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Apr 02
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559: How to Unify, Motivate, and Direct Any Team by Picking a Fight with David Burkus

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

David Burkus says: "Put to words the vision that's already in people's hearts and minds."

David Burkus discusses how crafting a compelling vision in terms of a fight can inspire your team to action.

You’ll Learn:

1) The three kinds of fights that inspire

2) A simple trick to greatly boost motivation and efficiency

3) The secret to getting along with the coworker you dislike

About David:

One of the world’s leading business thinkers, David Burkus’ forward-thinking ideas and bestselling books are changing how companies approach innovation, collaboration, and leadership.

As a skilled researcher and inspiring communicator, Burkus’ award-winning books have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and his TED Talk has been viewed over 2 million times.

A renowned expert, Burkus’ writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USAToday, Fast Company, and more. He’s been interviewed by NPR, the BBC, CNN, and CBS This Morning. Since 2017, Burkus has been ranked as one of the world’s top business thought leaders by Thinkers50.

Resources mentioned in the show:

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David Burkus Interview Transcript

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

David Burkus
Oh, thanks so much for having me. Great title for a show, by the way. I just need to say that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Yes, well, I like it clear. So, that’s what you’re getting here. I understand one thing that you’re awesome at is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and you got a blackbelt. What’s the story here?

David Burkus
Yeah, so I have been doing Jiu-Jitsu since probably 2016. Like a lot of people, I have that exact same story of college student, etc., go to Blockbuster when it’s still around and rent one of those old UFC DVDs and watch this guy named Royce Gracie destroy everybody. And, suddenly, you’re going, “What is this weird art from Brazil that everyone is talking about?” So, you go to the first class and get just like beaten to a pulp, but you go, “That was so much fun.” And if you keep doing it for 13 years, eventually the hand you a blackbelt. You get to be not terrible which is about what I would rate myself now.

Pete Mockaitis
Blackbelt equals not terrible.

David Burkus
Yeah, yeah. There are some people, like one of our coaches has been doing it for, let’s see, he’s probably 50 so 40 years and he’s still pretty fit. So, you’d think that you could beat up an old man, but you really can’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, David, do you have any pro tips if, let’s say, someone is at a grocery store and they’re buying the last roll of toilet paper or hand sanitizer, and then someone attacks you, what do you advise?

David Burkus
Well, the first thing would be to not get in that situation, right? Distance is your friend. So, the more that you can, I think, have situation awareness about who that guy that’s been eyeing the toilet paper awkwardly is and realize, “This is a situation I need to walk further away from,” that’s really your friend. That should be the biggest goal. I think a lot of people end up jumping. I mean, you watch it now but you also watch it during Black Friday shopping and things like that. People jump into confrontation way too quick. Keeping space from people is your friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, that’s advice for personal safety. Now, when it comes to rallying a group of folks, you advocate that people pick a fight. What do you mean by this phrase?

David Burkus
Yeah. So, pick a fight, referring to… it’s a bit of a double meaning, right? So, I believe that, fundamentally, we’ve had these conversations about purpose for probably two decades now and, yet, a lot of people are still really bad at saying what the purpose of a company is. We do mission statements or we try and start with why. We try and do all those things and it doesn’t really rally people the way it should.

And so, I believe, fundamentally, when you look at the research that one of the best ways to give a clear and concise and motivating statement, a purpose, is if you can frame it as the answer to the question, “What are we fighting for?” As a leader, if you can do that, and individually if you can do that, it just seems to, like you said, rally and motivate people a bit more.

But here’s the key, you have to choose your fight wisely. So, that’s the secondary meaning, you also have to pick the right fight which is almost never competitors. For the average employee, you’re almost never motivated by, “I work for Coke, and I want to destroy Pepsi.” “I’m probably going to go to work for Pepsi one day,” or something similar. So, you have to pick what is that higher purpose, that bigger thing that you’re striving for, that’s what the right fight looks like.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s interesting. So, we’re fighting for something as opposed to against something. I guess maybe you could fight against something if it’s like intrinsically evil, like poverty or disease.

David Burkus
Yeah. The way that I phrase it is, “What are we fighting for?” not “Who are we fighting?” right? It’s not about the other because, again, you see. I mean, we’re seeing it right now as we’re recording this. This was totally unintentional, by the way, but we’re seeing it right now. This is arguably the first time in world history that every country in the world is fighting for the same thing and we’re all fighting against the same thing, and it’s sort of that proof of concept. There’s not time and situations like this for little squabbles over which country is right and all this sort of stuff.

And the same thing happens organizationally when you have that true sort of purpose worth fighting for. Those little silos, politics, turf wars, they all get squashed to that larger purpose. So, that’s why I really emphasized, it’s, “What are we fighting for?” not “Who are we fighting?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, when you’re picking what you’re fighting for, we got some pro tips and pointers already in terms of not who we are fighting against. And so, maybe paint a picture for us with an example in terms of maybe if you’ve seen some cool transformation stories or some contrasts like, “Here’s an example of an organization that’s fighting for something and it works great. By contrast, here’s an organization that’s not quite doing that, it’s not working so great.”

