’s where the seven perspectives come in.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I was, indeed, just about to ask that. And so, you made a distinction there. I guess integrity, a good leader, as in one who is ethical and moral, versus an effective leader, one who gets the job done to bring in folks to improved destination. Is that kind of the contrast you’re making there?

Daniel Harkavy
Well, you can’t be an effective leader without being a good leader. So, it’s almost like the next rung on the ladder, so, yeah, you could be a good leader. You could be a good leader, meaning you’re a good person, and you do good, and maybe people like you and you’re respected. But to be truly effective, you may be investing a lot of energy and time in areas of the business that are not…they’re not leading to the results that you want. So, how do you continue to finetune your thinking, belief, and behavior so that you get the best results and you’re effective?

So, in 2014, I was so curious about leadership efficacy that I started doing a lot of intentional observation because, at that time, I was approaching two decades doing what I was doing, and that was following a decade in business prior to in leadership, and I just wanted to try to make it simple. So, the seven perspectives used to be five, and I started using them in organizations. And I started to bring executive teams around together for two-day retreats to focus on five, which then grew to seven, and they became communication and execution models in businesses.

So, the seven perspectives are current reality, long-term vision, strategic bets, the perspective of the team, the perspective of the customer, the perspective of your role, and the perspective of the outsider. If you have intentional curiosity and then you exercise discipline and place time and energy into those seven, really, six of the seven, the sixth perspective, your role, elevates as does your efficacy. So, that’s it at a very high level, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, when it comes to the perspectives, I guess the word perspective means just that, “I’m sort of stepping into the shoes, or trying on the glasses of a different party or view of things.” And that makes sense that when you think about things from each of those seven different perspectives, you see different things, like, “Hey, my current reality is this, and maybe there are some things I don’t like so much. And then my long-term vision is that, which is different from my current reality. And what my customer thinks is probably, ‘I don’t care at all about all those operational things you’ve got going on behind the scenes. Just give me my burrito on time, or whatever, your business is.’”

So, I like that just in terms of thinking about, “Hey, let’s hop into a different perspective and see what bubbles up.” So, once I know the perspectives, what do I do with them to get better at decision-making and influencing?

Daniel Harkavy
Well, knowing the perspectives does you jack. Doing the seven perspectives is where you see the meter move.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, how do I do a perspective?

Daniel Harkavy
You allocate time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Daniel Harkavy
You allocate time. There are probably some principles, Pete, that have to be unpacked. One principle is that “Better humans make for better leaders.” So, a leader’s job is to surround himself with really good humans who are both wicked smart and have high potential. When you, as a leader, do that, well, then you actually know that the people around you are the best ones to make the majority of the decisions.

So, what you’re doing is, a great leader is really curious. In current reality, perspective one, you’re spending time understanding the mechanics of the business. There’s this old saying that’s probably before your time, but you may have heard it. You’ve heard of the ivory tower leader?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Daniel Harkavy
Where’s that come from? What’s an ivory tower leader, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, the idea is it’s someone who is aloft, removed from the day-to-day kind of operational realities of how things really are, and instead up in a fancy ivory tower, just sort of thinking or pontificating and sharing theoretically how things ought to be. That’s kind of the picture that comes to mind.

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah, and you’re spot on, my man. So, think about working in an organization where you have an ivory tower leader. Is that leader making decisions that are leading to great results? And do those that are several rungs below in the organization, is that leader winning influence?

Pete Mockaitis
No. You know, as I chuckled, I was thinking, it’s like, “No, but I hope they’re writing good pieces for the Harvard Business Review that are giving us credibility and leads.”

Daniel Harkavy
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, that’s about all I could hope for from the ivory tower leader. Just a thought leadership in PR.

Daniel Harkavy
And you know what, you get great case studies. You do. So, that’s why I say current reality is your starting point because you get it. If you don’t have both feet firmly planted in current reality, if you don’t understand the operational realities, the levers to pull, the inputs to look at, if you don’t understand the mechanics of the business, well, then you impede your ability to make great decisions because you don’t understand what it’s like to do the business today. And then, as a result of that, you lose influence.

So, perspective one is foundation; both feet firmly planted. If you don’t have that, okay, starting point on your way is GPS, or your Google Maps is screwed up. So, good luck getting to a better tomorrow. You’re lost already.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got to get a really clear picture on what is current reality. And I think I recall from – is it the book 1776 – that was like a theme that I came to over and over again, “George Washington’s greatest trait was that he saw reality as it was as opposed to how he would like it to be.” Really hammered that thesis home.

And so, how do we get there? We talk to people. Any sort of key questions or activities that help us get a really clear true picture of the actual current reality?

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah, we understand the historical, we know which reports to look at, we know which dashboard, we know the content of the dashboard, we understand what the plans are for the year ahead, that’s all part of current reality. And then we invest time in some of the other perspectives which help to inform current reality. So, let’s camp on that current reality. And I will tell you, the best leaders spend time where they’re looking at the health of the business. They do a report review. They do a dashboard review.

Depending on the health of the business, that can be hour-by-hour if in crisis, and I’ve been there before. Or, if the business is running really, really well, it’s weekly or monthly, depending upon where you are in the business. But you understand you never get away from the workings of the business. The best CEOs, Pete, I don’t care if they’re like 70,000 employees, they’re still spending time on the frontlines, they’re in the factory, they’re in the restaurant, they’re in the hospital room floor, they’re in where the product or service is being experienced.

And it’s so important, Pete, that perspective is actually the perspective when you’re on the floor, and you’re in the restaurant, when you’re in the factory. There are a few things you’re looking for and you’re gaining perspective from the team and from the customer. And I used to have all of that combined into one perspective, and I was like, “No, it’s so important that you need to parse it out.” So, it went from five perspectives to seven. And one of the reasons it went from five to seven was because I added the perspective of the customer. All of that informs current reality.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then in terms of the seven perspectives, so knowing them and saying that you want to get a clear view of each of them is swell. I love it in terms of hanging out where the product or service is experienced is great for getting a view of what’s the true current reality, spending some time, getting up in there and not hanging out far away in an ivory tower, are great.

I’m curious if there are any particular all-time fave approaches that tend to yield boatloads of insight and surprise for folks, like, “I think walking around and talking to people is wise and should be done, and is often not.” So, it’s valuable just to remind people to go ahead and do that. What are some things that really open eyes? Is it a survey or is it a demo? Is it being an undercover boss, like the reality TV show? What are some of the, I guess, research approaches that really illuminate these perspectives super well?

Daniel Harkavy
So, there’s not a one instrument or process response for all of the different perspectives. They all require different energy, different discipline, different time. So, you say survey or an undercover boss. If you want the perspective of the team, the best leaders place such a high value in meeting with the team. You don’t need to overcomplicate it.

One of the guys in the book is Frank Blake. And Frank Blake is the non-executive chairman of Delta Airlines. He was the CEO of Home Depot for eight years and he’s part of our roundtable. We do a CEO roundtable in probably, let’s just call it July of last year. Yeah, probably either July or September. Frank serves as non-exec chair for Delta, plus he serves for several other, on other boards.

And what he was realizing, as he was talking to executive teams, was the leaders, when the pandemic first started, were doing a great job with a megaphone, “This is what’s happening. This is where we’re headed. This is the vision that we’re reporting out.” But with everyone going home, what was being missed was the one-on-one conversations that would take place over a lunch break, or, “Hey, let’s go for a walk,” or, “We have scheduled one-on-ones in the office.” That was being missed.

So, Frank was with this other group of CEOs, or a group of our clients and peers, and he said, “You guys, I’m having people over to my house, executive team members for Delta and other organizations that I serve on. I’m having them over on my porch for tea. If you want the perspective of the team, you have people over, sit outside in today’s times, and you have tea. This stuff may seem simple but I’m talking to you about Fortune One companies, and where are the pain points.”

Relationship is what suffered. And looking somebody in the eyes, and going, “Hey, how are you doing? What’s going on? What do you need to win? What are you seeing that I need to see?” There’s no instrument that will help you to see what’s not being said or to hear what’s not being said in the conversation. So, this one-on-one piece is the most effective.

Now, you use surveys to help guide your questions. Surveys are fantastic, but you don’t stop. That’s for the perspective of the team. And then you look at the perspective of the customer. I think of Martin Daum, who’s the chairman of Daimler, and Martin, again in the book, a client for seven, eight years, Martin and his organization, or Tim Tassopoulos and his organization over at Chick-fil-A, two radically different businesses.

Mercedes Benz, Daimler, trucks and buses, the largest organization in that space in the world, market share is more than 40%, Chick-fil-A, they outperform their restaurant-type peers in ridiculous ways, their leaders spend time in the restaurants or in the trucks with the drivers, talking to the customer, or in the restaurant with the people eating the food, talking to the customer.

So, you can look at surveys and you can glean insights but the best leaders are sitting down with the customers, saying, “What’s it like to do business with us? What do you like? What don’t you like? What would you like us to add? What would you like us to take away? What works well? What doesn’t? What would cause you to leave us and go to a competitor?” They just ask really great questions, but they invest the time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, I’m curious then, as I think about the seven perspectives, strategic bets seem to stand out in terms of it’s like current reality, the customer, the role, the outsider, the team, I hear like, “Oh, yeah, those are perspectives.” How do I take the perspective of the strategic bet?

Daniel Harkavy
All right. So, the perspective of the strategic bet is perspective three, and it comes after perspective two, which is vision. See, perspective one, current reality, allows you to manage the business but that doesn’t guarantee leadership efficacy. You’re managing well if you understand current reality. Vision has to be clear and compelling. You and your team need to see a better tomorrow if you’re going to engage the heads and the hearts of your people, so you have to see a better tomorrow.

