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Leadership & Culture Archives - Page 6 of 20 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Apr 21
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761: How to Shape Great Work Relationships Through Honor and Ritual with Erica Keswin

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Erica Keswin reveals how you can shape your workplace to be both good for people and great for business.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The do’s and don’ts of honoring relationships 
  2. Three components of rituals that bring teams together
  3. How you can make connections, even when working remotely  

About Erica

Erica Keswin is a bestselling author, internationally sought-after speaker, and workplace strategist. She helps top businesses, organizations, and individuals improve their performance by honoring relationships in every context, always with an eye toward high-tech for human touch. She was named one of Marshall Goldsmith’s Top 100 Coaches in 2020, as well as one of Business Insider’s most innovative coaches of 2020.

Her first book, Bring Your Human to Work: 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Design a Workplace That’s Good for People, Great for Business, and Just Might Change the World was published in 2018 by McGraw Hill. Her second book, Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines Into Workplace Magic was published by McGraw Hill in January, 2021. Both books debuted as Wall Street Journal bestsellers. 

Resources Mentioned

Erica Keswin Interview Transcript

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

Erica Keswin
Thanks so much. Great to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you, too. Well, I’m excited to hear about Bring Your Human to Work but, first, I got to hear the story behind The Spaghetti Project. Can you tell us the tale?

Erica Keswin
I can. So, when I was doing research for Bring Your Human to Work and my second book, which is about rituals, I came across a study out of Cornell University that was done by a guy named Kevin Kniffin. And Kevin was looking at and studying team performance, what makes one team higher-performing than another. And his dad was a firefighter, and so he decided, “I’m going to study the firefighters in the firehouses.”

Long story short, what he found was that the firefighters who are the most dedicated to the ritual of the firehouse meal and sitting around the table, connecting as humans, it actually correlated with higher levels of performance, and those firefighters saved more lives. So, sort of a goosebump moment for me and my work.

To your question about The Spaghetti Project, when you think about firefighters, and I visited many firehouses and interviewed a lot of firefighters, their stereotypical go-to meal is spaghetti.

Pete Mockaitis
With meat sauce, I’m guessing.

Erica Keswin
The spaghetti meat sauce, spaghetti and plain tomato sauce. It’s just pretty much what’s easy to cook in that firehouse. So, therein came in the name The Spaghetti Project, which is a platform that shares the science and stories of connection at work.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And so, now I’m intrigued. The firefighters who were most dedicated to the firehouse meal had the highest performance. And, wow, performance of saving lives, that’s huge. We’re not talking about selling stuff. So, part of me wonders, so causation, correlation, that’s always tricky to disentangle. Do we think that’s because they are the ones who are more committed, in general, to like “What we’re all about in each other,” and, thusly, those who choose to have that meal make that a priority, also care more in the line of duty? Or, do you think there’s another sort of chain of connection here?

Erica Keswin
Yeah, I do. So, when people are sitting around the table and bringing their whole selves, kind of shooting the breeze, more times than not, you start connecting with people on a personal level. So, let me give an example. I interviewed a firefighter that shared that he was at one of the meals with a colleague, and the guy shared that he was actually, when he grew up, afraid of heights.

Now, you wouldn’t really think that for a firefighter, that here’s this guy, Dominick, who’s afraid of heights. So, they’re just like shooting the breeze, like two people, no judgment, having their spaghetti. And four hours later, the fire alarm goes off and they go out to fight a fire. And the person overseeing the group and figuring out who goes where, now has this information in the back of his head, thinking, “Okay, you know what? Maybe I won’t put Dominick on the highest ladder as we go to fight this fire.”

So, the more that you know about people that you’re working with, the better that you can give them a sense of empathy around what’s going on with them. Take it to a present-day example. You may be really frustrated with a colleague who’s not returning your calls or not doing the level of work you think he or she should be doing. You, then, come to find out that a parent was dying, that somebody sick, someone had COVID, and you just have a different level of understanding and a way to work with them.

And so, the idea is it’s around bringing your human to work. And that meal, and you can even think about meals in terms of the role in our culture in bringing people together.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s excellent. Thank you. And so then, we talk about bringing your human to work, can you share with us – I think we’ve already got a taste – but sort of what would you say is the core thesis statement here of the work?

Erica Keswin
So, people ask me what it means to bring their human to work, and let’s say I boil it down to one line, which is honoring relationships. How do you honor relationships with your colleagues, with your boss, with your direct reports, with your clients, your customers, and even honoring that relationship with yourself?

And the premise of the book, I’ve been in the human capital space for 25 years, and so I’m sort of used to people either saying, “Direct leads to me,” or maybe, “Behind my back,” that some of this stuff is the soft stuff. And so, I would venture to say it’s actually the hard stuff and some of the really important stuff. And so, the premise of the book is why bringing your human to work and creating a more human workplace is not only good for people but it’s great for business and really does impact the bottom line.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that seems sensible and, like, that sounds true to me in my gut, although I am a feeler, I’m a Myers-Briggs.

Erica Keswin
Yeah, me, too.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I like that kind of thing. For the skeptic, could you share some of the most hard-hitting bits of research or evidence that says, “No, no, this is for real and not just stuff that Pete and Erica like because they’re feelers”?

Erica Keswin
Yeah. Well, first, I’d send them back to think about the firefighters. You can’t get any more hard data than that, than actually saving lives. There are many studies in the book. A couple that jumps out, one that found that when you have that high level of trust with your boss, that you can be who you are at work, collaboration goes up by as much as 47%, productivity goes up by 50%. So, the numbers are real.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Boy, productivity going up 50%, again, I’m curious about the mechanisms underlying that. Part of me thinks it’s just like you’re not sort of worrying, and CYA, watching your back, like really politically massaging every sentence to make sure you’re not offending people because you just sort of have a good sort of trust and caring connection going. But what are some of the other ways that that 50% productivity bump get realized?

Erica Keswin
Right. Look, that’s a piece of it. I remember I started my career in management consulting, and those were the days, very junior, sitting in the conference room, having late-night pizza, and just really, really getting to know people to the point where you can finish their sentences, and you just work better together because you know how people work. And so, sometimes it’s as basic as that, setting the whole trust thing, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, in terms of knowing, like, “Oh, boy, you really hate that stuff, so I’m not going to ask you to do it. I’m going to ask somebody else. And, in so doing, we’ve got more energy and strength, focus, and all that kind of goodness.” Okay. I think when it comes to dishonoring relationships, relatively few of your colleagues are sociopaths, like, in terms of wanting to, like actively wanting to harm others. I guess there’s a thumb.

But I think, at the same time, it’s quite possible that we dishonor relationships, maybe without even being aware of it, just by not having as much attention brought to it. What are some key don’ts, I guess, when it comes to honoring relationships?

Erica Keswin
Look, nine out of ten people leave their boss, not the company per se. And so, that relationship really does make a difference. It is that direct manager that’s going to impact your day-to-day, “Should I stay or should I go?” And we talk about bottom line implications, and I’ll get to the do’s and don’ts in a second, but, again, we think about the data. Turnover is expensive, and we’re sitting here doing this interview today in the midst of this Great Resignation, that if you do lose people that you don’t want to lose, it is really hard right now to replace them. So, those are some pretty strong numbers in and of itself.

In terms of do’s and don’ts, I think a lot of it, when I think of honoring relationships, it’s pretty straightforward. You don’t want to be the kind of manager where it’s, “It’s my way or the highway.” And what I tell leaders, if you’re not sure and it’s different, the behaviors that you want to see other than the ones we learned in the kindergarten kind of like the basics that we probably don’t need to go into on a podcast like this.

But in terms of specifics of what to do, I often turn to the values of a company. And I have a litmus test called the fork in the road, “Should I take a left? Should I take a right? Should I hire this person? Should I fire this person because he or she is a sociopath?” to your point. “Should I launch a new product? Should I do this deal? Should I fire this client?” I look at that through the lens of a company’s values. And, quite frankly, if the values aren’t helping to drive those decisions, either there’s way too many values, 10, 12, 14 values.

A great example of a company that had too many values, back in the day, was Uber in the beginning when Travis was the CEO. They had 14 values, and the values motivated the wrong behaviors, like crush people like bugs, that kind of thing. And so, you might have too many or they might be the wrong ones. And it’s the strategy and the mission and the vision highlight what you need to do, and the values are really the behaviors and get to the how, and aligning that gets back to this idea of what it means to honor relationships in a specific organization because it’s going to be different everywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
And can we zoom into some particular applications of this? So, in the firehouse, spaghetti meals, that’s awesome. Inside other workplaces where folks are often home before dinnertime, what are some excellent cool examples of places you’ve found where there are some great relationship-honoring and connection that’s going a long way?

Erica Keswin
So, the way that I mapped out my book about rituals, I mean, rituals are an amazing tool, amazing way to bring people together to have that connection. And some of the best examples that I’ve seen cut across all different aspects of the employee life cycle. So, there’s examples in onboarding. You only get one chance to make the first impression, so what better way to start that connection early and often than literally the first day or even when you get your offer letter.

Professional development, celebrating milestones in meetings is a great way. So, I looked at, and have examples that I’ll share with you in all of these different ways. One really fun one that I write about is from the company Allbirds, the cool felt sneaker company. And they have a ritual in their organization called 40 at 4.

And it came about very organically where there was a very early-on employee who was probably working too much at Allbirds as a startup at the time, and decided to go to the doctor and said, “You know, I’m really not feeling great from a health perspective. I’m going to set some goals for myself and do X amounts of pushups between now and the end of the year.”

He took that number and he divided it by how many days were left in the year, and he came up with the number 40. And so, he said, “All right, if I do 40 pushups a day for the rest of the year, I’ll meet my goal.” So, what does he do? He starts doing them in the office. A guy next to him joins, the woman across the hall joins. The next thing they know, everybody and their brother is either doing pushups at 4:00 o’clock, watching the pushups, talking about the pushups.

And I see it as like the healthy version of a smoke break. And even during the pandemic, I was able to reach back out with them because many people were really missing those company rituals. The way that they came together to connect with each other and honor relationships was gone, and they said, “Yeah, how do you know it’s a ritual?” Really, it’s sticky and people miss it.

And so, during the pandemic, they would rotate and somebody would volunteer to lead the pushups. Again, yes, it feels soft, it sounds soft, touchy-feely, but it’s these things that people come together and remind them, A, why they like the people they work with, B, why they do what they do every day. At least in 2022, we’re still human and not a bunch of robots running around, so these things do impact people.

Pete Mockaitis
For now, Erica.

Erica Keswin
For now. You never know, you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is beautiful, that ritual, and that does…as I’m thinking about to back to some of my workplaces and rituals, they just feel so good in terms of, boy, it’s almost like there’s a primal human tribe thing going on, like, “This is us and who we are and what we belong to and what we do.” And it can be doing 40 pushups at 4:00 p.m., it could be changing the lyrics to songs and singing dorky versions about your workplace at the annual meeting.

Erica Keswin
Right, it could be anything. And let me share this, so I would talk to companies about what a ritual is and the ROI of rituals, and some people still wouldn’t necessarily be able to articulate what the ritual is. So, I came up with this, I call it somewhat magic question now that every time I ask it, the person was like, “I got it. That’s my ritual.”

So, the question is, and I asked this at Chipotle, LinkedIn, Microsoft, all these different companies, and I said it to, for example, Marissa Andrada, who’s the head of HR at Chipotle, “Okay, Marissa, when do you think employees at Chipotle feel most Chipotle-ish?” Very high tech. Very high tech, right? But framing it that way, Marissa said, “I got it. Every day at Chipotle at 10:15,” by the way, I don’t know if you’re a Chipotle fan, but my kids eat it all the time, I like it, too, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
I ate it today.

Erica Keswin
Oh, there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
My napkins prove it.

Erica Keswin
Oh, my God. You’re right. You did eat it today. So, they open at…maybe you know this, I didn’t know this. Chipotle opens at 10:30 a.m. so I guess there are many people eating burritos at 10:30 in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve done it before.

Erica Keswin
Okay. So, you’re perfect for this example. So, every day at 10:15, before those doors answer, and before Pete comes through the door, they all sit down, all the people that have been working there since 6:30 in the morning, chopping up the lettuce, making the guacamole, they all sit down and have a meal together. And that is when they feel most Chipotle-ish.

Other people said to me at the company KIND bar, Daniel Lubetzky, founder, former CEO and now executive chairman. He said people feel most KIND-ish, or KINDly, when, during their orientation, their onboarding process, every new hire, once a quarter, meets with Daniel. Even now that he’s not even with the company, he still meets with them and talks about the history of the company and the genesis and why it’s called KIND, and how his father was in the Holocaust and was saved by someone, and how that person showed kindness to his dad, that drove the mission of the company.

And so, rituals, you kind of said it yourself, it gives this feeling of this sort of primal “This is us coming together,” and that’s when you know it’s a ritual. It’s that it sticks and you don’t force people to do it. Like, it just organically happens and makes people feel part of something bigger than themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s intriguing because I could see how you could try to force that and it would just be weird, like if you don’t like that.

Erica Keswin
Yeah, like if you have to force it, you need to move on. I tell people not to get their ego wrapped up in some of these rituals. Like, somebody might be listening to this and say, “Okay, we’re going to start doing pushups just like Allbirds at 4:00 o’clock,” and people might think, “Are you out of your mind?” And it might stick but rituals can come from the top-down, the bottom-up, inside-out, really from anywhere, so if something doesn’t stick, I just urge people to think about feel like changing it, get feedback, ask your team for ideas.

And, oftentimes, the rituals that are the most sticky are the ones that are connected, again, to values or even things that you’ve done before. And that’s why, many times, it’s an individual contributor, just like the example in Allbirds, that came up with the ritual to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
When it comes to not forcing, it seems like, sometimes just the invitation will do, like, “Hey, I’m going to start doing these pushups and you’re welcome to join me if you like,” and then some will, some won’t.

I think what’s also interesting about the pushup is that it’s just a little bit, I don’t know, weird or I guess counter-cultural, or like you don’t tend to go into workplaces and see people doing pushups, like, “Whoa, what’s going on here? That’s a little different.” And in so doing, I think that might give you a little more juice.

I’m thinking about my work with HOBY, Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership, seminar for high school folks doing leadership development stuff. And so, there’s a bunch of like cheering going on, which is a little bit like camp, and so it’s not that unique because camps have been doing it forever. But, in so doing, there are the HOBY cheers, and HOBY people know the HOBY cheers, and then HOBY people can just sort of vibe in that way. And in doing them together, you really do get this crazy bond formed in like three days amongst you.

And I think that if we were doing something very ordinary, like, “Oh, we’re brushing our teeth. Okay, well, that’s what everybody does every day, generally speaking, so it doesn’t have as much oomph.” Are there some, maybe, ingredients or components or principles that make a ritual a ritual?

