Tag

Leadership & Culture Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Jul 11
0

977: What Makes Leaders Bad—and What You Can Do About It–with Dr. Barbara Kellerman

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Barbara Kellerman explores the roots of bad leadership and offers strategic tips for challenging it.

You’ll Learn

  1. Where leadership training falls short 
  2. The two core components of “bad” leadership 
  3. Four tips for standing up to bad leaders 

About Barbara

Barbara Kellerman was Founding Executive Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School; the Kennedy’s School’s James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Leadership; and a member of the Harvard faculty for over twenty years. She is currently a Fellow at the Center. 

Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books. She’s appeared on numerous media outlets and has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.  

She received the Wilbur M. McFeeley Award from the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. From 2015 to 2024 she has been ranked by Global Gurus as among the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.” 

Resources Mentioned

Barbara Kellerman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Barbara, welcome.

Barbara Kellerman
Well, thank you, Pete. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for asking me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom, and I thought it’d be great if you could maybe kick us off with hearing a tale of maybe the most wild case of bad leadership you have witnessed or heard about through your work and research in the workplace.

Barbara Kellerman
Well, Pete, if you know my work, it goes back on bad leadership, in particular, to a book I wrote or an essay. At first there was an essay I wrote called “Hitler’s Ghost: A Manifesto,” which was me arguing that, what I call the leadership industry, which is my field, all kinds of experts on leadership, whether in corporate leadership or political leadership, mainly corporate leadership, that my colleagues in the leadership industry were not paying any attention to what I call the dark side of leadership, the painful side of leadership, the egregious side of leadership.

But in the book that grew out of that, which came out about 20 years ago, which is called Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, I developed seven different types of bad leadership. Those types of bad leadership are important because they range from the ineffectual, all the way, in awfulness, to evil.

So, it really depends on which type of bad leadership are we talking about. Obviously, if we’re talking about evil leadership, which I define as someone who inflicts pain, literally physical or psychological pain, on his or her followers, that’s obviously a different case in point as somebody who is, dare I say, simply ineffectual.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so I guess I’m interested in terms of, let’s go with evil, in terms of in the workplace, you say, “Whoa, so you think your boss is bad, check it. This is what full-blown bad looks like.”

Barbara Kellerman
So, I would say that the word evil as I define it, and again I developed and identified the types in the book, it very rarely applies to the workplace because it implies a kind of malevolent intent, which I don’t think we find that often in the workplace. In the workplace, I talk more about something called callous leadership, leaders who are thoughtless, mean, or unkind, not thinking carefully about the other, or leaders who are explosive, who lose their tempers too quickly.

Alas, it’s one of the mysteries of the human condition to me because it would seem to me that it would be in the interest of most leaders and managers to keep those who report to them relatively happy as opposed to unhappy.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve often wondered, that’s one of my top mysteries of humanity, it’s like even if you are purely self-interested, and truly care not a wit, about your fellow human being, you’re still better off not being a jerk. You adjust, you get farther, you achieve more of your ends if people can tolerate you and, generally, are fine interacting with you.

Barbara Kellerman
I completely agree with you, Pete, but I would say it especially applies to, let’s say, the United States of America in the third decade of the 21st century, when the issue of talent retention, holding on to people that you think are really important to your enterprise, to your mission, to your purpose, that becomes really top of your list of priorities.

So, it is often in one’s self-interest, apart from the graciousness of being decent as opposed to indecent to other people, it is in one’s, as you imply, in one’s self-interest, in the corporate interest, and almost always in the interest of the task that needs to be accomplished to keep people, if not wildly happy, at least from being miserably unhappy.

Pete Mockaitis
That checks out. So, with all that said, can you lay it on us, a tale that was particularly shocking in terms of bad leadership at work?

Barbara Kellerman
I think I’m going to take a slightly different example, a man, because he’s so extremely well-known since, even since, though he’s now dead, a man by the name of Jack Welch.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Barbara Kellerman
Who, of course, was one of the legendary corporate leaders of all time, the company, which many of your listeners will know, is General Electric, and it’s an example, I would not exactly call him a bad leader, particularly a prototype of somebody who’s awful, but he was known, very well known, and much admired for being lean and mean. And that, of course, meant letting a lot of people go.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember the nickname Neutron Jack. He would evaporate, make the people disappear, but keep the buildings and equipment.

Barbara Kellerman
Exactly. But I will tell you why I, in particular, think that history has proven him not to be a particularly good leader, even setting aside the point that we’re just making. So, Jack Welch was on the cutting edge of what I referred to earlier as the leadership industry. And you probably know this, Pete, that GE, again, was on the cutting edge of corporate training. They had a campus in Crotonville, New York, and it was well known, again, at the forefront of the leadership industry.

The irony of that, though, and it addresses what I am known for, I dare say, for better and worse, which is a kind of skepticism, if not even cynicism, about the leadership industry, which professes to teach people how to lead wisely and well, and I’m not sure we have an enormous amount of evidence for that. But setting that aside for the moment, the Crotonville campus was an example of something that didn’t work.

Because, as I hardly have to tell you that in recent decades, now it’s somewhat recovered under CEO Larry Culp, but for decades General Electric went from being the icon of American industry to being one of the fall guys of American industry, and Jack Welch’s successor failed absolutely to not only help the company thrive, but he succeeded in plunging it straight downhill.

Pete Mockaitis
And there, what do you believe are some of the particular behaviors that were so destructive and may have led to GE’s demise?

Barbara Kellerman
I don’t know that I would use that language, Pete, that it was particular behaviors, I think it was just a kind of hubris that assumed that, “You know, the way I teach leadership, it’s guaranteed to succeed.” As I suggested a moment ago, we have not a great deal of evidence that the way leadership is taught, whether within organizations, whether within business schools, schools of public administration, our criteria for measurement are rather meager.

We’re dealing here with human beings, not widgets, so it’s hard to measure the success of a leadership program, a leadership course, a leadership institute. And I would say that hubris was the main problem with Jack Welch and his legendary leadership training efforts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, then could you maybe give us some examples of how hubris translates into some of the things they did and said that were problematic?

Barbara Kellerman
Well, again, I want to be careful to distinguish between being bad, or to use the word you just used, “problematic” and not being good enough. In other words, I’m not saying that what was done at Crotonville was bad. I’m saying that the successes that were touted were in scant evidence and are in scant evidence.

And I’ve taught many leadership courses, although I don’t tell people I teach how to lead, I tell them I teach about leadership, which is actually two different things, that when somebody takes a leadership course, whether mine or anybody else’s, and then they’re questioned at the end, or there was a kind of review, “What did you learn? How was it?” typically, the answer is, “This was a great course. I learned so much. It’s amazing. I’m a different person.”

But, in fact, in the real world, we don’t really have brilliantly successful ways of assessing the long-term impact of what most leadership courses, programs, centers, institutes, etc. actually accomplish. So, it’s a quick and easy sell, “Buy my book and you too can learn how to lead,” “Take my course and you too can learn how to lead better than you’re leading now,” “Follow my seven easy steps and you too can succeed,” I would argue that’s not as brilliant to sell and brilliant to buy as people generally like to believe.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then I’m curious, from your perspective, having looked at a lot of things and having a lot of skepticism for a lot of promises, have you seen any bright spots and what makes them bright?

Barbara Kellerman
In a book I wrote called Professionalizing Leadership I argued that leadership learning should, much, much more strongly than it currently does, resemble learning how to be a physician, learning how to be a lawyer, learning how to be a teacher, learning how to be an engineer.

In other words, I argue that we need to take it more seriously, that we need to think more like some of the sages from the past, whether it’s Plato or Confucius or Machiavelli, which is it takes a long time, if not a lifetime, to learn how to lead.

And if you’re going to, again, emulate what the professions do, becoming a doctor, becoming a lawyer, you will realize that what I break down into a three-step process. First, it should be, in my view, leadership education, which is developing an intellectual understanding of what leadership and followership entail. Just like in medical school, one of the first courses that you take is anatomy. They’re not going to let you slice into a human body until you have learned, been educated about the anatomy of the human body.

So, it is with leadership. I believe first step should be leadership education. Second step should be what I call leadership training, which is where you develop the skills required to lead in your particular context. By the way, I’m going to deviate again because I want to stop at context. So, I can be a great leader in one situation but a lousy leader in another. So, I always talk about the importance of context, which is something we can return to if you like, but I’ll go back for a minute just to the three-step process of what I call professionalizing leadership.

Step one, leadership education. Step two, leadership training, learning the skills and talents that are required for your particular job or task in your particular organization, or situation, or circumstance. And step three is what I call leadership development, which is like adult development, which means, again, lifelong learning. You cannot get an MD in 2024 and presume that that medical degree, no matter how great the medical school, will stand you in good stead five, 10, not to speak of 15 and 20 years hence.

If you’re a physician or you’re a lawyer, you must take continuing education courses. You must take courses that keep bringing you up to date on what good medicine and good science entails. And so, it should be with leadership. There is no reason to assume that if I take a leadership course or a leadership training or a leadership program in 2024, there will be nothing new to learn in 2029, not to speak of 2034.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then digging into your book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers tell me, any particularly striking or surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you made here?

Barbara Kellerman
I would say they’re all surprising and counterintuitive, which is to say that our tendency, and this is the human condition, again, we’re not talking here widgets, we’re talking about human beings, which complicates the situation infinitely. The surprising thing is how passive we are when we have a bad leader or manager.

Now, again, let me go back, because on one level it is not surprising. Sometimes it is costly and sometimes it is risky to take on a superior, let’s say we’re talking in the workplace, to take on a manager or a leader, or whatever language we want to use, and it’s much easier for us to simply, even though we may dislike it or even become stressed out about it, which is not uncommon in the workplace, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, sometimes we just decide to put up with it, that it’s easier to put up with it than to try to figure out how to take it on.

The problem with that, as the title “Leadership from Bad to Worse” implies, unless we take on bad leadership, again, however defined, many different ways, relatively early in the process, it’s almost certain to get worse. In other words, bad leaders, probably like bad people more generally, don’t wake up one fine morning and say, “Golly gee, I’ve been bad. I’ve been not nice to my subordinates. I really ought to be a nicer boss. I ought to pay more attention to their well-being. I ought to care more about how they feel on the job. Silly me, I’ve not been behaving very well.”

What that means is that the only way then to get these people to change is in some way to intrude on, interrupt the process. Sometimes that’s an exogenous force, something that happens from the outside. But more often than not, it is unfortunately the subordinates that need to take on the issue and need to think through, “If there’s going to be any change for the positive, how can this be done, tactically and strategically, in a way where I don’t end up cutting my own head off, that is cutting off my nose to spite my face?”

So, I would say the issue of the reluctance to look at bad leadership and try to figure out how to stop it from getting worse, that to me is on one level surprising. Although, again, I hasten to add, on another level, really quite understandable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Barbara, this is fascinating. So many things are sparking up for me here in my brain. One is the movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” in which he sings the song, “Someone should do something.” You know, it’s that passive sense. It’s like, “I don’t like this. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s risky. I hope something changes.” But often, to your point, it just doesn’t.

I’m thinking, you might get a kick out of this example. We had a senior executive at a, I don’t want to name names here, at a major organization that teaches leadership, Barbara. And there was another…

Barbara Kellerman
We’re going to move on, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
…senior executive who, I guess, went through a startling number of assistants, maybe six, very quickly. And they were getting the recruiters, the headhunters fired up to hire a seventh. And then before they did so, it was a peer, a fellow executive said, “Hey, you know, I’ve noticed, and I want…” And so, he sort of demonstrated how to give this feedback well.

It’s like, “Hey, I want you to understand my intention is only to serve you and to help you out here. I’ve noticed that six people have left, and there’s been a lot of sort of comments or themes associated how your behavior has been perceived as pretty disrespectful and demeaning.” And so, boom, there it is. And sure enough, like, that’s hard to say, and nobody did.

Barbara Kellerman
And you’re talking about peer-to-peer.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, exactly.

Barbara Kellerman
You’re not even talking about subordinates to superior.

Pete Mockaitis
It was peer-to-peer, but that’s what it took. It took someone to sort of shake them up, to provoke the status quo, and sure enough it worked. At first, he was very upset, but then he took the feedback to heart and said, “Okay, I guess I can kind of see your perspective, and I guess I will behave differently.” And they had a good outcome, so that’s really cool.

So, yes, it does take something, and I think often, if there’s not a brave someone somewhere, it will just continue. What’s that famous quote? “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for the good people to do nothing,” Edmund Burke.

Barbara Kellerman
Yeah, that is a famous quote and it’s very much what I believe to be true, although I’m always very careful, Pete, as I suggested a minute ago, to not blame the, you know, I don’t want to blame the victim, I don’t want to blame the subordinate, because often people need and want to hold on to their jobs. Often people are really quite scared of doing that. It is, of course, as your example suggested, easier if it’s a peer as opposed to a subordinate.

But in the book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, I have examples of exactly that, including in the corporate sector, how, unless it is stopped, it almost does get worse. And one other comment on that is it’s much easier to stop it early in the process. When you start noticing somebody is not behaving well, however we want to define that, it is easier to say something, to do something earlier on.

The longer bad is able to take root, rather like a plant, the deeper those roots go and the harder it becomes to uproot them. So, without taking the plant analogy too far, I think you get the point that the longer this goes on, and the more entrenched everybody becomes, the more difficult and, indeed, sometimes often painful it is to upend what’s going wrong, to change it.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And it just makes the conversation itself harder, like, “How long has this been going on? Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” That’s tricky.

Barbara Kellerman
Exactly. By the way, if I can add one other thing here, Pete. I mentioned in passing earlier that my interest in leadership is matched every bit by my interest in followership. So, what do I mean when I use the word follower? As you may know, if you’re in the leadership field, and your listeners will know who are familiar with the leadership literature, that’s a kind of loaded word, follower, because it presumes among other things that followers always follow, which is not actually how I define the word.

Followers, most of us, by the way, generally follow. We are socialized to follow. We’re rewarded by our parents, by our teachers, by our bosses, if we’re good followers, meaning relatively obedient most of the time, again at home, in school, in the workplace. If we disobey too much of the time, that’s not good. But in order to understand the leadership dynamic, the dynamics of power, and the dynamics of authority, and the dynamics of influence, it is impossible to understand them if you focus only on one half of the dyad.

You cannot have a leader without at least one follower, and I have argued now strenuously for several decades that, therefore, the understanding of what happens, let’s say, in the workplace, it is impossible to get it by looking only at the person or persons at or near the top of the hierarchy. It is important, equally important, to understand why everybody else in the workplace is behaving the way they do.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that makes sense. You mentioned tactically, strategically responding. I definitely want to spend some time on that. But first maybe you could clue us into what are some of the telltale signs we should look out for? Like, what’s truly bad versus something I just kind of don’t like and doesn’t jive with my personal preferences?

Barbara Kellerman
So, the word bad, Pete, is inordinately interesting. So, it’s childlike, right? “You’re being bad,” says a parent to a four-year-old. Conversely, “Oh, what a good little boy,” or, “What a good little girl.” So, when I wrote the book “Bad Leadership,” I wrestled with that, “How do I define bad? What does that mean to be bad? Is there a better word in the English language than bad?”

You earlier used the word, for example, toxic. Well, not all bad leadership is toxic. There’s a lot of bad leadership. Toxic, of course, means poisonous. There’s a lot of bad leadership that is not poisonous. It’s just bad. But it’s not so bad that it is toxic. And I was interested, and I remain interested, in what I call the universe of bad leadership, all kinds of bad. A little bit bad, a lot bad, evil bad, as I said earlier, but not so bad too.