And if you have that perspective two, long-term vision, then you create a gap from where we are today in 2021 to where we’d like to be in 2025 or 2030. That gap is where you build strategy. Seventy-five percent of organizations fail in execution of strategy because they don’t have the right starting point, current reality, they lack the resources, whether that be people, time, money, expertise, or they lack that strong anchor of long-term vision so that when the going gets tough, they don’t stick with it.

If you’ve got current reality and you have long-term vision, then there’s a higher probability of you picking the right strategic bets that will move you from current reality to that long-term vision. So, strategic bets are strategies that are grounded in current reality and anchored in long-term vision. Good, you’ve got your two waypoints on your GPS. Then those strategic bets, you can’t have too many of them or the risk of failure is great, the strategic bets are the result of the team giving input, understanding what the customer needs, those other perspectives, and you stack the odds in your favor so the bets pay off.

You make sure you’ve got the resources. You make sure you’ve got the leader. You make sure you’ve got the team. You make sure you have the right people and the rhythms. You set the gates so you know whether you’re on track to hit the destination or off track, then you pivot and you adjust. They’re not guarantees; they’re dynamic. Then you know when to kill them. Some bets just need to, you know, know when to hold them, know when to fold them. Sometimes you just let them go. But if you win on two or three over a long period of time, they can change the game for your business, but they’re not guarantees, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then I’m curious, could you maybe give us a story in which we tie it all together in terms of there’s a leader who apparently didn’t have the fullest picture on one or more of the perspectives, and he or she did some things to get that perspective, and what unfolded?

Daniel Harkavy
So, I can think of a gentleman by the name of Hartmut Schick.

Hartmut Schick works for Daimler Trucks Asia, he’s the CEO. And one of my fellow CEO mentors on my Building Champions team, Tom Brewer and I did a two-day retreat with them, and we’ve been doing executive team work with the organization in their different op-coms, their different leadership teams around the world for seven years. But he was newer to doing it with his team. He served at the board level, which I’d work with for a while, but we did it with his team in Tokyo.

What we did was we structured two days to look at the overall business from six perspectives. We wanted to, well, excuse me, from the first five perspectives – current reality all the way through the customer. Then we had a session around how that impacts your role. Tom and I were the outsiders that spoke into questions and challenged. At the end of two days, they said it was the most effective meeting they’ve had. And then what he did was he communicated throughout the entire organization, thousands of people, as to what the leadership team, their op-com, had been through and how they saw the business.

So, he architected all of his communication from that point forward, all of their meetings from that point forward, around the different perspectives. It takes the complicated and it makes it simple. Because if you talk about a matrix organization that’s global, that gets parts from Detroit, that has manufacturing in South Africa, that is relying on chips coming from India, that has the frames built in Germany, that is delivering a product that is going to be driven in the streets of Sephora, with a customer base that can be everywhere, it’s so complicated.

What you do is you take that complicated and you put it into thinking buckets or perspectives, and it helps everybody to think better, which is a leader’s greatest responsibility. So, Hartmut is just one where I was so pleased because it was pretty neat to see years ago them adopt the model, the framework, then send the notes out to the entire organization around it, and now leading the organization as they do all of their exec retreats where they focus on each of the primary five, with the help of the seventh, then it impacts their role so they know how to function quarter by quarter.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m intrigued, so most effective meeting ever, that’s awesome. Good job. And having the seven perspectives enables some more simplicity and clarity as opposed to, “Ahh, I’m just kind of confused and overwhelmed by all this stuff.” Could you maybe dig in a little bit in terms of, and we can protect their confidentiality and use other examples if you want to, but I would love it if you could give us a demonstration before our eyes, to see, “Oh, yeah, sure enough. I was kind of stuck and fuzzy in a realm of complexity before I kind of segmented into some perspectives, and now I see how, yeah, that’s a lot easier”?

Daniel Harkavy
Every organization, when you look at how their executive team, and then the teams that move through the organization as you move down, if you look at their meeting notes and agendas, the agendas for their meetings, and then you look at the output of their meetings, you’ll see for most a lot of frustration. And the reason for the frustration is because there’s too much on the agenda for the time, or the agenda items aren’t the right agenda items, or there’s not the right information or clarity around, “What we’re supposed to be doing in those meetings.”

So, what will happen often is people, they don’t think in parallel. There’s a book that I would recommend to you, Pete, if you haven’t read it, and to your listeners if they’re interested in how to help people think better. And it is the Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, yes.

Daniel Harkavy
Parallel thinking. Awesome, right? You say, “Ah, yes,” because you know him or know of his work, right? Awesome. Well, his whole deal is, get people to think in parallel. So, how the seven perspectives help is you label what we’re going to talk about, “For the first 45 minutes, what we’re going to do is we’re going to do an update on the current reality of the business. What are the key metrics that we need to be looking at so that everybody in the organization gets up to speed? The accountants don’t see the same things that the salespeople see, the marketers don’t see the same things that supply chain sees, the CTOs don’t see the same things that the customer-experience people see.”

So, when you’re going to bring people together, you need to elevate awareness so they’re all seeing it and thinking it because they’re responsible for the global success, the organizational success, not just their department. You with me?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Daniel Harkavy
Current reality gets us on that level of playing field so everyone understands. Even though I’m the CFO, I need to understand what’s happening on the customer front. Even though I’m marketing, I need to understand what’s happening on the technology front. Even though I’m technology, I need to understand what’s happening on the customer experience front.

So, we spend time getting everybody to current reality, starting point on the GPS, “Everybody have all the white hat, all the information you need to have? Good. That will inform the next conversation.” We talk vision, “All right. This is where we’re still headed. Are we messaging it correctly? Does everybody on the team understand how their job is contributing to the bigger picture?”

Oftentimes, people get stuck in their four-by-four cubicle or, in today’s times, they get stuck in their home office and Zoom and they’ve forgotten that the function they’re doing day in and day out, Monday through Friday, is equating to a greater impact. They just see it as role-specific.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So, Daniel, that’s how we get the picture of current reality. So, then tell us, how do we go about getting a great understanding of the perspective on long-term vision?

Daniel Harkavy
And as I’ve mentioned, you think about the first three perspectives as components to a GPS. So, if you’ve got your starting point, that’s current reality, without that destination of having a clear compelling vision, then it’s really difficult for leaders to lead themselves and their teams and their organizations well.

And most great leaders have the gift of making the invisible visible. They can see who they want the organization to become and how they want the organization to basically serve or function in the future. They don’t see it with absolute 20/20 clarity, but they see enough to where it’s like, “All right, that’s exciting, so it’s compelling. I’ll take risks. We, as an organization, will take risks.” It’s compelling and then it’s clear. It’s got to be clear so that you can build that third component, those strategic bets, to move you from where you are to where you want to go.

So, Pete, we’ve got a model for how we help organizations and leaders build vision, and if you want me to unpack that, I’m more than happy to.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, what are the components there?

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah. So, years ago, we said that all teammates, they’re spending the majority of their waking hours at this thing called work, and they’ve got questions, either consciously or subconsciously. And the questions are around these three Bs. We call it 3B vision. What do we belong to? Who we’re going to become? And what are we going to build?

And if your vision can answer those questions, belonging in today’s time is being really valuable. And then, “Who are we going to become?” like, if I hitched to your wagon, tell me how I grow, we grow, because most people don’t go to work and just want to be average. They want to win and they want to create something special, so, “Who are we going to become?” And then, very specifically, “What are we going to build? If this thing all works right, and if we sacrifice for another 10 years, 5 years, 20 years, whatever it may be, what is it that we will have built that will be significant and will make a meaningful difference in the community or the world?”

And if you can answer those three questions from a vision perspective, between you, the leader, and your leadership team, and you really start to build a compelling picture, like I said, you paint something that you can begin repeating over and over again, well, then you start to engage not only the heads but the hearts of your people.

When people actually come together in really healthy ways, and they will be more selfless to pursue a greater purpose, a greater mission, because they want to see that happen, instead of just coming to work today, and going, “Yup, just doing my job. Got to count 17 widgets. Counted 17 widgets. Built 17 widgets. Oh, well, ho-hum. Clock out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then when we think about a long-term vision, could you share with us a really excellent articulation of that in terms of the belonging, the becoming, and the building versus a not-so excellent articulation of that?

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah. So, here’s the thing, if I were to show you the Building Champions vision, it’s about eight pages long because the belong piece is answered by your convictions and the behaviors that go along with those convictions. Those behaviors are what begin to establish guardrails and build culture in an organization.

And then the second piece of belong is purpose. So, what’s your organization’s purpose? So, in the last several weeks, I’ve been with two organizations where one of them, being a global organization, we just got back from Germany a couple weeks ago, and they were putting together convictions, the things they’ll fight for, and then the correlating behaviors. And that exercise takes a day, but when you’re done with it, you come away with like five or six convictions. And an organization like them, some 20 plus behaviors that they want to hold one another accountable to so that they know how leaders and teammates should behave in order for that culture to be healthy and dynamic.

So, for me to share a healthy, or for me to share a good example of that, that’s me reading me through five or six convictions and a purpose, and then 20 some behaviors. And then you move to “Who are we going to become?” and that’s paragraph by paragraph, “Who are we going to become in the community? Who are we going to become from a technological perspective? Who are we going to become as a team? Who are we going to become in the vertical? Really, what are we going to be known for?” And that can just be paragraph by paragraph.

The more clear you are in painting that picture, then it’s easier to begin executing on tactics and strategies to go there. And then, on the final, “What are we going to build?” that can be just some Herculean compelling and vision. If you studied Collins and Porras years back, they called that the big hairy audacious goal. For Nike, it was, “Crush Adidas.” It’s something that’s so big that everyone is going to work for it. It’s going to probably be a career’s worth of energy. So, that’s me telling you, “Do you want me to spend 15 minutes and read you through a vision?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that just understanding that that’s what it looks like, and if you could maybe share with us some links, we’ll include in the show notes, that’d be cool. But maybe, for now, could you give us an example or two of a conviction and some associated behaviors that flow from them?