Erica Keswin
Yes. So, first, let me share my…and it’s interesting. I’ll talk about how brushing your teeth could be a ritual, may not be a ritual, but could be a ritual. So, a ritual has three component parts. The first is a ritual is something to which we assign a certain amount of meaning and intention, sort of number one. Number two, a ritual typically has a regular cadence. So, for example, 40 at 4, 40 pushups every day could be once a week, it could be once a month, it could be once a year.

The third part though is really interesting. A ritual is something that goes beyond its practical purpose. And so, what do I mean by that? I’m sitting here in my home office and, let’s say, the lights go out. And if I decide to light a candle so I can see what on earth I’m doing, that’s not a ritual. But if I light a candle every day, or every Friday, let’s say, at 6:00 o’clock, to signify the end of the workday and the workweek and the beginning of the weekend, I’m lighting that candle because it means something to me and there’s a regular cadence, but I’m not doing it for any real practical purpose. And so, that’s the definition.

So, when you think about having a cup of coffee in the morning, maybe your purpose is the caffeine, but it’s almost something…I also think of it as sort of back-of-brain to front-of-brain. Like, you might have a habit, you just might have a cup of coffee every day, but if you make something like that a ritual where you sit down, take a few deep breaths, connect with yourself, there’s nothing practical about it but it’s something that’s meaningful to you.

And so, in the example of the pushups, yeah, the one guy was trying to meet his goal of doing those pushups but, half the time at Allbirds, people were kind of joking around, sitting there watching, and so there wasn’t this practical purpose but it felt good and something drew them into doing it. So, that’s sort of my working definition.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, these examples are so fun, Erica. Just keep them coming. What else have we got?

Erica Keswin
Oh, my gosh. There are so many. There’s a whole book on them. Let’s see. One of my other favorite rituals in the book is a company called Udemy, the online learning company. And one of the things that I have been thinking about a lot, both from the standpoint of a manager but also as an individual contributor, that professional development, people want to learn on the job, up, down, and sideways.

And I’ve been in the human capital space for 25 years, and gone are the days of all the rungs in the ladder of used to be able to get promoted every year. Now, we need to get creative about how people grow on the job. So, actually, I just wrote an article, which I’ll send you, if you send out show notes for your podcasts. But Jeannie Weaver at AT&T has a book club, and that has become a ritual for her and her team, and also something that is easy to do when some people are in the office and some people are remote.

The company Udemy has a ritual around professional development called DEAL, drop everything and learn. So, once a month, on a Wednesday at 3:00 o’clock, everybody kind of drops what they’re doing and takes a class in something. And, again, what I love about it is it may have nothing to do with your day job. So, in that definition of no practical purpose, it’s not that I’m sitting there, “How to improve a podcast,” “How to do an Excel spreadsheet.” There are people that shared with me that in November, during the Wednesday in November, they took a class on how to make a turkey.

And what they do is the team manager will bring everybody together and they can take anything they want. The only thing you have to do is share what you learned that month. So, again, it’s another way to connect, another way to bring people together in a way that might seem touchy-feely for the Myers-Briggs feelers in the audience, however, you’re learning more about each other.

And from a leadership perspective, you have some great employee who’s on the subway and runs, meets somebody, and they’re like, “Hey, why don’t you come work at my company?” you might think twice because you actually have friends at work and people that you know at work who kind of know you and know that you know how to bake a turkey.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yeah, that is fun in that not only are you learning but then you’re learning what other people learned, which is connecting, like, “Oh, you’re interested in cooking turkeys. Now, I know that about you.” And I guess with Udemy, it’s also a bonus in that if they’re learning the Udemy courses, then they gain some exposure to the platform and the product and may gain some insights, like, “Huh, this course isn’t that good, so maybe we need to update it,” or whatever. Okay. Cool. So, I love it. Let’s have another one.

Erica Keswin
I think there are, again, when you think about that employee life cycle, like let’s talk about meetings because a lot of meetings suck. So, you can think about rituals as a way to connect people. Now, here’s something. Beginnings and endings are what I call prime rituals real estate.

So, beginnings and ending of a meeting, the beginning and ending of a project, pretty much the beginning and ending of anything. So, Eileen Fisher, for example, the clothing company, they ring a chime before every meeting. And so, what that does is it just settles people. It gives them this feeling of, “You know what, we’re going to be at this meeting. I’m going to take everything that had been going on, all the chaos in the outside world, try to get rid of it, and come in and focus on what I need to focus on.”

During the pandemic, and even now we’re still in the pandemic, really, there is the importance of checking in, like that became a ritual. And what was interesting was, in 2020, probably for a whole year, sometimes there were meetings where 16 minutes of a 60-minute meeting were spent checking in. And then a year later, maybe 30 minutes of a 30-minute meeting. And at some point, like we needed to also do work in these meetings.

So, people will say to me, “So, what’s a way to have a ritual in a meeting that helps you connect but we can’t do this all day?” So, a couple of examples there, one CEO shared they have something, they have people say either red light, green light, yellow light, and they just kind of share how they are feeling that day. And what that does, the goal is not to solve it in that moment, but if you’re the team leader and Pete says red light, later that day, you can call him up and say, “All right, what’s going on? How can we support you as a company, as a leader?”

So, again, sometimes very little things. And one last one that I’ll share, a colleague from Microsoft has a cool ritual. She changed jobs in the pandemic and really didn’t know her team that well, so every week at her team meeting, a different person shares their origin story, which I sort of loved the way that’s phrased. You can go in any direction with that but learning somebody’s origin story, like stuff that you would never know about them, again, it kind of takes you back to where our conversation started with the firefighters and how to really get to know people in a human way.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like and I was going to ask about the remote work piece there. Any pro tips, do’s and don’ts when it comes to thinking about things remotely? I don’t know if there’s any tricks or software, tools, that you really think are nifty when it comes to some of this connection remotely?

Erica Keswin
Yeah, you’ve got to be even more intentional. It’s hard and you need to have protocols on how this should work. So, it could be something as…none of it is easy but something like, for example, every time somebody…let’s say you’re going to go around and people are going to share where they’re green, red, or yellow. One leader shared that everybody goes around and shares a one-word adjective that describes how they’re showing up that day. Rotate. “So, Pete is in the office, you go. Erica, she’s remote, let’s switch off, every person, so that we’re all engaging in the same way.”

Some people will say, “You know what, for all the remote people, we’re going to have one person that’s in the room be the point of contact that if there’s any issues with the technology or anything going on, that there is one person that kind of has their phone out and knows that they’re going to be contacted if there are any issues.”

And building in time for people to chit-chat a little bit over the proverbial watercooler. Having protocols around technology and really reminding people, “You know what, this meeting, we expect our cameras to be on,” which, by the way, I think that’s important but I don’t think they need to be or should be on in every meeting because Zoom fatigue is real.

And so, it’s just being as explicit as you can to manage expectations and to create an environment that’s as welcoming and as inclusive as you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I guess I’m also thinking about how not to do this because I think sometimes if folks think connection, they think, “Okay, we’ve got team building retreats, we’ve got trust falls, we’ve got ropes courses,” and I’ve had some good experiences with ropes courses myself but some people, they’re not a fan. So, how would you think about, when we say, “Okay, hey, connections are cool, rituals are cool. We want to do more of that. We’re excited”, what should we avoid doing as we’re getting some of this flowing?

Erica Keswin
So, I love that question because when I was writing the book and I asked people, “So, when do you feel most Chipotle-ish?” or fill in the blank-ish. What I was going to say next did not happen at Chipotle, for the record, but did happen in some other places. And the person I was talking to, all of a sudden, would look, get a little pale, and be like, “Ooh, God, I don’t know if I want to answer that question.” I’d say, “Why? What’s going on?” And they would say, “Well, now that you asked it that way, I feel like every time we come together and bond or do our ropes courses or whatever it is we do, we always do it over happy hour. We always do it when people are drinking, and that’s not going to work for everybody.”

And I had somebody come up to me afterwards, I had a talk one time, and said, “I just got out of rehab and this makes me feel really uncomfortable.” I had another company, when I asked them that question, “When do people feel most connected?” they realized that everything they do is either at night or maybe on a weekend when they were doing this bonding, and what about people that are taking care of elderly parents or need to pick up a kid from daycare? So, I do urge people to think about all the different ways that you connect through the lens of inclusivity.

And, again, it goes back to getting feedback from people around what’s working and not working. I am not anti-happy hour but it shouldn’t be the only way you come together.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes sense. And, likewise, just in terms of including folks, it could mean a number of things, like, “Hey, ropes course don’t work for this person because they have an injury of sorts or disability of sorts,” and so that won’t work, or they got the rehab with the alcohol, or just sort of the timing schedule.

Erica Keswin
Anything, yeah. Right. There’s a lot of different ways that something is not going to be inclusive. I like it when companies will also think about creating like a culture committee and get people to…LinkedIn does a great job of this. It’s a real honor and professional development opportunity to even be in the room to think about all of these different ways for people to connect and they rotate it. And so, you do, you want to get different people weighing in on these issues.

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

Erica Keswin
No, I think we got a lot of rituals in there, so it’s great.

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

Erica Keswin
One of my favorite quotes is a Louis Pasteur quote, which is, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” And, for me, I don’t like to leave things for chance. I’m a planner and I feel like I just like to live that quote, that “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

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

Erica Keswin
Well, since we’ve been talking about rituals for most, so I’ll share one of those. So, there was a study done, I call it the “Don’t Stop Believin’” study. Just my own name. I’ve made it up. A study out of Harvard was looking at two groups of people. They both went into a room. The first group went into the room and was told that they were going to have to sing karaoke to a bunch of strangers, and were told to go sit down and wait.

The second group was told that they were going to have to sing karaoke to a group of strangers but, while they were waiting, they were told to…they were given a piece of paper, and they were told to write down how they were feeling about what they were going to have to do. They were told to crumple up the piece of paper, sprinkle some salts on it, and throw the paper over their shoulder. And, again, the other group is just sitting in the room waiting.

And what the study looked at is both groups got up and sang their karaoke, and the study was looking at which one had higher performance, and that was measured by people being able to read the words on the screen for karaoke, number one. And, number two, when you are told, out of the blue, that you’re going to have to do something like that, sing karaoke, everybody’s heart rates spiked, went through the roof, which mine would, for sure.

But there was one group that was able to bring their heart rates down much more quickly, and that correlated with who was better to actually sing more accurately. And out of the two groups, I’ll ask you, which group do you think was able to bring their heart rate down more quickly?

Pete Mockaitis
The ones who are good at singing already?

Erica Keswin
No, the group that was given a ritual. The group that was asked not to just sit there. The group that was asked to actually write down how they were feeling, crumple up the paper, putting the salt on it, throwing the paper over their shoulder. And so, being connected, again, there’s no practical purpose for any of that, but being connected to something outside of themselves, it actually lowered their heart rates and they were able to perform better. And the reason why I call it the “Don’t Stop Believin’” study is that the song that they had to sing to the audience was the most downloaded song in iTunes history, which is “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Erica Keswin
Let’s see. Lately, I’ve been trying to read more fiction because I feel like I never had time to read fiction. I just read a great book called American Dirt, which I highly recommend.

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

Erica Keswin
Is an Oura Ring a tool where I track my sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Uh-huh.

Erica Keswin
I knew you’d be very jealous to know that I get a lot of 94s, 96s.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Erica Keswin
I’m like Fitbit people are very jealous.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I’m such a nut. I’ve got the Fitbit and the Oura Ring at the same time. I’m excited that the Oura Ring is going to be updating their sleep algorithm shortly to have even superior accuracy. And I will admit to refreshing their webpage more than once to see if it’s out yet. It’s not yet as of April 5th, 2022, but, anyway. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be more awesome at your job?

Erica Keswin
It’s my coffee ritual where I get a cup of coffee in the morning. Back in the day, I would sit there and have my coffee and do my to-do list and crank through my work, until one day, I realized that the coffee was gone and I hadn’t even tasted it, which kind of bummed me out because I’m really one-cup-a-day kind of girl, and at Starbucks it’s not cheap.

And that then went from becoming a habit to what is now my morning ritual where I sit and, instead of just working away through my morning coffee, I sit there and put the coffee and feel the heat from the mug in my hands, take a few deep breaths. Rituals are very associated with our senses. And so, that is what I do and it helps me start the day.

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

Erica Keswin
Yes. I would say the soft stuff is really the hard stuff and the most important stuff.

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

Erica Keswin
To my website, EricaKeswin.com. It has my books and a lot of articles I’ve written, podcasts that I’ve been on, and you could check out my Instagram which is just my name. LinkedIn is always a great spot as well.

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

Erica Keswin
I would say everything that we’ve spoken today about rituals at work ring true for rituals in your personal lives. And these days, to be awesome at your job, you also need to take care of yourself and put the proverbial oxygen mask on yourself and really focus on wellness because there’s a tremendous amount of burnout right now.

And so, I guess I would challenge you, and a great place to start is to ask yourself, “What do you do in your life that makes you feel most like you?” And that’s a great place to start to incorporate some of your own rituals into your life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Erica, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with your connection and rituals and fun.

Erica Keswin
Thank you so much. Great to meet you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you, too.

Feb 17
0

743: How to Achieve and Flourish in the New World of Work with Keith Ferrazzi

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Keith Ferrazzi reveals fresh best practices for working and leading in the post-COVID world of work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four critical shifts teams need to make
  2. Two tiny tweaks that vastly improve team morale
  3. Time-saving alternatives to time-wasting meetings

About Keith

Keith Ferrazzi is a bestselling author, speaker, investor, philanthropist, and executive team coach who helps teams transform enterprises. As Founder and Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, its applied research institute, he coaches executive teams in top organizations to achieve extraordinary outcomes. He formerly served as CMO of Deloitte and Starwood Hotels. He is the author of the new book, COMPETING IN THE NEW WORLD OF WORK: How Radical Adaptability Separates the Best from the Rest.

Resources Mentioned

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Keith Ferrazzi Interview Transcript

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Pete, this is an extraordinary time because your name reminds me of my father, and time together always reminds me of best practices and clear action. You’re one of those individuals that I really enjoy these conversations with.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you, Keith. I enjoy chatting with you, and it’s fun to be speaking to you live after I’ve read your books before I had a podcast. And you got some more coming and a big research project. What’s the scoop here?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, so the peak of the pandemic, I saw this not only as a horrible disruption of the world, but I saw it as an inflection point; an opportunity. And what I want anybody listening to think about is “Have you really captured this pandemic and this disruption as an opportunity for your career and for your team and for your organization?”

We benchmarked 2,000 executives and entrepreneurs, and asked the question, “How do we leverage this pandemic to leap forward to work, not go back to work? How do we change the ways we’re leading? How do we change our business models? How do we really think about workforce redesign during this incredible disruption time?” And we’ve been chosen as the number one pick of Harvard coming out of the pandemic in terms of books, and this has been a massive research project that I’m excited to share with your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, we’re excited to hear it. So, you interviewed all these folks, and you asked them specifically, “Which work innovations from the pandemic had the highest return and ought to be kept, held on to?” So, can you share what are the top one, two, three themes that folks are relatively unanimous about?