So, I not only developed the seven different types of bad leadership, to which I referred earlier, but I also defined bad, or bad to good, if you will, along two axes. And these axes have stood, dare I say, the test of time. There are two of them. You can think of them as intersecting if you want. So, one axis is from effective leadership, which is, needless to say, good leadership, to ineffective leadership, which is, needless to say, bad leadership. It’s better to be effective than it is to be ineffective.

The other axis, again, very simple, but simple is good when we’re talking about such complicated subjects. The other axis, the second axis, is not effective to ineffective, it is ethical to unethical. So, a leader is presumably better if he or she is ethical than if he or she is unethical. Now, to go to your question, since I’ve defined these as two different axes, one is ethical to unethical, the other one is effective to ineffective, you can even understand intuitively that one can be along a continuum.

So, sometimes, really very ethical, but sometimes, and this is again the human condition, not uncommon. For example, lying. We, generally, think that lying isn’t so great, but lying, we have a higher tolerance for lying now than we did, and most leaders lie a little bit. Some leaders lie a lot, and people don’t seem to mind necessarily. But that’s what I mean about two core components of being bad, being good. One, again, ethical to unethical, the other, again, effective to ineffective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Well, so then, in a way, that can surface things pretty clearly, like, “Oh, this guy who’s really a jerk and screams and pounds his fists a lot, he’s kind of getting some results in terms of folks hop to and do what he says, and do what he says quickly, and work long hours, and make stuff happen.” So, in a way, that’s effective, at least short term, but it doesn’t feel ethical in terms of dignity and respect and kindness and the golden rule sorts of things.

And so, that’s kind of handy. It’s like, “are we generating results, effective and ineffective? And does this seem to violate the world’s wisdom traditions about the dignity of the human person and treating others the way you want to be treated?” that’s more on the ethical, unethical side of things.

Barbara Kellerman
I cannot support your point enough, Pete. Muddling those two criteria for being bad or good is a big mistake for just the reason that you say. It is really possible. I mean, lots of people didn’t like working for Steve Jobs. He wasn’t adorable. He wasn’t always nice to people who worked for him, but he was, as you say, incredibly effective, brilliantly effective, a genius at being effective as a leader.

By the way, this lesson was taught to me very early in my career as a so-called expert in leadership. When I was giving a talk, I was still a young scholar, and I said something about Hitler being a bad leader, which I thought was self-evident. But I remember to this day, somebody standing up in the audience and objecting to what I said for exactly the reason that you just said.

That person pointed out, and I’ve learned my lesson since then, that, again, I’m not assuming your audience are not experts on German history, but the truth about Adolf Hitler is that between 1933, when he first came to power, and 1939, when the Nazis marched into Poland, he was a brilliantly effective leader.

He was an extremely good leader between ’33 and ’39, if you define good, again to the point that you just made, Pete. If you define good as being effective, he was a good leader between 1933 and 1939. Not ethical, but very, very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s a handy framework we got there in terms of “What kind of bad am I looking at?” And so, let’s say, we see on either side, “Yup, we got an ineffective leader here,” or, “Yup, we have an unethical leader here,” what are some of the strategic or tactical steps we should take if we find ourselves in that position?

Barbara Kellerman
So, one of the reasons I’m interested in followership is because of what in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a phrase particularly associated with the women’s movement, was called consciousness-raising. Raising our consciousness about the possibilities, in this case, of action. So those of us who are employees, or subordinates, or ordinary people working in a group or large organization, whatever it may be, tend not to be aware of the possibilities that we might actually be able to act in an effective way, be agents of action.

So, if you talk about strategy, it’s one of the reasons I’m so big on followership. It’s one of the reasons I would wish in a perfect world that good followership, how to be a good follower, would be taught every bit as much as how to be a good leader, because ordinary people need to understand their own agency. If we don’t get the fact that we may not have power and we may not have authority, and, by the way, I distinguish, as some of your audience may have picked up, I distinguish among power is one resource, authority is another resource, influence is the third. So, I distinguish among power, authority, and influence.

So ordinary people, that is, workers in a large organization or even in a smaller group, subordinates, whatever you want to call them, may not overtly have much power or overtly have much authority, but that doesn’t mean that they need to think, or that we need to think of ourselves as being without agency. So, consciousness raising about the power, you can call it follower power if you want, that, to me, is step one.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, once we have that awareness, what are some of the best possible moves?

Barbara Kellerman
Well, I’m always leery of putting people in bad situations. Whistleblowing, for example, has rather a romantic note to it, “Oh, my God, so-and-so’s a whistleblower. How great is that? They opened a can of worms at work and it deserved to be opened. Thank goodness somebody had the courage to do that.” In fact, in real life, it’s quite dangerous to be a whistleblower.

There are books on, if you’re going to be a whistleblower, you want to be a whistleblower, you better know the law. You better be sure of the financial resources you have because your agent, your organization, your company might sue you. So be careful. So, step one is to be careful. Step two is, in general, do not act alone if you can possibly help it. Step three is to start at the lowest level of action.

So, to use an example that you used a few moments ago, you said one peer came up to another peer, one boss to another boss, one manager to another manager, and said, “You know, you’ve lost six assistants in the last whatever,” let’s say it’s 12 months. “You might want to take a look at how your assistants are feeling, about being your assistants, about your attitudes and behaviors toward them.”

So again, “How do I do this at the lowest level?” which would be presumably a simple conversation, possibly between the subordinate and the superior, friendly, cordial, trying to raise issues that have perhaps nobody’s raised before, or to do it in a way that the superior can actually hear. Step four, five, and six is, at certain points you have a choice. Are you willing to risk your position, possibly even your job, assess your costs and your benefits. Don’t be dumb, even if you want to upend bad, however defined. Be careful, be aware of your own self-interest. Do you really need the job? Or is your talent sought elsewhere? And are you willing to lose your job over your intervention or over your action?

If you are not, you better assess your risks. You better be careful. But again, if at all possible, do not act alone. Get allies and consider tactically what your various venues are for possibly saying something and doing something. And that could include everything from several of you going to the person who is not acting the way you wish, to going around the person, possibly to a peer, possibly to a superior. So, there are all kinds of ways of doing it, but I never, ever want to make it sound simple, and I never, ever want to put people at risk professionally if, in fact, they can’t afford, literally or figuratively, to be at risk.

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

Barbara Kellerman
Well, I guess the last thing I’ll say, Pete, is that although our conversation has focused on the workplace, the work I do, I think of it as trans-sectoral. It applies as much to the public sector as to the private sector. It applies as much to Western Europe as it does to the United States. And, in fact, what’s interesting about our field, if I can assume you’re in my camp of being interested in these issues of leadership, is that for all the differences between, let’s say, Americans and Argentinians, or Americans even and Canadians, there are profound similarities in the human condition.

In the end, we’re all human beings. We all relate to power and authority and influence in similar ways, and that’s worth bearing in mind as we focus on the differences among us. It is, in this field, perhaps the similarities that are the most striking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Barbara Kellerman
One of the courses I taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and it’s arguably my favorite, is a course called Leadership Literacy. So, there is a great literature on leadership where people have thought about these issues since time immemorial. I earlier mentioned the names of Confucius and Plato, but if you simply go to some of our own, and by that, I mean American founding documents, such as the Federalist Papers.

Men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison. These men thought long and hard about the issues that you and I are surfacing. So, one could do worse than to go back to some of the classics of what I call the great leadership literature, of which I’ve just given you a small sample.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear yourself quoted back to you often?

Barbara Kellerman
I hear that people are happy to have me surface subjects such as bad and follower. Those are the ways, as I said earlier, that I distinguish myself most from my colleagues, and people are relieved to hear a discussion, an honest discussion, of how to tackle bad, again, however bad is defined. People are relieved, eager to hear about their own possibilities for exercising influence even in large organizations.

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

Barbara Kellerman
I’m available on email. I have a website and I am, by the way, a regular blogger. I’m also on LinkedIn, so happy to connect to members of your audience. And I can be found easily, if somebody looks hard enough, and I have many, many books on leadership and followership. They’re mostly available, of course, on Amazon. So, if people are more interested, I’m sure they can find both me and my work.

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

Barbara Kellerman
Become aware of your own potential influence on the people and on the situation within which you find yourself. And becoming contextually conscious, conscious of your own role, it is amazing. It is amazing how that empowers people to act.

Pete Mockaitis
Barbara, thank you. I wish you many pleasant encounters with good leaders.

Barbara Kellerman
Or effective ones with bad leaders, right? Either one or the other. Thanks very much, Pete. Good to talk to you.

Jul 01
0

975: Elevating Leadership through Radical Humility with Urs Koenig

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Urs Koenig reveals how to level up your leadership through the five shifts of radical humility.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why leaders win more when they’re humble
  2. Two tricks to getting better quality feedback
  3. How to make any tough conversation less intimidating 

About Urs

Urs is a former United Nations military peacekeeper and NATO military peacekeeping commander, a highly accomplished ultraendurance champion, a widely published professor, bestselling author, and a seasoned executive coach and keynote speaker with more than three decades of experience helping hundreds of leaders and dozens of executive teams unlock new levels of achievement across four continents.  

He is the founder of the Radical Humility Leadership Institute and speaks frequently on the topic of leadership to corporations and associations across the globe. His message of Radical Humility in leadership has inspired teams from across the spectrum, including Amazon, Starbucks, the Society of Human Resource Management, Vistage, the University of Melbourne, and Microsoft. 

He holds a PhD in geography and a Master of Science from the University of Zürich, Switzerland, and an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management.  

Urs is the loving father of two teenage boys who make commanding soldiers look easy. He lives in Seattle, Washington. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Urs Koenig Interview Transcript

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

Urs Koenig
Thanks, Pete, for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. Me too. I was a Model United Nations student in high school and college. So basically, we’re the same.

Urs Koenig
So, how’s that, Pete? Tell me more about that.

Pete Mockaitis
No, no, there’s no danger zones. We just sort of dressed up in Western business attire, as we called it, and argued over our resolutions and who was going to put their hands on the keyboard and go to the printer. But I want to hear you share with us a riveting tale from your work as a UN peacekeeper that kind of shaped some of your thinking on leadership?

Urs Koenig
Well, two things, actually. I went back to the military after having been out for 22 years. And so, went back to serve as a peacekeeper, left the business, left my kids to volunteer to make a difference. On the second day of reporting to my peacekeeping command, I dropped my flak jacket. And the sergeant, 25 years my junior and well below my rank, is chewing me out for dropping my flak jacket. And I’m here to be of service to make a difference, and this young punk is chewing me out.

So, it takes all the…and that’s the title of my book, all the humility I possibly can master, not to make a snarky comment, but I picked up the vest and I say nothing at all. But it was one of the first lessons in humility I would have to learn over the next nine months as a peacekeeper. Just a small one, but there were plenty more later on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious, Urs, did that gesture of humility have some positive impact on that relationship or did you just never bump into him again?

Urs Koenig
No, no, oh, no, I had to work with him later on, for sure, and he ended up being a nice guy. He was just posturing on the second day. But actually, so if I may, Pete, what then happened was I deployed into the peacekeeping mission and I opened my book with that story. We were escorted to a school play, end-of-year school play, and escorted to the front as part of the peacekeeping force, and I sat down and we were treated to a reenactment of the Kosovo War.

These are kindergartners, first and second graders, massacring their fellow students on the floor, shooting and shouting them, all with a roaring applause, to parents, teachers, and other students. And so, that was another lesson in humility. I thought I understood the conflict. I understood what’s going on. But when I sat there, I’m like, “You know what? I really still don’t get it.”

When you think you get it in a conflict zone, something happens, comes out of left field, like the school play, and you go, “You know what? I still am a student here and I need to ask bigger questions.” So that was another lesson in humility that I learned through the peacekeeping work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I can imagine you being in that scene, watching that unfold, and just kind of scratching my head, like, “What is going on here? And what does this mean?” And tell us, Urs, what was your takeaway from having witnessed that?

Urs Koenig
Well, you know what, my takeaway was asking bigger and harder questions, “So, is it our role as peacekeepers to not just build peace in their cities, but also in their hearts? What stories do these kids need to be taught at home and at school so that this nation can actually transform into a peaceful nation?” And so, the more I learned, the less I understood, it seems, but the quality of my questions improved, and like that’s no small feat. So that was a real takeaway.

The same in the Middle East a couple of years later. The quality of your questions improved but you’re always a student. You constantly need to learn because being in a conflict zone like that it’s just a humbling experience in itself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Urs, you put together some of your insights into a handy book, Radical Humility: Be a Badass Leader, and a Good Human. Can you tell us any particularly surprising or counterintuitive or extra fascinating discoveries you made while putting this together?

Urs Koenig
The best leaders are actually deeply humble. In my personal experience, the best commanders in the peacekeeping force, they ask great questions, they’re deeply self-aware, they let their team members shine, and they constantly ask for feedback on how to get better. And we can look at the corporate world. Microsoft, Satya Nadella, how he transformed the tech giant from the Steve Ballmer command-control into what it is today, based on his own values, curiosity, constant learning, growth mindset, and humility. And so, those are two examples.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, what’s sort of the big idea or main thesis of your book here?

Urs Koenig
The main thesis is that, to actually win in today’s world, we need to be deeply humble. Leading in today’s environment is, by definition, humbling. No one person can have all the answers. And so, that is the big idea. The best leaders, the most successful leaders are actually deeply humble. It’s not the show-off folks who win at the end.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you maybe tell us an example of someone that you got to see up close and work with who upgraded their leadership by adopting this radical humility approach? What were they doing before, and what did they do differently, and what results emerged?

Urs Koenig
So, one of the best commanders I’ve ever had in the peacekeeping mission, he opened one of the meetings we had in his office with these words, he said, “I love you, Urs. You know I do, and this is not even close to being good enough.” So that’s a deeply humble approach. So, his words made me shrink in my chair, and I turned myself inside out then to produce the very best work I could over the next nine months.

Now if the guy would have chewed me out, if the guy would have yelled at me, I would have tuned him out. But because he deployed a core element of humble leadership, namely strong relationship-building, we had a very close relationship, he got me as a whole human being versus just somebody who did work for him, I knew he cared, he was supporting me in my career path, I was really able to hear and take in his message.

So that’s an example of radical humility in action, building meaningful, collaborative relationships with your people while holding to the highest standards. I call that tough on results and tender on people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, so in your book, you’ve mentioned five key shifts. Could you give us a quick overview of each of those five?

Urs Koenig
Sure. So, the first is dig deep. So that’s the first pillar of leading with radical humility. It’s deep self-awareness, really understanding, and that’s what people think about when they hear humility, like seeing myself accurately, not having an overly low or high picture of myself. So that’s deep self-awareness. What’s tied in there is also the humility to know that I can’t achieve everything, but I can achieve almost anything I put my mind to. So, there’s the notion of focus.

The second pillar of leading with radical humility is tough on results, tender on people. I just talked about that. Holding our people to the highest standards while building meaningful and trusting relationships with them. The third shift is called lead like a compass. So, this is getting out of the spotlight, empowering my people to execute at the frontlines, getting out of the weeds, leading with my eyes on, hands off, and comprehensively delegating.

The fourth one is full transparency. If we want our people to really be empowered to make good smart decisions at the frontlines, they need to know more. And the only way they’ll know more is if we share more. And all the research consistently shows that we think we over-communicate as leaders and the message still doesn’t get heard. So, heard, 150 times, seven different ways, and only when you hear your people paraphrasing back what you’re talking about, then you know you’re heard. What’s also tied into full transparency is, and I write quite extensively about this, the value of vulnerability.