David Burkus
Yeah. So, my favorite example, and one we talk about in the book, of changing that fight midstream, because it’s easy to see, “Okay, this startup has this sort of big fight-based mission,” but it’s a lot harder to do with an established organization. But in the late 1980s and throughout the entirety of the ‘90s, a gentleman by the name of Paul O’Neill took the reins at Alcoa, which is an aluminum-manufacturing plant. They make a lot of different types of aluminum. Fun fact, they make the aluminum foil that goes around Hershey’s Kisses, or they did for a really long time.

And what they were running into when Paul O’Neill took over, stock price was declining, their efficiencies were declining, I mean, it’s a normal 1980s, 1990s story of losing out to offshoring and manufacturing in developing countries and that sort of thing, and a lot of people were wondering, “What are you going to do to turn this company around?” And the way O’Neill describes it, he says, “Part of leadership is to create the crisis,” but he knows the crisis of a declining stock price isn’t going to rally anybody. The crisis of “We need to be more efficient” isn’t going to rally anybody.

So, he chooses, as his fight, safety. He gets up on the very first day of his tenure at this press conference and says instead of, “Here’s how we’re going to increase profitability or shareholder value, etc.” We’re in this era where CEOs basically go right to buy-backs and try and back stock as a cheap way to raise the stock price. He doesn’t do any of that. He says, “I’d like to talk to you about worker safety. I’d like to talk to you about the number of people that lose a day of work because of preventable accidents and I intend in my time at the leadership of Alcoa to go for a zero-accident company.”

Now that’s unheard of in manufacturing but that’s something worth fighting for. It speaks to that sacred value of who’s to the left and to the right of you. And, ironically, if you make a plant more safe, you make it more efficient anyway, so he knows that there’s still this goal, “We’re going to turn the company around,” but just turning the company around doesn’t rally anybody. He chooses to name the enemy. And in this case, the enemy is safety, because if we beat that enemy, we’ll find a lot more things that we accomplish along the way as well.

In his time, by the time he retired in the late 1990s, the stock price had increased fivefold. The company ran more efficiently. Alcoa now is like a pinnacle of safety. There are other manufacturing plants that go to Alcoa to learn how to be much more safe. But, before he came, that was never a concern. It was an acceptable cost of doing business. It hints at the first of like the three templates of fights that I outline in the book. I call it the revolutionary fight, which is when you say, “This has been a norm or a standard that the industry does, and we refuse to accept it as normal any longer. We don’t find it acceptable.” In Paul O’Neill’s case it was safety, “We don’t find some level of acceptable loss acceptable anymore. We’re going for zero.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, that’s a revolution. While we’re at it, what are the other two?

David Burkus
Yeah. So, the other two, the underdog fight, my personal favorite fight because I’m from Philadelphia and we’re the city of underdogs, is about not necessarily about what the industry is doing but how you’re perceived by the industry. Sometimes it’s by competitors, other times it’s by critics, etc. You leverage the underdog fight when you can point to a way that people are disrespecting your team, disrespecting your company, or underrating it, and you can point to why they’re wrong. And this is really key, you need two things. It’s not enough just to be criticized because they might be right. You also need a rebuttal. You need rejection but also rebuttal for this one to work.

And it turns out, I mean, this is, like I said, I’m from Philadelphia. We know the Rocky story. Our favorite sports hero is a fictional character who lost a boxing match. New England gets Tom Brady. We get a fictional character who loses a boxing match. But it turns out, more modern research has shown that that really, that desire to prove the critics wrong, even in a business context with the way people frame their careers, the way people frame whether or not going into negotiations, like salary negotiations, etc., the more that you can frame that narrative, that this is about proving the haters wrong, the more you can actually inspire and motivate somebody. So, that’s the underdog fight.

And the ally fight is, I think, one that a lot of organizations look at because if they’re really a customer-centric organization, this is an easy one for them because the ally fight is not about our fight at all. It’s not about what we’re fighting for but we can point to a customer or some other stakeholder who is engaged in a fight every day, and we exist to help them. We exist to provide them what they need to win that fight.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so I’m picking up what you’re putting down here in terms of these are kind of visceral, emotional, maybe even primal human things here in terms of like, “No more,” for the revolution or, “We’re going to prove them wrong,” like the Rocky story, or, “We are going to help someone who’s in need of our help,” and you sort of tap into that heroic action there. So, yeah, I’m digging this. So, then can you give us some examples? So, we got Alcoa in terms of, “Hey, efficiency in plants and let’s lower costs and stuff,” doesn’t do it as the way safety does. Can you lay out a few more to make it all click into place?

David Burkus
Yeah, a few more from the revolution or from the underdog or the ally?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s take them all.

David Burkus
So, my favorite revolution story, this isn’t actually in the book, so this is new for you, is I have this around my phone, and you can see it but everyone else is just going to have to like Google it. There’s a company based out of Vancouver called Pela Case, they make cellphone cases. The difference between them and every other cellphone case is theirs don’t sit in a landfill for 10,000 years when you get a new phone. If you throw it in a compost pile, it will decompose within 10 years. It’s totally biodegradable if you compost it.