Keith Ferrazzi
I’ll give you three themes, which you’ve asked for. The first one that I’ll give you is how much collaboration transformed during the pandemic, and I’ll give you a number of very distinct practices. Because we were in crisis, org charts and positional authority, they went out the window. Anybody who could lead change was given the opportunity to lead change. If you had an idea, if you had a way of working around a crisis situation, you could step into the void and you could fix it.

Now, that was extraordinary. We saw people emerge without titled leadership into significant leaders. And I want to make sure that we keep that going. I’ve never been a particular advocate for managing org charts or thinking about your team as who reports to you. When I was a kid at Deloitte, I had a vision that Deloitte could be a great marketing organization, and I started leading toward that end, and I became the chief marketing officer at Deloitte before I was 30. Before they even made me partner, I was the chief marketing officer of the company.

So, the opportunity for all of us to step into the void and see a vision for improvement or opportunity, that was afforded to us. Now, the second piece that we saw was, because of hybrid work, we could think of our teams as an unbounded way. We didn’t have to think about geolocation. We didn’t have to think about anything. We could think of “Who do we want to collaborate with to really achieve this vision?” And that’s one of the big tips I want to leave everybody here with.

Your team is whoever you need to get your job done. Now, if you imagine that, who do you need to get your job done is your team. Then the next question is, “How do I let them know that they’re on my team if they don’t report to me? And how do I invite them in to really co-create extraordinary new advances?” And the answer is just that. You reach out to individuals that you want to collaborate with, and you say, “Here’s a vision I have for how things could be better.”

And then with that, you say to them, “But I could never get there myself,” humbly speaking, “Maybe we could work together and achieve that together. We could co-create a solution. We could take that hill together.” The next thing you know, you’re now a leader of another individual who, working together, is going to achieve something that you couldn’t have achieved on your own.

We saw that happening all over the pandemic. And in the chapter that we have in the book around collaboration, we saw that hybrid work put all of that on steroids. We could really be unbounded in our collaboration and there’s a ton of things in there also on best practices on how to start rebooting the way we think about work in a hybrid work environment, which most of us aren’t thinking of today.

So, for instance, we think of the way to collaborate is through meetings. Well, the best organizations were collaborating asynchronously. They were collaborating in Google Docs and other things so that we didn’t have all of these droning meetings one after another. So, we started using the tools in a more effective way to reboot the way we were collaborating, and that was very powerful as well.

So, all of that, I would say comes under the theme that you were asking for, one of the themes, which is, “How do we really fundamentally re-imagine the way we collaborate?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And I’d love it if you could share a fun favorite story or two that shows that in action.

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, sure. It’s a big company one, it’s the first one that I think of. So, Unilever has always done business planning in very traditional ways. They cascaded business planning down from the CFO and the CEO, figure out the budgets, then they work with the executive teams, then they give everybody their budgets and they’d trickle it down.

Well, what happened was one individual, an HR person in North America, so here’s an HR person in North America had an idea, which is “Why aren’t we crowdsourcing innovations and growth opportunities for next year 2021 that I guarantee we wouldn’t have seen at the executive team, at the central headquarters in London?”

So, Mike Clementi came up with the idea that we should be crowdsourcing among the top 300 leaders in the world, not the executive team only where the growth opportunities were. And he ushered that process into being, and they literally ground-up the business-planning process instead of top-down. Another example is a learning executive inside of Federal Express was asked to host these townhalls on behalf of their chief operating officer and chairman.

Well, typically, these townhalls were one-way broadcast conversations, but this person said, humbly speaking, “Why are we, when we’ve got the technology, we’ve got breakout rooms, why aren’t we asking people questions of what risks they’re seeing in the Federal Express platform, what opportunities they’re seeing to serve customers differently?”

So, instead of a one-way townhall, they started inventing two-way dialogues, once again, breakout rooms, opening Google Docs, having people give their ideas, and they created a very two-way collaborative engagement with thousands and thousands and thousands of people. So, those are two very small examples of massive companies that fundamentally rebooted real important processes in their business because a single individual saw hybrid and collaboration and crowdsourcing and innovation as something that didn’t have to be limited to a small group of people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Another theme in your book I want to dig into is you say that there are six decision dials that can impact the way we work. What are we achieving with this framework? And what are the dials?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah. So the book was divided into two sections. The first half of the book focuses on how all of us need to change the way we work and lead, and there are four components to that. One of them is agility, the other one is foresight and, really, how do we look around corners and run an agile operation. And then the one we just talked about, collaboration. And then the next one, which is really a hot issue today, which is the subject of resilience and mental wellbeing.

And then what we did is we said, “Once you begin to lead in these four fundamentally different ways, where do you apply this philosophy to?” You apply it to reinventing your business model, reinventing the way your workforce works, and to, whether or not, we, as organizations, are led by the north star purpose, which became a very important aspect of a lot of businesses.

So, what you’re referring to in terms of these dials is inside of a chapter called “Workforce Redesign.” One of the things that really happened was we started to realize that the old ways we thought about work needed to be rebooted. So, of course, we’re all now thinking about “Are we physically proximate or are we remote?” So, that’s a dial going one way or the other.

Now, when we really dug into it, we realized it was a spectrum. It wasn’t just an and or or. The hybrid spectrum of how we work together actually includes a dimension that isn’t even on that dial which is called asynchronous. How do we work asynchronously? How do we work in a way that doesn’t even require meetings? How do we work in a way that collaborates in the cloud where I don’t give a damn if you’re physical or if you’re remote? It doesn’t really matter.

The other thing is whether or not you’re domestic or global. Now, on my personal organization, and this, Pete, could be something you’d be interested in, I designed an entire marketing function at Ferrazzi Greenlight. Now, we coach executive teams. I designed an entire marketing function out of the Philippines. I used to have marketing executives in my company that were about 85,000 in their base salary and their job was what I called high-touch marketing, curating relationships with executives that could ultimately buy our services. High-touch marketing, very high touch.

But there was a lot that I wanted to do around search engine optimization, there’s a lot that I wanted to do around content marketing, email marketing, etc. that I never really put as a primary because I didn’t see the return on investment for it from the kind of money that I’d dispend in the United States on marketing executives.

I ended up hiring folks out of the Philippines, an entire marketing team at, on average, $25,000 a head, who are every bit as good as the professionals I was hiring at $85,000. They work on my time zone, they’re incredibly English literate, and driven, and ambitious, and thoughtful. And so, I really, this outsourcing conversation, many organizations are now totally rethinking the boundaries of where they’re hiring. And I’m sure you’ve read a lot about that in the marketplace, but we can live anywhere and work anywhere.

And so, why doesn’t an individual like yourself, Pete, even, anybody who’s a solopreneur, whatever, you can be thinking about building a team that you were never able to think about before, both from a global perspective, gig workers. Now, we’re dealing with a choice. Do we even want to hire a full-time employee or do we want to hire an individual who’s an expert on an hourly basis that can really change the game in our strategy?

So, all of those are workforce dials that we look at in the chapter of re-engineering the workforce. I guess the one tip I would say is if you can start thinking about hiring globally, you can get incredible value for some of the employees that you hire. Anybody listening should consider that.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah. I have had great results myself by pursuing that approach. Okay. And we got some extra dials here, huh?

Keith Ferrazzi
Well, look, what I really want to make sure we have time for is to get to some that which really starts in the book. There were many organizations that were fundamentally caught on their heels during the pandemic. On March 13th, I sat on a March 11th in a room with an executive team that had major presence in China, and this topic of the pandemic was only a mention at one point during the discussion, and that was just a few days before the shutdown.

Yet, the question that we looked for is, “What organizations foresaw the pandemic and were able to react to that risk whereas others did not?” We found an organization called Lockheed Space. Now, Lockheed, interestingly enough, didn’t even have operations in China, yet they had a simple process I highly recommend for all of your listeners whether, again, you’re a team leader, a company leader, or a solopreneur. They brought together, on a monthly basis, a group of individuals that would look at the marketplace from different vantage points.

“So, Pete, you’re going to handle the customer vantage point. What’s changing from the perspective of the customer? Dave, you’re going to look at competition. Jane, you’ve got technology innovations. Sue, you’ve got the focus on macroeconomic policies and finance.” And then, once a month, as a part of a natural meeting, they would spend five minutes, and everybody on the call reported if they had a major risk that they saw from their vantage point, or if they saw a major opportunity that should be pursued from their vantage point.

Now, sometimes, they would go beyond that five-minute meeting and nobody would have anything to say. Fine. Or, somebody would say, “Hey, I just read this blog about some virus in China. Maybe it’s worth us taking a look at in terms of a disruptive force.” At that point, they wouldn’t even gut-dive into it to disrupt the meeting. They would say, “Let’s have an assessment meeting to determine whether or not we move into some form of planning or watch and observe.”

Well, Lockheed Space saw this in December of 2019, they had their assessment meeting in January, and went into planning and went fully virtual in February. Fully virtual in February. And how many of us, if we had had that insight and wisdom, we would’ve shorted so many stocks, we would have invested in other stocks. As individuals, we’ve got to leave some space and time in our lives as individuals, as leaders, to assess risk and opportunity that are from different vantage points that we may not be seeing every day.

That was one of the biggest takeaways that I saw which is us realizing and, interestingly enough, it moves interestingly into the agile question. We practiced crisis agility during the pandemic. Now, I was working with Delta Airlines, coaching that executive team moving into the pandemic, and we were going to reinvent the travel industry and we’re doing a great job of it, and, all of a sudden, they lost 90% of their revenue in a day.

Now, they went into daily agile sprints. They assessed the situation from all different vantage points, “Where are the risks? Where are the opportunities?” They planned for a day. They went and did it. At the end of the day, they did a standup, and said, “Okay, what did we achieve? Where did we stumble? What are we going to do the next day?” Every single day, they went on an agile sprint willing to assess what was going on from the external marketplace.

Now, the power of that is that model of agility is well-practiced in technology companies while they’re programming and designing software. It’s well-practiced among any organization doing strong project management, but it’s not practiced in many executive teams. It’s not practiced by most of us leading our work, running our work in small agile sprints.

I believe what we saw in the pandemic was this crisis agile that is going to become the new operating system for any organization. We are living in volatility. We’ve got to lead in agile where we’re constantly assessing and re-assessing pivots and movement and readjustments, and we can’t just be planning on a quarterly basis anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so powerful that the five minutes assignment was all it took to be like, “Oh, okay.” And then to have it on the radar and then go deep. And so, I’m curious, for folks looking to implement something along those lines, do you have any favorite ways that you think about breaking up the world of stuff to be on the lookout for?

Keith Ferrazzi
Of vantage points, yeah. In the chapter called “Foresight,” we actually have a list of the vantage points. But the reality is every company is going to be a little different. The ones I gave you make the most sense, which is by functional area, you know, sales is dealing with competition, marketing is dealing with customers, your IT folks are dealing with technology advancements, your CFO, your accountants are dealing with… etc. Those are natural.

But in any given business, you’re going to have your own nuances. And I would say one of the things you should do as you start this process is ask your team, what vantage points they think we should be looking at on a constant basis. Now, I’d mentioned this to you, Pete, that we created an entire video series around the book that helps any team move through each chapter, and anybody who buys the book gets that free video series.

So, if you go to RadicallyAdapt.com, and you purchase the book wherever you want to purchase it, just let us know that you bought the book and we’ll send you the video series. It’s all on trust. But the power of that is that in the section of “Foresight” we actually walk you through all the details of how you can set that up for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very cool. All right. Well, so we talked a bit about agility, foresight, and collaboration. How about resilience and wellbeing?

Keith Ferrazzi
So, that was one of the more exciting ones to me personally for a number of reasons. I have felt for a very long time that teams needed to build a greater relational competency inside of their teams because you know me, the guy who wrote Never Eat Alone cares a lot about relationships. And as I came along with subsequent books, we have double-clicked on how important those relationships are to functional teams and organizations.

And what I saw happened during the pandemic was what I know brings greater relationships among people and brings greater empathy among people is the willingness to be authentic and vulnerable. This got dialed up during the pandemic significantly. I saw grizzled white shoe-type old leaders being vulnerable, crying in fact, on townhalls where they were talking about the fear that they had for their parents’ health who were in a nursing home, or a spouse that was diagnosed with COVID early on in the process before we knew what that meant.

And I saw that vulnerability and that shared sense of openness, and I was proud of that, and I knew that that was something that I think we had opened a door that we’d never be able to shut again, thank goodness. Now, the question then is, “What do we do with that vulnerability? How do we resolve it? And how do we help people have greater resilience?”

Of the teams that I saw be most successful, they were the ones that had a different social contract. They owned each other’s energy. They lifted each other up. They asked how people were doing openly, and then when people were hurting, the team rallied around that person. Now, I feel like there was an old myth associated with work of the past, which is your resilience, your mental wellbeing, that’s your responsibility. And it’s not even your responsibility; it’s your private affair, and we’ll leave you to it.

Whereas, what happened in the pandemic was there was much more transparency around all of this. And some teams did a very simple practice, they called an energy check, which I love and I advocate, which is in your meetings, just every once in a while, ask, “What is everyone’s energy level?” And I’m not just talking about in the afternoon. I mean, going into a meeting, you say, “What is your energy level these days? Put in the chatroom from zero to five what your energy level is.”

Now, anytime somebody puts a two or below, then you pause, and you say, “Pete, tell me, you put a two. Are you okay?” Now, Pete might respond, “Well, my kids had a restless night, and I was just up all late last night with my kids.” “Great. Sorry to hear that and hope they’re okay.” But they might say, “Jane, why did you put a two or why did you put a one?” “Well, my spouse has just been diagnosed with needing a kidney transplant.” Now, I heard that in teams, and the person who particularly said that had been sitting on that information without sharing it with the team for two weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, because nobody asked, like it doesn’t live anywhere. It’s nothing like, “Hey, anyone’s family need an organ transplant?” Like, that just doesn’t pop up.

Keith Ferrazzi
It’s not part of the vernacular. But where it used to happen organically, and this is what we found across the board, where it used to happen was in the casual walk down the hallway, or the lunchroom conversation, or the coffee-break conversation. Now, that’s where these kinds of conversations happen, but in the remote or hybrid world, they don’t happen organically. And if you make it a purposeful process, it actually happens.

What was most interesting is that we found that…we’d been coaching teams for 20 years. We had a diagnostic tool that we used in coaching teams, and what we found was that teams that made a…one of the areas is relationships. Teams that didn’t pay attention to relationships purposefully eroded their relationship score on this test.

So, one of the tests is “I am deeply committed and connected to my team.” That’s a scale of zero to five. Well, those that didn’t have purposeful processes around it went down on the score. But, interestingly enough, those that decided to have these kinds of energy check-ins, or they hosted a meeting…one of the things we recommend is a personal/professional check-in meeting where the whole meeting’s intention is “What’s going on in your life personally and professionally?” so people just share what’s going on with them.