Vulnerability is the quickest way to build trust with your teammates as a leader, as a peer, and as a direct report. So being transparent about my shortcomings and what I want to do about them. And the last shift is to champion a fearless culture. There, I’m leaning on Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety, providing an environment where it’s safe for anybody to speak up with questions and concerns without fear of being shamed or, worse, risking their career. So, these are the five shifts of leading with radical humility.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we’ve had Amy Edmondson on the show, and we’ve heard some of the cool research on psychological safety. Can you tell me, are there any other veins of research or data or experiments or studies that really make this stuff pop in terms of saying, “Whoa, this is not just your opinion. This is gold”?

Urs Koenig
So, there is a particular study I’d like to talk about, but there is actually research on how humble leadership transforms into better bottom line results. So, there’s plenty of academic studies: higher employee engagement, better relationships, you know, healthier team dynamics, and ultimately actually better bottom-line results.

There was just an HR study published last week which showed that humble leaders are actually more likely to get promoted themselves. Why? Because they’re talent incubators. They grow and build their people up, and, as such, they become more successful leaders themselves, “So who do I promote? I promote the people who build other people up.”

But one particular study I’d like to talk about is this notion of vulnerability building trust. So, there is this study where pairs of complete strangers are brought into a lab, and they’re tasked for 45 minutes to ask and respond to meaningful personal questions, such as, “What does love and friendship mean to you, Pete? And if you only had one year to live, what would you change?” At the end of the 45 minutes, these complete strangers were asked to rate the level of trust they developed with their partner, 45 minutes.

When they responded, they rated their level of trust about as high as the level of trust they have with their average person in their lives. Some even rated it as high as their level of trust they have with their significant other. And I love this, one pair even got married. But what the research shows is that even sharing for brief periods of time with vulnerability is an incredibly powerful way to build trust in relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you demo some of this for us in terms of either these conversations or these questions? I guess it’d just be really nice to get a view of what is this humble leadership, radical humility stuff look, sound, feel like conversationally, as opposed to perhaps the average or the norm that we’re accustomed to in our professional communication interactions?

Urs Koenig
It looks like asking for feedback. You know, Pete, it’s all simple stuff, but it’s not always easy. At the end of every one-on-one with my team members, I ask for, “Hey Pete, what do I do well as your manager? And what can I do better?” Increasing our self-awareness by constantly asking for feedback, and we don’t have to be a leader or a manager to do this. We can do this in project teams, right? We can ask our team members, “What do you see me do well? What can I do better?” That’s one thing.

Another piece is wanting to get to know my team members or also for the project team, my teammates, on a more personal level, actually having a conversation about what’s going on personally with their lives. So, getting to know people as whole human beings versus just worker bees. So, self-awareness by asking for feedback and deepening relationships.

And Gen Zs want this. Like, it’s all the research out there shows we want meaningful and trusting relationships at work, and some studies even show that those young adults actually value relationships and relationship culture more than they value salary and money.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Urs, since you’re an example for vulnerability, I’m just going to put you on the spot. When you’ve asked people these questions, what have they shared with you and what changes have you made as a result?

Urs Koenig
I have been told that I, especially early in my career, that I was too rigid. I’m Swiss, right? Too organized, too structured, and not flexible enough actually, and so that I needed to sometimes soften up a little bit and maybe look at things from a different vantage point versus just powering through the original plan. So that’s one of the things I most definitely learned about myself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how have you implemented that to become more flexible?

Urs Koenig
Well, I actually then, what I do is, “So Pete, you give me that feedback, what suggestions do you have for me to actually do this?” And so, I have team members hold me accountable for it. So, I say, “Okay, I’m working on becoming less rigid and more flexible. Give me feedback in the moment when you see me go down a rabbit hole, and just stick to the original plan because we said we should,” instead of asking, “Hey, what other options can we look at here? Or, how might we approach this a bit differently?”

Pete Mockaitis
And then, tell us, if folks are asking for this feedback, and folks are reluctant to give it, do you have any pro tips on how we can encourage that all the better?

Urs Koenig
Yeah, it’s an excellent question. It happens all the time, right? So, one of the options is to actually call it out explicitly. Say things like, “Hey, I know it can be uncomfortable, Pete, for you to give me feedback. I feel exactly the same way with my boss but I actually see your ability to give me honest feedback as part of your professionalism.” That’s one thing, call it out explicitly.

The second piece, the second thing we can do is we can actually say, “Hey, Pete, I’m working on becoming a bit more flexible. What feedback do you have for me on how I’m doing with this?” So instead of keeping it just open-ended, I make you give me feedback on a goal I already identified for myself so that it makes it less threatening for the person to be honest about giving feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And I’m reminded of some of my work experiences where I’ve had folks, managers I’ve worked with, and we talked about some things I was looking to work on and learn from the project, and then they just flipped it right around and said, “Okay, and here’s what I’ve been working on.” I was like, “Oh, wow, okay.” And it was just really cool to see, as well as, “All right, well, hey, as we start working together, how about you chat with some other folks who’ve worked with me historically and they’ll give you a little bit of a sense of what I’m like to work with?”

And I just found those so striking in terms of like, “Oh, wow, you are a human who is aware that you are imperfect, and you have no need to try to hide that from me or show me how impressive you are as the big boss,” and I just immediately respected them more from right off the bat.

Urs Koenig
You know, I love what you’re saying here. It’s exactly that. So how many of us have bosses who are so arrogant and so full of themselves because they’re actually deeply insecure, right? So, actually, people challenge me sometimes, “As a humble leader, you’re just weak. You’re an emotional doormat.” But, no, to actually humbly invite feedback and share what I’m learning, what I’m working on myself, I need to be fundamentally confident in myself, have a fundamentally strong sense of self, only then can I do what your boss did as well, or I’ll humbly ask for feedback on what I can do better. I need to fundamentally be confident in myself.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. You have to have some self-confidence and some courage. So, help us out, Urs, what if we don’t have that yet, and we’re like, “Oh, my gosh, that sounds really cool in this utopian happy work-life world, Urs, but that actually sounds kind of terrifying to me”? How would you speak to those folks?

Urs Koenig
Start small. If you’re concerned about asking your boss for feedback or as a leader or your direct, ask a peer. Ask your best friend at work. So, ask somebody who you’re close with at work for some feedback, and start there and then build from there. And you know what, it’s a contact sport. So, humility is not for the meek or the weak. So, it is tough, right? So, there’s no two ways about it. We need to make ourselves uncomfortable to actually grow. So, in time, I would encourage and push everybody to just always take a step further than what you’re comfortable with.

Pete Mockaitis
These are cool examples, Urs. Can you lay some more on us in terms of transformational conversations that unfold in this radical humility style that you’ve seen go down, people talking and growing as a result?

Urs Koenig
So, one example I love is Brad Smith, the former CEO of the financial technology company Intuit. He’s now president of Marshall University. He volunteered to his board to do a 360 survey. A 360, as many of you listeners probably know, anonymously surveys everybody around you, around your strengths and weaknesses as a leader. But he then shared his 360, which he volunteered with his board, but he sent the report to the entire company via email.

So, the anonymous feedback that he got back, he sent to everybody at the company. He even taped, back then, a copy to his office door. He even taped the copy to his office door for everybody to see. So, what happens in the process? The top dog is sharing his shortcomings and strengths, with some vulnerability, publicly, and in the process makes it safe for everybody at Intuit to start working on their own stuff as well. So that’s humble leadership in action.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, do you happen to know any of the spookiest elements on that 360 report?

Urs Koenig
I am sorry, I don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’ve received a lot of feedback that I’m a total jerk and a toxic boss. Very helpful. Thank you.”

Urs Koenig
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess, because you wonder, Urs, like, in terms of how much volume vulnerability is too much, or in terms of it’s like, “Oh, shoot, we’ve uncovered some deeply troubling things here. I don’t know if I want to broadcast that to the world”?

Urs Koenig
Absolutely. So, a couple of things there. So, I often talk about humility in three acts. So, the first act is me. The second act is what I’m sharing, maybe an insecurity, something I’m working on. And the third act is, “What am I doing about it?” So, give me the three acts. Don’t just talk about all the stuff you suck at. Go all the way to the third act.

And then the other piece is there is definitely, this is why this is a thinking-person sport, places and times where you share more, and places and times where you share less. And so, this is about reading the situation, knowing your audience, and in a one-on-one with somebody you feel close to at work, you probably reveal a bit more about your weaknesses than publicly in your first senior leadership management meeting. So, it’s situational, is the best I can say here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And with the notion of being tough on results and tender on people, I’d love to get your pro tips on if folks are so tender on people, they find it difficult to be tough on the results, they’re softies and they realize they need to hold people to a standard, but they’re very uncomfortable doing so, any pro tips for them?

Urs Koenig
It’s actually one of the most common mistakes people make when they hear my topic, when they hear about humility, when they hear vulnerability, then they are too conflict averse, and they think that it’s not actually holding team members accountable. So, one thing, identify the one tough feedback you know you have to give and you haven’t given it, and go and do that. Just one. One tough feedback. Identify it and go and give that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Urs, can you give us an example of a time you’ve done this, and what you identified, and what you said and what went down?

Urs Koenig
Well, I had, during my peacekeeping command, my first warrant officer was so nervous and so on edge that he endangered all of us in his handling of his weapon. So, I had to let him go, and he was the nicest guy. It was really hard to do. He was so motivated, the nicest guy but he just didn’t have it in him. So, I had to basically sit him down, and in a very loving way, tell him, again, “I love you, Marcus. You’re a great guy. You really try hard but you just don’t deliver. I cannot take you on a mission. You’re not fit for mission. You’re fired.” That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what did he say to that?

Urs Koenig
He cried.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Urs Koenig
He did. Yeah, but he accepted it, and he had no choice. And, to this day, we actually exchange WhatsApp messages.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it sounds like he understood that what you said was the truth, though he didn’t like it.

Urs Koenig
Exactly. I mean, Management 101, this wasn’t obviously the first conversation we had about this. There was a long process coming and lots of, in the business world we would call it performance improvement plans and whatnot. So, we had plenty of ongoing conversations around it. It wasn’t a surprise to him at all, and it never should be a surprise. That’s the other piece.

When we give our people feedback in performance reviews or otherwise on a regular basis, if they’re hugely surprised about the feedback, then you have not actually done your job as a leader. Because it’ll be an ongoing conversation, right? Not only asking for feedback, but also providing feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have any pro tips for the actual delivery of the feedback, do’s and don’ts in that conversation?

Urs Koenig
Well, try to take the emotions out of it as much as you can. I mean, this is such a cliché almost, right? Center yourself, because often these things make us nervous. We’re anxious when we have to deliver the feedback. So, I actually use breathing exercises to calm myself down before difficult conversations like that. So, whatever your technique is, and be in a good mind space yourself, be clear around your talking points, think about what the other person’s reaction might be, have contingency plans, but be very firm on what you want the message to be and stick with your message.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I am a fan of Breathwrk. I actually subscribe to the Breathwrk app. So, Urs, what’s your go-to “Calm down because I’m freaking out about this conversation” breath protocol?

Urs Koenig
Well, so I actually go and work out. So that’s the first thing I do, and that really helps me. So, I go and work out and then I do the two-minute sitting meditation basically, where I just focus on my breath. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And for the workout, are we talking cardio, are we talking strength, are we talking both, are we talking intense, are we talking light?

Urs Koenig
We’re talking, for me, personally light cardio, in that case, because I don’t want to tire myself out. I want to still be ready, but the cardio certainly. I mean, the research shows it over again, helps to calm the nerves down and helps us to be centered.

Pete Mockaitis
And your light cardio is more intense than a leisurely stroll? Or where would you put that intensity?

Urs Koenig
Yes, it’s a run, or a StairMaster, or a treadmill, something like that.

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

Urs Koenig
One that comes to mind is General McChrystal. So General McChrystal. He was the commander of the taskforce fighting terror in the Middle East. And his taskforce was losing the war on terror, you know, Al-Qaeda, much more nimble, much more flexible, and McChrystal was leading top-down command control, very old style, what I call heroic leadership. But he had the humility to recognize that he needed to change the way he led his taskforce.

So, he shifted from top-down command control, or as he put it, he said, leading like a chess master, controlling his pawns on the chessboard to leading like a gardener, providing the right environment, the right culture, so that his people could execute more swiftly, and more precisely, more independently. If you think about it, as a gardener, we can’t actually make plants grow, you can’t make flowers bloom, but what you can, what you must do, is plant the right seedlings at the right time and the right spot, provide a nurturing environment by watering, weeding and keeping pests out.

So, from top-down command-control leader to humble creator of the right environment, strong relationships, radical transparency. He got into trouble with the intelligence community because he was sharing too much with everybody. And so, that was a really interesting transformation that McChrystal, a tough military leader, went through to become a more humble leader.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really cool. I like that metaphor, because, well, I like chess and gardening. So, you really do get the sense for, that is a very different vibe in terms of, “I am having all the great ideas and I am masterfully commanding that they be executed. I have all the smarts. You do the smart things I’m telling you to do,” as opposed to, “I can’t do much other than create a better environment that works for you.”

And so, that’s a fun example, sharing so much information, intelligence communities are upset with you. Any other examples of master-guarding behavior from General McChrystal?

Urs Koenig
He said, “Thank you became my most important word, and, nodding and showing appreciation, my most important behaviors.” And so, I don’t know if you’re familiar with his book, Team of Teams. But in terms of networking his taskforce, he asked that everybody know somebody else on every other team. So, you don’t need to know everybody in HR, you don’t need to know everybody in Ops, but you need to know one person, so that when you need to work with this other team, you don’t imagine some adversary, but actually a friendly face.

And so, he builds strong relationships across and up and down the taskforce by applying this team of teams approach where everybody knows somebody on every other team.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you.

Urs Koenig
And, by the way, the taskforce became measurably more effective because of his approach. Al-Qaeda’s ability to strike was reduced by a factor of 17. And once again, or not once again, I haven’t probably mentioned it, I’m not advocating for humble leadership because you want to be nice or liked, because it produces bottom-line results, like McChrystal’s taskforce shows.

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

Urs Koenig
“Nothing changes if nothing changes.” Unless we make small changes every day, the big changes won’t happen.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Urs Koenig
So, I like the vulnerability research I just shared, and then Project Aristotle by Google, showing that psychological safety is the best predictor of a team’s performance, more important than talent, more important than the size of the team, who’s on the team and so forth.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Urs Koenig
My favorite book is Endurance by Alfred Lansing. It’s about Ernest Shackleton’s voyage.

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

Urs Koenig
I like the Johari Window. The Johari Window which identifies our blind spots. It’s a two-by-two matrix, basically.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that is popular, resonates with folks, you hear quoted back to yourself?

Urs Koenig
People like the tough on results, tender on people. I get asked about that all the time, and that gets quoted.

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

Urs Koenig
My website, UrsKoenig.com, or on social, I’m primarily active on LinkedIn, actually.

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

Urs Koenig
Just ask. Ask for feedback. Just ask. And ask to get to know your teammates better. Just ask.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Urs, this is fun. I wish you many lovely exchanges full of radical humility.

Urs Koenig
Thank you, Pete. That was fun.