Daniel Harkavy
Oh, you bet. You bet.

Daniel Harkavy
So, here’s some real good work that was done by one of our clients. They did some work with our team to go through these convictions to behaviors exercise. And this organization is in the financial services industry, and their convictions are integrity, creativity, family, and fun. So, let’s take creativity and we’ll use that one to riff on. They have creativity, “We embrace and drive positive change and innovation.”

This is in an industry where technology is really transforming and disrupting how people have done work and how the consumer interacts with the financial services firm. Now, the behaviors that they’ve identified are, “We empower our associates to find creative ways to fix problems quickly in order to meet the needs of our clients, both internal and external. We intentionally create space to brainstorm solutions without judgment, and believe that great ideas come from anywhere in the organization.”

The next is, “We never stop asking ourselves how we can improve.” And the final behavior for creativity is, “We regularly share ideas and successful processes between departments to spark creative ideas across the company.” So, Pete, you think about an organization where your highest-paid leaders come together and, usually when it’s strategy, they’ll spend anywhere from a half day to two days together, anywhere from once a month to every quarter, those are in your higher-performing organizations, and what they will do is they will pre-game.

So, just like an athlete who’s getting ready to go out and compete when it’s game time, they go through that mental exercise. We’ve got a competitive rower who’s one of our clients. She tells us how she would walk around the boat and the exercises, she would do the breathing, etc. We train corporate athletes to do the same.

So, when you’ve got a team that’s coming together for a half day, full day, two days, every month, or every quarter, we have them pre-game by reading these documents, these guiding tools that they’ve used, so that their heads and their hearts are ready to engage in productive conversations instead of coming in, reactive answering the email, and then moving to the crisis du jour. They stay at that higher level, and reviewing these helps them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s clever in terms of because you know, as they do that, they’re like, “I’ve read this before,” and maybe if it’s quarterly or monthly, perhaps many, many times, and yet it’s like, “Ah, and here that elevates me to a different vantage point. This is what we’re up to, what we’re doing here,” as opposed to the immediate cross off a task for the day.

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah, it’s fascinating if you do any research on kind of brain science or neuroscience with regards to how people transform and elevate behavior. What the brain needs to do is it needs to focus on what matters most. And if it attends to, or focuses on what matters most, then it’s better equipped to prevent the noise and the distraction, but you need a system for working memory. And we humans, the best system we have for working memory is to repeat looking at or listening to something.

So, the more we read this, the more it becomes us, we attend to, and then manifest these behaviors because we’re reminding ourselves, “This is what we did together. This is who we said we would be. This is what we said was most important, and how I said I would show up as a highest-level servant or leader in the organization. And I have to hold myself accountable to this, and then healthy teams hold one another accountable, not just to the results but to these behaviors.” That’s where you see real lift with teams.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Daniel, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah, I would just say with regards to vision, it’s not a one and done, Pete. Great leaders are reminding their teammates of a vision and how everybody’s job connects to the purpose or the vision, and they’re doing it over and over again. My organization, Building Champions, is now 25 years old, and every single Monday, with the exception of holidays, at 7:30 a.m., Pacific Time, the entire team comes together on the screen, and we were doing this long before COVID and all that.

We’ve been coming together on the screen because we’ve got teammates spread throughout the country, but every Monday, 7:30 a.m. Pacific, for half an hour, the team comes together, we talk about business at hand, and then we always do a remind on the vision, which is some aspect of it. You have to be the chief reminding officer, as my buddy Pat Lencioni says. So, it’s something you live, it’s something you repeat, it’s something you’re always doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Daniel Harkavy
You know, I love one that has really impacted me, and it’s just as a result of the privilege of getting to walk side by side with so many humans in my business. And it’s an old Hebrew proverb, scripture, and it says, “So, teach us to number our days so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Pete, the reason I love that is because our heads are so easily deceived. We believe we can always get to what matters most tomorrow, “Oh, if I could just get through this one project, or through this busy season, then I can give my best to my best, then I’ll attend to my health, then I’ll start to focus more on that partner, spouse, friend, or whatever it may be.”

And that passage, “Teach me to number my days,” because every one of us have a finite number, “so that I may gain a heart of wisdom,” that conviction, so that I focus more on the here and now, and I’m more present, makes me a better human. And I’m now 57, but that thing really became meaningful to me when I was in my young 30s and I lost a couple friends who were young, and I realized, “Shoot, there’s no guarantee of 82 years on this planet.” So, it’s a guider for me, bud. Thanks for asking.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a piece of research?

Daniel Harkavy
Lately, if I were just to show you the books that are here that I’ve been diving into, new and old, it’s more of a theme. So, The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul, or the new Think Again by Adam Grant, or the old, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. And now I just jumped into this one The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

I’m fascinated by transformation and how our brains work. So, that’s been the area of extreme interest for me lately.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool?

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah, this will sound so self-promoting and quite possibly arrogant. But I will tell you that I wrote a book with a co-author and longtime client and friend, Michael Hyatt. I wrote a book in 2016 called Living Forward. And it’s all about a life-planning format, a life-planning framework, that helps you to figure out who you want to be in all areas of your life. And it has a profound impact on leaders, and the majority of our executive client leaders are all in their 50s.

And so many, over the last 25 years, have said, “Okay, huge gamechanger. I wish somebody would’ve walked me through that in my 20s.” So, it’s such an effective tool that we’ve just launched a not-for-profit to help America’s young adults, it’s called Set Path. SetPath.org, where we’re giving life-planning and mentorship, gratis, to young adults to help them to fight the drift, and to bring more intentionality and focus to their lives. That tool or framework is one of the most powerful that I’ve watched people experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And how about a favorite habit?

Daniel Harkavy
Dating my wife. I got a lot of habits but married for 33 years. We’ve been in each other’s lives for 46 and I got all sorts of crazy addictions, as you can see behind me. But dating my wife is the profitable one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that you’re really known for, and people quote you often?

Daniel Harkavy
I think a lot of it has to do with a few beliefs that I have, “Better humans make for better leaders.” I think I’m known for really instilling that. I think I’m known for being one that listens and does everything I can to instill meaning into conversations so that you felt heard. Then I believe self-leadership always precedes team effectiveness. And team effectiveness always precedes organizational impact.

So, just with the theme of your podcast and what you’re hoping to help people with, I would say I have a deep belief around that “Better humans make for better leaders,” and how you lead yourself is always something you’re working on because it impacts how you lead your team, and how you lead your team ultimately impacts how you impact the overall organization. So, if you can figure out how to make progress in each of those three domains – self, team, and org – what you can be doing to advance and make a greater difference on all three of those, you’ll do well. And that is a core belief of mine.

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

Daniel Harkavy
BuildingChampions.com, SetPath.org, and Daniel Harkavy on all of the social channels. As of late, I’m not as active but I do have a team that’s always pumping out content that our collective group puts out there, everything in the way of podcasts, to blog posts, to thoughts. And you can find this wherever you’re doing your social stalking and engagement.

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

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah, I do.

Daniel Harkavy
For many of you in their young 30s, you’ve recently purchased a home, many of you have made a life commitment decision with a partner or spouse, some of you now are starting to have little ones crawling up your legs and all around you and they’re fun and they’re crazy, and you’re trying to build your careers.

The book, Living Forward, I’m going to continue to sell for as long as I can because it’s all around building a life plan. But you can get the life-planning tool for free at Building Champions, costs you nothing. And I would tell you, if you want to figure out how to be awesome at work, you figure out how you can be awesome in life because work is only one aspect of who you are.

And the better you’re doing and the more value you’re adding in all areas of your life, you’ll actually be better at work. Absolutely true. So, you want to accumulate net worth in all aspects of your life, not just your career and your finances. You want to attend to all the areas of your life that bring you happiness and joy. And if you do that intentionally over the long haul, well, then you’re just going to be a heck of a better teammate and a better leader.

Living Forward, you can check that out. There’s a Living Forward book, website, you can see it on the Building Champions website. It’s wherever you buy books, but you can get the tool for free.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Daniel, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you tons of luck and success in your effective leading.

Daniel Harkavy
Pete, thanks for allowing me to join you and your tribe. I love your questions. I love your depth. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you and I wish you great success and happy holidays as well.

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

Jim Kouzes
Hey, Pete, thank you for the opportunity to chat with you today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your goods. But, first, I want to hear about your experience as JFK’s honor guard. What is the story here?

Jim Kouzes
Well, I was an Eagle Scout at 15 years of age and I guess back then that was a rare occurrence.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s pretty young, 15 versus 18.

Jim Kouzes
Yeah, 15 years old. And so, they asked a few of us, I think it was about a dozen, two groups of six, who were stationed at the base of the reviewing stand where President Kennedy and his family and some of his Cabinet and the spouses stood, and watched as the parade went by. This was when he was right in front of the White House years and years ago. And I stood there in the very, very below freezing cold. When I talk about it, to feel the frigid cold in my feet, it was so cold.

And it was one of those experiences in life that you can vividly remember, and as Kennedy unveiled his various initiatives, the Peace Corps was one of those, and I think it was that event that really inspired me both to join the Peace Corps but dedicate my life to service and education. And so, I joined the Peace Corps after university and that began this career that I’ve been in since, really, 1967.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. That’s cool. Did you get to shake hands or were you just sort of standing there with the honor guard duties?

Jim Kouzes
No, we later were invited to the White House.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Jim Kouzes
So, yes, we did meet the President and the First Lady much later after the inauguration.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, your career is storied. We were chatting, before I pushed record, that I read your book The Student Leadership Challenge when I was a student 15 plus years ago, and you’re still cranking out the hits. So, I’m excited to dig into your latest Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership. But maybe, first, could you share what have you discovered that is perhaps the most surprising and fascinating thing about leadership from all your decades of research? Like, is there something the average professional doesn’t quite seem to grasp about leadership?