And those teams that had these purposeful processes, actually, their scores rose above what they were when they were in physical meetings together. So, people claim that remote work eroded things like innovation and relationships. It only eroded work if you didn’t do the things you needed to do more purposefully. If you did them, it actually improved the qualities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful in terms of it’s like, “Well, yeah, if you’re just kind of going with flow, yup, that’s what’s going to happen. It’s not going to be so rosy.”

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, it’s lazy. It’s lazy and you’re going to suffer lazy results. Now, we spend a lot more time on this, “When is a wellbeing and resilience question?” We had major partners like Headspace and Weight Watchers all working with us to create innovations, and we found a number of things. Number one, as I sort of mentioned, just the awareness and the collectivism gained around “We own each other’s energy. We’re going to serve each other. We’re going to take care of each other,” that was the highest lift in scores and mental wellbeing.

But there was no question that we needed to make sure that people were aware that they had to take a more proactive responsibility for their own wellbeing, their own mental and physical wellbeing. There were people who just sat down in the morning and they didn’t leave all day. They didn’t get their workouts, they didn’t take a break, they didn’t take a moment for themselves. And, by the way, because they didn’t leave any time for email or anything else, that time got squeezed into their evenings and weekends. They were just one meeting after another.

So, what we learned is that there are a set of personal routines that you need to adopt, and the most important thing is, if you’re a leader, you adopt those personally. Like, block your workout time, block your walk with the kid time, make sure that small breaks that you’re taking, you actually put them on your calendar so you’re signaling to the organization that they need to have those routines for themselves as well. Very powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so you mentioned a few personal routines, and we love that sort of thing here. Anything that came up again and again as being super powerful and restorative or good bang for the buck in terms of rejuvenation per minute?

Keith Ferrazzi
One that was really funny that nobody did until, all of a sudden, somebody cracked the code, one of them was end meetings five to ten minutes early.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that does feel great for everybody. No rushing.

Keith Ferrazzi
Right, it does, but guess what? Nobody ever does it because you’re in the flow of the conversation then we don’t end the meetings five or ten minutes early. So, what one group, I remember who this was, I think it might’ve been FedEx, they did something brilliant. They started meetings ten minutes late so it’s easier. Everyone is used to ending on the hour but if you start meetings ten minutes late, then that’s where the break is, and so I love that simple idea. And once companies started adopting that, that was kind of breakthrough. It’s so important that ten minutes to walk into the other room and give a hug to your significant other, or go check on the kids, or whatever it is, so powerful.

The other thing is blocking out time for you to think, do emails, and do asynchronous work. So, for instance, if you’re doing asynchronous collaboration where you’re working on a Google Doc with a group of people, block a half of an hour to do that as if it’s a meeting and protect it as if it’s a meeting. “That’s my half of an hour time to do that work,” and you tell the world that, “That’s my time, and, no, you can’t take that time just because it looks available. It’s not available. That’s my time to do my asynchronous work,” because, otherwise, as we said earlier, it’s just going to get squeezed into nights and weekends, but blocking that time is really precious and important.

So, that was another really important routine. Those are the things. What we found was that the stuff around meditation, etc., it was all very powerful but, at the end of the day, if we don’t change the way we work, none of that stuff can keep up with us.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. All right. Well, Keith, tell me, any final top do’s, don’ts, implications from this stuff, particularly from the vantage point of either a frontline manager or an individual contributor?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, I feel that one of the greatest things we can all start to do is start to shift our meeting time out of meetings. We need to make meetings the enemy. And if we imagine saying, “Okay, how can I not make somebody of a meeting with me on this but, actually, free up time?” So, I tell you, like one of my employees who does work for me, actually she’s the individual that helps manage my speaking business, individual contributor.

And we used to have a weekly meeting just to get an update, “How’s the speaking business doing?” and she would go over all the things she was doing and I’d banter back and forth, etc.

And now what she does is she sends me a five-minute recording that I can listen to at my leisure with a quick update. And then if I have any response or feedback, etc., I just shoot her another recording back. It is the easiest thing in the world for me and it has freed up a half of an hour block of time that my administrative assistant is so grateful that he doesn’t have to have as a weekly meeting.

So, start asking yourself, how can you take meeting time off of the people around you off of their agenda. Let’s say you’re going to throw a meeting with your team, and you’re going to talk about X, Y, and Z, give you a piece of information. What we found was that during the pandemic, if you have 12 people in a meeting, only four people feel that they’re fully heard in that meeting. The average is only about four people of 12 feel that they’re fully heard in that meeting.

If, on the other hand, you send, we call it a decision board, out to folks, and say, “Listen, we’re not going to have a meeting on this topic. I’m going to say we’ve got a problem. The problem is we’re falling behind on inventory right now. And I think the solution is X and some of the struggles or challenges I know we’re going to have is this,” and send that out to everybody, and ask everybody at your leisure, “Add to the document.”

Now, you want to do a document that’s a SharePoint document or a Google Doc where everybody can see each other’s answers, and say, “You put your point of view in there.” So, now in a meeting, which you might’ve called a meeting with six people, all six people are going to get a chance to see each other’s point of view. Everybody will be fully heard.

Then you look at it, and then you decide if you even need a meeting. Maybe the problem has already been answered. And if you do need a meeting, you’ll be able to see that, really, we’re only two people that really had an opinion that mattered, so I’m going to have the meeting with these two people and let everybody else off the hook.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot.

Keith Ferrazzi
It’s powerful. Also, some of these people will say, “Well, listen, I think the better person who should be weighing in is so and so.” So, now, originally, you might’ve invited six people but maybe eight people get a chance to weigh in. These other people wouldn’t have even been invited. So, the biggest thing that I can say as a takeaway is start thinking about how you rethink some of the fundamentals of how you work personally. And one of the great evils of wasted time is meetings, so make sure that you work hard to eliminate as many of them as you can, move to asynchronous as best as you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And for your speaking business manager, with your quick video recordings, I love Loom myself. Is there a tool you’re using and digging?

Keith Ferrazzi
We’re really simple here on this, and that’s the other thing I found out, Pete, which is it didn’t matter what technology people used. We could jerry-rig anything. It was more about, “How do you rethink the way work is?” The fact that she could literally just send me an audio message in Slack so that if I wanted to, they’re all housed there. Or, if we wanted to get lazy, she could send me a voice text right on her iPhone. But the point was it’s not about the technology. It’s about the mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Perfect. Well, now, let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Can you give us a favorite quote?

Keith Ferrazzi
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’ve always been a thoughtful curious agile person. I want more information and I love changing my mind. It means I learned something.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. That’s good. Sorry, I’m just thinking of…

Keith Ferrazzi
Hobgoblins

Pete Mockaitis
Spiderman and Green Goblin and my kids.

Keith Ferrazzi
Exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Keith Ferrazzi
I would say that my favorite research is the Gallup organizations research on employee engagement, when they really cracked the code and realized how fundamental relationships were. One friend at work was the greatest predictor of an employee’s engagement. And it’s interesting, so many organizations just dismissed that as a critical element of what they focused on, engineering for their employees’ happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Keith Ferrazzi
I would say The Great Gatsby, and that has nothing to do with business. It just has to do with the plight of a man who was deeply insecure, trying to aspire into a society that he didn’t think welcomed him. And that feels a lot like my life as a young man when I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, a poor Pittsburgh kid trying to do better than my family history had been.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Keith Ferrazzi
I love this new tool called MURAL. It’s a whiteboarding tool. And I love getting on and whiteboarding things and collaborating. But I love it when it’s virtual and I love it when I can pass around between members of meetings, live asynchronously, grow. So, these days, I’ve really started to love this whiteboarding technology called MURAL.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Keith Ferrazzi
Ten minutes every morning. So, snooze to me isn’t go back to sleep. Alarm awakes, I push snooze and I do two things. I spend just a bit of time being grateful and I think about why I’m so grateful. And I happen to be, in my household, not to get too private, in my household, I need my space when I’m sleeping, so my significant other stays on that side of the bed. But that last ten minutes is my cuddle time, just time to be warm and intimate, and excited about the day, and so gratitude and connection to me to start the day couldn’t be used for anything better.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Keith Ferrazzi
Oh, yeah. It is that, “We can’t get there alone and, therefore, people are so important. And the currency for deeper relationships is generosity. Find the folks that matter to you and be of service.”

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, RadicallyAdapt.com is where we’re engaging with folks and will be for a while around this particular book. RadicallyAdapt.com. You will get all the information that you need to get the video series for free, which we’re really excited to put in your hands. Obviously, if you want to get the book there, you can do that as well. RadicallyAdapt.com. Thanks.

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, it might be broader than we want for this time, but I would say, going back to my core roots, every single one of us have to recognize that your opportunities in this world will come to you not only because of your competency but because of your relationships, so build a relationship action plan. After today, literally just pick the five people who are most important to your progress and success, and be of service to those individuals.

And I would say, measure the current relationship status you have with them. Zero means you don’t know them; they don’t know you. A five means you could call them up on the weekend and cry about something that you’re disturbed by, so it’s that end of the extreme. A three is what we normally call a friend at work, just an acquaintance. I want you to try to move those five people into being fours and fives, not twos and threes where they usually reside. So, build a relationship action plan.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Keith, this has been a treat once again. I wish you much luck in the new world of work.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thank you, Pete. And thanks so much for your generosity of this amazing audience.

Jan 06
0

732: How Aspiring Leaders Can Succeed Today with Clay Scroggins

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Clay Scroggins lays out how leadership is rapidly changing and what aspiring leaders can do to adapt and succeed.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The 4As for mastering tricky conversations 
  2. Why the “right” people aren’t necessarily the right people 
  3. One question to surface your superpower 

About Clay

Clay is the author of the best-selling books How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge and How to Lead in a World of Distraction. He holds a degree in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech as well as a Master’s degree and Doctorate with an emphasis in Online Church from Dallas Theological Seminary. 

In January of 2022, Clay is releasing his 3rd book titled The Aspiring Leader’s Guide to the Future: 9 Surprising Ways Leadership is Changing. No one denies the changing landscape of leadership, but Clay explains how to become the kind of leader the future is demanding. 

For the past 20 years, Clay Scroggins has served in many pastoral roles at North Point Ministries, a multisite church started in Alpharetta, Georgia led by Andy Stanley. Most recently, Clay served as the lead pastor of Buckhead Church, one of North Point’s largest campuses.  

He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Jenny, and their five children. 

Resources Mentioned

Clay Scroggins Interview Transcript

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

Clay Scroggins
Oh, Pete, thank you. I feel so grateful to be back because last time I was here, you changed my keynote talk that I do on the book that you were interviewing me about, so thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks.

Clay Scroggins
I hope today is just as impactful.

Pete Mockaitis
No pressure. Cool. Well, to kick it off, it’s been a little while and we’re going to be talking about your book here The Aspiring Leader’s Guide to the Future: 9 Surprising Ways Leadership is Changing. And I’d love to hear a surprising lesson you’ve learned in the couple years since we’ve last spoken.

Clay Scroggins
Well, I resigned from my job three months ago, so I don’t know what exactly the lesson is for the future of leadership but I’ll tell you, for the now, it has been remarkably great to be self-employed.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Yeah, certainly. Well, I’ve enjoyed the journey myself, pros and cons, and every set of tradeoffs. Cool. Well, hey, good luck. I hope that you continue rocking and rolling.

Clay Scroggins
Well, you know, I feel a bit like a walking cliché about it because we’re in the middle of The Great Resignation. United States is resignation nation. We went through a pandemic, or going through a pandemic. Anyone who is in a helping industry – nurses, teachers, nonprofits – and then I was in the clergy business, I was a pastor, still am doing a lot of preaching at churches on the weekends, but anybody who’s in one of those lines of work, the emotional toll of the pandemic just seems to be a little bit more stressful, and I just felt like, “Oh, of course.” Like, I went through a pandemic and quit my job.

But honestly, it wasn’t the challenge of the last year and a half. I actually enjoyed the challenge over the last year and a half, but it was that feeling that I think everyone has from time to time, which is, “Can I do it? Like, do I have it in me to make a go of it on my own?” I guess it was like a little bit of a, “I’m going to take a bet on myself.” And, obviously, you did that. Was it ten years ago?

Pete Mockaitis
Just about, yeah.

Clay Scroggins
Crazy. So, that’s pretty much what I decided to do was, “Let me go out and see if I can do it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, congratulations. It’s good to have you.

Clay Scroggins
My kid bought me this Van Gogh poster, and she’s been meaning to write “Let’s Van Gogh” on this poster. Well, she gave it to me as a gift for working for myself now, which I thought was really brilliant. She hasn’t “Let’s Van Gogh” on it quite yet. I need her to. So, let’s Van Gogh, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Let us. Let us, indeed, Van Gogh. Well, so tell us, what’s fundamentally sort of the main thesis or big idea behind the book The Aspiring Leader’s Guide to the Future?

Clay Scroggins
Well, I, like everyone else, noticed that leadership is…I like leadership. Let me back up and say I enjoy the concept of leadership. I think everybody was made to have an impact on this world. I think it is baked in your DNA that you want to make a difference, that you want to build something, grow something, create something, move something forward. And I believe at every level of any organization, every single person is a leader.

Leadership is not about authority. It’s not about a title. It’s not about power. It’s about the ability to influence someone, to move someone to do it, they maybe don’t even want to do to accomplish what they want to accomplish. And so, from that standpoint, I’ve written a couple of books on leadership. So, I spend a lot of my time speaking about leadership, talking about leadership, helping organizations that have a girth of emerging leaders, of swaths of emerging leadership, helping them figure out how they can become better people. When you become a better person, you usually become a better leader.

And I started realizing, obviously, in the last couple of years, “Oh, my goodness, leadership is changing at a rapid rate.” And I don’t think anybody would disagree with that. Every time I’ve started out to research the topic of how leadership is changing, every blogpost, every book, every research study, started with that same concept – leadership is changing. Leadership is changing.

But the more I tried to understand it, the more I realized, none of us really know how it’s changing. And if you don’t know how it’s changing, it’s really not very helpful. That Wayne Gretzky quote that to be really great at hockey you have to skate to where the puck is going, not to where the puck has been. If we’re going to grow and develop into the kind of leader that the future is demanding, then we have to know how leadership is changing.

So, that was really what was behind it all, was, “All right. Well, then how is it changing? What are the ways that leadership in the future is going to be different than it has been in the past? And let’s talk about it.” So, I threw a bunch of research, and reading, and studying, and thinking, and conversing, came up with nine, I call them, surprising ways. Some of them are less surprising than the others but nine ways that leadership is, in fact, changing, and how we can become the kind of leader that the future is demanding.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I would like to get a view of that. And maybe to kick us off, could you provide an example or illustration of what’s some leadership going on – and you don’t have to name names, but you can if you want – that is old and broken and not what’s with it anymore?

[06:02]

Clay Scroggins
Well, I think some of the cliches, some of the tropes of leadership that I remember, when I was probably 20, 21, I co-oped for Accenture business strategy consulting firm when I was an engineering student in Atlanta, and the phrase is like “Dress for success,” “Fake it till you make it,” “Don’t let them see you sweat.” They used to watch how people would salt their food to determine whether or not they made good decisions. If you salted your food before you tasted it, you were rash and impulsive.