May 02
0

958: The Five Essential Behaviors of Great Collaboration with Tricia Cerrone and Edward van Luinen

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Edward van Luinen and Tricia Cerrone slice through the clutter to identify the fundamental keys to effective collaboration.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What most people get wrong about collaboration
  2. How to overcome the barriers to authentic collaboration 
  3. How to zero in on an inspiring  “noble purpose” that drives motivation and engagement 

About Tricia and Edward

Tricia Cerrone 

Courage and collaboration are hallmarks of Tricia’s global leadership experience, whether it is leading a project, innovating new designs, or overseeing a portfolio of work. With a keen eye for talent and more than 20 years on the business and production side of designing and delivering technically challenging projects at Disney and other Fortune 500 companies, Tricia is adept at inspiring and motivating teams toward successful outcomes while advancing careers and developing new leaders. 

Edward J. van Luinen, Ed.D 

For over twenty years, Edward has been a talent champion of teams worldwide. His experience includes Disney, Sony, and Heineken. He led teams through transformational global-regional-local restructuring, successfully implemented mergers and acquisitions, and introduced new software, learning systems, and leadership strategies. Edward’s collaboration motto is “advance a team member when you advance yourself.” He has worked in Africa, Europe, and North America. Edward collaborates in both French and English. 

Resources Mentioned

Tricia Cerrone and Edward van Luinen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Trish and Edward, welcome.

Tricia Cerrone

Hey, Pete, happy to be here.

Edward van Luinen

Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I’m happy to be chatting.

Edward van Luinen

Great to meet you.

Pete Mockaitis

So, your company’s called Authentic Collaboration. We’re going to talk about that a lot. Maybe, for starters, you could give us a definition. What do you mean by collaboration? And what makes a collaboration authentic versus inauthentic?

Edward van Luinen

Authentic collaboration is a group of people working toward a goal with all-hands on deck all the time. That’s a unique time because a lot of teams, the first thing they try to figure out is, “Okay, who’s the boss? Who’s the doer? Who gets the glory work? Who doesn’t get the glory work?” So, that makes it original and authentic right off the bat. It’s also a process with a lot of specific tasks that teams can begin to do on day one to set the tone of how they want to work, not just people staying in their swim lane and doing lists of tasks. How we work together is really the most important part of authentic collaboration.

Tricia Cerrone

And I think the part about why we picked authentic is we come out of the womb really good, and then but we get all these attachments and behaviors and things that aren’t useful to us anymore. And so, just imagine, like, we just want to kind of wipe off all the barnacles of life and be our true selves. And the behaviors really fight that and combat all of our weaknesses in a really easy way that’s natural.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, tell me, you’ve done a lot of research and teaching in the world of collaboration, any particularly striking, surprising discoveries that you’ve made about us humans and how we collaborate, best and worst?

Tricia Cerrone

That’s a good question. It’s interesting that people don’t actually know how to collaborate. I feel like the reason why it’s so important now, and we see in so many statistics people are trying to figure it out, and it’s the cause for so many work failures, but people are sort of just told to collaborate, and then they don’t really know what that means.

And sometimes they’re like, “Okay, we’ll make this beautiful cute room with fun things in it,” or, “We’ll kind of work together,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean collaborate. So, it’s like we learn how to walk but we forget it actually takes a few different movements to walk and sustain with collaboration. Only no one’s ever told you what those movements are.

And so, once we realized people just, they were doing things accidentally, but didn’t know why they worked, and so sometimes something would work. But, overall, no one really understood what it meant to collaborate. So, for us, we figured these five behaviors. If you do them all, you create this culture of collaboration that works consistently all the time. And so then, we went through, and we validated each of the behaviors of why they work for us as humans.

Edward van Luinen

Absolutely. The five behaviors of a new way to work and lead, which is authentic collaboration, is generosity, co-creation, action, resourcefulness, and gratitude. And as Tricia exactly said, many of those behaviors are on their own, not original. But we did some original research with hiring a researcher and found that these cluster of behaviors are unique and have not appeared in any sort of model before.

So, exactly as Tricia says, too, it’s like we first have to understand what all the behaviors are, and then start to practice them day in and day out, and that makes a difference and that makes an authentic collaboration team.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, could you give us a picture for what’s the state of collaboration today in terms of how well are, say, American, for the sake of conversation, workers doing at collaboration and what’s at stake?

Tricia Cerrone

Well, there’s a few statistics, right? I’ll let Edward go in a second, but I was just reading a Gallup poll about our lack of engagement at work, which really speaks to collaboration. And the 2023 kind of state of the world was basically that we’re losing like $8 trillion in productivity because people aren’t engaged, and they just don’t want to work with each other. And in America, that’s like $550 billion of what’s being wasted. So, basically, like 21% of people right now are looking for another job, and that’s about the amount also that are engaged at the office. And, Edward, do you have a few other statistics?

Edward van Luinen

Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with Trish. I mean, the Gallup poll is really important. Salesforce did a survey, and 85% of workers said that the primary reason that projects are failing is because of a lack of collaboration. And I think they think, “Oh, I’m a team member. I’ve just got to do tasks. It’s consensus. 50 people have to be in the room, but I’m not sure what people are doing.”

So, going back to the behaviors, it’s really about how we work, not what we’re doing. And authentic collaboration focuses on making sure that we are working effectively together first before we start accomplishing our goals and tasks. Software, another industry, 50% of software budgets are created for collaboration tools. The big question is, “Do the software engineers creating the collaboration tools know how to collaborate?” Maybe some do, maybe some don’t. So, a challenge and an opportunity for those to learn more about authentic collaboration, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, could you perhaps zoom in to a particular group or workplace or a team, and paint a real clear picture of what does typical, yet unfortunately bad collaboration look like, and then perhaps something they did to turn things around and the cool results that came on the other side of that?

Tricia Cerrone

There’s certainly like many things you can do wrong. One particular team that I was working with and I was not the leader at the time, the leader, you know, people can be so nice at work, at home, and then they get to work, and some of the times their insecurities come out. So, if you have a leader who is insecure, which, in a way, is like how one of the ways that pride can show up at work, then it’s hard because they don’t trust your decisions necessarily, but they also don’t trust their own decisions.

And so, what we had to do was actually gently educate our leader so that he could trust working with us. And so, I think leadership, it can show up as like ego. So, when you have someone on the team who like wants all the attention, then they don’t want to collaborate. And I think the other thing that happens in teams is, to Edward’s earlier point, people stay in their lanes because HR, to a degree, has made an industry out of, “These are your roles and responsibilities. You do these.” And then, “If I do those, no matter what someone else does, I won’t catch the blame, I won’t lose my bonus.”

And so, it’s this fear that’s come onto teams, and so that’s what we see a lot of is sort of like fear that I won’t be able to do my jobs because someone else didn’t do their job. And so, that’s why we try to use this sense of generosity to remove fear, and so that people are trusting each other and actually being honest with each other, and helping to problem-solve quicker. Did that answer your question, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yes. Thank you. And when you talked about insecurity, what are some of the typical behaviors, I don’t know, words, phrases, actions, that you see insecure people taking?

Edward van Luinen

Great question, Pete. I feel that it shows up in hoarding information, hoarding team members, “This is my team. I’ve spent years hiring, coaching, growing them to be the high potentials or leaders. I want to keep them,” instead of the organization owning the talent. I think it shows up in not being all hands-on-deck all the time, “Because I’m a senior vice president, I don’t have to clean up the conference room after a meeting, when in fact I should, because I was participating in that meeting,” as an example. So, it can show up in a lot of ways.

I feel that another way that, on teams that I’ve been on, is that if we, as Tricia says, valiantly try to demonstrate the authentic collaboration behaviors in three, four, five meetings, and sometimes when you give, you kind of want to get, because you are role-modeling and demonstrating how you want to be treated. But in additional meetings or collaborations that I’ve tried, after three, four, five meetings, if I’m not getting any response from these authentic collaboration behaviors, it’s a good indicator that it may not work.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, okay. Well, that’s kind of quick results. We know pretty fast, apparently, if we need some traction here.

Edward van Luinen

Well, yeah, sometimes you have to. of course, depending if you’re in a company, you don’t often have the luxury of saying, “Okay, I don’t want to do this,” but as consultants or in a company even, you get an indication of how easy it’s going to be to demonstrate these behaviors and want to love your job. So, the question we want to ask is, “How can we get people to love their job even more?” And we feel we can do that with authentic collaboration.

Tricia Cerrone

I want to just add something to what Edward says. One thing we do tell people is if you do these behaviors, whether anyone else does or not, you are going to enjoy your work better because the way people respond to you is going to be different. And so, it does change the energy and the dynamic of everyone that you interact with. So, even if your whole team isn’t doing it, you’re still going to have greater success.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, I think we must hear these five behaviors. We got some hype here, let’s deliver. Tell us, what are they? How do we do them?

Tricia Cerrone

Well, the first one is easy, and I’ll just say, like, anyone can do these behaviors. It’s not about personality or style or how you were brought up, or anything like that. You can all do them. They’re all about the actions that you can do, behaviors, and getting better at them and being a little intentional about it. So, generosity is the first one, and generosity, you know, we all know that. It’s about serving and helping others.

So, it’s like, “How do you look at your team developing each other? How do you grow each other? Do you coach each other after a meeting? Do you,” as Edward said earlier, “help to clean up? Do you see what their needs are?” But the other great outcome of generosity is that it overcomes fear and scarcity, and that we talked about earlier, that insecurity and pride because it creates connection. So, that’s one of the great things about generosity. We could talk about generosity all day. I’ll hand it off.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, sure thing. And so, if I am trying to practice generosity regularly, are there any particular mottos, mantras, mindsets, attitudes that just I have in me and I’m working through as I see the world and make decisions, and choose what to do?

Tricia Cerrone

No, I probably wouldn’t say that we do have one. It’s more of like, “Look, be a little bit self-aware and look around you to see who needs help.” It’s how we walk through life, “Who needs help?”

Pete Mockaitis

And I love those simple examples in terms of cleaning up and coaching, etc. Can you give some additional easy little ways we can help out every day?

Edward van Luinen

Absolutely. Thanks, Pete. And one of the ways is we worked with a lot of leaders on our project, three-year project, Authentic Collaboration, which came out of this project, and one is that feedback is very important on how you’re doing. And we made a commitment to provide very specific, timely, written feedback to leaders that helped us within 24 hours.

Many of them commented, “Gosh, I usually got this verbally, or it was very late, or it wasn’t specific,” but we wrote detailed thank-you notes, which seems a little bit old-school, but I think people still like to get written thank-you notes about how they made a difference on the project. Another generosity trait that we demonstrated was we had a lot of high potential junior, more junior talent, you could say, on our team.

Well, one of the ways that we thought we were generous and collaborative with them was “You’re going to kick off this meeting with a bunch of executives present.” “I don’t know if I could do that.” “Well, we’re going to coach you to make sure you feel comfortable doing it,” and then they did it, right Trish, numerous times.

And then we said, “Well, how did you feel doing that?” “Oh, my gosh, it was great. Someone came up to me and really was happy to meet me, and didn’t know I worked in that division or department, and we’re going to have a coffee because now they know who I am.” So, I feel that’s another specific behavior of generosity, is letting other people shine. That’s real important.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And I guess the counter, the opposite of generosity is not necessarily being evil and maliciously destructive, but rather maybe more of a scarcity mindset in terms of the hoarding, “This is mine. I’m not going to share. If I give a little then it’s going to come back to bite me because I will have less because I have given.”

Tricia Cerrone

Right. And also, like, the ego of like, “Well, I did this on my own, I’m the star,” and not sharing that it took a team.

Edward van Luinen

Exactly. No, you’re right, Pete. Great question. And our motto, actually, and our book title is Collaborate to Compete. We feel that’s counterintuitive, it’s original, it’s pretty disruptively innovative, because most times, as you know, Pete, and Trish and I experienced as well in companies, people are unnecessarily competing against each other. Why don’t we work together and compete to get more market share?

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly.

Edward van Luinen

That’s who we should be competing against. So, collaborate is, and the whole performance management system, as Trish was saying, the rewards were built on competing, not collaborating, so it’s a real head-turner.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so let’s hear about the next behavior.

Tricia Cerrone

One of the next is like resourcefulness. So, it’s better to be resourceful than to have resources, but it’s really about developing your ongoing growth and knowledge about everything in the world because you can often use everything, whether it’s tools or information. And so, it’s knowing how to use all of that in the moment, but having this also attitude of behavior of always learning.

So, even if we were going on a trip to Hong Kong to check out a different park, we would take a half day to like, “Okay, maybe I can get a tour of operations and learn how they do things differently here.” Or, if I’m in a restaurant and it’s, again, another country, like learning a few words, asking the history of the restaurant, because all those little things feed into your experiences and who you might be talking to.

And, as a designer, especially working with Disney so much, even looking at the world around you, like, “What’s the sense of humor of the country?” and you can see that in advertisements, or you might experience the culture in a store or anywhere you go. So, resourcefulness is really about asking questions and being curious, and curiosity really drives resourcefulness.

Edward van Luinen

I agree with Trish. Another behavior is co-creation, and a lot of people think, “Oh, I’m just going to go to a brainstorming meeting, and we’re going to come up with sort of a group decision.” I think that’s probably the 101 of co-creation. Co-creation can actually be democratized, for lack of a better word, throughout the organization in every interaction you’re in.

How can a conversation become co-created? You have ideas, I have ideas. We co-created our solutions all the time within the team. If they were co-created, that doesn’t mean, again, going back to the definition, all-hands-on deck all the time. It’s not my idea, it’s our idea in a conversation, in a meeting, in almost every interaction you’re having, you’re co-creating. And that’s, I think, another important behavior to authentic collaboration.

Tricia Cerrone

Yeah, and a lot of part, a lot of the co-creation piece is it’s important with problem-solving, and often people are jumping in with like this solution, that solution, but this kind of gives you the discipline to pause and listen and ask questions and build on that idea first, and explore it first, and then move on to the next idea, and then prioritize.

And all of that’s important, one, because you might miss something that is a great solution, but it also makes sure that everyone on your team feels seen and heard and valued for the idea and contribution. And a lot of the behaviors do that. It’s sort of a thing that we all need as humans and it also makes our work feel like more valuable. So, connection and being seen, heard, and valued is kind of core to why all these things work together.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, do you have any top do’s and don’ts to achieve those ends?

Tricia Cerrone

Yeah, keep your mouth shut to start, right? So, co-creation, like if you have a problem, state the problem. And if you’re a leader at the table and you’ve brought everyone together, don’t be the leader who’s like, “No, that won’t work.” Don’t be the leader who’s like, “Oh, I have a better idea.” Don’t be the person who says, “We’ve tried that before.” Pause, and even if you don’t think it’s a good idea, ask the question, “Well, tell me more about that,” or, “What made you think about that?” or, “Why do you think that might work in this situation?”

So, it’s that ability to explore an idea a little deeper despite your own filter that you have. So, again, a little bit of self-awareness and a little more listening. We were just interviewing another leader who was sharing that she brought together this entire team of leaders, and the solution came from the custodial person, not from all these other experts who are great designers and thinkers. And I think that’s what it is. Everyone needs to listen because you don’t know where that great idea is going to come from.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Edward van Luinen

Absolutely. I agree, Trish. And, gosh, I was a people manager for five or six years, always leading the team meeting. And I don’t know, finally I had the realization, Pete, that was like, “Edward, why don’t you ask your team members to take turns leading a meeting? Why are you doing it all the time?” And I think that speaks to what Trish is talking about.