Jim Kouzes
Well, there are a couple of things that come to mind immediately, Pete. The first of those is the most frequently-asked question we get, “Is leadership born or made?” And we’ve been asked that question since the very first edition and we still get asked that every time we speak or do a seminar or workshop or a class. And so, Barry and I have done the research on this, my co-author Barry Posner and I, and we have determined, based on our extensive research, that every leader we have ever met is born.

Pete Mockaitis
They emerge from the womb. Okay.

Jim Kouzes
Never known one not to be born unless it’s a fictional character that was made up in somebody’s mind. And so, that’s really not the question to be asked. The question to be asked is, “Can leadership be learned regardless of what you might be born with?” And the answer to that question is definitively yes. I wouldn’t have stayed in this career this long if it wasn’t.

And I think that reveals an assumption that people tend to make, that leadership is something special that only a few people have and you’re either born with it or you’re not, it’s a gift from the gods, it’s in your DNA, and it’s only a few people, a few charismatic individuals that might have the ability, or people who have lucky circumstances early on in their lives.

And we’ve found that that’s just not the case. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why we wrote this book directed at everyday leaders. Everyday People, Extraordinary Leadership is really about the fact that, and I say fact and I’ll give you some data in a minute, that supports the notion that we all have some capability to lead regardless of our circumstances. And I think that’s probably one of the most significant things we found in our research.

Just to give you some data, we looked, Pete, at the data from our leadership practices inventory which, as you may know from your reading of The Student Leadership Challenge is the assessment we use to determine whether people are engaged with these practices or not. And what we found was that the number of people who exhibit zero leadership capability, that is they actually scored the lowest score on our inventory, from observer standpoint the number is 0.00013%.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Jim Kouzes
So, that means 99.99987% of people have some leadership capability. Now, that doesn’t mean that everyone is at the 10 level of leadership, which is the highest number you can get on our scale. That is not the majority of the people, or the majority, or somewhere in the middle but it does indicate that most people, only one in one million people do not have leadership capability, and most people, 99.99987%, or 999,999 people have some leadership capability. And the issue really is then, “Can you increase the frequency with which you use leadership behaviors?” And, again, the answer to that is definitively yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to dig into some of the particulars of how that’s done. But maybe could you kick us off with an inspiring example of an everyday professional who, indeed, went ahead and exercised some extraordinary leadership?

Jim Kouzes
Absolutely. One of the people that I’ve had the opportunity to follow not only in writing the book but subsequently, in fact, this person, Erin Bern McKelroy…

Pete Mockaitis
Fine name.

Jim Kouzes
…and I would be doing a session together tomorrow, a virtual session together tomorrow, because we’ve stayed in touch. And Erin, during the pandemic, like all of us, was sitting at home on her couch feeling very anxious. Not anxious about the pandemic but anxious about what she was going to do to help her community during this difficult time.

And, given her background with the community, she was very service-minded, she had been involved in a lot of activities in her community in the Midwest, she decided that she had to do something about it as someone who is deeply involved in her community. And what she told us is that, she said, “I turned to my core values and took an internal audit of my heart and my mind.” And what came up for her was that service to others was the most important thing to her.

And so, she asked herself, “What can I do to be of service to others during this time?” And she came up with an initiative that would enable local restaurants, which were currently not open, to serve frontline workers and first responders by preparing meals for that group with funding that would be raised with the community.

And so, as a result of that effort, they raised $50,000. It doesn’t sound like a lot but given this small community that she lived in, it was considerable from 542 residents and 40 local establishments participated in preparing meals and delivering meals, and 8,130 frontline workers and first responders benefitted from that service. That’s just one example of many.

And she had no title, she had no position, people knew her in the community because she was involved but she wasn’t the manager, she wasn’t the boss. She was just someone who felt the need to take initiative during a challenging time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. Yeah, perfect in terms of example right there, someone who didn’t have that authority and, yet, made some big things happen very cleverly, helping multiple people in need of help in some great way. So, very cool. Well, then can you walk us through, how is that done? You’ve got your five practices of leadership model. Should we start there or how would you think about discussing the how?

Jim Kouzes
Yeah, I think that is the organizing framework for the book. And what we did was we took a look at data to validate this premise that we all have some leadership capability regardless of title, regardless of position, regardless of authority. We took the data from peer leaders only. So, these were people who had direct reports, these were individuals who were part of a team, part of a community, were not the boss of anyone, and, yet, were observed by others as leaders.

We took that data and we looked at the extent to which they engaged in these five practices and whether or not those individuals had a positive impact. And what we discovered, and we report out in the book with several graphs to illustrate this in data and story, is that individuals who are peers, who lead other peers, who exhibit these five practices more frequently are viewed by others as effective leaders and have an impact on their sense of whether they’re making a difference, the extent to which they understand the purpose and the vision, to the extent to which they are willing to work hard when necessary, those kinds of outcome measures, or engagement measures as some people call them.

And so, what we did in this book was to tell stories, like the one about Erin Bern plus the data around these five practices, which are model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re bringing back fond memories, Jim. Bring this back in the days, like, “Yeah, that holds up. Those do sound like the five things that make up leadership,” which is huge in and of itself because leadership is such a big amorphous fuzzy word, like, “How does one do that?” “Well, this is how you do it, these five practices.”

Jim Kouzes
Yes, absolutely. Like in Erin’s example, for example, I mentioned how she said she did an audit of her values. One of the things that exemplary leaders do, we call it model the way, is, first, clarify what’s important to them, their values and beliefs, and then they set an example for others by living them out. She came up with a vision of what could be, she saw this picture in her mind of these people working together to provide service to frontline workers and to first responders, engaging people in the local community who were providing food through their restaurants or the kitchens.

And she had this picture in her head, she was able to then envision it, and then inspire others to share it. And then, because it was a challenging time, they searched for innovative ways to do this because people were all locked down, and they experimented and took some risks, we call it challenge the process, and she involved a team of people to make this happen, we call that enable others to act. And along the way, they celebrated their little small wins as they went through this process, they encouraged each other’s hearts.

And as a consequence of that, Erin recently was awarded, in her local community through their leadership program in their local community, leader of the year as a result of that experience. So, that’s how individual peers live out these five practices.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s lovely in terms of that one story, we kind of walked through all five of those. So, then maybe we could spend a couple minutes on each of them. In terms of model the way, it starts with getting clear on values, beliefs, what’s important to you, and then living it. Any pro tips on how we can get a boatload of clarity on those dimensions without taking decades?

Jim Kouzes
Yeah, without taking decades. We’ve written a few books about this. Well, let me just give you a couple of those. Let’s take clarify values. And one of them is a little technique we can try on our own is imagine the following scenario, imagine you’re going to be away from your team that you’re wanting to lead or currently leading. You’re going to be away from your team for, let’s say, three months, and you’re going to be not able to communicate with that team while they’re doing their work in any way whatsoever but you can leave them a one-page memo, we call it credo memo, prior to being incommunicado.

What would you tell people are the principles by which they should conduct themselves in their work during your absence? What are the values and beliefs that should guide their decisions and actions? Write that one-page memo to your team.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. And it’s probably not going to have much to do with the specific software tools they should be using.

Jim Kouzes
Exactly. What are the principles that should guide their decisions and actions? And do it in one page. That forces people to have to think in short memorable ways in which they can communicate to others what they should use as guidelines for doing their work and making their decisions. That’s very effective. I’ll use other techniques like values cards. We have people do card sorts. But any way in which you can explore your head and your heart, as Erin talked about, and your soul, and think about, “What do I really believe in and what do I hope other people will believe in as we conduct our work?”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, could you give us a couple examples of that verbiage? I mean, when you say values, it could just be a word like integrity, or humility, courage, innovation. Or, how are you thinking about values and how they’re expressed here?

Jim Kouzes
Well, I’ll offer a couple of examples. Because there are about 150 values words in the English language and not all of them are understood similarly so you can’t hold 150 values simultaneously and have people follow those guidelines. It’s just too many. So, five to seven that will help people to understand. And integrity might be one of them but go the next step and ask yourself, “What does integrity look like to you? What does it look like in practice?”

So, integrity might look like to you in practice that, “When we’re with each other and we’re doing our work, we’re always straightforward and honest about what’s going on. We give each other honest feedback even when it’s tough, even when it’s challenging, but we do it in a way that’s empathetic and not critical of other person but really ways in which they can take that feedback and act on it.” So, we have to go the next step from the one-word integrity to give an illustration of what that might look like in practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you. So, that’s modeling the way. And how does one inspire a shared vision?

Jim Kouzes
Well, let’s take another technique that we like to use, and I call it the life technique, L-I-F-E. Think about the following scenario. At the end of the year, you’re going to be awarded leader of the year, and people who are your friends, your peers, your colleagues, your team members, your family are going to be there celebrating with you this award, and they’re going to be telling stories about you, and they’re going to tell about the lessons they learned from you, the ideals you stood for, the feelings that you have, that they have when around you, and the evidence that you’ve made a difference, you’ve had an impact.

L for lessons, I is for ideals, F is for feelings, and E is for evidence, L-I-F-E. If you’re hearing other people talk about you, what do you hope they would be saying about the lessons they learned, the ideals you stood for, the feelings they had when around you, and the evidence that you made a difference? Apply that to yourself, write that down, and then apply that to your team.

If your team is going to get team of the year, what would you hope others would say would be the lessons people learned from you, the ideals your team stood for, the feelings that people had when they were around your team, and the evidence that you made a difference? That kind of exercise helps people to think more deeply about how they hope to have an impact on others, how they hope to be seen by others. It helps them to see more clearly how they would envision themselves in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that so much and this is also kind of making me think of Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind, and like a eulogy, like what you want people to say even at your funeral, like if you win the leader of the year award, but you can even zoom out into other context to make it spark things.