They would look at how clean your car was to determine how organized you were. I would say, at a very basic level, it’s those kinds of things that I feel like are maybe good examples of the old way of leadership that is no more. That’s kind of that GE – and I love GE, I love Jack Welch. Straight from the Gut was one of my favorite books, but I would say that concept, that style of leadership is probably one that is of the past.

Clay Scroggins
Does that resonate with you at all? Do you remember any of it?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I agree with you that. Well, I guess I thought those were never good. And they weren’t good then, they aren’t good now, in terms of because there’s all kinds of reasons why, “Oh, maybe they salted their food because they’ve been to this restaurant before, and they know darn well it’s insufficiently salty.” So, if you’re going to draw an inference on someone’s career and future and potential based on that datapoint, that’s really foolish and you should have a more robust process to assess the things you’re looking to assess. There’s my hot take on that.

Okay, so that’s old school. Well, then you’ve got nine particular surprising ways. Can you give us a quick rundown of what those nine are?

Clay Scroggins
Yeah, the first one is the idea that you don’t have to know everything to be a leader. Most people think that, “I’m not ready to lead because I don’t know enough.” I think because the way knowledge is rapidly changing and growing, we have to be more comfortable with those three words “I don’t know” if we’re going to be willing and ready to lead.

The idea that you need a coach, whether you’re going to pay for that coach or not, I think is something that my parents’ generation were a little less accustomed to. The idea that all the greatest athletes have coaches. I think the great business executives have coaches. That concept is new. The idea that if you fail you’re not a leader, is outdated. I think all of us are going to have failings, that you’re not going to have just success after success after success.

The idea of not just being aware of your weaknesses, but being intimate with your strengths, I think it’s surprising to me. There’s been research that’s been done that says the majority of people think their weaknesses can grow while their strengths remain stagnant, remain fixed. But the truth is you can grow your weaknesses and you can grow your strengths as well. But when you ask that interview question, “What are your greatest weaknesses?” most people have their canned answer, but most people are not aware of their superpower, their strengths.

That Jim Collins line, “Get the right people on the bus,” I take that concept and really challenge whether or not we know who the right people are. I think who the right people are is changing. Some people that might have been deemed as the wrong people have helped me become, helped me make right decisions, helped me become more of a right leader, helped me to see more rightly even though they may have been the wrong people. So, challenging that concept was really exciting for me.

The idea of trust, I think, is pretty crucial as we look toward the future. In the past, particularly with our work environments where you could walk down the hallway and look over someone’s shoulder to see how they’re doing, within a matter of days, the concept of trust on teams was challenged in a way that it had never been challenged before because everyone is working from home. So, learning how to give trust without demanding trust, learning how to give trust to be trusted, I think is a way that leadership is changing.

The concept of conflict. The conversations that we’re having at work, I’m sure, Pete, even though you work for yourself, you’re well aware of this, there was a day where you left religion at home, you left what you thought about a lot of the social issue at home, but we’re having those discussions at work on a regular basis, “What do you think about race? What do you think about gender? What do you think about sexuality?” Those are conversations that are very common in the workplace. Not only that, but people are growing less accustomed to having conflict. So, the idea of learning how to have healthy conflict, I think, is going to be more important for the future than it even was in the past.

Learning to lead with vulnerability. Most leaders are, we’ve been taught, “Hey, I’ve got to ‘show the best and hide the rest.’” Social media enforces that. And learning how to lead with that thing that makes me feel most insecure, learning how to lead with my weakness is something that I don’t think we’re naturally accustomed to.

And then the last way leadership is changing is around the idea of success. Learning that success is not a scarce commodity, but learning that it’s really having an abundance mentality when it comes to success, making sure the people that you work around know that, “Hey, I’m in this for you. I’m not in this for me. And when you’re successful, I’m successful. If you’re not successful, I can’t be successful.” I think that concept is a way that the future is going to demand that of us whether we’re ready for it or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, I like that. So, those are juicy in terms of we have nine ideas, which you can think, you can bat around, you can chew on and dig into. And so, to recap, number one, saying it’s okay to not know. That’s cool. Two, we all need a coach to be our best. Three, you’re going to fail and that’s normal. Let’s see, four, you want to be intimate and knowledgeable of your strengths, your superpower. Five, the wrong people can, in fact, be helpful. Six, give trust to be trusted. Seven, learning how to have healthy conflict. Eight, leading with vulnerability, a place where we’re insecure. And, nine, success is abundant and not a scarce resource we need to squabble over and politic and scheme to hoard.

Clay Scroggins
Pete, can I have an engaged interruption?

Pete Mockaitis
You may.

Clay Scroggins
As you look at those, which one do you think, “Oh, yeah, that definitely is new”? And maybe another way to think about it, Pete, when you think about your parents, which one would your parents go, “Wait a second. Why is that one on the list?”

Pete Mockaitis
I think that the one that struck me is new is when you talk about learning how to have healthy conflict, like in some ways that’s not super new. Like, I guess, what do we have? Abraham Lincoln, “Team of Rivals,” like, okay, yeah, old school, and that sure was helpful in terms of having that healthy conflict. But in terms of, yeah, what folks are bringing into the workplace, and I’m thinking right now about Basecamp. They had quite the kerfuffle associated with the leadership.

And I don’t know the ins and outs of the story, but it seemed like they were somewhat good-intentioned when the leadership said, “Hey, guys, you know what, these kinds of issues, I feel like they’re getting a little bit divisive, a little bit distracting. Let’s not do that anymore.” And then there’s like a riot, like, whoa, like it really blew up.

Clay Scroggins
Coinbase did the same thing. Sounds like they’re very similar situation, where the CEO of Coinbase basically said, “Hey, look, we’re not dealing with that. We’re here to continue to help in the decentralization of the economic system of the world. We’re not trying to solve the race issue, so let’s leave all that outside.”

Pete Mockaitis
And that didn’t go well for them.

Clay Scroggins
Well, I think he feels great about it, but I think there was a walkout, there was a protest. And there’s a part of it I can understand why he would say that because he’s going, “I’m not an expert in this. I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s get back to talking about the economy and how we pay for things.” But, no, I think, in general, it was not received really well.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, it does really feel like a new thing in terms of that’s happening now. And I guess that’s a whole other conversation if that’s good or bad, right or wrong, appropriate, inappropriate.

Clay Scroggins
Exactly. Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s there in terms there are a healthy proportion of folks who want to engage and think it’s necessary, proper, and appropriate to engage on those matters at work. So, lay it on us, Clay, how do we do that well?

Clay Scroggins
Well, I think the way you put that is really great, Pete. Pete, just so you know, this is what’s great about your podcast, is you do a great job of playing this, like, Switzerland, neutral, “I’m just a facilitator,” but you’ve got really great thoughts, and you have great interjections and opinions as you’re trying to pull things out of people, so thank you for doing that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Clay Scroggins
But I give a plan, I give a, “Hey, if you’re trying to become better at conflict, here’s a way to approach it.” I give four A’s that you can work on, that you can go think about, you can prepare for. Number one, would you affirm the person however you can? You might not be able to say much, but would you affirm them? “Here’s what I believe is true about you. Here’s what I’m afraid you’re going to think about this conversation, and I just want to let you know that’s not what it’s about.”

So, it’s really affirming your intentions, it’s affirming what’s true about the other person, and it creates safety. What you’re trying to do in any high stakes difficult conversation is you’re trying to build a bridge of safety that’s strong enough to bear the weight of whatever is about to come across that bridge. And so, if you can start by affirming whatever is true about that person, I think you’re off to a great start, but you have to prepare for that. You don’t want to think of that on the fly.

Secondly, would you ask a couple of really curious questions? Arrogant people don’t ask questions. They don’t have to. They know it all. But people that recognize, “Hey, there’s something I don’t know. There’s something that you see that I don’t see. And whether you’re right or I’m right, or you’re wrong or I’m wrong, I’ll be better if I can get behind your lens and see the way you see it.” And so, would you ask a couple of curious questions that will allow you to see from the other person’s perspective?

And then, third, would you acknowledge what you’ve heard? Miscommunication has started wars in this world. It can certainly start a fight or a conflict in your workplace. And so, learning how to simply acknowledge what you’ve heard. We do this a lot with engaged couples. We do a lot of premarital counselling, my wife and I do, with engaged couples. We’ll have them sit on our couch six or eight times before their wedding, and the session on conflict, we’ll say, “Hey, bring the latest, greatest conflict you’ve had.” It’s always about the in-laws, by the way. Spoiler alert. It’s always about the in-laws.

And so, what we’ll do is we’ll say, “All right. You, sir, would you explain what you wish would be different with your spouse?” And he’ll say, “Well, I wish you would check with me before you call your mom about,” said situation. And then she’ll go, this is her acknowledgement, we’ll have her repeat back. He’s assertively communicating, she’s actively listening, and she’ll say, “So, what I hear you saying is you don’t want me to talk to my mom anymore?” “Okay, that’s not exactly what I said. That’s not what I’m hoping for.” So, there’s a chance for them to sync up what they’re actually saying. That’s really important.

And that’s what that step of acknowledgement is doing. It’s trying to let the other person know, “I hear you.” When you say something, that’s important. But when you feel heard by someone, it is such a crucial part of communication. So, if you’ll start by affirming and ask a few curious questions, and then acknowledge what you’ve heard, and then advise, and then give the advice, or whatever it is that you want to bring, you’re just off to a way better start. And the problem is if you don’t go through it in that order, if you go through it in the reverse order, which is what most people do, most people want to fire off the text to the boss or the peer, to the coworker, “Hey, I just want to let you know this is your problem. And how dare you? And you better not,” and whatever.

And if you do that, you end up having to walk backwards through the process. You end up having to acknowledge that you were wrong, ask for forgiveness, and then affirm that you really love working there. So, if you don’t go through it in that order, I think you’ll end up paying for it in the end, but that’s just a simple process. As we think about the future, why conflict is even going to be more important in the future than it was in the past, specifically healthy conflict, my hope is to give a pathway for people that they can prepare for so that they can have healthier conversations at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. That’s cool. So, affirm, ask, acknowledge. Nifty. Let’s hear about wrong people being helpful.

Clay Scroggins
Well, I love what Jim Collins has said. Jim Collins is like the GOAT. That book Good to Great, I’m sure it sold more copies. He has not sold more copies than you have had podcast downloads, I can promise you that.

Pete Mockaitis
What 50-million-ish? Maybe.

Clay Scroggins
Yeah, you might have, I don’t know. He has sold a lot of Good to Great copies. And that line “Get the right people on the bus” I’ve had it rattle around in my head for as long as I’ve been leading teams. But what I found is that what I thought was right might not be right. I always thought right was, “I get along with them. I like them. They’re like me. They look like me.” And the more I have stepped into leadership opportunities, the more teams I’ve led, the more I’ve realized that the right people aren’t always the right people.
And sometimes the people that I think are the wrong people are the ones that actually helped me the most. Just because you’re ambitious, it doesn’t mean you’re the wrong person. Just because you are prickly doesn’t mean you’re the wrong person. Just because you’re hard to get along with doesn’t mean you’re the wrong person. Now, certainly, you want to be a great team player, you want to be willing to get along with the people around you, but sometimes the wrong people really do help you see the right way or make the right decision. And I think that’s new. I think that’s different. I think that’s a different way of seeing the future than the way we’ve seen it in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they’re the wrong…I guess what this means is sort of like the halo effect or if there’s a devil horn effect in reverse.

Clay Scroggins
The opposite, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, someone is prickly or abrasive and, thusly, they’re all bad. And then they’re not the right person to be on the bus, and so they don’t belong on the bus and so don’t associate with them. They’re unclean.

Clay Scroggins
Unclean, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet, it seems that in this instance, like the very same candor, shall we say, associated with that prickliness or abrasiveness is just what the doctor ordered in terms of helping you see blind spots or learn, grow, improve.

Clay Scroggins
I certainly think so. I’m sure you’ve had people that have…it’s been the people that have challenged even the way you’ve ran your business or thought about your podcast that maybe, initially, you were like, “Ugh, I don’t like the way that feels.” But in the end, they’re the people that actually helped me grow and helped me change, helped me see something that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.

And so, I think early on in my leadership, I thought, “Get the right people on the bus. I got to get the people that I like on the bus. I got to get the people that are like me on the bus.” But the longer I’ve led, the more I’ve realized I don’t know that I’ve got the right concept of who the right people are and how sometimes the wrong people are the right ones to help me see differently. Honestly, Pete, it’s why I think people underestimate diversity.

If your team looks just like you, there’s a problem. Somehow deep within you there’s probably something within you that wants to justify why you look the way you look or why you are the way you are. But valuing other opinions, valuing other backgrounds and the way other people see it is only going to help you see more clearly. It’s only going to help you reach the people that you’re trying to reach, or sell whatever it is you’re trying to sell.

And I think sometimes we miss that about diversity, that we feel diversity is…there’s an altruistic motive behind diversity that I think is great. But I think we miss out on the idea that you will come up with better…you will make better decisions if you get people around you that don’t look like you, that don’t see like you. It will only help you in the future. And I think sometimes we miss out on that. That’s a complicated thing for two white guys to talk about, but I think it’s a really important part as we look toward the future, as we start thinking about who should be on the bus and who shouldn’t be on the bus.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly. As you have a broader array of perspectives, you get a fuller picture of reality and, thus, yeah, especially over the course of many decisions, you’re going to have better ones and sometimes epically better ones. So, that’s handy. Let’s get your hot take on being intimate with your strengths and knowing your superpower. First, Clay, what’s your superpower?

Clay Scroggins
I think my superpower is the people around me. They feel believed in. They feel like someone sees them. I’ll tell you, you’ll find out more clearly what your superpower is when you resign from a job, which is kind of unfortunate. But they did a little exercise on my last day of work where everybody had a whiteboard, and they said, “All right. Everybody, write on the whiteboard, what do you want Clay to know?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Clay Scroggins
And that was a great exercise. And there was a gal on our team who grew up very differently than me, looks very differently than me, has a very different background than me, but was an incredible teammate for me. And she wrote on her board, she said, “What I want him to know is I’m grateful that he always saw me.” And I thought that’s pretty stellar. I think that I probably gained more awareness of what I was good at by leaving than I had while I was there, which I think is one reason why every now and then you ought to just quit a job and resign from a job.

I had the same job for about 18 years, and so I don’t know how much you’ve done on resignation, Pete, but the morning I had to go meet with my boss to resign, I opened up my podcast app and typed “How to resign from a job?” because I had never done it before.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we had an episode on that. I’m wondering if we turned up.

Clay Scroggins
I wanted to make sure I got it right. It’s kind of a hidden…it’s one of those hidden parts of having a job that you just don’t think about until you have to do it for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, it sounds like you did it fairly classy if that’s the sort of exit they gave you as opposed to a swift kick in the butt, and a, “Here’s your pass. Get out of here.”