So, their revolution is there’s this whole consumer goods company that finds using petrochemicals and creating plastics totally acceptable because we need to lower cost or whatever. It’s an acceptable norm that they’re using this thing that’s destroying the environment. They refuse to accept that. You ask anyone who works for Pela, “What are you fighting for?” they’ll tell you they’re fighting for a waste-free future. They’re never going to change consumerism. We’re not going to get people to, it’s not like a plastic bag, you can’t reuse it, right? As soon as there’s a new cellphone with a different design, it’s hard to reuse that case. But we can change what’s consumed to itself be waste-free.

And what I think is really telling, they just did this about six months ago, they launched their second product which proves that their focus is on this waste-free revolution idea, because their second product has nothing to do with cellphone cases, which no strategic advisor would ever say. You have this little niche inside of electronics, inside of smartphone case, the next thing you do is make an iPad case or something else. No. Their next thing was sunglasses because that’s the next thing that’s consumable that they could tackle, right? We buy sunglasses in May. We’ve lost them by September. So, if we can trust that they’re biodegradable, somebody finds them, they get put in that landfill, they’ll decompose, they’ll biodegrade eventually, then at least we’re making it waste-free even that. We’re never going to change consumerism but we can change what’s consumed to make it waste-free. That’s my other favorite revolution story.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and that reminds me. You talk about it doesn’t seem like a strategic adjacency from the classic strategy matrices type of thinking, but from that fight, that purpose perspective, that makes total sense. And I’m reminded of Pat Lencioni who we had recently, talked about a company and their purpose, why they were founded, was to provide good work opportunities for people in the community, and so they did roofing, but they’re like, “Hey, man, if people didn’t want roofs, we could shift to landscaping or concrete, that’s fine.”

And so, that might not seem like, I don’t know, the same skillset or whatever, but it fits in from that perspective and it continues to be inspiring even when there’s a shift afoot. So, that’s pretty handy. Well, so then how do we, let’s say, I’m thinking if we zoom into maybe an individual contributor or someone who has a small team, how would you recommend…I’m just going to throw you into the fire here. Let’s just say, “Hey, you know, we’re a marketing team, and what we try to do is get a lot of impressions, and conversions, and brand awareness, and our story out there.” And so, these are the kinds of the things that we measure and so maybe that’s a little bit flat from a fight perspective. How might we go about tapping into the power of the fight?

David Burkus
Yeah. So, the first thing, like if you’re running a small team, for example, the first thing you got to do is figure out which of these fights will most resonate with your existing people. This is actually the big misconception with a lot of the leaders that I work with is that you, as the leader, get to declare and cast the vision. It doesn’t work that way and it never really has. You get to put to words the vision that’s already in people’s hearts and minds but they haven’t really thought about enough. And so, there’s that idea. What’s going to resonate the most with you?

If you’re an individual, again, I think it’s thinking about each of these in turn and figuring out which of these narratives. I know a joke that I’m from Philly, but the truth is, the way that I’m wired, that underdog fight is actually what inspires me, motivates me to get to work, etc. And then you got to choose what stories you need to be exposing yourself to, to keep that up.

So, let’s say you choose the ally fight, for example. You’re that marketing team, you find out what the ally fight, meaning it’s, “Yeah, we’re measuring progress with impressions,” but what the larger company does can be framed inside that ally fight, then you have to figure out, “How can I make sure that I’m seeing evidence of that finished product?” This is, I think, the big problem in a lot of motivational research inside of organizations is that very few people inside the organization actually get to experience what, in psychology, we call task significance. They actually get to see the end-product of their labor and get to see how it helps people.

Adam Grant sort of did a lot of research on this about 10 years ago and reframed it. It’s what he called prosocial motivation, the idea that if you’re working to help people, you’re more motivated. But even task significance, even if it’s one of the other types of fights I think is hugely important. So, I think the biggest thing you can do, once you figure out what resonates with you, is, “How do I make sure that I’m catching that material, that I’m catching success stories from clients? If it’s the ally fight, how do I catch stories about what’s going on in the industry and why we’re doing differently so that I’m seeing that on a regular basis?”

Because most of us in the day-in, day-out, especially if our performance metrics and things like that, or how many impressions we get on random websites, we lose sight of that larger thing. And so, if you’re the only one that can do it for you, do it for you. If you’re running even a small team, that becomes one of your job, it’s how do you curate those stories. It’s not your job to cast the vision. It’s your job to curate those stories.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Well, that reminds me of right now is, hey, we’re speaking on the podcast and all I really see is you, and then I see impressions, downloads, etc. in my platform. So, we had a 10 million downloads celebration in Chicago, which is informal, we had some folks over for dinner. And then I’ll just give a shoutout here, we had a couple from Alabama, and Andrew told me that they started listening to the show on the way back from a funeral, and they were listening to kind of a heavy audiobook, like Tom Clancy, I think terrorists and stuff, it’s like, “You know what, let’s just mix this up and change it to something,” and then heard the show, it was really upbeat and it was useful and inspiring, and it keeps coming back. And so, I thought that was super awesome that, one, they valued it enough to drive from Alabama to Chicago just to have dinner. So, that was super cool.