And that reminds me, well, I did a brief stint of nonprofit consulting at The Bridgespan Group, and when we did our sort of farewells, someone said about me, I was very touched, and she said, with regard to me, and working and leading, collaborating, that I never made her feel dumb. And I thought, “Well, thank you. That’s a really kind thing to say about somebody that you work with,” because I don’t know about you, Jim, but I felt dumb a lot of times working with a lot of people. And that is, that’s something that you remember and it sticks with you as does the lessons, the ideals, and the evidence of the impact. And I think that’s a really nice tidy summation there.

Jim Kouzes
Pete, one of the things that’s most challenging for people to do, we have found from our research, is be forward-looking, and inspire a shared vision is the lowest-scoring practice of all the five practices. So, inspire a shared vision is extremely challenging for people to do. And, in fact, we found this find that this is probably the only practice which is correlated somewhat with age, meaning younger people are not as forward-looking as those with more experience.

Part of that is you’ve had more experience in the workplace and you do understand that you don’t get instant results in an organization. It takes a while to complete a project and so you need to be thinking ahead, particularly when you’re managing or supervising or leading other people. You need to think potential years down the road.

And so, it is a skill that’s developed over time but we can build that skill the more we begin to imagine scenarios out into the future and what we hope things will look like at the end. And so, we can draw on our past about things that we’ve accomplished in the past and kind of go back and review them to see how they went for us and what the end results were, reminding us that we can start at year one, and in year three, something gets realized, and imagine what went on during that time.

And then, coming to the present and reflect on what’s going on right now that is in need of some action, what are the trends, what’s happening, that can inform our vision today. And then let’s look into the future and project ahead and say, “Well, what’s going to be the impact of what’s happening right now down the road?” People do that all the time. Who would’ve known that you and I would be communicating this way 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, or 20 years ago? And, yet, here we are, using this technology that someone invented a while back.

One short little example of this, Barry Posner and I wrote the first edition of The Leadership Challenge starting in 1983 up through 1985 and did some editing and got published in 1987. We wrote the first edition of The Leadership Challenge using a software program called Kermit. It was available only to people at universities, it was only available to people in research institutions. It wasn’t publicly available. It was an internet program that allowed us to share files over the internet.

Today, people just assume that’s the way it’s been all along because we’re doing it all the time. But when we first started writing, there was no such thing as the internet publicly available. But somebody imagined that we could be doing this kind of thing now. What do you, as you’re working in your community and you’re thinking about what you can do, what is it that you imagine could happen if members of your community took an initiative to deal with a particular challenge?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, now, let’s talk about the third step there, challenge the process. How do we do that well?

Jim Kouzes
Well, challenge the process is essentially about searching for opportunities by kind of seizing the initiative. Again, going back to Erin Bern McKelroy’s personal best leadership experience that she told us about during the pandemic. She was sitting there on her couch just feeling anxious about wanting to do something because she’s always been involved with the community. So, she seized the initiative to do something and, also, by looking outward for ways to improve.

So, looking out in the community and ask yourself, “Well, how could we make this happen? We can get people from food service organizations, or restaurants and kitchens and commercial kitchens, and ask them to be involved. And then who could we be serving? Well, who’s the most important population in need?”

So, she looked outside, not just in her own head, but she looked outside in the community for ideas about what could be done to improve, then she ran that by some people who were close to her to test these ideas, and then they set up little experiments to try it out, then things began to work and come together. So, it’s about searching for opportunities by seizing the initiative and looking outward for innovative ways to improve. And then, by experimenting and taking risks, by constantly generating little ideas that can help them to take action on that vision that they had.

Pete Mockaitis
Any pro tips for sparking more ideas when you’re in the heat of things?

Jim Kouzes
So, here’s one idea that I think anyone can use that will help them be more curious and more innovative and creative. The idea, actually, talking about looking outward for ideas, came to us from a participant in a workshop. We had this idea of sitting down and asking your team at least once a week, “What have you done over the last week to improve so that you’re better this week than you were a week ago?”

And so, we offered that suggestion, and one of the participants in the workshop followed through and implemented that idea and came back to us four weeks later, and said, “You know what happened? The first time I asked my team to think about this question, ‘What have you learned in the last week to improve? What have you done in the last week to improve so that you’re better this week than you were a week ago?’ The first time that I asked that question,” he said, “…no one had an answer. They kind of looked at me silly, and said, ‘He’s been to a workshop. This will pass.’”

He said, “The second week, about 25%, 30% of the people had a response. Those conscientious folks who thought maybe I’d ask this question again, 75% had it the third week. You know what happened on the fourth week? They asked me what I had done in the last week to improve so I was better than I was a week ago.” So, we knew that that worked. It stuck.

So, you need to come up with some way in which you ask a question or you set up a situation in which people have to think about what they’ve done to improve, to learn, to innovate, to create. You can take people shopping for ideas. Think about organizations that do things not identical to yours but if you’re in the service business, other people in the service business that you might go and observe, who seem to be very creative and innovative. Go shopping for ideas from other people. Anything that we can do to get people to exercise curiosity about themselves and about others will be helpful to improving.

So, I like that technique of asking people, “What have you learned in the last week, or what have you done in the last week to improve so you’re better this week than you were a week ago?”

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s also, in and of itself, illustrative about how change can unfold. At first, it’s like, “Okay, blowing this guy off.” And then the second time, a couple people get on board. And then, with that consistency, there it goes, you’re off to the races.

Jim Kouzes
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you tell us now about the fourth practice there, enable others to act?

Jim Kouzes
Absolutely. So, enable others to act is about two things. It’s about fostering collaboration by building trust and facilitating relationships, and then about strengthening individuals by increasing their self-determination and developing their confidence. So, here’s another technique or method that can be helpful, again, one of those things that you can do almost instantaneously.

Whenever you are engaged in an interaction with another person or a group of people, whether it’s one people, ten people, or a hundred people, ask yourself the following question prior to the interaction, “What can I do in this interaction with this person or a group of people that will make them feel more powerful, efficacious, strong, and capable after we’re through with this interaction than when we started? What’s one thing I can do to make other people feel stronger, more capable, better and more capable than maybe even they thought they were?”

It might be simply to listen to that person or that group of people. It might be to offer a suggestion. It might be to say, “Well, I know somebody who might be able to help you with this.” It might be, “You know, I think there’s a development experience that would be useful to you here. Let me see if I can get you connected with someone who can help you with that.”

Anything that you can do to make other people feel more powerful, whether it’s in a one-minute interaction, or a one-hour interaction, or longer, is something that will help other people feel stronger and more trusting of you because you’re paying attention to them and their needs.

Pete Mockaitis
And let’s talk about the opposite of that. How might a well-intentioned everyday leader accidentally or unintentionally disable others from acting?

Jim Kouzes
Let me give you a specific example to frame this because I think it’s really important that we talk about this. This is probably one of the most important topics we can discuss, “How do we make other people feel enabled or how do we make them feel disabled?”

So, in response to that question, here’s a study, one of my favorite studies that I think will help to frame this. So, researchers were doing an experiment on collaboration and trust using what’s called the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s a zero-sum game that’s often used in experiments on cooperation and collaboration.

And they set up the experiment in a very unique way. They told people that one group of people, half the participants in this experiment, that they were playing the Wall Street Game. And they told others, the other half, that they were playing the Community Game. What they were really looking at was the extent to which people would cooperate. The rules of the game were the same, were identical, and the only difference was the name of the game – Wall Street Game, Community Game.

Who would you guess was more cooperative, those playing the Wall Street Game or the Community Game?

Pete Mockaitis
I would guess the Community Game.

Jim Kouzes
Exactly. And that’s the point. The only difference was the name of the game not the game itself. But those who played the Wall Street Game, only about 37% were cooperative on their initial move and subsequent moves. Those playing the Community Game were 70% cooperative, and that continued throughout the game.

We, as leaders, have impact in just one or two words so when we speak as leaders, we, essentially, are like viruses, to use a current example. We spread things and we can either spread positive behaviors or negative behaviors in just a couple of words. And, as leaders, we need to really reflect on the language we’re using in order to have a positive impact in people because we know that that positive impact will produce better results.

So, do you want to be playing the Wall Street Game? If you want to be playing the Wall Street Game where people are uncooperative with each other and try to compete and beat the other person and never have a win-win solution, then call it the Wall Street Game. But if you want people to be cooperative, you need to play the Community Game.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you.

Jim Kouzes
So, again, I think that helps to frame our understanding of this concept. It is a lot about language and behavior. As leaders, you have to be the first to trust. You have to be the person who creates a climate of trust for others, makes it possible for people to cooperate in a trusting manner. So, take a cue from that research that you are having an impact, either positive or negative, you’re either being transformational or toxic. Which do you choose to be?

Pete Mockaitis
And, finally, how do we go about encouraging the heart?

Jim Kouzes
Encouraging the heart is, again, about a couple of things. One is about recognizing contribution from individuals. What have people done that you can show your appreciation for? And, secondly, celebrating the values and the victories as a group of people. So, we need both to recognize individuals for what they do as well as we have to celebrate, as teams, the milestones we’ve reached and the values we’ve been consistent with.

One of my favorite examples comes from Tom Malone, he wasn’t an everyday leader in this particular case but he was a great example to all everyday leaders, to all leaders. He had a small…a medium-sized factory. And, as the owner of the company, he would often walk the floor. It was a relatively small organization and so he had the chance regularly to walk the floor. And one day, he saw one of his manufacturing employees put a part in a refrigerator, in the freezer of a refrigerator, and he was really curious about that.

So, he went up to this individual, he said, “Lala, excuse me, I’m really confused. Why did you put that part in the freezer?” And he said, “Well, I put it in the freezer because it was a little too large to fit in the hole,” this was a rod that went into a component. “The rod was a little too big and I knew if I put it in the freezer, it would shrink a little bit and be able to fit into the part. I wouldn’t be wasting either part.”