Clay Scroggins
Lit everything on fire and the doozies, right.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Clay, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about a couple of your favorite things?

Clay Scroggins
Well, I do think we would all agree that the future is going to be different. I think we would all agree that we’re moving toward a different future than the past that we came from, and I hope people feel encouraged by that. I certainly do. I think, as I started thinking through this concept, I felt so encouraged that I think a lot of these changes in leadership are healthy changes.

There was a story that Angela Ahrendts…I had a chance to interview her for this project. Angela was the CEO at Burberry, and then after that, left to be the senior VP of Retail for Apple. And Angela told this story about sending out these videos to her 75,000 retail employees at Apple, and she was trying to unify them, she’s trying to bring them together. And so, every Monday morning, she would send out a video called Three Points in Three Minutes, which I thought was a great little concept.

She said one of the first times that she shot it, she had a video crew in her office, and she had a phone call in the middle of while she’s shooting it, and it was her daughter, Angelina, who was in school in London, in college. And she said, “Hey, just keep it rolling,” and she picked up the phone, and she said, “Hey, Angelina, I’m shooting this video right now. As soon as I get done, I’ll call you right back.” Her daughter said, “No problem. Call me back.” She hung up the phone. She finishes the video. She gets done with it, she tells the camera crew, she says, “Hey, keep that in there, send it out just like that.” They said, “Are you sure?” They’re like, “We’re Apple. We make beautiful things.” She’s like, “Yes, send it out just like that.”

She said the next morning, she wakes up, and looks in her email, and she had hundreds of emails of people telling her, “Thank you. Thank you for reminding us that you’re a person too, that you’re trying to do your greatest work, but you’re also trying to be an amazing mom, and you’re trying to have a great marriage, and you’re trying to be a great person. We’re trying to do the same thing.”

And so, I think some of those changes like that, that’s an example of vulnerability, it’s an example of being open and honest about what’s really going on in life, and I think there’s something for all of us to learn in that, that people want a different kind of leader. People do not want a leader that has it all together, that knows everything, that has the right answer for every single issue. People want a leader that’s willing to say, “Hey, I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know but I’m working on it as well, and I don’t have it together either. I’m inviting you to help me become a better leader. I’m doing something that’s such a big deal, I can’t do it alone, and I’m inviting you to be a part of this.”

And I think that’s who we all want to work for. I think that’s the kind of leader we all want to work for. So, why not become that kind of leader? Why not become the kind of leader that is growing into that kind of vulnerable, aware of conflict, better at conflict, giving trust even though you might not feel trusted kind of leader? I think it’s the kind of leader we want to work for and I think it’s the kind of leader that we all really want to become.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Okay, so resigning is one way that you can get some insights in your superpower. What are some of your other practices you recommend to get those insights?

Clay Scroggins
Well, the easiest way is to ask people. Probably the best simplest thing that I did was anytime you’re changing jobs, whether you’re resigning or not, it’s a great time to ask people around you, but you don’t have to wait until you changed jobs to ask the people around you. I just sent a simple Google survey with three questions, “What do I do that inspires you? What do I do that bothers you? And what do I do that I don’t even know that I do? What are my blind spots?”

And, of course, Pete, like anybody, the parts that I harped out on, that I really camped out on, were questions two and three. But reading the answers to question one, “What do I do that inspires you? What do I do that motivates you?” it gave me such crystal-clear clarity on what it is that I do that people appreciate. And so, the easiest way to find out what you are good at is to ask the people around you. Most people just don’t know.

I’m amazed at how many interviews where you ask people what their weaknesses are, and they give you the Michael Scott answer, “I work too hard. I care too much. I spend too much time at work. Those are my weaknesses.” But most people, they don’t know what they’re good at, and the people around you know. They know what you’re good at. And if you can become more intimate with your strengths, you’ll find that your strengths are what the people around you love you for, and you can grow in those and become an even more valuable player today and tomorrow as well.

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

Clay Scroggins
I love that Abraham Lincoln quote, “I prepare and I study because one day my time will come.” I love that little simple concept that I think what he’s trying to say is “I recognize that destiny has something for me in the future.” And I think that’s true for every person, that the future has something for you. The future has something where you’re going to be called a moment, a mission, an opportunity where you’re going to be called upon to lead, and so what you’re doing now is not wasted effort. What you’re doing now is not worthless. No, it’s so important because you are getting ready for that moment.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Clay Scroggins
I love Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute. Do people ever comment on that one? Does that ever come up?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s come up a couple of times. I listened to the audio version but I hear it in my mind’s ear right now, “You’re in the box.”

Clay Scroggins
“You’re in the box,” that’s exactly right. That’s probably my favorite leadership book and it’s in the fable, it’s done as a fable, which some people like the fables and some people don’t. But, yeah, I love the concept that you are constantly affirming the narratives that you’ve already written about people, and so you have to challenge those narratives or else you’re going to just continue to put them, in the words of The Arbinger Institute, “In the box.”

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

Clay Scroggins
Well, ClayScroggins.com would be the easiest place to go but I’m on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, a bit on TikTok, not a lot, but some. So, @ClayScroggins, that would be great.

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

Clay Scroggins
Well, I would just say continue to study, continue to grow, continue to learn because you just never know when your moment is going to come. And if your moment hasn’t come and you feel passed over, or you feel like people have forgotten you, there’s still more to come. Your story is still being written. And if you can continue to grow and develop and challenge yourself, I think you will be better prepared for whatever the future holds.

So, I’m grateful for podcasts like this that help people grow personally because without this, we just wouldn’t have opportunities to challenge ourselves, to hear new ideas new and concepts. So, Pete, you’re modeling, I think, which is a great thing for every one of us, which is to consistently try to learn something from someone so that you can grow and prepare and challenge yourself to be ready for whatever the future holds.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Clay, thank you. This has been a treat. Keep up the great work.

Clay Scroggins
Back at you, Pete. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dec 23
0

730: How Leaders Can Succeed by Mastering the Eight Paradoxes of Effective Leaders with Dr. Tim Elmore

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Tim Elmore says: "I need to speak as if I believe I’m right, but I need to listen as if I believe I’m wrong."

Dr. Tim Elmore sheds light on the eight paradoxes the leaders of today must embrace to more effectively inspire and connect with their teams.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why leaders say it’s more difficult to lead today
  2. The eight conflicting demands of great leaders
  3. The two behaviors that set aspiring leaders apart 

About Tim

Dr. Tim Elmore is the founder and CEO of Growing Leaders, an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization created to develop emerging leaders. Since founding Growing Leaders, Elmore has spoken to more than 500,000 students, faculty, and staff on hundreds of campuses across the country. Elmore has also provided leadership training and resources for multiple athletic programs. In addition, a number of government offices in Washington, D.C. have utilized Dr. Elmore’s curriculum and training. 

From the classroom to the boardroom, Elmore is a dynamic communicator who uses principles, images, and stories to strengthen leaders. He has taught leadership to Delta Global Services, Chick-fil-A, Inc., The Home Depot, The John Maxwell Co., HomeBanc, and Gold Kist, Inc., among others. Committed to developing young leaders on every continent of the world, Elmore also has shared his insights in more than thirty countries. Tim’s expertise on emerging generations and generational diversity in the workplace has led to media coverage in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com, Investor’s Business Daily, Huffington Post, MSNBC.com, The Washington Post, WorkingMother.com, Atlanta Business Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, and Portfolio.com. Tim has appeared on CNN’s Headline News and FOX & Friends discussing parenting trends and advice.

Resources Mentioned

Tim Elmore Interview Transcript

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

Tim Elmore
Thank you, Pete. Good to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat. You’ve worked with a lot of leaders over a lot of years. I’m curious, what’s one of your most surprising, counterintuitive, fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us human beings and leadership across your career?

Tim Elmore
You know, this won’t shock you, but meeting with C-level leaders and finding out they’re just as humans as the intern at the office. We gain experience and we gain wisdom, I think, I like to think we do, but then you find out, “Bob puts his pants on one leg at a time, and he struggles with his daughter and his dog,” that sort of thing. So, I think that’s liberating a little bit because I think we think we have to perfect something by the time we reach 50, and that just doesn’t happen.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I find that really reassuring and true to my own experience. I remember in consulting, the first time I was in a meeting with, like, “A CEO is going to be in the meeting and I’m going to be there too? Oh, my gosh.” My first sighting of a CEO up close and personal in real life. And then he asked us a very basic normal question, it’s like, “Oh, so does that number include the benefits or just the salaries?”

Tim Elmore
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “That’s what I would ask if I were him. Wow!”

Tim Elmore
Yeah, maybe becoming CEO means you get the guts to ask those questions that we’re afraid to ask.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. All right. So, your latest work is called The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership: Embracing the Conflicting Demands of Today’s Workplace. That’s cool. Tell us, what’s the big idea behind this book here?

Tim Elmore
Yeah. Well, I think it’s not hyperbole to say we’re living and leading in very funky different times. This is my 42nd year leading something as a paid leader and I’d just never seen a time like this that we’re in. So, I don’t mean to exaggerate or create drama, but I think I just look around. In fact, I tell you what, the genesis for this book actually was a green room conversation I had with 16 CEOs.

So, it was right before an event and I thought, “I’m going to capitalize on this moment and talk to these people about what they’re experiencing.” So, Pete, I asked the question, “Do you think leading people today is harder than it was when you first learned to lead?” And I thought I’d get a mixture of answers, but every single one of these people said, “Absolutely.” One of them said, “A hundred and ten percent.” They were ready to wave the flag.

And then I kind of pushed back, and I said, “Now, that’s kind of odd that you would say that. Wouldn’t you think leadership would’ve been harder when we were in our 20s and we first started leading something but we didn’t know much?” But everyone of them stuck to their guns. And that set me on a search, really, “Why is it that we would say that?”

And part of the reason, I think, is that we do live in just complex times. Post-COVID 19 pandemic is just weird and we don’t know what normal will look like two years from now. It may look much like this. We thought we were coming through the Delta variant, and then there’s another variant. But here’s what I also note. When I look around at leaders and teams, I feel like people come to our teams today with higher levels of education, higher levels of expectation, what they expect from a leader today, higher levels of entitlement, meaning, “I feel like I’m entitled to more perks and benefits than ever before.” That’s not wicked or evil. It’s just true. Higher levels of emotion.

Pete, I remember when I first began my career, it was very common for bosses to say, “Leave your personal problems at the door. Come and get the work done,” and then we say, “Okay.” Today, it’s, “Bring your whole selves to work,” and that’s awesome. We keep it real that way but we bring emotions, we bring baggage, we bring personal problems with us, and so it’s just a different day. And that’s perhaps why leaders go through decision fatigue.

I heard a leader say recently, “I feel like I’ve made a year’s worth of decisions in one month, last year. So, I’ll stop there but just feel like, because of the complex times, there are paradoxes. Here’s the premise of the book. There are paradoxes that all involve social and emotional intelligence. So, they’re doable for all of us, we can learn these, but we’re often not practicing them, and then we see a resignation that didn’t need to happen or a retirement that didn’t need to happen so soon because we just weren’t leading as effectively as we could.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Tim, I love what you said there because, well, as you might imagine, I’ve read a lot of business books, and, as we know, the first third-ish, I don’t know, it varies, of the book is convincing you how critically necessary, “This book is right now.” And a lot of times it feels a little trite, because you’re, “Oh, with globalization and competition,” it’s like, “Yeah, okay, globalization and competition has been going on for a while now.”

But, no, I think you’re keying in on something in terms of genuinely the human experience and expectations, it’s cool, like, “Bring your whole self to work,” has advantages in terms of, “Oh, yeah, we’re getting some, we’re tapping into some creativity and some passion,” which you just can’t get when it’s like, “No, no, no, leave that at home and you crank through the task list that I need you to crank through.’ You just don’t get that.” Well, you do with bring your whole self to work. But you also have a new whole set of challenges and expectations to live up to and deliver upon effectively. So, yeah, well-said. Thank you.

So, let’s hear about these paradoxes. You’ve, in fact, listed eight specific paradoxes. What are they?

Tim Elmore
Yeah. Well, let me be the first to concede, there might be 8,000 of these things we need to learn but I found eight. So, just to list them or, at least, a handful of them, the first one in the book is I believe effective leaders, uncommon leaders, must be confident and humble. And very often, you get one or the other. At least you lean toward one or the other. You’re a very confident leader. In fact, some people wonder, “Are you too confident now, Bob?” Or, they’re very humble and that’s winsome for us, but with a humble leader only, you kind of wonder, “Are we going to get to the goal or we’re just going to be nice to each other?”

So, I think the best leaders bring both – confidence and humility. And what I do in this book, Pete, just so you know, is I center on a case study for each of these paradoxes. And my case study for this one was Bob Iger, the former CEO of Disney. Bob took that role, followed Michael Eisner, and Michael was this very, in all due respect, cocky, kind of just full of himself, and actually was so arrogant that he stopped conversations with Steve Jobs when they were trying to buy Pixar, and never got it done under Michael Eisner.

Bob Iger comes in, knows less about leading an empire like Disney because he’s never done it before, and calls Steve Jobs up, and says, “Steve, it’s Bob. You don’t know me. We’ve never met. I’m heading up Disney now, and I just can’t help but think that we might be better together. What do you say?” And Steve Jobs goes, “That’s not a crazy idea. Let’s talk.” And he gets it done. Disney buys Pixar.

But then what I love about this story about confidence and humility is when they buy Pixar, Bob and the Disney enterprise put Pixar in charge of all Disney animation, “So, I just bought you. Now, would you tell us what to do?” That, to me, is confidence and humility, and that’s rare but I think it needs to not be rare. So, that would be the first one in the book, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Tim, once again, I love what you’re saying here. It’s like we have an idea, we have an example, and it’s like, “Okay, I get what you’re saying.” So, can you just do that for the next seven, please?

Tim Elmore
Absolutely, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re crushing it.

Tim Elmore
Well, let me give a homework assignment to listeners on this one. I am trying to practice these eight paradoxes. I didn’t write them because I know them all. I wrote them because I’m trying to be them. My assignment for this one is when I’m in a meeting, I need to speak as if I believe I’m right, but I need to listen as if I believe I’m wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s kind of thing will re-tweet, Tim. That’s well-said.

Tim Elmore
Yeah. Well, thanks. It’s a great assignment for me because I don’t do that listening thing well. I listen as if I believe I’m still right and I’m just waiting for my next turn to talk. Anyway, that’s been good for me. So, the next one is even more, I think, challenging. I believe uncommon leaders, paradoxical leaders, leverage both their vision and their blind spots, which sound like, “No, you can’t have those together.” But I actually believe, in all the leaders I interviewed, they actually said, “No, I ended up benefiting both from my vision, ‘Here’s the target we want to hit.’”

But isn’t it true, when you talk to leaders, a lot of them will look back, and go, “Man, if I had known then what I know now, I never would’ve started this enterprise. I learned so many things.” And it was because they didn’t know the protocol. They didn’t know how it was done before that enabled them to find a whole new way to reach the goal.