And to remember that, these numbers, we talk about impressions, translate into human beings who are having an experience that is empowering and worthwhile and, boy, that can resonate hugely if it’s in sort of medical care. But even in smaller matters in terms of, boy, I’m just looking around my desk, a candle that makes for a nice intimate, positive experience for someone who’s having dinner or praying or just setting a mood that’s more pleasant for everyone there. And if you’re marketing candles, I think that does connect and resonate a whole lot more than, hey, 12,400 people saw our Facebook ad about our candles.

David Burkus
Yeah. You know, I totally agree. A lot of organizations, too, will rather than even create impressions, will just label growth, “This is how we’re growing and therefore that.” But growth isn’t a sense of purpose, right? That’s like saying, “Hey, we’re driving 65 miles an hour. Now we’re driving 70. We should all be excited.” Where’s the car going? Tell me more about that. And I think that’s incumbent on if you’re in any leadership role, even if it’s a small team, but it’s also incumbent upon us.

One of the practices I’ve had, admittedly it’s easier to do when you’re an author, but one of the practices I’ve had is to develop what I used to call the win folder. I don’t know what it’s currently called. I should look on my desktop. But it’s basically when people really do send you those thank you emails. I drag them into a folder so that when I need them, I can pull them back. We get those for any of our work.

Even if our work is the impressions and somebody elsewhere in the company said, “Hey, thank you so much for this. I know this project was rough. And look at this success.” When they give you that sort of thank you email or that success email, find a way to keep that because that’s going to be the easiest way to give yourself that reminder is to keep looking back on those sort of things because those are…I mean, we like to think that an organization’s customer are just the people that spend money with them. But your customers are everyone in the organization who benefits from the work that you do. So, finding ways to capture stories from all of them is hugely important.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yes. Well, why don’t you go ahead and tell us about a win that keeps you inspired?

David Burkus
Yeah. So, I have a bunch of them. So, I was a full-time business school professor for seven years, and this started as a non-digital, right? We taught business, and I taught a couple of the sales classes. We taught about thank you notes, and people actually listened to me and started sending them. So, I had a little box that was full of those thank you notes. Now, it’s been electronic. Probably my favorite one in the last six months or so, and this is why it comes to the top of my mind, is my prior book was called Friend of a Friend, which is a book about how networks inside organizations but also if you’re looking for a job,  or you’re in sales and trying to find more clients, networking works as well.

And I got an email from a woman who was totally dissatisfied with her job in PR and moved to New York thinking, “I was a PR major, this is where I’m supposed to go to get into film and television and news and media and all that sort of stuff,” and just hated it, loath it. Walked through Barnes & Noble, found the book, which is great but also a little depressing because I wish people like that would already know I exist, but that’s a whole other dilemma. Found the book, read it, and sort of started to develop a plan of action for moving into that world of fashion. And now that’s the world that she’s in. I have no idea why fashion appealed to her, but if you’re already in New York, it’s not a bad place to transition from media over to because it’s also based there.

And, literally, it was two emails. She sent one, I sent one, and then I think she sent one back. I have those two emails in my computer about her job transition over time. I look at it, especially when I look at the sales numbers for Friend of a Friend and we have an off week. I go back and I pull emails like that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Thank you.
Okay. So, then by contrast you say that it’s not so effective for the leaders to go offsite and go figure out and cast a vision or a mission statement. You say that they’re often terrible. What’s the story here?

David Burkus
Yeah. I mean, I think they all start well-meaning. The process that we use to develop a lot of them is really flawed. So, we go off to an offsite, usually we start with sort of a draft, we start with what we do which is just not necessarily why we do it but just what we do. Like your example of the roofing company, it’s not really why we do it, it just happens to be this is the business that worked best for the people we have. But we start with that description of what we do, and then everybody turns into like college English professors or parliamentarians and starts debating the specific wording, where this comma goes.

The first thing we need to do, because we care about everybody, is we need to make sure that everybody gets represented. And so, we talk about shareholders, and customers, and stakeholders, and the community, and a ton of different people. And then it’s not enough to say what we do, we also have to say how we do it, so we throw in buzzwords like synergy and excellence and innovation and all of that sort of stuff. And the end result is a phrase that ends up, and it’s way longer than the answer to the question, “What are we fighting for?” part of the reason for the question is just cut through the crap of a mission statement and tell me what you’re fighting for. But it also becomes incredibly difficult to even remember.

I have literally been in the room with CEOs of companies, and said, “What is your mission statement?” and seen them like look under the table, at their phone, or they have to look up their investors, or About Us page of their website to find it because we’re all excited when it came out two years ago and we put it on a glass plaque. But if it doesn’t actually inspire people, using one of the three levers that we were talking about, it gets very easily forgotten.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Well, now I’m intrigued. So, some people might say, “Well, you know, that’s really great for any number of those examples, safety with aluminum, candles, writing books.” Have you seen some folks do a bit of connection to a fight in maybe an industry or a set of activities that would seem like the opposite of inspiring? Like, “It’s really hard to find a purpose here but, by golly, these guys did it and it worked for them.”