And then Tom realized that Lala, is what his name was, put this part in the freezer because he was committed to the value of zero rejects called the total quality control. And later, at a celebration, which they had weekly on the floor, Tom called this out, told this story and said, “He is an example of the kind of person we’re looking for who stays dedicated both to his job, to our value of zero reject quality, and to the productivity of this organization.”

So, as a leader, be out there and about looking for individuals who are doing things that you can then tell stories about. And when you tell that story, you’re communicating to others who are part of that team that they are individually making a contribution, and “Here’s one of your colleagues, one of your peers, who’s done that. This is an example to you of the kind of behavior that we’re looking for throughout this organization.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Jim, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jim Kouzes
I would only say that you’ve done a great job, Pete, with your questions, but I think the thing that I want to emphasize and I want to say most, Pete, is that every person has a capability to improve their leadership skills and abilities. And using the five practices of exemplary leadership as a guide, find ways in which you can more frequently engage in modeling, inspiring, challenging, enabling and encouraging.

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

Jim Kouzes
Quote from one of the people we interviewed early on, Don Bennett, who, in response to a question of “How did you do that, Don? How did you climb 14,410 feet on one leg and two crutches to the top of Mount Rainier?” and He looked down at his one leg, the first amputee to climb Mount Rainier, and said, “One hop at a time.”

I think of that quote every day when I’m stuck somewhere, and if I may add a second quote from Don. When I said to Don, “You were the first amputee ever to climb Mount Rainier, the first to do it. What was the most important lesson you learned from climbing that mountain?” And he said, “You can’t do it alone.”

People often think about leadership as an individual solo act that is just unique to the person, but Don made me recognize very early on in our research that it really is not about what one person does. It is about what a team of people does together. Any leader who claims credit personally for accomplishments is not going to have the kind of impact that a leader like Don who attributes his success to the team.

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

Jim Kouzes
My current favorite, Pete, is the newest book from Adam Grant.

Pete Mockaitis
Think Again.

Jim Kouzes
You got it. You knew that book.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s a great Kindle as well.

Jim Kouzes
Yeah. I’m sure you have the same stack or a similar stack. Yeah, but Think Again is a wonderful new book. Highly recommend it to anyone. And I think, particularly around this notion of challenging the process, it’ll help us all to recognize that we all have blind spots, we all are always in need of thinking again about the way in which we think.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Jim Kouzes
You know, one of my favorite tools is Grammarly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Jim Kouzes
As a write, I use it all the time. Again, I work alone writing, and there’s often not an editor nearby, but I just run my texts through Grammarly, and say, “Oh, yeah, I see how I could do that better here.” So, that probably is my favorite tool that I use in my day-to-day work.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a favorite nugget, something you share that people quote back to you again and again?

Jim Kouzes
I would say that there are a couple of them. One is “Credibility is the foundation of leadership.” “If you don’t believe in the messenger, you won’t believe the message,” is often something that people recall from our work. People also frequently say, “The best leaders are the best learners,” another line which we wrote. But I think my favorite is, “Leadership is not an affair of the head. Leadership is an affair of the heart.”

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

Jim Kouzes
I think the best way to find out the scope of everything that we are up to these days is the LeadershipChallenge.com. So, LeadershipChallenge.com website, which is where we have programs and books and activities. And then follow me at Twitter @Jim_Kouzes.

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

Jim Kouzes
I would say that my challenge is the following to all of us as leaders, whether with a title or as peers, that our wish, ours, mine and Barry’s, is that you make the most of every opportunity to lead, that you stretch yourself, and be willing to learn continually from the challenges in front of you, and that you step out to the edge of your capabilities, and then ask a little bit more of yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Jim, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and adventure in your extraordinary leadership.

Jim Kouzes
Pete, thank you very much. I really appreciate this opportunity to talk with you. So, we’ll sign off and I hope that we get to do this again. Love them and lead them.

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

Michael Hyatt
Thank you, Pete. I appreciate you having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, I’m looking forward to dig into this. We’re going to talk about visions and leaders. So, I want to kind of hear from your own experience. Tell us, who’s the greatest leader you’ve encountered firsthand and what was their vision like?

Michael Hyatt
Oh, man. Yeah, I would say probably John Maxwell. He’s well-known in corporate circles for sure but I had the privilege of being his publisher for about a decade and got to know him pretty close. And he was sort of my unofficial mentor. But, yeah, he had a tremendous amount of charisma and was always able to just be super relatable. And the thing that I loved about him the most is he led from his heart.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we’ve had him on the show a couple of times, I’m a fan, so right on. Very cool. And I’m curious, did you have any particular moments with John that really kind of hit you, like, “Hmm, yeah, do that. Do that in my leadership”?

Michael Hyatt
Yeah, there were a couple of times. When I was the CEO at Thomas Nelson Publishers, which was a pretty large publicly-held company, I remember him telling me when I first took that job, he said, “You know, you hear people say all the time it’s lonely at the top.” He said, “I just want you to know that’s a choice. You don’t have to be lonely at the top. That’s totally a choice.” And I’ve always remembered that because I thought there’s a real reason why you need friends outside of work, and why you need people that you can relate to outside of work that can kind of understand you, get you, be an encouragement to you, and support you when things are not going that great at work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that’s a handy tip. Excellent. So, well, let’s dig into your latest upcoming book here, “The Vision Driven Leader.” So, I’m curious, that sounds like that’s how leaders should operate. But if leaders are not driven by vision, what is driving them?

Michael Hyatt
Yeah, the thing that’s driving them typically is the tyranny of the urgent.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Hyatt
Most leaders I know that are leading are not driven by vision, and I think that most of them think they should be driven by vision but it’s not taught in business school, there are only about two books that I could find on the topic on Amazon, nobody’s really written about it, and because there aren’t a lot of visionary leaders in the marketplace, people just assume that it’s a special kind of charisma, or clairvoyance, or gifting, and most people just kind of go, “I don’t have the vision thing so I guess I can’t lead from vision,” so they just kind of do the next thing that comes across the plate.

And being driven from vision is a very different way to live. It’s a way to live by design, a way to run your business or your department or your division by design, because the alternative, Pete, is to drift and nobody ever drifted to a destination they would’ve chosen. And if you’re just in reactive mode all the time, then you’re really squandering resources, you have lack of focus, lack of attention, and if you can consolidate all that around a vision, it changes everything.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m intrigued by your assertion there that there’s only a couple of books on Amazon. I guess I think that, hey, a vision is one of like the main things you got to have as a leader, and you should craft and communicate and inspire through that. And so, you’re saying that is a rarity. And so then, I want to kind of zero in on the distinction here. So, I guess there’s a lot of books that kind of talk about vision. You say there’s only about two that do what exactly?

Michael Hyatt
Yeah, I think the issue is that people confuse it with mission, and people think that a vision has got to be something that’s short, brief, clever, something you can slap on a coffee mug or put on a T-shirt, and that’s really not robust enough to guide you. But just to make it clear, mission and vision seems similar but I differentiate the two in the book.

A mission provides day-to-day clarity by kind of defining the identity and scope of the business. And an effective mission statement keeps on you task by answering some certain questions. But a vision is really not about now, and a mission is about now. A vision is about then. A mission is typically short, something that you can repeat almost from memory, but a vision is going to be more robust blueprint of the future that you’re trying to create. So, I think it’s important to differentiate those two things from the other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then let’s zero in. So, the subtitle of your book, we’ve got 10 questions there that focus efforts, energize team, and enable scaling. Well, I love powerful questions. So, can you lay some of them on us here?

Michael Hyatt
Yeah, like the first one is, “Are you a leader or a manager?” And this is a fundamental question, both of them are important, but they’re distinct functions. Sometimes they’re the same. Sometimes your role, they require that you have a leadership role and a management role, but let me kind of differentiate the two.

First of all, leaders create vision while managers execute vision. Think of it this way, if you’re leading, you’re leading people somewhere, otherwise you’re just taking a walk. That somewhere is your vision. If you don’t have a vision, you’re just taking a walk. Leaders inspire and motivate. Managers maintain and administer. Leaders take risks, managers control risks. Leaders stay focused on the horizon, while managers have their eye on short-term goals and objectives. Again, both are important but the essence of leadership, the foundation, the thing that’s kind of the number one priority is vision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then I guess a couple of clarifiers. One, can a person be both a leader and a manager?

Michael Hyatt
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
And I imagine you’re doing some activities that are more in the leader column, and some activities that are more in the manager column, depending on the hour of the day.

Michael Hyatt
Yeah. Well, let me give you an example of where we’ll separate it in two people, but I really think this is a skillset and something that anybody can develop, and this is why I wrote “The Vision Driven Leader” because it’s my conviction that anybody can be a vision-driven leader.

But Steve Jobs is probably the most iconic biggest example, somebody that was a visionary leader. His wife, at his funeral, said that the thing that Steve brought to the table was that he didn’t just see what reality lacked, but he set about to try to remedy it. So, he saw what was missing and went about to try to remedy that.

And so, you can remember when the iPhone was introduced. Steve wasn’t just a guy that said, “Hey, let’s make an incremental improvement on the phone keyboard,” which was very prevalent at the time. No, he said, “Let’s completely eliminate that. Let’s make it software-driven. Let’s let it be operated with one finger,” and he had one button on that initial iPhone. Of course, now it doesn’t even have a button. But that was an iconic kind of vision.

Meanwhile, you’ve got Tim Cook who is really the manager, who is behind the scenes optimizing the supply chain, making sure that costs could be controlled, risks could be managed, and it took both of those guys to really develop an amazing company. But here’s the thing, when Steve died, everybody, all the press, all the tech press, people on Wall Street said, “Well, I guess that’s the end of Apple. Maybe they’ll last for a while, maybe they can coast on their momentum, but the visionary is gone.” Not so fast.