Co-creation is other people have gifts and talents and creativity, and, gosh, they probably are maybe better at leading a meeting than you are, and you’re the one that has the manager title. So, I think that goes to also being generous and co-creating and being grateful for wonderful team members too.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Let’s hear about the fourth behavior.

Tricia Cerrone

Action or preference for action is what we call it, and so it’s obviously you have to move. The reason it’s important and we include it is because people have a lot of fear about making decisions, and you have to act even when you don’t have all the information, and that’s the point. And you actually don’t need that much information to move forward on something, and to try something, but if you do that then you will learn, “Okay, does that get me a little closer to the answer? Or is that something I’m going to cross off as it’s not going to work?”

And then, either way, whenever you do act, it builds that courage in you to continue to take more action. And when you do it as a team, it builds that confidence on a team so it’s a great feeling of that first time, especially when you do that together as a team, and you grow that kind of security and confidence and ability to take risks together.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And the fifth?

Edward van Luinen

Gratitude. Gratitude, we define as it’s really more than a feeling, it’s an action. So, it’s tied to action. I’ll give a specific example. I had to get ready for a very difficult meeting. I don’t know where I was working at the time, and I took the time to journal before that meeting, “What were all my thoughts about why I thought this was an excellent project? While I was even having a difficult time with the project at that moment, overall, what was great about what was I doing, what the team was doing, what the effort was, what were the early results?”

So, that when I went into that difficult project meeting, I was actually, that time spent on gratitude was almost sort of like an armor. Other people were negative, and they might have been critiquing but I was calm and I feel giving myself gratitude, and allowing to share gratitude with team members is also really important which is recognition and rewards, and it also gets to that collaborate to compete.

People are not expressing that much gratitude in the corporate world. We need more. It’s like water in the desert, and I feel that that’s really important for leaders who are authentic collaboration leaders and also team members to spend more time in gratitude. I may say, too, that sometimes people wonder and are suspicious at first, “Why are you buttering me up? Why are you complimenting me? We are in a competitive corporate environment. Are you trying to get something from me?”

And I feel that the authentic way of approaching compliments through gratitude and the consistent way shows that, “No, I care about the team. I care about the company. I care about the noble purpose of this project and this company, and that’s evident through my consistently doing it, not just haphazardly complimenting and being full of gratitude just to get something.” Or, as you said earlier, Pete, it’s really about, “How do I demonstrate that authentic gratitude?”

Tricia Cerrone

Yeah, there’s nothing worse when it’s insincere, right? But I think the value of it is to be specific of how that person contributed to this amazing outcome. I also think it’s important for the team to share celebrations together. And if you think of, like, when you tell a story, there’s the highs and lows, and even with our five behaviors, there’s points where I see it as telling a story, and gratitude is sort of that celebration moment that everyone needs like a breath from all of the action, and so it re-energizes everyone again.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, talking about stories, I’d love if you could share with us some of the most clear, illustrative, transformative examples of folks who have really made a 180 on some of these behaviors and the cool things that happened when they did so.

Tricia Cerrone

I had a colleague who honestly thought I was… he was a good friend and I had pitched this program for bringing innovation to Disney, and it was in a room with like all VPs and me, the only woman in there too. But, anyway, he totally put my idea down in front of everyone, and he was passionately against it. And so, I was like, “Okay, that was not co-creation right there.”

Pete Mockaitis

Could you share, what did he say when he put it down?

Tricia Cerrone

He said, “It’ll never work. No one can pitch an idea within five minutes,” and those were his main things. One, it’ll never work, and, two, it’s not actually possible. And so, after the meeting, I went with him and I said, “Can you talk more about why you’re so against this?” And he just said, “I just think it takes a lot more to pitch an idea, and you have to really understand the lay of the land, and blah, blah, blah.” He had all these legitimate reasons because when we pitch something at Disney, it could be 20 minutes to an hour where you have an executive. So, the idea that you could pitch something in three minutes and get potential feedback in two minutes was a little bit of an alien idea.

So, I took his notes and then I addressed them with everybody who wanted to pitch, and so I basically used generosity and taught everyone how to pitch, and I also brought him in to hear their pitches and critique them. And then when it came to the time for this event to happen, and all these different Imagineers were pitching various ideas in front of the leaders, he sat there in the audience, and he came to me afterwards, and he’s like, “That worked and that was really great.” He’s like, “I didn’t think it through.” I was surprised he admitted it but he said it was really great.

And so, through his not belief, and then him willing to sort of be generous and listening and giving me his opinion, actually, and then co-creating with me and the team to understand how to pitch, then he was able to, like, kind of overcome how he thought about something. And so, I think that’s kind of a co-creation experience of how that kind of came together.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Thank you.

Edward van Luinen

And just to add to that story, there’s going to be barriers to authentic collaboration, Pete. It’s not all just Pollyanna that everyone understands these five behaviors, and we’ve got a great product and process and team, and I love my job because now I practice these five behaviors and work with great leaders. And we have sort of a part of our book, which is “Negotiating Naysayers.” Like Trish said, what do you do in that instant when you’ve got someone who’s against you, publicly?

And Trish pushed through that barrier of whatever that was, insecurity or ego, by finding out sometimes, as Trish met later with that person, “What’s going on? Why? Tell us more.” Sometimes people saying no have a legitimate reason for saying no, and we can find out what that is and uncover more information to be more action-oriented and co-creation. So, sometimes barriers are a gift, not in the moment because they don’t feel so great, right, Tricia? But it’s like, “Wow, okay, this is the test of leadership, you know.” Yeah, this is the test of leadership. It’s not all Pollyanna all the time.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Tricia Cerrone

I think one of the other kind of important things that companies need to be aware of, and even like leaders on a team should be aware of is, and we call it noble purpose, but individuals and humans want to be working on something that’s important in their life. And how we express that to them on a team can make all the difference in their engagement and their desire to like push a little harder.

And so, if you think about a company vision and mission, a vision is sort of that emotional piece of it, and then the mission is the “This is what we actually do to make that happen.” And the noble purpose we always try to bring to a team, and it’s that combination of those two things, like, “What it is it for the company?” but then, “What does that mean for the team? How does the team’s vision and mission support the company? And then me, as a leader, how does that support the company? And then you, Pete, your unique contribution on the team that no one else can do, that is your more than more defined vision and mission, your noble purpose.”

So, we make sure everyone on the team understands how this doesn’t happen without them. Even the assistant who’s ordering food is incredibly important to make it all happen. So, we make sure that noble purpose is this concept that’s both emotional and practical and clear for each individual to, again, go back to like, “You are important and valued in this project and in this company, and we can’t do it without you.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Edward van Luinen

And if we can get our team members to say, “I love my job more,” then we’ve won with authentic collaboration. They can actually say they love their jobs more.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Edward van Luinen

I think that the Maya Angelou quote is so appropriate for authentic collaboration, “People forget what you say, people forget what you do, but people will never forget how you make them feel.” And I think that is really at the heart of authentic collaboration, is that people feel seen, heard, grown, developed, honored, and are rewarded being on an authentic collaboration team.

Tricia Cerrone

I think for me, one of my favorite sayings is the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Tricia Cerrone

I really like, as a business book, Essentialism by Greg McKeown, and also, anything by Michael Lewis, who wrote Moneyball and The Blind Side. I love all his stuff too.

Edward van Luinen

I like The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. I think that it speaks to how we can create in almost all circumstances.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Tricia Cerrone

They can find us at Authentic-Collaboration.com, which is our website, and we’re also on LinkedIn and post a couple times a week.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Edward van Luinen

Every day is day one. Sometimes when you’re in your routine as an HR director, or SVP of HR, or a general manager, or CEO, or hypo, sometimes we get into our routine. What we don’t want to do is repeat our same leadership style and wake up 20 years later, and say, “I’ve just been doing the same leadership style for 20 years over and over again.” So, every day is day one. Try something new. People don’t know you’re doing something new. They think you’re just being a great leader. But for you, it’s like, “Oh, this is the first time I’m doing it,” but no one knows that, so keep trying.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Tricia, Edward, thank you for this. And I wish you many lovely, authentic collaborations.

Tricia Cerrone

Thank you, Pete. It’s fun to be here.

Edward van Luinen

Thank you, Pete. It’s been really fun. Thank you very much.

Mar 14
0

944: Becoming a Leader that People Want to Follow with Jon Rennie

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Former submarine officer Jon Rennie outlines the leadership principles that make people want to follow you.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to deepen your connection with your team
  2. Why to let your colleagues fail more 
  3. Your fastest path to standing out 

About Jon

Jon is the Co-Founder, President & CEO of Peak Demand Inc., a components manufacturer for electrical utilities. He is a former U.S. Navy Nuclear Submarine Officer who made seven deployments during the end of the Cold War.

Before starting Peak Demand, he led eight manufacturing businesses for three global companies. He is the author of three best-selling leadership books and hosts the Deep Leadership podcast.

Resources Mentioned

Jon Rennie Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Jon, welcome.

Jon Rennie

It’s good to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

I am excited to have this conversation. I’d love for you to kick us off with a riveting tale from your days in a nuclear submarine during the Cold War. Bring us into the scene.

Jon Rennie

Well, can you imagine 155 guys getting on board a submarine, then locking the hatches for 100 days, where you deploy out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for 100 days, and you’re with the people that you deploy with, you have to get all these very difficult things done? We had 24 nuclear missiles, a nuclear reactor, and the average age was about 20 years old, and I did that seven different times in my life. So, it’s kind of an interesting experience. It’s certainly a great place to learn how to deal with people, how to get along with people.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. And, jeez, you know, Jon, do people ever just go nuts down there? Like, how does that work? How do we prevent for that? Because that seems like there’s a reasonable probability that at least a couple of those folks would just mentally lose it. I don’t know if I could handle it. Like, how do you train for that?

Jon Rennie

I don’t know if they train for it, but they do screen, they do a lot of psychological evaluations, but here’s how they really test you. On your first deployment, they actually have you climb inside of a torpedo tube all the way with a grease pencil to write your name on the end, on the outer door of the torpedo tube, and then they shut the inner door while you’re in there. And that’s their test to see if you’re claustrophobic.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so you’ve got a couple books here in terms of sharing what business professionals can learn from sailors and their experience in submarines.

Could you give us a cool example of a story, of a principle that you know you’re right, you teach about it, and how it really came to life and transformed someone in their profession, or, in particular, into a leader worth following?

Jon Rennie

So, one of the big things about being on a submarine is that there’s a shared level of responsibility, so every sailor is critical to the operation of a submarine at sea, and no person is more important than another. So, we have a shared responsibility to operate the submarine correctly, complete the mission and get home safely.

Now, the other side of it is we have a shared vulnerability, so if anything goes wrong, if your most junior sailor turns the wrong valve, everyone perishes. So, there’s not like one person dies, we all die. So, there’s a shared level of responsibility and vulnerability that is kind of unique to just about any other organization.

And you can imagine, when I came out of the military and went into the corporate environment, I didn’t get that same feeling.

There were certain people that had certain privileges and other people that had other privileges. And when things went bad, the people with the lower privileges are the ones that get laid off. So, the manufacturing workers or the call center people, they’re the ones that always got the brunt of whenever there were layoffs.

But when I started running manufacturing businesses after I got out of the Navy, I took that philosophy of “We’re all in it together and we need to have a shared level of responsibility and accountability to the business results.” In fact, my second belief, “All in the Same Boat,” because, literally, I learned leadership in a boat, all of us together working towards a common objective.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And could you share with us a tale of a time where you shared these principles with folks and someone really latched on and incorporated it, made it their own, and put it into practice, and saw some cool stuff happen?

Jon Rennie

Yeah, my first plant that I took over, I was young, 32 years old, I was the youngest plant manager in that plant’s history. And I came there and I noticed that there was an us-and-them attitude in the manufacturing plant. So, the hourly people kind of stuck to themselves, they had their own bathroom, they had their own areas where they congregated, and the salaried people had their own areas, too. And I kept thinking to myself, “How do we become one team?” We have sort of two separate areas, we live two separate lives, we didn’t have a lot of shared experiences.

And I wanted to get back to those days, like, for example, on a submarine, you stood long watches, six hours at a time, with your coworkers, and you really got to know them, they understood what your challenges, you understood their challenges. We just didn’t have that in the corporate world in this manufacturing plant.

So, I implemented this process called Fridays on the floor, where the first Friday of every month, I went out on the shop floor for four hours, and I work, and every month, I go to a different department and I work. And so, I’d actually operate the equipment, I would get to know the people, they would get to know me, and I learned that there was a tremendous amount of information on the shop floor that most of the salaried, most of the manager, they weren’t even aware of.

So, it was like there were two different worlds we live in. We weren’t one boat; we were two separate boats. And when I started doing that, I kept learning more and more about the way things operated, and the concerns that people have, tooling that was bad, procedures that were bad, all these things that I learned when I was doing it. And when I would come back and talked to the other managers, they didn’t understand my passion, they didn’t understand what I was talking about.

So, over time, we actually created Fridays on the floor for all of our management team, so we all would go out every Friday, we’d rotate different areas. And then after those four hours, we’d come back into one of the meeting rooms, and we would talk about what we learned. And what was interesting is that we basically started bridging that gap between the hourly and salaried people on that site, and we started fixing all these problems that have been going on for years and years that kind of have been ignored.

So, just by doing that, by getting out on the shop floor, and actually spending time with people, we actually built that bond, we built a connection, and we sort of built a common view of the businesses. And so, we ended up on that business, well, I was there for almost four years, and we were able to just improved our processes, reduced our scrap. We ended up having record-level of sales, record-levels of profitability, and a very high-performing operation, and we became sort of the top factory in our division.

But it was all about connecting the people. Instead of having two worlds, we brought them together into one world. And this came straight from the ideas from the military.

Pete Mockaitis

That is good. Back in episode 149, we had a guest S. Chris Edmonds, who said, “People in the organization see stuff that’s dumb all the time.” We see stuff that’s dumb, and then, whether or not that gets shared or implemented upon is, I guess, there’s all kinds of variables that might speak to it in terms of what’s the culture, what’s the psychologically safety in the organization.

And what’s fun about your approach there is we don’t actually have to rely on someone speaking up to get the information. And, hopefully, as you do that over some reps, we build some real trust and communication lines that go both ways so that people will just say, “Hey, our mallet is worn down.” “Oh, got you. Okay. Well, boom, here’s a new one.” So, you see these sorts of ongoing improvements in the communication, the culture, and the ability to fix the stuff they see that’s dumb all the more quickly and readily instead of waiting for years to get a fresh mallet.

Jon Rennie

Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing, too, is I think we built shared experiences, and that’s one thing that we had on the submarine, is we had all these shared experiences where I’d noticed, when I got to the corporate world, they had different experiences about what work life was like. A lot of people on the shop floor didn’t even know what the people in the office did, they’re like, “I don’t know. There’s just a bunch of people over there. I don’t know what they do.”

And so, part of it was them getting to know what we did every day. And I think that was one of the eye-opening things about this Fridays on the floor, is that the people were actually thankful, they were like, “I never knew what you guys did all day long. I never knew what marketing did. I didn’t know what accounting did. I just knew there’s a bunch of people in the office, they got to sit. I had to stand all day.” Really interesting, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so I want to hear about you got a few books. The title I love the most was I Have the Watch: Becoming a Leader Worth Following. A fantastic subtitle. Generally speaking, how does one become a leader worth following?

Jon Rennie

Well, it comes with the title, which is “I Have the Watch.” I was a Naval officer, and part of that, when you took over the watch, you’re responsible for the mission and the people. So, if I was the officer of the deck, for example, I was responsible for six hours for the mission of that submarine and everybody inside of it.