David Burkus
Yeah, there’s a couple different there. One of the big things we’re seeing is, like you said, I, after I wrote the book, became aware of a company in Cincinnati called Jancoa that is very similar, they’re a janitorial company, but their whole thing is to help people get settled. Usually, folks that are trying to climb the socio-economic ladder, or immigrants, etc., trying to find and get them settled and move on, so there’s that idea that what we actually do isn’t necessarily all that important, so there’s that idea.

But then there’s other things that people do or sometimes it’s supplied to you from the business model that makes what you do not necessarily all that important. Now, if I’m getting it, something that might be behind your question, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody properly leverage a fight and say, “We’re going to do evil,” right? “But we’re going to call it the revolution because the rest of the industry does good.” And this actually is an example that’s coming into my head but it reminds me of we were just talking about mission statements. Sometimes if you’ve got a good fight that you’ve adopted, the mission statement isn’t actually all that important.

So, there’s a little company, you may have never heard of them, they’re called Hershey, the Hershey Company, they make this candy. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. And for a long time, actually, they had the worst mission statement I’ve ever seen. Their mission statement was literally “undisputed marketplace leadership. That’s our mission. In this industry, we aspire to that.” And, thankfully, they changed it over time mostly because people, like me, criticized them for a really long time. But the truth is they didn’t need that mission because their fight has been a part of the company DNA for a lot longer than that. Not a lot of people know this, but if you work at Hershey you definitely do.

Milton Hershey, before he died, set up a school for biological and societal orphans, the Milton Hershey School. It’s literally almost across the street. You basically, if you go to Hershey Pennsylvania, you have the headquarters of Hershey, Hersheypark, which is an amusement park, and then on the other side of Hersheypark is the school right there, all sort of laid out. Almost along the same street. And this isn’t like a corporate social responsibility, “We give some of our profits to this school that Milton started.” When Milton was preparing his estate, when he was getting ready to die, he set up a trust for the school and willed his shares to the trust. So, the trust and the school is still the majority shareholder of the school. It’s not the profits that fund the school. The trust owns the school. Milton Hershey School owns Hershey Foods.

And so, they could get into any industry they want at this point as a company, and there’s a lot of different divisions now, they’re in entertainment, they make a lot more than just chocolate, all of that sort of thing. So, I think they’re probably my favorite example of a company that you could go into any business, and as long as the trust still owns the primary business, you could change your mission statement to whatever you want to because the sense of purpose that people are going to feel is that ally fight, “What are we fighting for? We’re fighting to give those kids an education.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, so we talked about the fight a lot. I’d love it, adjacent to that or complementary to that, do you have any other best practices that make a world of difference when it comes to motivating a team?

David Burkus
Yeah. So, the task significance piece, I think, is a huge one. I think the biggest one that we are probably in dire need of in this world of virtual work that we’re about to face is, I think, we don’t often tell people how best to interact with us. Like, if you think about the majority of research that you read on people inside of teams, how you interact with your coworkers, etc., most of it is like, and I’m guilty of this, most of is content about how to deal with that coworker that disagrees with you, how to deal with this coworker that you can’t get along with, etc.

I think we’d be a lot better if we thought about us as the problem, and we actually presented to our team, “Hey, here are my little idiosyncrasies.” So, like mine is I’m very easily distracted not by little shiny things, but you’ll say something and then I’ll think about the ramifications of it, and you’ll keep talking but I’ll be over here thinking about how that affects some downstream issue. Like, it’s just I’m a systems thinker like that, and you may have to catch me up at times. You may also find me super excited about an idea that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about but it sparked in that meeting.

So, I try and present to people, “These are the little idiosyncrasies of how I work.” I’ve sometimes heard this described as an owner’s manual for yourself. What if you created an owner’s manual for yourself and gave it out to the rest of your team, and said, “Hey, based on people that used to work with me in the past and my own introspection, these are the things you can expect, strengths and weaknesses, so that we can get a little more clear”? I think that goes a whole lot further than just reading a bunch of listicles about, “How do I deal with a coworker that we disagree with?”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And it’s so powerful in terms of that display example of vulnerability invites others to do the same and just can go so far in building trust and camaraderie and all kinds of good things.

David Burkus
Yeah. Oh, no, I totally agree. I had this situation, in the spirit of trust and vulnerability, I’ll actually share this from two days ago. I was in a back-and-forth, more chat-based debate with somebody that’s, we’ll call him a colleague. Like a lot of the work that I do now is we don’t work for the same company but we’re working for the same mission, be it getting the book out or whatever, and we’re arguing back and forth.

We’re saying something, and he said, “Sorry, this was harsh, whatever,” and I said, “No, I wasn’t offended,” and then I immediately hit him back with, “No, actually, that’s a lie. I was but then I reminded myself of this.” And I forget what the this was but it was basically like, “No, in that moment, I really was angry at you for like 45 seconds but I got over it and here’s why.” And I don’t think he had ever had somebody actually say, “Yeah, you made me angry and I got over it because I care more about this project,” right?

So, those little, I think, displays of vulnerability, I think, are hugely important. I do want to caution here around vulnerability and authenticity that it’s also not an excuse to be a jerk. Like, this owner’s manual is not, “Here’s all the things you can expect about how I tell it like it is.” Right, this is not what we’re talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
Sometimes I’m going to scream at you.