Tim Cook stepped into the role of leading that company and became visionary in his own way. It’s different than Steve’s but it was still visionary. And guess what the stock price did. Basically, the market cap of that company tripled under Tim’s leadership. So, the company has gone on to amazing heights that even Steve couldn’t take it to. So, yeah, so I think these kinds of roles can be…they are roles, they’re not the essence of who you are. Anybody could be a vision-driven leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good line there. They are roles and not the essence of who you are. And so then, you say that we are often kind of caught up in the urgent and the stuff that we’re handling, and the vision is bigger and it’s kind of where we’re going. So, could you just sort of lay down a few articulations of visions for us so we can get that distinction crystal clear, like, “Oh, that”?

Michael Hyatt
Let me give you a definition. So, when I’m talking about a vision, I’m not talking about a vision statement. A statement is not sufficient. I’m talking about, and the word I use in the book is a vision script. It’s a written document that’s three to five pages in length, it articulates an imagined future, at least three years into the future, maybe five years or more depending on your industry, it’s superior to the present, it motivates you, it’s written in the present tense, and it guides you and your team in day-to-day decision-making.

And it’s organized, and I talk about this in the book, around four key components: the future of your team, that’s where it’s got to start, the future of your products, the future of your marketing, and the future of your impact. And those are just sort of the objective, measurable metrics, things like financial size, or market reach, number of customers, web visits, or something like that.

But the reason it starts with your team is your team is going to be the primary means by which you realize this imagined future. They’re going to be the ones who are going to help you bring that into reality. Your team, the people you attract, the culture that you’re creating is the single biggest driver of operating results. This is why some leaders can’t seem to make any progress in their organizations. They’re fighting against this invisible wall of culture. So, you’ve got to reimagine something different and begin to create that. That’s why the team component of that goes first.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I also want to get your view, so if you’re not at the super senior, or CEO, or just a notch or two below level, how do you envision – huh, vision – these vision scripts or principles playing out for someone who has a small team or someone who does not yet have formal direct reports but is doing that influencing across functions and such?

Michael Hyatt
Well, it totally works at any level. So, I talk in the book about when I became sort of the mid-level manager at Thomas Nelson Publishers. I was given a responsibility for one of our 14 book divisions. So, I was two steps removed from the CEO, I was in charge of this division, and I discovered, much to my surprise, a few days after I took the job, that that division was number 14 out of 14 in every important metric. They had the slowest revenue growth. It was the least profitable. In fact, it had lost money. Team morale was terrible. The division was failing.

So, the CEO said to me, he said, “How long is it going to take you to turn this division around?” And so, I said to him, I said, “I’m not sure but I think probably about three years.” The first thing I did was I booked an off-site retreat. I went away for 24 hours, and I just tried to get clear on what I wanted to create for the future. This is the first time I’d ever done this but I thought, “This thing is such a mess that I’ve got to imagine something different that’s going to motivate us and something that we can build toward.”

And I’ve been heavily influenced, though I’ve never met him, by Stephen Covey, and habit number two in the seven laws is “Begin with the end in mind.” So, I began to think to myself, “Okay, what is it that I want to create here?” And I started writing down everything I could think of, and I end it up, this is like an early version of the vision script, I end it up with 10 statements or 10 bullet points about the reality that I wanted to see in the future.

So, for example, let me give you an idea. So, that division had not had any bestselling books for years, and so I wrote down, “We’re publishing five New York Times’ Business Bestsellers per year.” So, literally, I wrote that down like it was a present reality. I said, “We’re publishing 48 books a year.” Now, the interesting thing was, at the time that I wrote that, we’re publishing 120 books a year, so I was essentially proposing that we cut the list by more than half because I felt like the increased focus, the concentration of resources, would better ensure the success of each of the books. So, it was a radical thing.

Another example, I said, “All of our employees are maxing out their bonuses,” because I wanted our team, I wanted us to earn the maximum bonus because I knew that would motivate people, and people can work for that because they would have the incentive to succeed because they would directly benefit if we did.

So, after that retreat, I came back with those 10 items written down, and I got together my inner circle, a handful of direct reports, and I said, “Look, I’ve been thinking about the future, and I’ve written some things down, this is kind of the beginning of a vision, but I don’t have it perfect, and I need your help. This is a rough draft. It’s wet cement. I’m probably missing some things, there are probably some things I don’t have quite right, and I need your input.” So, I involved them, I invited them to a conversation, where over the course of the next few weeks, we collectively got clearer on what it was that we wanted to create.

Once we got that together, then we shared it with the entire team. It was so motivational, everybody was inspired by it, we got excited about it, we let that be an operating document that informed our daily actions, and we worked hard. It didn’t take us three years like I told the CEO. It only took us a year and a half. We went from number 14 to number one in revenue growth, number 14 to number one in profit margin, and that division remained the most profitable division at Thomas Nelson Publishers for 10 years, for a decade, until I left the company in 2011.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, that is quite lovely in terms of once you start to describe specifically those bits in a present reality, it just naturally stirs something inside you, like, “Yes, I want that.”

Michael Hyatt
Definitely.

Pete Mockaitis
“Let’s go get that.” And, now, a few things that leap to mind here are, one, how do you deal with the potential cynicism or lack of belief, like, “Yeah, Michael, that’d be great but, I mean, come on, you know, not in the cards. Yeah, I’d love that yet here we are”?

Michael Hyatt
Yeah. Well, cynicism is really a cancer, and it’s a really hard thing to deal with in a lot of organizations because people have dealt with a lot of disappointment, they listened to leaders that articulated a vision but not rolled up their sleeves to help. It seems so pie in the sky. People have to believe it. And I think it really starts with you as the leader. You’ve got to be sold first. If you’re not buying what you’re selling, you don’t have a chance of selling to other people. You’ve got to be able to believe it, and you’ve got make it compelling.

This is like so many things in any kind of organization. It comes down to sales. We’re all in sales. I don’t care what your role is, if you can’t sell your ideas to your boss, if you can’t sell it to the people working for you, you’re not going to be successful. So, what you go to do is you’ve got to tune in to the most popular radio station on earth that everybody listens to, and that’s WII-FM, “What in it for me?” That’s the question that everybody is asking, and so you’ve got to be able to answer that question when you’re selling the vision.

What’s in it for you? It might not just be financial compensation, although that helps, and that’s why I put the one bullet point about maximizing bonuses, but it’s also for a sense of meaning. People work because they want to be connected to a larger story. They want to feel like they’re a part of something meaningful, something that’s making a difference, something that’s making a dent in the universe. And this is particularly important for the millennial generation. Millennials often get a bad rap because people say they don’t have the work ethic, they’re entitled, whatever. I’ve got an entire company full of millennials. They’re the hardest working people I know. But the reason they are is because they’re connected to a vision they believe in.

And that’s another key too. It’s got to be their vision. It starts with you as the leader, you can’t outsource this, you can’t delegate it, it’s got to start with you, but in the process, it’s got to become ours. It’s got to become a collective vision, otherwise people are going to be disengaged, and they’re going to be cynical, and they’re not going to work towards the fulfillment of it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, once we’ve got it situated in terms of we’ve got a draft, we got some inputs, we’ve got it fleshed out and revised based upon that, what are some of the key questions and next steps to turn that into specific actions that starts bringing it closer to that vision?

Michael Hyatt
Yeah, one of the things I talk about in the second part of the book, I talk about, “Is it clear? Is it inspirational? But is it practical?” This has got to translate into your daily actions. And here’s what the linkage looks like. There’s so much emphasis on most corporations on execution, “We got to execute. If we could execute better, we can accomplish more.” Well, here’s the thing, if the execution isn’t based on a vision, you’re going to create a lot of sideways energy, a lot of unproductive fake work. But the vision acts as a filter. It enables you to separate opportunities from distractions.

And so often, the more successful you become, distractions show up masquerading as opportunities, and this is why people get overwhelmed, like companies have too much to do, why people work in 70 to 80 hours a week. The vision focus is that effort. But once you’ve got a clear vision, then you can ask yourself the question, again, the three-year time horizon, “Based on that, what do our annual goals need to be for this year so that we can achieve that vision over the course of the next three years?” I recommend seven to 10 goals on an annual basis. That’s got to be further disseminated or distilled down to two to three goals per quarter.

Then, from that, we come down to the weekly priorities. And everybody’s got to have weekly priorities that are based on those goals, and I recommend no more than three. Probably you got a thousand things you could do this week, but what are the three most important? And then, finally, what are your big three daily tasks? The average person has, and we’ve done a lot of research on this, but the average person who uses a task management system has 15 tasks on any given day that they have to do. As a result of that, they wake up feeling overwhelmed. Even if they get eight of those done, more than half, they end up with seven that are unchecked, they go to bed defeated. They’re playing a game they can’t win.

Instead, if you take sort of the Pareto principle, that 20% of the effort drives 80% of the results, there’s probably 20% of those 15 tasks that are really going to move the needle, that are the high-leverage activities that really, really matter. So, 20% of 15 is 3, so identify your three big tasks for the day, declare it a victory if you get those three done, and do that day after day after day, and you’ll incrementally move toward that vision. And that’s exactly what my coaching clients do, that’s what the leaders we consult with do, and that has made all that difference, and it links that vision with daily action.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve given me some fun data there, those 15, and I guess, in practice, most of the time, people do not accomplish all 15, and then you do have those carryovers that are frustrating. And so, I’ve thought a lot about the 80/20 Principle and I am…it’s funny how you talk about do those three and you get to declare a victory. Sometimes I wonder, it’s like, “Well, there’s those three things, but what about the amount of time? It’s like have I really earned a victory if I did those three things in one hour?” And so, take it.

Michael Hyatt
Yeah. Well, I was going to say, it’s not about how long it takes. Here’s the thing, success is not about how much you accomplish, it’s whether you’re accomplishing the right things. And this is the question that real leaders ask, they’re not asking, “How much could I get done?” but, “Can I get the right things done?”