So, in the case of, maybe, the midwatch, the captain was asleep in his rack down in his estate room, and I was responsible for that shift, everything that happened on that shift for those six hours. And so, it’s the idea of mission and people, and that’s really critical, because a lot of times people get promoted into management jobs, and they sort of go back to what they were used to doing, maybe as an individual contributor. They do emails, they go to meetings, and they forget that it’s about the mission and the people.

And so, the idea of “I Have the Watch” is that you have responsibility, you take ownership of the mission, you take ownership of the people, and that’s a really critical part of leadership. And a big part of this book I talk about is that leadership is a people business. It’s about people. So, if you are doing and not leading, then you’re really not doing your job as a leader. So, your job is to lead, your primary function is to lead.

And it’s different than when you’re an individual contributor, like maybe an engineer or an accountant. When you become the manager, you have leadership responsibilities, and sometimes we forget about that. Oftentimes, I saw it in corporate that people forgot their people responsibilities.

Pete Mockaitis

Could you share with us an example of a common people-responsibility that people forget?

Jon Rennie

So, the big thing I saw is busyness. So, we stay busy as managers, and in a lot of cases, it’s fear-based, where managers really don’t want to deal with people because people are messy. I always say that, too, people are messy so they don’t want to deal with it, so, “It’s easier to be in my comfort zone and answer emails, or be on the phone all day, or be in conference rooms all day than going out to the uncomfortable place where my people work, and they may have complaints, or they may have concerns.”

And maybe you’re overloaded, maybe you got a lot of things on your plate, and you don’t want to spend that time getting out and talking to the people so you isolate yourself. And I see a lot of managers, in my 22 years in corporate, I saw the managers isolating themselves, and mostly it was fear-based. They just didn’t want to take the time and listen to the challenges that their employees are having.

And so, I always challenge managers to get out, to go where your people are. It’s an essential part of what we do, is to get out of our offices and spend time to where our people are. So, I have a manufacturing company that I run, and in the afternoons, I always push myself away from my desk, and I go out. I pretty much can work any job on the shop floor, so I’ll just jump on the line and help out the employees. And I’m not there to help, I don’t really do a lot helping, but I’m there to listen, I’m there to talk, and I’m there to communicate because that’s really what’s important. We have to be present as leaders.

Pete Mockaitis

Now, Jon, I’m wondering, so manufacturing is really cool because, well, one, it’s just fun to watch how stuff gets built and it’s unfolding along the process. It’s a beautiful thing to witness.

If folks are in other industries that are a little bit less hands-on or tactile, how might we implement that with regard to that joining together on the frontline and observing? I’m just sort of imagining, I’m thinking about my audio people, like, “So, how do I hop in on that?” It’s like, “So, you’re many miles away from me, and you’re doing audio stuff and software, which I appreciate, I love it.” How might I apply some of these Jon principles in these contexts?

Jon Rennie

So, we’ve seen a lot with remote and hybrid work these days, and the concept, by the way, is not something that I developed. It’s called Gemba, it’s part of the Lean Manufacturing principles that come from Toyota. And the principle of Gemba is to go where the value is added. And, usually, in the case of any type of business where most of your people are, that’s where the value is added. So, you want to go to where your people are.

So, now the question is, “What do you do with hybrid and remote work?” Well, you have a normal check-in process. So, you have a check-in process where, in this case, I would say probably more like once a week where you check in on individuals, and you have a one-on-one, and you say, “How are things going? How are things going with this project?” And you have that chance to be able to touch base. It’s a little different than pushing yourself away from your desk and walking out to where your people are.

So, it’s the idea of Gemba where the value is added, go where the value is added, and it’s going to be different for every type of business.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you. I guess I’m also thinking about sort of screen-sharing type stuff, like, “Hey, here’s what’s up. Here’s a software I use, etc.” and they could just behold, “Oh, what’s going on there? Oh, wow, that’s really cool.” It’s like, “Wow.” But I think you could still learn some things, like, “Wow, it seems like you’re spending a lot of time dealing with this.” Like, “Yeah, man, we get the audio, it’s a mess.” It’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry. I had no idea. Maybe I should be sending guests microphones,” and we do.

Okay. Cool. You’ve got a number of interesting turns of phrase, which I like to dig into a little bit. What do you mean when you suggest that we let people fail?

Jon Rennie

Failure is a powerful teaching tool. We don’t like to fail, right? So, as humans, we don’t want to fail. We want to succeed in everything we do. One of the things the Navy taught us was that was the best way to learn was to fail. And the way they did it was they put you in a position as junior officer of the watch, so you would have like an officer of the deck, and you have a junior officer of the deck.

And so, when you were junior officer of the deck, you were under the supervision of a more senior watch stander. And so, typically, then you take that junior position, and they would throw all sorts of different casualties at you – flooding, fire, you name it, an incoming torpedo. And they wanted to see how you fought the ship as a junior watch stander. And, inevitably, they would throw everything at you, and you would fail because it was impossible. They threw too many things at you.

And then they would stop the drill, we’d get the ship safe, and they would start talking to you, “What do you think you did right? What do you think you did wrong?” And it was the teaching session, the coaching session, and through that, we became better watch standers because we failed, we learned, and we got better at each of these individual tasks.

Now, what do we do in corporate a lot of times? And one of the things I noticed, kind of coming into corporate, is that we take our really difficult jobs and we give them to our senior people because we don’t want any mistakes, we don’t want failure. We take our junior people and we give them grunt work, and we make them do grunt work until you’ve been around long enough to take on a more important task.

And I think we miss out on opportunities to give younger people challenging assignments and a mentor to help them through that process, so they get exposure to the difficult things in business instead of just doing grunt work. The problem when you give a junior employee grunt work for two years is that they get frustrated.

They might come into your company very excited, very happy to be there, with a lot of passion, and that goes away as they continue to just do stuff that’s beneath maybe their skillsets, or beneath the things that they trained for in college, or maybe they got a certification in something that they never got a chance to use.

So, I really do believe that we need to allow our employees to fail in a controlled manner if we want them to learn and develop and become better.

Pete Mockaitis

Can you give us some examples in practice of folks failing in controlled manner, specifically in terms of what’s a person’s normal responsibilities versus new stretch responsibilities? And how is that controlled manner executed?

Jon Rennie
So, in my case, I’m always looking for leadership potential in employees, like someone that can maybe step up to the next level. And so, one of the things I like to do is to give them a stretch assignment. So, this might be anything from, “Develop a marketing literature for this new product that we’re coming out,” or, “Give me a market study for this particular region for this product,” or, “Lead this effort to setup pricing for this new product.”

So, I’ll give them a stretch assignment that might be outside, which is almost always outside their comfort zone, and then I want to get a chance to meet with them and assess how they do with that, so how did they with the project that was outside their comfort zone. And you learn a lot from those sessions, so you get a lot of feedback. A lot of times, the employee is excited, they get an opportunity to do something different. They’re going to mess up and it’s a great chance for coaching.

You find some employees aren’t ready to step up, and they even say that, like, “Wow, that was way beyond what I want to do. I’m maybe not interested in that.” And others are just energized by it, “Can I do it again? This was fun. This was what I want to do in my career.” So, I think finding great employees and giving them stretch assignments is a great way to evaluate their skills and give them a chance to do something kind of exciting and different.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, then with the marketing study, for example, I suppose if they give you a terrible study, nothing disastrous has happened there, it’s just like, “Okay, we’re not going to use this information to make any decisions,” like nobody has died, injured, or millions of dollars have been destroyed. Like, they just said, “Okay, you’ve produced a document that is of no value,” so that is a failure, but it’s controlled in the sense that no major damage has been done. Is that how you think about it?

Jon Rennie

Yeah, I think so. And, again, the more you get a chance to see somebody in action, the more you’re going to give them more responsibility that may have higher risks associated with it. But, yeah, so you do where failure is not going to be fatal.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, so failure is not going to be fatal. And then you’re sharing with them great feedback associated with, “Hey, thanks for taking a crack at this marketing study. Here are some ways you can make that useful for us, etc.”

Jon Rennie

And also, too, is the feedback of learning from them, like, “How did it go? Where did you struggle? Where did you have a hard time finding information? How do you think you did on this?” Just hearing their experience helps you understand kind of their mindset going into it and coming out of it, and how you can coach them to even be better.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have pro tips for how you do deliver that coaching?

Jon Rennie

I think it’s kind of being honest. I think being honest is really important. Obviously, you’ve got to be sensitive to people’s feelings. I’m maybe a little more sensitive to that. I don’t want to be too harsh but I do think we need to give them the honest feedback. And I would tell you, I’ve had people where I’d given them stretch assignments, and they have failed, and when I say to them, “This isn’t really working out,” and they know it’s not working out, they’re like, “Yeah, I recognize that, and it’s probably not something I want to do more of.” So, I think both parties recognize when this is not a good fit.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Jon, just for thought, I’d love to zoom in. Let’s say I handed you a marketing study, which clearly appeared to be assembled in 45 minutes with Google and ChatGPT and had factual inaccuracies but a couple of cool-looking charts, and so it’s no good. How do you share that with me?

Jon Rennie

Yeah, I would ask the process, “So, how did you develop this? Where did it come from?”

Pete Mockaitis

“Oh, I did some research across the internet.”

Jon Rennie

“Yeah. Well, what kind of research?”

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, I was looking to see different competitors and their potential revenue associated with these offerings.”

Jon Rennie

“Did you talk to anyone else as you went through the research? Did you talk to anyone in the marketing department or anybody in our sales department?”

Pete Mockaitis

“Oh, no, I didn’t talk to anybody.”

Jon Rennie

“Okay. Why not?”

Pete Mockaitis

“Oh, it didn’t occur to me.”

Jon Rennie

“Hmm,” so I think there’s the discussion, there’s the sort of finding out what and where that they could do…where they see the aha moments, like, “Maybe I should’ve talked to more people.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, I’m wondering, how do you also convey kind of the standard or what good is?

Jon Rennie

Does it answer all the questions we’re looking for? Typically, with an assignment like this, we have things that we want to get out of it, and if they fall short, then we’re going to have those discussions.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, there you go in terms of, “Okay, the study to go into a little bit more detail, these are the particular questions we were looking to get answers for, and this deliverable does not presently answer those questions, or has false answers to those questions.”

Jon Rennie
Right. Exactly, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. You also have the turn of a phrase “earn your oxygen.” What does that mean and how do we apply it?

Jon Rennie

So, we have an expression on the submarine that was, how do I say it, it’s a little controversial because there was a high level of positive peer pressure on a submarine. I mentioned earlier, every sailor has to have, “We have to trust you with our lives.” And so, when you first come on a submarine, we call you a nob. A nob is a non-useful body. Until you could earn your oxygen, until you could be responsible for some area of the submarine, then you were a useful body.

So, you were taking in the oxygen and the food from people that were useful, and so there was a high level of positive peer pressure to get qualified, to become a qualified operator. And so, what qualification meant on a submarine was for the sailors, junior sailors, to work with more senior sailors to prove their competencies in various operations, procedures, watch standing.

And so, as they prove their proficiency, they would actually have, what’s called, a qualification card, a qual card, and they would get signatures that, “Okay, a senior watch stander says this person understands how to use the torpedo launch system. This person knows how to repair a steam fitting.” So, you would get qualified over time and become qualified.

So, earn your oxygen means that everywhere you go, not even in the Navy, but in the civilian world, “What are you doing to earn your oxygen? What are you doing to add value to the business that you work for, the organization that you work for?” So, I often talk to high school students, and that’s one of the messages I say, is, “Don’t be a nob.”

And so, the concept there is that there are so many people in our world that are consumers and not creators. They’re consumers and they’re not builders. And so, I really encourage high school students to “Not be a consumer, not spend your time online just entertaining yourself. What are you doing to build? What are you doing to grow? What are you doing to add value?” So, the idea of earning your oxygen is becoming valuable to your organization, whoever you work for or whatever you’re doing in the world.

Pete Mockaitis

And I think that’s important to consider. And I think about in business-y terms, there’s the value you consume associated with there are costs, associated with keeping you employed with a salary and benefits, equipment, office space, etc. and then there’s value you, hopefully, are creating through your work. And so, I guess if you talk about oxygen versus dollars, it’s interesting that in some fields it’s very clear, like sales, like, “Okay, man, this is what you sold, this is what I’m paying you,” or a fundraising, it’s very clear.

And then it gets a little fuzzier the farther away it gets from that in terms of, it’s like, “Oh, well, I am doing accounting or finance work.” And so, it’s like, “Okay, well, that needs to be done, we have to stay compliant, that’s valuable.” And so, it’s tricky to precisely assess that, and yet I think, it’s my belief, as we see layoffs and such, that the more clear and massive the value you’re contributing is, the safer your job and the more likely you’re going to be on an upward trajectory there.

Jon Rennie

Yeah, absolutely. And I would say a lot of people will kind of come into a job, and they say, “Well, this is your job responsibilities,” and people will do the bare minimum, or they would just do that job responsibility. And I also say look for the extras that you can add value to in the organization. So, I started out in corporate world as an associate design engineer in a cubicle. And five years later, I was running a manufacturing plant.

Well, it didn’t happen that I just magically got there. It was through earning my oxygen and adding value in everything that I did. And, in my case, going from a cubicle to the corner office was all about volunteering, learning new skills, being there when the company needed me, and doing anything I could to support the organizational objectives. And that eventually got me the opportunity to lead a plant.

But I think if you haven’t put the extra work in, you say, “Well, I want to be promoted, I want to move up the corporate ladder but I’m not willing to put the work in,” you’re not going to get there. It does take extra effort if you want to get noticed, if you want to achieve goals that you have in your career. I didn’t necessarily have a goal to run a manufacturing plant at 32 but it happened because I was adding a lot of value in everything I did.

Pete Mockaitis

And, Jon, I’d love to hear the counterpoint to that in terms of if employees are doing that and have seen, “Hmm, the meritocratic forces do not seem to be operational here. My added value appears to amount to squat and it feels like I’m just sort of burning the midnight oil for no extra compensation, and it feels like a raw deal,” how do you speak to that perspective? And how do we assess whether extra efforts are likely to result in extra goodies?

Jon Rennie

Well, it doesn’t always work out that way, does it? So, I have a good friend, John Brubacher, who always said, “Go where you’re celebrated, not where you’re tolerated.” And I think a lot of times that we are in positions, or in organizations, that don’t recognize that kind of extra effort, you have bosses that don’t care necessarily, or they’re looking out for themselves and not looking out for their team, so there are times when you can do a lot of extra work and not get noticed, and maybe that’s not the right organization that you should be in.