So, my case study on this one is Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx. So, she created this industry, shapewear for women, it’s kind of a combination of pantyhose or stockings and girdle, and she ends up calling Neiman Marcus, and ends up talking to a female executive, and says, “Hey, can I come have 10 minutes of your time?” She gets the meeting, she tries them on, she tries on Spanx in front of a lady in the restroom and, of course, sold, “This is great.”

Well, later, when Sara was doing a Q&A session for a large group of business leaders, one of the people in the audience stands up and says, “Sara, how did you get the attention of a major department store in a trade show where there’s a thousand exhibitors?” And she said, “Tradeshow? I never went to a tradeshow. I just called up this executive.” And Sara looks back and says, “It’s what I didn’t know that saved me. I didn’t do the normal stuff that people wade through that most people die in.” It’s what she didn’t know that helped her.

Pete Mockaitis
So, she didn’t know, “This is not how this is done, Sara, the whole process by which we onboard new products into our merchandising lineup.”

Tim Elmore
Yes, that’s exactly right. And isn’t it true, the more experience you gain, the more you know what the protocol is, and you can get stuck in doing it the way we’ve done it before. So, Sara says, “Hey, it may be what you don’t know that may completely put you in a blue ocean where there’s nobody there yet.” And that’s what happened.

I feel like, when I started Growing Leaders, I didn’t know what I was doing. Thank God, I didn’t know what I was doing in some ways. Anyway, I’ll stop there but that was a really, really important one for me to learn from as I wrote it down.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Well, let’s hear about the third paradox.

Tim Elmore
Okay. The third one is I believe effective leaders practice both visibility and invisibility. And all I mean by this, and everybody listening that’s a leader will go, “I know exactly what you mean.” When you’re up front, in other words, when you’re beginning any project or product or offering that you are going to sell, people need to see their leader very visible. We need to model the way. We need to set the example. We can’t just give a lecture. We need to show them the way.

But along the way, if we stay visible, other people aren’t going to step out. They’re going to defer to us in the meeting. They’re going to lean on us. They’re going to say, “Well, I can’t say anything. Tim, go ahead.” I think there comes a point in every leader’s journey that he or she says, “I need to be invisible now. I need to perhaps not show up at that meeting because John or Susan needs to step up.”

So, my example on this one is Dr. Martin Luther King. Between 1955 and 1963 in the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King was a very visible leader. He marched, he protested, he boycotted, he, on purpose, got himself thrown into prison. There were 29 times Dr. King was imprisoned. Part of it was just setting the example for making sacrifices.

From ’63 on, you begin to see him do something different in his leadership. He didn’t show up at some meetings. And when young John Lewis would call him and say, “Dr. King, we need you here,” he’d say, “John, you know what to say.” He knew that young John Lewis wouldn’t speak up if Dr. King was in the room because, “I defer to Dr. King.”

So, there’s a point in our training process, in our equipping process, we’ve got to be not absent emotionally, or not purposely absent because it was a hard meeting…

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, didn’t feel like it.

Tim Elmore
Yeah, exactly. And that’s a problem today, absentee leadership, because we didn’t feel like it is a problem. But I’m saying, now we start strategically saying, “You step up, you step up, you step up.” And I just think the greatest leaders always find their way to do that, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Keep it coming. Number four.

Tim Elmore
All right. Here’s another tough one for me. I believe uncommon leaders are both stubborn and open-minded. Now, does that not sound like an oxymoron? How can you be stubborn and open-minded? But here’s what I would say to this. I think, at the beginning of any venture, leading any company, you have to be stubborn about a few things. You’re not going to reach a goal unless you’re strong-willed, and you say, “Doggone it, we’re going to do this.” You just have to have that. Obstacles will throw you if you don’t.

But I think any leader would say, “If you’re only stubborn, you’re not listening to anybody, you’re not open-minded to new ideas, you don’t think you need anybody else, aargh, that puts us in trouble.” So being stubborn means you got a chance at reaching the goal. Being open-minded means you have a chance at taking others with you to that goal.

So, my example on this one was Truett Cathy, long time ago founder of Chick-Fil-A restaurants. Truett only had one restaurant for 10 years, and he was tweaking his recipe, not just for chicken but for the way he was going to run this restaurant. And you and I both know he was very different. You’d like him or hate him but they’re closed on Sunday, “This is our values,” so forth and so on.

So, I discovered Truett was extremely stubborn when it came to some core issues. He was very open when it came to almost anyone else. And what his core issues were, Pete, was his people, he really erred on believing in his people. He would keep people long just because he so wanted them to know they were believed in, but he also had his core values. I know that sounds cliché, but he had a core set of beliefs, that he said, “This is how we’ll run the company. I don’t care if it’s 2021 or 1951.”

And those cores were what he was stubborn about, and everybody knew this is sacred here, and I think it’s actually served them. I think they’re becoming a leader in the quick-service restaurant industry. Now, McDonald’s is copying them. Now, Kentucky Fried Chicken is copying them because, I think, they had that core that they’ve never left.

Pete Mockaitis
And there are some of the things that they just totally throw out the window, like, “You know what, let’s do the opposite of what we were doing. That’s fine.”

Tim Elmore
Yeah. Well, so you might know this. I don’t know how often you get to a Chick-Fil-A, but wherever a Chick-Fil-A is, you know if you walked in that restaurant and you order something, and you say, “Thanks,” they’ll say, “It’s my pleasure.” That’s their phrase, “It’s my pleasure.” It doesn’t sound like a big deal.

But Truett Cathy introduced that phrase at their big annual conference for all the operators, all the owners, and he didn’t push it. I mean, he did push it but he didn’t demand it. He didn’t say, “Now, you’re going to get fired if you don’t use this phrase.” But he kept creating a tone and a spirit and a culture of, “Let’s say, ‘It’s my pleasure. It’s my pleasure. It’s my pleasure.’” Ten years later, it stuck.

And I would say what happened was originally people were going, “I’m not going to say that phrase.” First of all, in quick-service restaurants, they’re not asking for great customer service. They want speed and cheap. In other words, most of the time you go to a fast-food restaurant, you want it really fast and you only want to pay $2.50 for a burger or something like that. He kind of introduced a whole new…and they adapted along the way to introduce some things that they just became open-minded about.

So, the way they’ve gone about it, the new menu items on the restaurant, it always involves chicken in some way, but there’s all kinds of menu items they were adaptable about. At 92 years old, Truett Cathy actually designed a brand-new restaurant called Truett’s Luau. It was a Hawaiian restaurant. It wasn’t just selling chicken. He came up with all the décor and the menu at 92 years old. He’s still learning. He’s still growing.

He wrote me a thank you note in his 80s for a book I’d written, and just said, “Here’s what I learned,” and I thought, “Oh, my gosh. He’s in his 80s, he could teach me everything.” So, I’m not sure if that answers your question but that’s what I think of when I think about what you asked.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that open-mindedness, that really shows in terms of it’s not like, “Oh, we’ve already figured out restaurants. That’s how it is.” Like, “Nope, here’s a new kind of restaurant.” As well as, “Hey, I read your book in my 80s, and here’s some learnings,” and that’s got to feel good to get that letter.

Tim Elmore
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Let’s hear number five.

Tim Elmore
Okay. Next one, yup. This one really is geared at the heart of a leader, and I think sometimes leaders maybe aren’t as aware of their heart issues, not just head issues, we need to master. I believe uncommon leader practice this paradox. They hold high standards for their people but offer gracious forgiveness. So, high standards and gracious forgiveness.

What I mean by that is…well, let me put it to you in the opposite way. If we only have high standards and not gracious forgiveness, our people aren’t going to take any risks because they’re going to be afraid for their jobs. If you just have a bunch of high standards, “I may get fired if I make a mistake,” they’re going to be scared to try certain things that we need them to try to move the company forward. But if we only have gracious forgiveness and not high standards, people are going to give you mediocre work. They’re going to go, “Oh, he’ll forgive me. He’ll forgive me if I’m lame on this one. It’s no big deal.”

So, I think we need to say, “We got these high standards.” This about Amazon, think about Apple, these great companies that set these ridiculous high standards for the industry they’re in. But I think the best leaders say, “I’m calling you up to this high standard but just know I love my team members. And if you shoot for the standard, you give it everything you got and you miss it, you’re going to be forgiven.”

So, if you don’t mind, I want to double-click on this one because this is one I often talk about, and people go, “How do I do that? I don’t know how to do that.” One of our habitudes images,- we teach leaders with images. One of our habitudes images is called the Golden Gate paradox, and it’s actually a paradox for this one.

You’re familiar with the Golden Gate Bridge. It was built way back in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Because it was built during the Great Depression, they had a whole line of people that joined the team to build the bridge that were just regular workers, they were just looking for jobs, so they weren’t engineers, they never built a bridge before, but they needed money.

So, they hired these workers who were up on the scaffoldings, building this incredible engineering feat in San Francisco, and people were falling. They were falling to their death. So, they have a meeting with the foreman, Mr. Strauss, and Strauss is asked by the workers, “Could we put a safety net underneath this bridge?” Well, that was not common because it was going to cost a lot of money and that was just not common at the time. But Strauss, thankfully, said, “You know what, it’s going to cost us some money so we’re probably going to go overbudget, and it’s going to cost us some time to build this net so we’re probably not going to finish on the deadline, but I owe it to my people to do this.”

So, they put a $300,000 net, and back then, $300,000 was a lot of money. They put the net up and quite the opposite happened. They actually finished on time and on budget. But here’s why. Now, the workers, because they had a safety net beneath them, could focus on succeeding not surviving.

Pete Mockaitis
More attention on the thing itself, and so it’s like, “Whoa, don’t do this wrong or you die.” Okay.

Tim Elmore
Yeah. And, by the way, don’t you know companies, everybody is just trying to survive, not succeed. I mean, if they were honest, they’d say, “I just don’t want to lose my job.” So, I’m saying if we find a way, figuratively speaking, to put a safety net, and say, “Go for it. Give it everything you got. I’m going to catch you if you fall,” oh, my gosh, people stay.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a beautiful image, yes. And I guess what I’m thinking about, I’m thinking about the infamous, or it can just be famous, it’s both, the Netflix culture document, which is funny that that’s achieved such fame. Part of me thinks like, “Well, every company should just have that and be clear on that,” but it’s rare and that’s why it’s famous.

And I think one of the points there was, “Hey, you know you’re going to perform at an exceptional level or you’ll be given a generous severance and you’re going to be compensated top of market as well, so it’s kind of how we operate.” And I get the vibe that there’s no animosity, it’s like, “Hey, you know what, you’re just kind of not delivering at this level, and so this may not be the place for you.” That’s not going to feel good, of course, to get that messaging but there is a bit of that net.

And I’d been on the receiving end of that as well. I remember a notion of…it was an expectation that in consulting that I was to perform zero defects analysis, which is really kind of intimidating when you’re a few months out of college, like, “So, don’t make any mistakes. That’s our expectation.” Like, “Really? Is that fair?” But I guess no mistakes mean like the clients will notice or your manager will notice so just take the time to double-check in advance, basically, is the practice.

And so, I remember falling short of that and also receiving sort of gracious forgiveness in terms of like, “Hey, well, it’s just work. Nobody died but, yeah, this is why we believe in this because it can hurt our credibility, and we’re backtracking a little bit, and so let’s figure out how we can do that.” So, that is nice and it feels good.

It’s interesting, like, I remember the word forgiveness is interesting in that…well, I believe we all make mistakes and we all need forgiveness. And, yeah, I remember one of the first times someone actually said to me, “I forgive you,” it was sort of off-putting. One, people don’t say that very often.

Tim Elmore
Yeah, it’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, literally, “I forgive you, Tim.” It felt a little odd to me because it was like, “Oh,” because it’s sort of like, “You’re not telling me I didn’t screw up,” which is what most people would say, “It’s fine. No big deal. It happens, Tim.” In fact, it almost double-affirmed, “Yeah, you screwed up, Pete.” But then it also… so at first, I didn’t like it, it’s like, “Whoa, that’s kind of intense but also very true and right and big of you, and I like and respect you more.”

So, yeah, just that…it takes a little getting used to but it’s awesome. That’s my take. What do you think about forgiveness as a word and a term and a social vibe?

Tim Elmore
Yeah, no, I think you’re spot on. It’s weird. It seems spiritual, like, maybe in church we’d say that, or maybe God says to us in church. But, you’re right, when someone says, “I forgive you,” it can feel at once, like, “Well, that’s patronizing or that’s condescending,” “I’m the holy one here and I’m going to forgive you. I am perfect and you’re not.”

But I think what I love about what you just said was that person didn’t say you didn’t make a mistake. They’re actually saying, “Yeah, I’m sorry. It was really bad. It was bad. It’s wrong.” But then they let you off, and say, “Let’s do better next time.” One phrase we try to live by at our organization, Growing Leaders, is this, “Let’s shoot for perfection but settle for excellence.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Tim Elmore
Yeah, because excellence is pretty good. We know we’re human. So, I worked for John Maxwell for 20 years, and I feel like John modelled this for me right out of college. I was in my 20s at one time, and, gosh, I did some wingnut foul-tipped bonehead things. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I went to John with fear, thinking, “Oh, my gosh, he’s going to let me go,” and he didn’t. He said, “You know, we learned from that, didn’t we? And let’s talk about what we learned,” so I had to come up with some things I learned.

But I built some confidence up, and thought, “I’m going to keep pushing myself because he’s not going to let go of me.” And for 20 years, I stayed there. So, anyway, it was just a great, great lesson for me to say there’s a heart issue to leadership, and I think that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s beautiful and John is beautiful, and we’ve had him on the show a couple of times.

Tim Elmore
That’s neat.

Pete Mockaitis
I actually keep forgetting I need to send him something.

Tim Elmore
That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Listeners can hunt down that episode if they’re really curious about that.

Tim Elmore
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Okay, so high standards and gracious forgiveness. And so, maybe while we’re on the topic, like, in practice, when someone screws up, what do you recommend we say? So, that’s a good phrase, “Hey, we learned something today, didn’t we? I forgive you.” For some personalities, it can really be powerful. For others, it can be very off-putting. What do you think?

Tim Elmore
Yeah, it can be. Of course, people bring different experiences to the workplace so that might be I don’t know how they’re going to respond. But I tell you what, the classic story for this one is…it’s not my case study. My case study for this one is Harriet Tubman, the leader of the Underground Railroad during the Civil War. She’s a brilliant picture of this. But the story, I think, we’ve probably all heard, the business story, is Tom Watson who was a former executive at IBM. He was quite famous for having a young manager under his care that made a million-dollar mistake decades ago.

And Watson called him into the office, and the guy came in and spoke first, he thought, “Man, I’m going to just rip the Band-Aid off,” and so he said, “I suppose you want to fire me for my mistake.” And Watson said, “Why would I want to fire you? I just spent a million dollars on your education? Let’s keep going.”