David Burkus
“Sometimes I’ll just throw things and walk off.” No, that’s not what we’re talking about. But we are talking about, “Hey, here are the things I know about what it’s like to work with me, and some ways that I found are easiest. Here are my flaws so that we can work around them.” And, hopefully, that inspires a conversation. That works a whole lot better than like, “Let’s all do a book club, or let’s all take a personality test and talk about our differences.” I don’t know that those go all that far but that vulnerability and open sharing definitely does.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think the tools whether it’s Myers-Briggs or StrengthsFinder, any number of things out there, can be a fantastic starting point in terms of like, “Yes, this is highly resonant for me, and so I will share it.” And it’s interesting, you mentioned that that person had never had anybody admit that they were upset or offended. I think that’s a whole other ballgame. But there have been some times where people have said that they did this thing, and they said they’re sorry, and I really was kind of ticked off, and I said, “Oh, I forgive you.” It’s like people are used to hearing that, and they’re like, “Actually, that feels more intense.”

David Burkus
Right. You’re supposed to respond with, “No worries,” or, “Oh, it’s no problem,” or whatever. Like, “No, it really was a problem, but I forgive you because I care about you.” Yeah, and it’s the same deal with like I learned this from my kids and like parenting books, which is, ironically, more relevant. Most of them are more relevant to the workplace than they are to parenting. But one of the other things around emotions is it’s always okay to say your emotion. It’s never okay to blame somebody else.

So, when we work on with our kids, you can never say, “Mom, you’re making me mad.” You can say, “I’m mad.” You can say you’re mad at me as much as you want, but you got to take responsibility for your emotion. And then when you say you’re mad, I’ll help you. That might be because I have to apologize, or that might be I need to help you calm down, whatever. It’s totally cool to label your emotions. But I think we’re in this game where we only got half of that in the corporate world where we were talking about you’re not suppose to use you-statements, use I-statements. We ended up just saying nothing instead, and we just kind of mask those emotions. So, people say, “I’m sorry,” and we say, “No worries,” and that’s a lie on both counts because they’re not sorry and we’re still angry.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s true. Well, hey, man, labelling emotions when we’re working out with our two-year old who’s been doing a lot of screaming, maybe you heard some, and so we got these emotion flashcards which are really helpful in terms of the different happy, disappointed, sad, angry, and that’s been going far. We also say, “Johnny, can you please stop screaming?” And then when he does, we clap, and he likes being applauded.

David Burkus
Oh, I like that. I like that. Mine are not two but I might still steal that. For my coworkers, I mean, not for my…

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

David Burkus
No, I think to bring it all together, I think emotions, again, are a powerful thing in the workplace, and we’re just sort of realizing that. And that’s one of the reasons I think this purpose thing, like you said, it’s almost primal, this idea of a fight because it taps into that emotional level. Purpose is great but if it’s just logically apparent, we see how AB equals C, and C is a good thing in the world. That’s not as motivating as let’s tap into that actual emotion of, “Here’s an injustice I need to fix,” or, “Here’s a critic I need to prove wrong,” etc. So, ironically, we hit from both angles, that power of sort of emotions that work used properly.

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

David Burkus
Yeah, one of my favorite quotes. I mean, I’m trained as an organizational psychologist, even though I always wanted to be a writer. And one of my favorite quotes from that world is W. Edwards Deming, “In God we trust, all others bring data.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

David Burkus
So, I talked about it a bit in the pro social motivation piece around, and some of Adam Grant’s studies. You probably heard these, because I know you and you’re smart, around the doctors and handwashing, very timely study for right now but also the call center workers and spieling the beneficiaries. But I feel like we need to shine more attention on a lot of those studies because one of the things you realize right off the bat is that organizations are pretty terrible at sharing those stories, at sharing those wins and those people who benefit from work. So, it’s a popular study already but it’s not popular enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And for those who have not heard it, now is your chance to popularize it. What should they know about it?

David Burkus
Oh, yes. Sorry, we’re all getting nerdy here. I apologize. I shouldn’t assume. So, Grant, while he was a Ph. D. researcher at the University of Michigan, the first study of this was a call center study looking at…especially if you’re going to a state school. I went to grad school at OU, and the very first thing I got in terms of any communication from the University of Oklahoma was a call from a student trying to raise money for scholarships. Every large school has these call centers where we’re just calling alumni asking for money all the time. And I appreciate him because they’re trying, they’re working, these are kids who were trying to pay their own way through school. Talking to them is a bit like talking to the Cat in the Hat, or the Green Eggs and Ham guy. I forget it. It’s Sam. It’s a bit like talking to Sam-I-Am because it’s like, “No, I don’t want to donate a thousand. No, I don’t want to donate in a box. No, I don’t want to donate $20 worth of fox.”

So, Grant looked at this, I mean, it’s incredibly sort of draining job, and Grant looked at it and thought, “How can we increase that task significance piece, leverage the pro social motivation?” is the term that he would use. And so, he designed this study where, basically, everybody in the call center got put into three groups. One group got an extra 10-minute break one day, another group, during that 10-minute break got to read letters from students saying how much they appreciated the scholarship that they earned because of these call center efforts, and the third group got to meet an actual student. So, they went to the breakroom for the normal break and there is a student who describes how the scholarship helped him, how he wouldn’t be able to afford to go to the University of Michigan without it, etc.