But I think it’s good to have a discussion. You’re always going to have those opportunities to have a one-on-one with your boss, and a lot of companies it’s once a year. During annual performance review, you get a chance to sit down with your boss. And at that point, you can have that discussion, “Hey, I’ve been trying to do this. I’ve got this dream, or this desire, or this goal, to get to this level. I’ve been doing a lot of extra work. What else could I be doing to try to earn or move into the position I’m looking to do?” Have that frank conversation. But I would also say is be willing to move to find those opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Jon Rennie

I think the one thing I would say to this, when it comes to like a similar analogy from the Navy to the businesses is that without a crew, the ship is just a hunk of steel sitting in the harbor. It takes a crew to bring a ship to life. It takes people to bring our businesses to life, our plans to life, the things we’re trying to do. So, I think people are very critical to our business, and without them, we’re not going to go anywhere. So, I think we sometimes overlook the importance of people in our organizations.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, now, Jon, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jon Rennie

Well, I like Teddy Roosevelt just as many of the things he said, but “The Man in the Arena” quote is probably been best for me. So, the idea of being in the arena is where I want to be, not a critic in the stands. And I always say be a builder, not a critic. It’s hard to be a builder. It’s easy to be a critic.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And could we hear a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jon Rennie

I’ve been doing a lot of work right now in my Ph.D. program on perseverance and grit, and, especially, in small teams, “How do you develop grit in a team?” So, Angela Duckworth did a lot of work on grit. I love her work. So, yeah, perseverance has been something I’ve been into lately.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Jon Rennie

First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham. It’s the one book that sort of changed my outlook for how leaders can lead.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Jon Rennie

I get up at 4:00 a.m. every morning. So, I write until 5:00, and I work out from 5:00 to 6:00. So, I’ve been doing that for about 10 years, and so I feel like I get a lot done in the early morning.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Jon Rennie

The big one is leadership is a people business. I see that quite a lot.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jon Rennie

My website JonSRennie.com, and I’m on every social media @jonsrennie. I’m pretty active on Twitter, so. X, I guess, now.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Jon Rennie

Hey, you want to be awesome at your job, don’t be a nob, don’t be a non-useful body. Be useful in everything you do.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, Jon, thank you and good luck.

Jon Rennie

Thank you, Pete.

Mar 04
0

941: The Best Way to Hire Top Talent with Mike Michalowicz

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Mike Michalowicz reveals a surprising strategy for finding and retaining top talent.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The more effective alternative to job interviews 
  2. The key signs someone is perfect for your team 
  3. The three drivers of commitment and engagement 

About Mike

Mike Michalowicz founded and sold two multi-million dollar businesses by his 35th birthday. He is the bestselling author of Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, Clockwork, and Fix This Next. He has built two additional multimillion-dollar companies and has become one of the world’s most popular speakers on small business topics. Fabled author, Simon Sinek deemed Mike Michalowicz “…one of the top contenders for the patron saint of entrepreneurs.” 

Resources Mentioned

Mike Michalowicz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, welcome back.

Mike Michalowicz

Dude, it’s awesome to be back. Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s awesome to be chatting. I have enjoyed so many of your books over the years, and I’m excited to hear about your latest All In: How Great Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams. Lay it on us, I know you go deep with your research. So, tell us the tale of how you came to understand the problem and the solutions that you’ve put forward in your book All In.

Mike Michalowicz

So, basically, what I do in my research, I say, “What’s the desired outcome we have in a circumstance?” So, in this case, it was recruiting high-performing employees, people that are super engaged, great people for our company. Then what’s the actual outcome? And most businesses have horrible outcome.

When we have a desired outcome, and the actual outcome is far off, I look in the middle, which is the method we follow, I call the DMO, desire method outcome. And the method we’re using is interviews. So, this is not a shocker but the solution is. It’s no surprise that most people we interview don’t work out for the long term or aren’t high performers. The percentage, which shows about 5% of people we hire are rock star employees for long term in our company.

But what I found is the solution kind of blew my mind. So, I said, “Well, is there any example of any organization that doesn’t use interviews or use a different method, and has a high percentage rate?” Well, sure enough, there’s an industry, it won’t be a surprise in a moment, but they’re over half a trillion dollars in revenue, that does not run a single interview, they only do performance-based and what they call workshops or camps, and the output is like 95% extremely high performers.

So, here’s the industry. Sports. And that’s not the surprise now, it’s like, “Well, of course.” If I’m a football team, I won’t go, “Hey, why don’t you come for an interview? Where is the green light?”

Pete Mockaitis

Actually, throwing balls, catching balls, running with balls?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, you get on the field and do. But there’s two forms of interviews. There’s one where I’m considering a candidate and I want to see your functional skills, but there’s an even greater level, and this is the big opportunity for all of us. There is what’s called potential assessments, and it’s not done in the interview process. It’s through an education process.

So, I’ll give a personal example because I didn’t really appreciate experiences. I played Lacrosse in high school, and, admittedly, I was not such a good athlete but, whatever, I played. I went to Hobart Lacrosse campus, which is in the northeast where kind of where I lived, and this is like the preeminent school in this area, there’s 300 kids there. And while we were practicing over this week’s period, certain students were tapped on the shoulder, brought to another field, and invited to play more advanced skills, whatever.

The people who had potential in the beginning were quickly vetted out to perform on more competitive fields and try new skills. By the end of the camp, I think two or three students were invited to play for Hobart, this elite team. I was not one of them. But here’s what’s cool. I played Lacross in college, and it’s in the big part because of what I learned at Hobart. The lesson is this, that we, as employers, can put on camps, an educational event, where everyone gets elevated and used also as an observational medium to cherry-pick the best candidates.

Now, the last thing I want to share, because I get so excited about this. This is happening in the real business world, just not enough. And for the folks listening, I bet you no one’s doing workshops right now, but I’ll tell you a major company who is, it’s Home Depot. And the next time you hear they’re doing a Build a Birdhouse workshop, that is a recruiting platform, and this is how it works.

You see this ad, Build a Birdhouse, Bring a Kid, whatever, and you go down there, and you have experience. They’re there to educate you, you’re having fun, you get ingratiated at the store, it’s cool, we build a birdhouse. They have an employee there that’s observing participation, and if you’re the parent who is learning quickly, helping other parents, asking good questions, really enthusiastic about it, they will tap you on the shoulder, and say, “You’re the exact candidate we’re looking to work in Home Depot. Have you ever considered us?”

So, here’s the lesson. Don’t setup an interview platform, saying, “We’re interviewing people to build birdhouses.” Simply say, “If you’re curious, you can learn,” because the best candidates are curious. The other thing that’s interesting is it’s a recruiting platform that doesn’t follow where the standard fair is going. Everyone is going to the platform DuJour, or Indeed, or whatever it is nowadays. We go there, and everyone keeps going after the same 2% of unemployed people and a few people that are looking for a job right now.

But in an education format, I can go to my competition. I can go to anyone, and say, “Are you looking to get better at what you currently do?” Because, at the end of the day, top performers are always looking to learn. They’re learners. So, put on a learning environment, now people come, they learn the skills that you are looking to hire for, or they have the prerequisite skills and you’re giving them new education, and now you can observe and cherry-pick the people you want. I mentioned in the book, we were testing this other company, and, sure enough, we had a bookkeeping agency that, to a great effect, they preschool, the last organization is using this now.

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, I love so much of what you’re saying here because, well, I actually own a podcast production company, and that’s how we do hiring, is we just put people through sort of a gauntlet. They’re from all over the world, so it’s hard to get them together physically but we’ll just have a series of things, it’s like, “Okay, show me what you can do here and here,” in terms of one of my favorites is “Tell me what’s wrong with this sentence and write a better one. What’s wrong with this sentence, and write a better one? Summarize this podcast episode, etc.”

And so, then when we get together, it’s like, “Holy schmokes, you really sure know how to write very well. Go figure. And I guess you have to in order to pass this gauntlet of assessments.” And then this is also connecting in that I have coached many, many candidates through what I call case interviews for consulting jobs in which they have to solve real-time, live, a business case in front of the interviewer, like, “Hey, our client is this business, their profits are down, what do we do?” and they have to do this all dance of asking clarifying questions, and doing and putting forth a structure, and doing some calculations, ultimately generating a solution.

And, go figure, the folks they hire at the consulting firms tend to work out and not leave early. But I think the coolest experience of this was with, have you heard of the Fossey Foundation?

Mike Michalowicz

I have not.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, this is a nonprofit and, on their website, they identify and recruit and train individuals with extraordinary leadership potential, and Fossey scholars get full tuition leadership scholarships from their colleges and universities. And so, the idea is they want diverse students in colleges, and their students’ brilliance may not show up on the ACT/SAT GPAs. And so, I volunteered several times. It’s so fascinating.

Mike Michalowicz

That’s cool.

Pete Mockaitis

So, we observe high school students as they engage in these activities and we’re all just watching and writing down who’s impressing us with the leadership things they’re doing and who is not.

Mike Michalowicz

I love it.

Pete Mockaitis

And then when all the students leave, we talk about them. And so, that’s like one way that this talent is surfaced, and it’s like a camper workshop for “How do we find great high school talent that should be going to college who isn’t showing up on the ACT/SAT GPA?”

Mike Michalowicz

And you used that term students, which is perfect. So, when you talked about the gauntlet, that’s what’s called a skill assessment. The challenge of the gauntlet is these are people who are already applying for a job so they know they’re in a test environment, and it is a powerful tool. It’s kind of, like, I’m looking for a football player throw-catch-run, but there’s also camps, and that comes prior to this. This is for students, so this is people that they don’t know they’re being vetted, and that’s not even the primary intention, it’s to educate.

So, I can run a workshop, saying, “Learn to be a podcast editor,” or whatever it may be, and now I can invite in my competition, I can invite all these people, and they learn the experience. A couple keys to running a great workshop. Charge for it because people who are curious will pay, and it is educational. Give a certificate of accomplishment. Now they have a piece of paper, or digital paper, that they can use, if you decide not to employ them, maybe you can benefit them with another employer, but in the process always observe.

And that last example, as we said, they are students. So, they’re going through an education and learning, but we’re cherry-picking. The analogy I use, I put this in the book, is pretend you and I, Pete, we want to start a rock band, and we want just like trashing guitarist, and we’re like, “You know, let’s pick a guy from the ‘80s, let’s pretend Eddie Van Halen is still alive. We want Eddie Van Halen.” Now, how do you find Eddie Van Halen without knowing who he’s going to be?

We already know Eddie Van Halen is a qualified person, and if we called him, he would reject us, he’d laugh. The A players are gainfully employed, they’re making Goku box, and they’ll say no. But if we could have Eddie Van Halen when he is 12, that’s when he discovered guitar, I bet you we could’ve secured him. So, the big question, of course, is “How do you know Eddie is going to be Eddie Van Halen?” Well, you do a workshop. We could put on a guitar shop. If we need a future guitarist, we need a great guitarist. Let’s put him in a workshop.

I actually play a guitar but I don’t play it well. We need somebody that’s really a trasher, maybe you do, but we’ll bring in someone from the outside, and say, “We’re going to pay you for a five-day workshop, or one day, or one hour online, whatever it is,” then we reach out to all 12-year-olds, and say, and their parents, “A hundred dollars, learn to play a trashing guitar.” Then we look for the indicators of potential.

It’s always in three stages. Curiosity is the first stage, “Oh, I will do this or not.” So, people vet themselves out right there. Second stage is desire, it’s like, “Oh, I really like this.” Eddie couldn’t put the guitar down. He’s asking tons of questions. That’s what Home Depot was looking for, the parents that help other parents, ask questions about building birdhouses. The final stage is thirst. Thirst is, “I can’t stop.” It’s almost an addictive level. The job of the instructor is to provide an education so everyone comes out better.

Then, or additionally, observe for desire and thirst. When you find those people, that’s when you pull Eddie aside, and say, “Hey, by the way, we happen to be starting a band. Thanks for joining our class as a student here. Do you want to join a band? Do you ever think about that?” That 12-year-old Eddie may have said, “Yeah.” And we don’t know he’s going to necessarily be the Eddie he became, but those desire and thirst are the strongest indicators that he has that potential to become that guy.

Pete Mockaitis

And in the setting of the workshop, I can see curiosity, what are some of the telltale signs, “Ooh, there’s some desire. Ooh, there are some thirst”?

Mike Michalowicz
So, usually, if there’s homework assignments, they actually do the homework. Another part is lots of questions. So, curiosity will come after questions, but desire is also indicative of questions. It’s the person who’s raising their hand the most. The second one is attendance. So, you’ll see if someone is really into it will often arrive early, stay late. They’ll usually be distraction-free. That’s actually the biggest indicator.

When people try to multitask, it means they’re not engaged with the task at hand, so they’re trying to do other things. So, you can see someone online, or wherever, if they turn their cameras off, those are awesome indicators. In a workshop, someone is checking their phone regularly. Well, when someone gets immersed in it, it becomes this tunnel vision. So, we’re looking for the tunnel vision effect.

Thirst may not present itself right away. It may come later on but thirst is an inability to quit. It’s the person that stays for an extra five hours. It’s the professor that says, “Oh, my God, I wish this person will go home now,” or the instructor will go home. That person who can’t quit it has thirst, so we look for those elements.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s so phenomenal. And this reminds me, I was doing a workshop for a pharmaceutical company, just a series of workshops, what you said about the homework was striking. And I thought, “I need to encourage these folks to do the exercises outside of our workshops.” And so, I thought, “Okay, we got gift cards,” I thought a little bit of accountability, a leader board might embarrass them, like, “Hey, your boss and everyone is going to see that you’re not doing the exercises,” and that didn’t really motivate very many people.

Mike Michalowicz

Unbelievable, huh?

Pete Mockaitis

I was surprised, like, “I’d be so self-conscious about my name being at the bottom of the leader board.”

Mike Michalowicz

I know.

Pete Mockaitis

But, sure enough, there were two people who were smoking it, like, with great consistency, getting it done. And so, we stayed in touch, and they might be listening to this show. Hello, guys. And it was so funny, they said, “Hey, you know what’s really interesting, Pete? The two of us were the ones who got promotions, and we were also the ones who scored highest on doing all of the homework.”

Mike Michalowicz

No surprise.

Pete Mockaitis

And I was like, “Yes, that is interesting.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, very interesting.

Pete Mockaitis

Because they had the desire, it’s like, “Ooh, I really want to develop these professional skills,” and they went after it, and then they signed up for my email list and other stuff afterwards because they were just into learning these skills, and it so happened that those skills are the ones they needed to flourish in their careers, which is why that was the subject of the workshops in the first place. And so, that’s really telling. If I can give, set a stage to create an opportunity whereby people can distinguish themselves by choosing to proactively do the thing or not, that’s supremely telling. I love it.

Mike Michalowicz

I remember I was doing a presentation last week in front of 200 folks, and these are all business owners. And I said, “Who in the room here is an A player?” And I said, “Please don’t be bashful. This is an opportunity to brag, if you feel that’s appropriate.” And every hand went up. And they defined A player, drive and all the stuff. And then at the same group, I said, “Keep your hand up. I’m curious, what percentage of the population is A players?” And they’re like, “Five percent, 2%.” The most gracious was 10%.

I said, “Okay, we have 100% of the people who are A players, yet, at the same time, saying 10% of the population is A players.” So, this is some bizarre statistical phenomenon happening. There’s some warp in the universe right now, or something is not right. And what I believe is not right is everybody is an A player in the right circumstances. These people, and we all see the best, we all have the potential to see the best in ourselves, some people don’t, but we do have the potential to see the best in ourselves but we have to be put in the right environment.

Eddie Van Halen is probably a pretty crappy, or was a pretty crappy bookkeeper. And so, we’d say, “He sucks.” Yeah, but you give him a guitar. The thing is my little business, I got 20 people here, I have maybe one more role available in the next year. Of all the people in this planet, there’s a small percentage they will be a match for that. But what I had to realize as a leader, as an employer, everyone coming in is an A player. The question is, “Are they an A player for my needs?” And it does change the perspective.