And I thought, “What a great attitude that is.” But it sounds cliché but that’s essentially what a boss needs to, “We learned from this. Let’s make sure we did learn from this. Let’s not repeat it but now let’s move forward but let’s keep the standard high.” And I think most people need a leader to keep the standard high.

Most of us would begin to settle in for average, “Whatever my teammates are doing, if it’s average, I’ll be average.” And I think leaders need to keep calling people up to a standard that’s above and beyond what we would do on our own.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you. All right. Well, let’s hear about the paradox about being both deeply personal and inherently collective.

Tim Elmore
Yeah. So, all of these are different categories of paradoxes. This is the paradox of vocabulary. This paradox is, have you ever noticed when a leader is communicating with a team of people, or any audience, for that matter, the best ones are inherently collective, meaning when they speak, you can tell they see the big picture? They have a grasp on the gravity of this issue, they see the whole, not just part, they see the whole, and yet, as they communicate, you get the feeling they’re talking to you. They’re deeply personal in their language.

So, I can think of great speakers I’ve heard before. You hear them talking, you go, “Man, he gets it. She gets it,” but then they start telling a story, and you go, “Oh, my gosh, did he read my mail last week?” that sort of thing, “How did they know I was feeling that right now?” So, I think this ability we need to develop of being inherently collective but yet deeply personal is brilliant.

My case study on this one was Mother Teresa. So, most people have heard her name, she’s now a saint in the Catholic Church. But Mother Teresa was a great leader. She started this order The Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, India, and it became the largest order of its kind, thousands and thousands and thousands. And she didn’t start thinking, “I’m a great leader. I’m going to build the biggest company.” She didn’t do that.

But what she did was she grasped a big-picture issue, there were people living in poverty and dying on the streets, and she thought, “I’m going to address that issue. We’re going to do it one life at a time so I can stay personal to the needs. And when I go to a donor, I’m going to have a story to tell, not, ‘Well, did you know that 53% are actually dying?’” She didn’t do that.

So, she would talk to people that would say, “Don’t you think a government program would be more effective than a bunch of nuns and Catholic Church?” And they would say, “This is going to destine your plan to fail,” and she would say, “No, it’s going to destine us to scale.” Ain’t that brilliant? And the reason she said that was you scale when people see you setting an example but you’re not leaving the personal touch, and people go, “I know that’s how life ought to look.” In customer service, we don’t want to lose the personal touch.

And so, she was doing it so beautifully, people just kept joining and joining and joining. So, she’s in Calcutta, then there were men and women, then there were this group and then that group, and now there’s groups all over the world. I think the brilliance of it is it is counterintuitive. She never lost sight of the big picture. This is huge. But she never ever, ever lost the touch.

Let me tell you one cool story from her life that might be a cool thing for your listeners to hear. One day, she’s in Calcutta, on the streets, even though she’s heading up this huge thing. She’s wiping the leg of one of the people that are living in poverty. She’s wiping the leg because it’s leprous. They have leprosy and it’s pretty gross. Well, there were some business people that were touring the building, and they saw her on the ground wiping this leg that’s just “Aargh.”

And one of the men turns to the other man next to him, and says, “Aargh, I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars.” Mother Teresa looks up, and says, “Neither would I.” Her point was, “That’s not my motivation.” And it’s moving to me but I’m just thinking, “I never want to lose why I got into this gig in the first place, which is to serve these people. And I need to feel what they’re feeling, and so when I address them, they don’t feel like I’m in some ivory tower that can’t be touched, and I’m some lofty guru now that’s written a bunch of books or whatever.” I don’t want to lose that touch.

So, yeah, Mother Teresa is my great example on that, and, one, I feel like that’s an aspiration that I want to have – collective and personal. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is powerful and quite beautiful, indeed, that in having the personal touch and such, in this case, compassion or…I guess there’s many virtues or dimensions of excellence, just depending on your flavor and vibe and organization that you’re working with, when done at an exceptionally high-caliber level, inspire and touch and motivate. And that is hard to quantify exactly what impact that it has but it is vastly greater than the one, even though your focus is on the one. So, I’m picking up what you’re putting down with regard to the word paradox here.

Tim Elmore
Yeah, it really is weird. It’s almost oxymoron kind of what it feels like until you dig, and go, “Oh, I see. I see how those two can go together.” So, yeah, it’s really fun. Okay, so let me…let’s see, what am I missing? Oh, two more. Is that right?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Tim Elmore
Okay. So, one of the paradoxes is one that I think we’ve all said to ourselves at one point, “I need to be both a teacher and a learner.” So, Angela Ahrendts is my example on this one. Angela Ahrendts was asked to leave the United States and take over Burberry coats in London, this high-end fashion coat, plaid coat that usually was purchased by rich old ladies back in the day, back in 2006 when she took over. When she came in, the brand was on a decline, not an incline. They were losing money, and they thought, “Oh, my gosh, we may be on our way out.”

So, Angela comes in, and her job, the board said, was to save this brand. The first thing she does after she meets her fellow executives is she meets with the youngest team members at Burberry, I mean, 20 somethings, interns were in the room, and she says, “I want to learn from you. What do we need to do different that will build the brand again and start reaching your people, your colleagues, your peers?” They weren’t reaching the millennials. And at the time, it was the millennials that were the new adult consumer.

Well, this group of people came up with a bunch of ideas, these were young professionals. One of the ideas they came up with is the Art of the Trench, and they said, “Let’s, on our website, put a place for our customers to put pictures of themselves in our coats, which will prompt them to buy our coats.” Now, it sounded kind of funny but it worked. In fact, the Art of the Trench is a page on their site. You scroll through it, there’s all kinds of pictures, mostly of young adults, young professionals, in a very nice coat. The brand began to take off, tripled in size, it was crazy.

But, Angela, if she were here today, she would say this, “I had to be a teacher and a learner. I, obviously, went in as a teacher. I had to lead the way. I had to run point on saving this brand, but I knew one of my first jobs was, if we’re going to reach new customers, I got to talk to some people that understand them, and say, ‘Here’s what you need to know.’” So, it’s just…I actually have found that most leaders will confess to me, “I’m either one or other. I’m either really good at learning,” or, “I’m really good at teaching but not learning.” And I think this is one we have to kind of juggle together.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And uncommon leaders are both timely and timeless.

Tim Elmore
Yeah, the last one is timely and timeless. This would probably make sense. I have found that, in today’s world of rapid change, this is cliché, but we have to be timely, meaning we’ve got to keep up with the times. We need to read the culture before we lead the culture, so we need to be relevant with technology. We need to be on the cutting edge with our offerings, our products and services, but, at the same time, I think the best leaders are also timeless, meaning they don’t leave behind those timeless skills and values that made the company what it was when it first began in 1901, maybe.

So, Walt Disney is my brilliant, brilliant example, I think, here. If you think about it, if you walked into Disneyland in Anaheim, California, the original theme park, you look to your left, it’s timeless. You see Frontierland, Adventureland. He looks back at the past, and says, “Here are the heritage of our nation. Here are the virtues that built us into a great country, integrity and honesty.” But you look off to the right, there’s Tomorrowland. He was fascinated by science fiction and technology and science and animatronics.

So, Walt Disney was this leader that said, “I’m going to use cutting-edge technology to message timeless virtues that we dare not leave behind as we progress into the future.” So, I think great leaders jump on a swing set. They swing backwards in order to swing forwards. Swinging backwards is what enables a swinger, a person on a swing set, to swing forward. A swinger, that’s right.

So, I think we need to say, “What was our beginning? What problem were we trying to solve? What was the mission? Why were we doing this in the first place?” And then swinging forward, “Does that need still exist today? How can we repurpose our mission? Are there changes that we need to make?” So, I think that timely and timeless, I saved it till last because I think it’s so important that we master both being pioneers along the way as well as originators. Let’s hold onto the foundation that we built ourselves on.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s really interesting, you talked about the Walt Disney example and timely and timeless because, as we speak, I’ve got two toddlers at home. And so, they went through a bit of a Frozen phase, which I guess most American toddlers have, it seems.

Tim Elmore
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I just noticed at the end that it was based on…the whole story was based on the fable, like the Ice Prince, or Ice Princess, by Hans Christian Andersen, or one of those, or not them, but it’s like Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen. Then, at the same time, we’ve got these books of like Aesop’s Fables and fairytales and just sort of books like these classics, like Jack and the Beanstalk, and all these things, and then you see Pinocchio.

And what’s fascinating, it’s like many of these stories are like old, like centuries old, and yet we’re bringing in the most cutting-edge storytellers, musicians, designers, animators, to make something like Frozen happen. And, sure enough, it’s like if you just really sit with some of the emotions and some of the songs, it’s kind of like deeply moving, “Oh, my gosh, this person feels so isolated. Whoa.”

And then if you open up and get vulnerable, and think about the ways you feel isolated, that can really be moving. So, Tim, look, you and I are both tearing up in one interview.

Tim Elmore
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’re like, “This is a child’s cartoon. What is going on here?”

Tim Elmore
I know. I know. Well, can I volley back really quick, Pete? I think one of the shows that Disney+, speaking of Disney, just put on their channel was Hamilton, you know, the Broadway play. Hamilton is such a great example of this. It’s a rags-to-riches story that is timeless, the story of Alexander Hamilton, and they’re doing rap music, they’re hip hop on the stage. So, here’s a timely medium to share this story to kids you might not want to read in a history book but you’ll go to a stage show.

So, I think that’s the need of the hour. We have some pretty cool principles that our nation was built upon, and perhaps every civilization down through history was built upon, but we’ve got to find new ways for the next generation, your kids, my kids, that will say, “Oh, I can embrace that because you found a fresh way to say it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Tim, I really appreciate the rundown here, the clear ideas that are powerful and vast in their implications along with very clear illustrations, stories, case studies, that bring them to life. So, perfection. Thank you. So, lay it on us, for professionals, maybe they’re not yet leaders or they’re just starting to lead, if you had to boil it down to one starting action that you recommend folks take that gives a big bang for the buck, a high ROI in terms of your time and effort and energy, and the leadership shot-in-the-arm it gives you, what should we start doing or stop doing right away?

Tim Elmore
Wow, that’s a great question. I’ll be honest with it; two quick items are coming to mind. Let me see if I can share them quickly. One is, and, by the way, we’ve done a course, Habitudes for Young Professionals. So, when it’s kind of beginning of the journey, one of them is a principle or an image we call coffee step, and it was built off a story.

We had some interns, when I was working with John Maxwell, that I was overseeing, and one of the gals that was an intern told me this story way later when she became a professor at a university. But she said to me, “I was immediately asked to get the coffee for the executives on the team as an intern,” and she goes, “I was actually kind of put off by that. It was off-putting to me,” because she thought to herself, “Do you not realize I got a college degree? Are you asking this because I’m a girl?” that sort of thing.

And then she said, “I made a decision that I’m going to get the coffee,” and she said, “It was the smartest decision I made. When I was willing to kind of stoop and do that menial task, it got me in the room. I’m meeting the executives. I’m meeting the VPs and I’m starting up conversation. Pretty soon, they asked me to sit down with them and talk. Next thing I know, I’m interacting, they know me,” she starts moving up.

And so, coffee step is simply this challenge. Don’t be afraid to do the small thing even though your talent enables you to do way more than that. If you’ll execute the smallest of tasks, you might be amazed what will enable you to do. Because I think early tasks are not about talent; they’re about trust, “Can I trust you to do what I’ve asked you to do?” So, that would be one.

The other is an image that we call early birds or mockingbirds. And this is kind of cheesy but here it is. I think when people come onto a team at the beginning, they either start becoming a mockingbird, “I’m just going to imitate everybody else. What are you doing? I’ll do it too,” or an early bird, “I’m going to be the first one in the office. I’m going to be the one that sets the pace.”

Pete, you’re going to love this. I had an intern a few years ago, second week on the job, he was an intern, a summer intern, he said, “Dr. Elmore, could I get a key to the office?” I said, “What do you need a key for?” and I didn’t say it but I was thinking, “You’re an intern, you’re going to leave in August.” He said, “Well, I’ve been noticing, I got a lot to do here and I actually want to do a really good job. I may get here before everybody else. I’m going to need a key.” I said, “You’re going to get a key.”

So, my point of that, it seems so simple, but if you’ll be the early bird that’s just going above and beyond, that second mile, that whatever, and then don’t be afraid to do the small thing, it’s probably going to lead to bigger things. That would be what I would say.

Pete Mockaitis
Tim, that’s beautiful. We only have time for a couple of your favorite things, but can you give us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Tim Elmore
Being a good parent has been very important to me, and one favorite quote I’ve tried to live by is this, when it comes to the next generation, “It’s better to prepare the child for the path instead of the path for the child.” I think so many parents are trying to pave the way for their children and make it easier. I think we don’t need to make it easier. I think we need to build strong kids that are ready for whatever comes their way. So, prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Tim Elmore
One book I re-read every year is a book called Leadership and Self-Deception. Have you read that one?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Tim Elmore
Yeah, it’s one I re-read probably because I tend to be selfish, and that book just gets me out of the box, that whole thing of…and I think we don’t realize it as leaders but, even though we say, “Well, I’m a leader. I’m about everybody else.” Really, we’re about getting our stuff done, and now we have everybody at our beck and call. So, that book has been so rich for me.

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

Tim Elmore
Well, you can go to TimElmore.com, you can find the book there at Amazon prices, and I do events. But the nonprofit I lead for the next generation is called GrowingLeaders.com, and that’s where you can find me there.

Pete Mockaitis
Tim, this has been a real pleasure. I wish you much luck and fun in navigating these paradoxes.

Tim Elmore
Thanks, Pete. Great to be with you.

Nov 29
0

723: The Crucial Perspectives of Effective Leaders with Daniel Harkavy

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Daniel Harkavy walks through his proven framework for elevating your leadership.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The seven perspectives of effective leaders 
  2. The critical first step to elevating your leadership
  3. Three questions to help you build your compelling vision 

About Daniel

Over the past twenty-five years, Daniel Harkavy has coached thousands of business leaders to peak levels of performance, efficacy, and fulfillment. In 1996, he harnessed his passion for coaching teams and leaders to found Building Champions where he serves as CEO and Executive Coach. Today the company has over 30 employees, with a team of 20 executive and leadership coaches who provide guidance to thousands of clients and organizations. His previous best-selling books include Living Forward, a simple framework for prioritizing your self-leadership, and Becoming a Coaching Leader, a step-by-step guide to moving from manager to coaching leader. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, sponsors!

  • Blinkist. Read or listen to summarized wisdom from thousands of nonfiction books! Free trial available at blinkist.com/awesome 
  • University of California Irvine. Chart your course to career success at ce.uci.edu/learnnow 

Daniel Harkavy Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Harkavy
Crazy seat. Yeah, crazy seat.

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Harkavy
Good to figure that out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, how do I do a perspective?

Daniel Harkavy
You allocate time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Daniel Harkavy
Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, yes.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Harkavy
Oh, you bet. You bet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool?

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And how about a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Harkavy
Yeah, I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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