Interestingly enough, there’s no effect in group one or two. Obviously, there’s no group in group one because they just got an extra break. But group three made more phone calls afterwards for a number of weeks, raised more money per phone call. None of these groups received any training on how to be a better salesperson, anything like that. It was just the sheer motivation to, “I can put a face and a person to who I’m helping. I know what I’m fighting for at this point. I know it just feels like I’m on a phone call but I’m fighting to help keep those kids who would otherwise not have it, stay educated,” had a dramatic effect on their motivation with no other interventions.

So, Grant wrote all this up in a series of follow-up studies, too, and kind of labeled this term pro social motivation, which I think, personally, like I said, I think it needs to be more popular, talking about extrinsic motivation at all time, we’re talking about intrinsic. I think we’re going to start talking about pro social motivation like it’s a third lever of that level of motivation, that it goes alongside these other two.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thanks. And how about a favorite book?

David Burkus
One of my favorite books is by an intellectual hero of mine named Roger Martin, it’s called The Opposable Mind, and it’s about how, especially in business, but even in life, his thing was when we look at a lot of different mental models of how a business should operate, for example, it’s low cost or differentiation, or we look at how you interact with customers, either speed of service or quality of service, a lot of times those models that seem opposed are not actually opposed. And it’s the leader or even the individual contributor that can find a way to integrate those two models and leverage the strengths of both, that’s why it’s called The Opposable Mind, that can really thrive and create something new.

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

David Burkus
This is going to sound super, super low-fi, my absolute favorite tool is Facebook Messenger. I don’t know why. I feel like there’s a lot of stuff you can do in iMessages or Slack, but there’s a little bit more you can do inside of Facebook Messenger, but then there’s not all the other disruptions. And what I like about it is I probably could figure out how to do this better on my computer. But what I like about it is I can get at it from just about anywhere. I’m on my tablet, it’s auto-installed there. I’m on my phone, it’s there. I’m on my desktop, it’s sort of a click away. So, I never could get messages to work the way it should. I know that seems weird but that’s probably how I interact with more colleagues and that sort of stuff. And I don’t use Facebook for anything else. I literally only have Messenger on my phone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how about a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome?

David Burkus
So, we talked about kids already so I’ll tell you this one and yours is at the age where you could start this. My wife brought this into our daily kind of shutdown routines. So, apparently, when she was growing up, it was a common question they asked on the dinner table. Our life is such that we have more family breakfast than we have family dinners, so we didn’t ask it there. But before we go to bed, we ask both of our kids, “What was the favorite part of your day?”

And when the oldest was about three, maybe three and a half, he started asking it back to us and wouldn’t let us put him to bed until we gave him an answer too. And so, that little, now we’d call it a gratitude practice and all of this sort of fluffed-up stuff, but I really just like that question, “What was the favorite part of your day?” Let’s spend 30 seconds and go, “What was the favorite part of today? What went absolute best today?” And so, we still do it. Now, they’re eight and six, but we still do it almost every night. We probably don’t remember every night but we still do it pretty much every night.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s a particular nugget you share that you’re known for?

David Burkus
I like to say that I’m trying to make the experience of work suck a little bit less, and I do that in a variety of ways. Pick A Fight is one of them, a lot of the other books that I’ve written, but we also put out a lot of content, just like you said, about how to interact better with coworkers and show motivation. I think work, the big grand overarching theme, or my personal fight, is that work is far more important to think about work-life balance as just the number hours because toxic work will drag itself home, and positive work will make homelife better as well. So, we need to be talking about the experience of work in a way where people leave it more energized than they came.

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

David Burkus
I would point them to the show notes for this episode because you do an awesome job of writing up all those show notes with all of these little lightning-round questions. And if you’re listening to this, you already know where that is. And, let’s be honest, both of our names are a little hard to spell so no one is going to remember that. I’d send you to DavidBurkus.com but you’re already listening to the show. You know where the show notes are. Find me there.

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

David Burkus
Find your fight. Look at the tasks that you do and the story that would resonate the most with you, and find a way to frame it, and remind yourself of that story all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. David, this has been a treat. Thank you and good luck in your fights.

David Burkus
Oh, thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks for fighting for people to have a more awesome job.

Mar 30
0

558: How to Escape Non-Stop Urgency and Become Visionary with Michael Hyatt

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Michael Hyatt: "Success is not about how much you accomplish, it's whether you're accomplishing the right things."

New York Times bestselling author and leadership mentor Michael Hyatt shares what it really takes to become a vision-driven leader.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why anyone can be a vision-driven leader
  2. The 4 key components of a good vision script
  3. How to turn your vision into action

About Michael:

Michael Hyatt is the founder and CEO of Michael Hyatt & Company, a leadership coaching and development firm twice listed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing US companies. A longtime publishing executive, Michael is the former chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson, now part of HarperCollins. He is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of several books, including Your Best Year Ever, Living Forward, and Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World.