When we think most people aren’t a fit, it’s all about just, “Oh, everyone sucks.” When we think everyone is great, then we start saying, “Well, what will be an indicator of their greatness in compliance with what I need or in alignment with what I need?” It just changes the vision a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis

It is, yes. And it feels more kind and hopeful.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, totally. And I think it’s the truth. Pick any person, in the right role, they can crush it. And I’m not saying everyone is going to be great nine to five. Maybe some dude, all he does is sleep all day. Maybe he can test mattresses. Like, you got to figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis

“Dude, get in a sleep clinic.”

Mike Michalowicz

He’s a sleep clinic tester.

Pete Mockaitis

“You’ll be giving so much data for the scientists.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, or maybe he watches training videos to see if he can stay awake to any training videos. And if he does, he’s a great tester.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Mike, you’re so fun. I love these perspectives. Okay. Well, that’s such a huge takeaway right there, is creating these workshops or camps. I’d love it if we could get a few more examples for how this can be turned into reality. So, Home Depot, build a birdhouse, sports camps, we talked about the Fossey Foundation. What else?

Mike Michalowicz

So, we worked with a preschool, and this preschool is what’s called site directors. This is a multi-location preschool and they need teachers that can review the performance to ensure all standards are being achieved in their multiple locations. And the prerequisite is you need to be a teacher already. And so, you can get people with advanced skills by having prerequisites.

So, what we did is we reached out to all the competition. And this is the beautiful thing, the competition will send people. We said, “We’re putting on an educational event,” it’s always educational, “We’re going to charge $150 or whatever it was, for a one-day training on site directors services and how you’d manage it. The prerequisite is you must be a teacher for five years, blah, blah, blah.” Our competition sent teachers, so now, at our location, all the competitors’ teachers there, and we teach in this process, we start observing who shows desire and thirst.

By the end, everyone has a certificate, they had accomplished the prerequisite skills or the tests, whatever, but we also identified three of those teachers, we said, “Well, gosh, you’re perfect to be a site director. We happen to be hiring,” but they’re also ethical, we said, “Hey, listen, you have a current employer. If they have a site director opportunity, it is clearly your talent. We invite you to talk with them and consider that, but if there’s not an opportunity and this is something you want to pursue, we’d love to have a conversation with you.” We got our best two site directors that way.

There was another case where a company of bookkeepers, they’re based out of the US, the founder, her name is Tuesday, she is originally from Kenya, an African country. I think it was Kenya. And she teamed up with the University of Nairobi, and said, “I’ll give you a bookkeeping course, all remote.” Actually, she even prerecorded the videos. She had an adjunct professor, she taught bookkeeping. They didn’t offer this course before at this particular university. I think it was a dozen students who went through it.

By the end, the onsite director, she gave them direction, saying, “As an adjunct professor, give me feedback on who’s doing the homework, who’s engaged the most, and I want to talk to those people, and I’ll start doing one-on-one coaching.” So, they did additive education, and she started coaching them individually, and she vetted down about three people that she hired. They’re her best performing employees. But the beauty of that story is the remaining nine people all got jobs as bookkeepers at other companies.

Now, here’s the last thing I want to share, this kind of feels overwhelming. I got to put on a course, I had to do a webinar. Even if it’s an hour, I don’t have the skills. Here’s the ultimate shortcut. Whatever position you need to hire for, find the workshop, the course, the education, the class that’s teaching it, and go as a student to observe the other students. That’s the shortcut. Just go and watch the others, seek desire and thirst, talk to them, and say, “Hey, I’m looking to hire, not deal.”

Pete Mockaitis

This is beautiful. All right, workshops is huge. Well, keep it going, Mike. What are some other pro tips on building these unstoppable teams? And I want to hear, generally speaking, interviews aren’t the method between desire and outcome that we’re after. Workshops are a cool alternative means of selecting folks. What are some other things you suggest that are not interviews?

Mike Michalowicz

So, the most common other thing I heard, and this was also mind-blowing to me, is the desire was, “I want my employees to act like owners.” The method was if you achieve certain goals, you’ll get rewarded. And the outcome is most employees see their job as just a job and don’t function as owners. They don’t put in that extra effort because they don’t have a desire.

What I found is a concept that was buried away in the 1970s-1980s called psychological ownership which is ignored by leaders, but, my gosh, it’s the tool that makes any of us, leader, owner, or not, to feel like owners. What it’s called is psychological ownership. So, there’s two types of ownerships. There’s legal ownership and psychological.

Legal ownership is just a contract of sorts but it doesn’t give you the feeling. Psychological always does, and we need to amplify it. The best example is I own stock in Ford, a hundred shares. I recently drove by a Ford factory, and I was just driving by, I didn’t look at it and say, “Oh, my God, I own three of those bricks on that building.” I just drove by, and I go, “Oh, there’s Ford. Where’s my money?” which is entitlement even though I have legal ownership.

Now here’s the irony, I also own a Ford pickup truck, and I feel that I own it but I actually don’t. The bank owns it, I’m making installments but I feel like I own it. So, the question is, “Why do I feel that way?” Because I treat it with such care. The reason is three elements. First of all, I have the ability to personalize it. I can program the radio stations the way I want. I can put bumper stickers on the back. When you can personalize something, you feel a sense of authority over it, and it becomes part of you. It’s an expression of identity.

The second part is I have control, authority, meaning I can park it where I want to park it, I drive whenever I want to drive it, all those elements. And the last part is I have intimate knowledge, I know all the bells and whistles. I went through the whole manual. I know what every button does. So, the more intimately we know something, the more we can personalize and put authority or control into it, the more we sense ownership.

So, as employees in an organization, within the confines of their job, where can they assert control? Part of it is idea generation. When someone comes up with their own idea, they feel control. Say, “Hey, here’s where we want to move our company, here’s your capacity in it, what do you think you could do or want to do to help us move the business forward?” So, now you’re asserting control, “How can you make this more your own? How can it be an expression of yourself?”

One thing we do when we have an SOP or standard in our own company now, I used to have the person that does it, currently teach it, and everyone follows a script, no control, no authority. Now, we do is we have a script, we give it to the new person, and say, “Learn from this. And then how can you enhance it and create the new training video because it’s going to be your standard?” The irony is the best student in every room is the teacher. So, they’re teaching, which means they’re learning, but also because it’s an expression of themselves, they have more ownership in the role.

Pete Mockaitis

I want to put you on the spot with, like, this really tricky example. Like, let’s say, “Hey, there is a standardized process by which this needs to be done for the sake of compliance or for the law.”

Mike Michalowicz

Right. Right. So, you can’t change the coding or anything.

Pete Mockaitis

So, there’s a few things that are kind of immovable. But could you give us some cool examples of how, even within such environments, folks manage to feel a lot of that cool personalization, control, and intimate knowledge?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, so a quick simple personalization tip, trick, is to change the name of something, maybe not publicly but internally. So, if there’s some kind of compliance document, I can call it Kelsey’s compliance, and right there, with the assigned names, you have a sense of authority, and really personalization over it so you can give it unique names and lingo. It’s a real simple technique.

Intimate knowledge, I would exploit that. So, I’d say, listeners, “Rules and regulations, we had to follow it to the tee. I want you to be the master at this. So, research it, study. Can you find loopholes, which is an opportunity?” When you find a loophole, it’s a technique of personalization, it’s like, “Oh, there’s a little button here that no one knows about that I can get through.” So, explore it. But even if they don’t find “loopholes” the fact they know the protocol better than anyone else, they’re building intimate knowledge.

Control and authority. There may be protocols they have to follow but can they control the submission times? You can say, “Hey, when is the optimum time to get this in? Does it always have to be Monday at 10:15 a.m.? Or, can we work with a schedule that suits you?” That’s giving them a sense of control so you can assert it. Again, what we’re looking for is for them to say, “This is my responsibility. This is my job,” and that means they’re sensing that authority.

I will give one word of warning though. There is a risk here of fiefdoms. And what a fiefdom is it’s where a person has so much knowledge that they start blockading other people from access. That’s dangerous. So, we want to move to a higher level of psychological ownership which is called collective psychological ownership.

What we do here is you have multiple parties involved, you make teams around it, so if there’s something, a risk of a fiefdom being built, invite multiple people to work in concert, in that way you prevent those walls from being built.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny how into things we can get in terms of if you feel like you’ve got your own little touch on it. In terms of like if I am getting into my own audio editing, which I do from time to time, here and there, even though I’ve got great supportive teams, I love to do certain things which are just sort of my little style. It’s like I’d like to do a gentle downward expansion to attenuate the intensity of a breath sound as opposed to a harsh noise gate that have layers of rich complex gradations of silence. It’s like, “Okay, that’s so dorky but I own it. I am invested in this.”

Mike Michalowicz
Amazing.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, if someone were to take that away, in terms of, like, “No, Pete, that’s not how we do it here. Actually, you’ve got to comply with the situation where we use XYZ software,” I wouldn’t like that.

Mike Michalowicz

Totally, right, because when someone asserts control or authority on you, we start building resistance. I was saying, when forced to comply, we seek to defy.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, Mike.

Mike Michalowicz

The classic study, and this works from poise, but the classic is with rental cars because we’ve all experienced this. The next time you go to Herts or wherever, you go through a protocol of compliance requirements. First, you got to fill out a hundred forms for an hour. Secondly, if you don’t return with a full tank of gas, we’re going to penalize you by charging $10 a gallon for us to fill it because it’s so hard. Secondly, no scratches, no dents. Third, must be clean. Fourth, good luck passing the DMZ zone where there’s going to be flashing lights, spikes coming up, and some dude coming out with a gun asking for your ID, all that compliance.

So, when forced to comply, we seek to defy. What do we do the second we pull out? We do donuts in the parking lot, or we fly into the light and skid in sideways, or we punch it when it turns green. We definitely drive it more aggressively. Rental cars get beat up on compared to our own car, where we’re, “Hey, this is my car. We’re going to take care of it.” No one washes their rental car before returning, but we wash our own car. Why is that? When forced to comply, we seek to defy.

And this is one of the things that great leaders realize. Most leaders focus on compliance, achievement, and so employees are seeking for elbow room to get back at the boss. Great leaders embrace the internal human and allow them to take charge. Yes, there’s rules and confines. You can’t let people just go wild. We have to work as a team collectively. You can’t have a football team where you say, “Everyone just run any way you want.” We have to serve the plays.

But if we can give them self-expression, they can expand.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then as we speak, there’s a world of work, there’s these back-to-office mandates. Tell us, as we think about personalization and control, what’s your hot take on these?

Mike Michalowicz
Is that in the best interest of employees? Sometimes you have to require something that actually serves people, and you’ll get resistance, a.k.a. if you ever had children, that’s the world of raising children. My kids, “You have to take a shower at our house after a week.” There are some minimum requirements. These stink bombs walk around, and it’s really in their best interest.

Some employers are doing this because we’re losing the socialization at home. Everything is going virtual. And we’re losing that tactile experience. So, the employers that are requiring come back to the office to promote socialization are building connectivity among people.

It’s funny, they used to wonder that the water cooler, that business got done there, good ideas. No, business didn’t get done there. Connection happened there. People talk about their kids. When we have connection, we understand each other from a tactile level, we have trust. So, it’ll actually rebuild trust. But employers that are mandating it because they want to track time, or trying to assert authority, “I got to make sure you’re producing, so come on in.” That’s not going to work. People are going to, when forced to comply, they will seek to defy. That definitely won’t work.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, it sounds like what you’re saying is there are certain rules, guidelines, times, places, contexts where it is good, right, proper, and necessary for there to be some, “Hey, we’ve all got to be here” stuff going on, but if it’s from a perspective of authoritative, “I’ve got to watch you,” we’re in for bad news.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, if there’s a kind of a nourished, flourishing, comply to fly. So, if you are nourishing people, have demanded to come back because you’re going to nourish the team, “Go team,” and it’s really in the best interest of people, they will flourish, that’s a great move. If you’re doing to force compliance, measurement, control, authority over, you’re going to get that resistance, and it’s not going to work long term.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. Well, Mike, tell us, anything else we really should know before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Michalowicz

So, one last thing, it’s about safety. Leaders have to build a safe environment. Now, I’m not just talking only about physical safety. But ironically, this is a concern with many companies, including mine, and I didn’t even know. We’re a knowledge-based business, we’re writing books and speaking engagements, and other stuff like courses and classes. So, how can I have a safe environment?

Well, we ran a survey, and my colleagues said, “You know the back alley that goes to the cars…” we have a parking lot behind the building, “…is dark at night, and it’s kind of creepy going out into the pitch-black walkway.” I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.” So, starting at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun sets in the winter by 5:30, people get nervous about going home, I’m like, “This is crazy.” We just put lights up, string lights, it’s always bright.

And now my colleagues are like, “Oh, I can see what’s going on. I feel safe.” So, we got physical safety, but the bigger thing is relational safety. Do people feel comfortable expressing themselves as they are? Because if they can’t show up as they naturally are, they’re going to start faking it, and now you get a depleted version of that person.

The leaders got to express themselves naturally. Lead with humanness. Show the warts. I’m not saying have a cry fest and talk about how miserable you are. What I’m saying is you can share your struggles. Be integral about your own experiences in life and talk about the wins and the losses, and you’re going to encourage your team to do the same, which actually builds connectivity.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, Mike, could you share with us now a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, this is attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite research is, oh, there’s a book that came out called The 3.3 Rule by a guy named John Briggs. And what he did was he researched out productivity and found that people can work up to three hours max without needing recoveries, safe recovery, and you need 0.3, which is 30% recovery time. So, if you work three hours, you’re going to need 90 minutes of recovery time, if that works right, and so forth, 3.3.

Pete Mockaitis

Three times 180 minutes.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, I mean it’s not 90 minutes, but you know what I’m saying. It’s maybe 48 minutes. So, yeah, 30% of the time used is needed to recover. So, if I worked for one hour, it’s going to be 18 minutes or whatever that works out to be of recovery and so forth.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Mike Michalowicz

I just finished reading 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan. Really opened my mind to perspective.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite habit is sauna, I do it with my wife. And I’m going to try to convince her to do it again tonight. I will tell you this, when you’re in a hot box, it is so hot you can’t have your phone in there, which is great. And the only thing you can do is talk, and it’s hard to think. So, when someone is talking, you’ve got to listen deeply. It’s like the best connection device ever.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that folks retweet and they quote back to you often?

Mike Michalowicz

Yes. What I say often is that the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job. It’s to be a creator of jobs. So, I get that retweeted often.

Pete Mockaitis

And, Mike, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where shall we point them?

Mike Michalowicz
MikeMotorbike.com because, similar to your last name, no one can spell Michalowicz. MikeMotorbike rhymes with motorcycle. Everything is there. I got book downloads. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, you can get those articles, plus I have a podcast archive there.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, your clients want you to be profitable. And this isn’t just a final thought, but when you look at your clients, are you proud of your surviving check by check, to say, “I’m barely making it. I’m struggling,” or, “I’m very profitable”? I’ll give you context. Say you had an emergency, and you go, “I got rushed to the hospital. I have a heart attack,” or something. Doctor one comes down, and says, “I’m making no money. I need clients. I need patients. Let’s get this done quickly.” Or, doctor two says, “I’m very profitable and wealthy because this is all I do and I’m exceptional at it. I have all the time in the world to do this with you and do it right.”

Who do you choose? Option two. When your life is on the line, you want to be catered to. When your life is being altered or served in some capacity by us, we want to be catered to. Your clients want to be your number one customer. They want your undivided attention. And if you aren’t profitable, you can’t do that, so they want you to be profitable. You should be profitable.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mike, thank you. This is a treat. I wish you many, many fine colleagues who are all in.

Mike Michalowicz

Thanks, brother. It’s been a joy.