And as it turns out, there’s not that many things you have to do to contribute toward the vision. Now, let me just give you a case in point. So, I have about 500 business coaching clients, many of those are business owners, some of them are entrepreneurs, some of them are just leading inside a corporation. But on average, people that are responsible for revenue in my business coaching clients, on average, in the first 12 months in the program, using this kind of vision-driven approach, their business grows by 62%. On average.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Hyatt
That’s interesting all by itself. But here’s what makes it even more interesting. On average, they shaved 11 hours off their work week. They’re able to achieve more by doing less because they’re not fixated on all these stuff that doesn’t contribute to the vision. They’re focused on the stuff that contributes to the vision and to the future reality that they’re trying to create. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah. Well, that is exciting for all the overworked people experiencing that. All right. So, we’ve got the crafting the vision, breaking it down into the particular activities. I want to hear, when you are going about communicating this, what are some of your top do’s and don’ts for conveying it effectively with other people?

Michael Hyatt
Well, the first thing I would practice is something I call cascading communication, but it’s got to begin with a written vision statement. So, it’s not enough to just have this rattle around in your brain, let it be vague, or ambiguous, or just kind of floating out there. You’ve got to express it, and so that’s why I always say you’ve got to write the vision. That will force clarity. By writing it down, that forces clarity. So, you’re going to end up with a vision script, again, a document that’s three to five pages in length.

You’re going to practice cascading communication which means that you’re not just going to like go back, get your entire department together, or your entire division, or your entire company, and then just read it. No, that’s not the way you want to do it. You want to submit this, first of all, to a small, small group, your inner circle. Then you want to roll it out to the next level down, and then the next level down. This gives an opportunity for input, so if you’ve got some glaring errors, or some things that you’ve absolutely missed, or don’t have quite right, you’ve got a chance to correct those before you roll it out to a broader group.

So, each time you roll it out, there should be a little bit less change. But even when you roll it out to the entire group, and you’re standing in front of whatever organization you preside over, whether, again, that’s a department, or a division, or the entire company, you basically want to say, “Look, we’re crafting, we’ve crafted and we’ve worked on a vision of the future. This is a reality that we want to create. And we, as a leadership team, or a management team,” or whatever you call it inside your organization, “we’re committed to this future, but we can’t do it ourselves. We need your help. There may be things here that we’ve missed, and we want to invite you to contribute to that and to give us some feedback.” So, you want feedback.

And, by the way, you’ve got to reframe negative feedback as something that’s truly helpful. If somebody sees something you’re missing, I would much rather know from a teammate than to roll it out into the marketplace and figure out when the market doesn’t accept it, or you embarrass yourself, or fall flat on your face. So, you want to involve everybody in that process, so it does involve cascading communication, that’s one thing.

Second thing, it’s not a one-and-done kind of thing where you finish your vision script, you make a big announcement, “Ta-dah!” and then you put it on the shelf and forget it. No. Here’s the thing. Vision leaks. Andy Stanley talks about this in his book on vision, but vision leaks. What that means is that in a daily grind, as we’re trying to work through all the tasks, and we’re trying to deal with all the incoming stuff that we’re reacting to, it’s very easy to forget where this task you’re doing fits into the bigger story. That’s why leaders, true leaders, have to be the voice for the vision. If they’re not giving voice to that vision, the vision might as well not exist. The only thing that keeps it alive is you constantly repeating it.

Another story, 2009, I was in the teeth, the midst of the great recession. It was a horrendous time. Our sales have fallen by 20% that first year, the entire industry had fallen by about…the book publishing industry had fallen by about 20% that year, I mean, it was rough. And I remember complaining to my executive coach, I said, “I am so tired about talking about the vision. I feel like it’s kind of a lost cause at this point. We got to re-strategize, and I’m tired of hearing myself talk about it.” She said, “Well, I’ll tell you what, when you’re tired of hearing yourself talk about it, you’re half done. This is the time people need to hear the vision because people are discouraged, people are not seeing the results of their work. They need to be reminded why they’re working, what’s important, what you’re trying to create.”

So, I rolled up my sleeves, redoubled my effort, and kept preaching the vision. I had to keep it alive, and I really think that was the only thing that got us through the great recession, was the belief that we were creating a future that was bigger than the recession and would come to pass once we got through the other side of the recession, which we did.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very cool. Well, let me follow up on your point with regard to that this applies to all folks at all levels. So, how do you recommend you apply some of these questions, or principles, or approaches when you got no direct reports whatsoever? Do you make a vision for yourself, and a plan for yourself, or how do you think about those matters?

Michael Hyatt
Absolutely, because you’re still presiding over an area where you have responsibility. And if you’re responsible for any kind of results, you can have a vision for what those results can be. So, to give you an example, our social media manager has zero direct reports, but she’s got her own vision script about what it is she’s trying to create for us in terms of our social media channels, in terms of she’s got an outside team, very small team of contractors. She’s got one contractor that she’s working with, that’s her team. What’s her product? Well, it’s the posts. What’s the marketing? How does she do this? What’s the impact she’s wanting to have?

But for her to get crystal clear on that, the alternative, again, if you don’t design the future, you’re going to get to the future. You’re just going to drift into it and you’re going to drift to a destination that you didn’t design using one that’s not desirable. So, I really believe that everybody at every level needs to have a vision for what it is they’re trying to create in their role, even if they’re just a solopreneur, even if they’re one person in a department with no direct reports, or they have a small department or a division. It doesn’t matter. You still need vision. Begin with the end in mind.

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

Michael Hyatt
Well, I would say that inevitably when you’re coming up with a vision, you’re going to experience resistance, there are going to be challenges. Just because you come up with a vision, it doesn’t mean that, all of a sudden, like magic, this begins to start happening. Steven Pressfield wrote an incredible book called “The War of Art.” And one of the things he talks about in that book is the resistance. And anytime you purpose to make an improvement, I don’t care whether it’s trying to lose weight, improve your marriage, improve your business metrics, whatever it is, you’re going to encounter opposition.

And it may just be in the form of something that’s not direct or personal, just challenges in the marketplace or whatever, or maybe just people that oppose your vision. But, regardless, the value of a vision is when you get into that messy middle, when you’ve invested too much to quit, and you’re not sure you have the resources to finish, it’s that vision that gives you the tenacity to stay in the hunt, and follow through, and not quit, not bail out before you realize it. So, this has a really practical consequence for staying engaged when you want to quit.

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

Michael Hyatt
Yeah, I would say one of my favorite quotes about writing that’s apropos to a vision is “Thoughts disentangle themselves passing over the lips and through pencil tips.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michael Hyatt
I think the research that I’ve done in my book “Free to Focus,” which is my last book, was the importance of actually limiting the amount of time you work so you increase your focus and your productivity. One of the things I discovered in that process is that once you work more than about 50 hours a week, you actually go backwards in terms of productivity and accomplish less. So, all these people that are out there advocating what I call the hustle fallacy, you need to work 70 or 80 hours a week, or like a loan you need to work 80 to 100 hours a week, they don’t have the science on their side. People that are more productive and accomplishing bigger results are people that are putting firm boundaries around their work and have a life outside of work.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s the magic number or the range?

Michael Hyatt
Oh, 50.

Pete Mockaitis
Fifty, all right.

Michael Hyatt
Yep.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Michael Hyatt
I’m typically a fan of the last book I read, and one of the most recent ones I read that I really loved was Jason Fried’s book “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work.” He advocates some of the same kind of concepts. But if I had to point to a book, one of my favorites of all time is, I’ve already mentioned, is Stephen Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Michael Hyatt
The tool I’m using the most right now is a tool called Dynalist. Have you ever heard of it?

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’ve seen it listed but I’ve never used it. Tell me more.

Michael Hyatt
It’s an outlining tool. I used to use a tool called Workflow. And I tend to think in hierarchical outlines, so whenever I’m trying to create content, that’s where I start. But Dynalist is kind of like Workflow on steroids. It’s got a lot of features that Workflow is missing. But, yeah, I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite habit?

Michael Hyatt
My morning routine. That’s crucial. Having a morning ritual that sets me up to win is critically important. And of my morning ritual, there’s a number of things that I do there. I think my daily practice of exercise while listening to either podcasts or audiobooks is critical to both my physical maintenance and my intellectual growth.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget that you share, you’re really known for, people kind of quote it back to you often?

Michael Hyatt
I think the whole thing about self-care and investing in yourself, that if you want to accomplish more, you’ve got to drive the roots deep and plant the tree on firm ground. And I think a lot of leaders don’t do enough of that. They’re run rugged by their work. They’re not reinvesting in themselves. You’ve got to fill the well if you’re going to have anything to share with other people.

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

Michael Hyatt
Well, first of all, to find out about the book, you can go to VisionDrivenLeader.com/awesome, we’ve created a special landing page for your listeners. And there, if you buy the book, “The Vision Driven Leader” from any outlet and bring the receipt there, you can turn it in, we’ve got a number of free bonuses there including the Audible version of the book. So, if you buy the physical book or the Kindle and come there, we’ll give you the Audible book that you can listen to as well for free.

Also, the Kindle edition of my last book, and then a tool called the vision scriptor tool which will take you by the hand and walk you through the process of creating your first draft of a vision script for your department, or your division, or whatever you preside over. So, again, that’s all at VisionDrivenLeader.com/awesome. For all other things related to me, my podcasts and my other products and tools and blog and all that, it’s in MichaelHyatt.com.

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

Michael Hyatt
Yeah, I would say you’ve got to be, if you want to succeed, if you really want to grow, if you want your career to progress, you’ve got to be a vision-driven leader. It’s essential. I don’t care at what level you are, if you develop a vision, if you develop the habit of developing a vision, if you’re being vision-driven, that’s going to make you stand out and give you a competitive edge against everybody else that is totally in reactive mode. You’ll create bigger better results, you’ll get noticed, and you’ll get promoted faster.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, thanks. This has been a treat and good luck to you.

Michael Hyatt
Thanks, Pete. Appreciate it.