Michael is the creator of the Full Focus Planner, which combines quarterly goal-tracking and daily productivity in a proven system for personal and professional achievement. His blog and weekly podcast, Lead to Win, are go-to resources for hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, executives, and aspiring leaders. He has been featured by Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Fast Company and Wall Street Journal. Michael and his wife of 40 years, Gail live just outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

Items Mentioned in the Show

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Michael Hyatt Interview Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt
Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt
Definitely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt
Oh, 50.

Pete Mockaitis
Fifty, all right.

Michael Hyatt
Yep.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt
Thanks, Pete. Appreciate it.

Mar 19
0

555: Why We Fail to Empower, Inspire, and Engage: Unmasking the The Advice Trap with Michael Bungay Stanier

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Michael Bungay Stanier explains why we need to stop giving advice and start asking questions instead.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Three reasons why advice is overrated
  2. A step-by-step process for breaking your advice-giving habit
  3. How to ask more insightful questions

About Michael:

Michael Bungay Stanier is an author and the founder of Box of Crayons, a company best known for teaching 10-minute coaching so that busy managers can build stronger teams and get better results. He was named the first Canadian Coach of the Year. He left Australia 25 years ago to be a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Michael has been featured in several publications such as Business Insider, Forbes, The Globe & Mail, Fast Company, and The Huffington Post. He has held senior positions in the corporate, consultancy, and agency worlds. He has lived and worked in Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada. He currently lives in Toronto.

Items Mentioned in the Show

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Michael Bungay Stanier Interview Transcript

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
I know. Thank you for having me back, Pete. It’s really nice to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, I was having a lot of fun during chats because you’re not afraid, again, putting the pressure and expectation on, not afraid to get a little silly and neither am I.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I strive to be hilarious yet useful at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s a winning combo in my book. So, we’re going to talk about advice. And you’ve got a fun turn of a phrase, the advice monster. Can you tell us what is that? And can you maybe give us a wild example, like if you’ve got one or two, of the advice monster in action?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Oh, the examples are a legion. People are going to know this right away. So, when I wrote the last book, The Coaching Habit, as a throwaway line, I’m like, “You’ve got to learn how to tame your advice monster.” And people have loved that idea, they’re like, “Oh, I know what an advice monster is. I know my advice monster. I have it.” And, in fact, you all do. As soon as somebody starts talking, and even though they’re telling you about a situation you don’t really understand, involving people you haven’t properly met, with a context you don’t know at all, and technical specifications that you don’t get, after about 10 seconds in your brain, you’re like, “Oh, I’ve got some ideas here. Step aside, I’ve got something to say to you.” And that’s our advice monster. We’ve had to train for years, we spend our lifetime nurturing, feeding this insatiable part of ourselves.

And in this new book, The Advice Trap, I’m like, “You know what, the barrier to staying curious turns out not that we don’t know what a good question is, not that we don’t know the value of staying curious and being more coach-like. The barrier to actually making this behavior change is our advice monster. We’ve got to learn to tame our advice monster.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you’ve got examples are legion. But could you give us one or two that made you go, “Wow, that is not what to do textbook”?

Michael Bungay Stanier
It’s like, do you want me to just talk about the ones that have happened over the last three hours for me or should I go back to the rest of my life? So, let’s talk about my marriage.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, this is getting good.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I have been happily married for almost 30 years. I met Marcella, my wife, when we were studying at Oxford together. It was one of the two great outcomes for me being a Rhode Scholar. But there’s nothing like a spouse just to drive you nuts. You know, somebody once said, “Your soulmate is the person who pushes all your buttons.” And Marcella does that for me. She has all the right things as well but she also has a way of me going, “Right. If I’m going to give anybody advice, it’s going to be her.”

So, she starts telling me something that she’s up against, and I’m like, “Okay, just stop talking. Just let me tell you what to do.” And if any of your listeners are married, or in a longer-term relationship, or you’ve been in a relationship, or maybe you have kids, or maybe you have parents, you will recognize that need to kind of go, “Okay, with this person I’m close to, or this person that I love, this person I actually like and I want to support, part of what I default to is this, ‘Let me rush in and try and fix it and solve it for you.’”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, that sort of the impulse, the inclination there, “Let me fix this and solve this for you.” And so, I can see that, hey, that’s not sort of fun on the receiving end frequently. But could you make the fuller case for how that’s really problematic and just what can be at stake if we let our advice monster roam wild?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, advice is overrated for three reasons. The first thing to say, Pete, is, look, don’t think that I’m saying never give advice because that’s obviously ridiculous. I mean, the podcast is actually this moment of advice-giving so it’d be ridiculous to say never give advice. The problem isn’t with advice, the problem is when giving advice becomes your default response, and we have this ingrained way of behavior. And it turns out that advice kind of goes bad in three ways.

So, here are the three ways. Number one, you’re often trying to solve the wrong problem. We get seduced into thinking there’s all the time that we believe that the first challenge that shows up is the real challenge. It almost never is. It’s the best guess, it’s the stab in the dark, it’s an early hypothesis. But almost never is the first challenge the real challenge.

But let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that actually you are working on the real problem, the real issue that needs to be fixed. Here’s the second issue with advice, your advice is not nearly as good as you think it is. Now, there’s all these cognitive biases that are wiring us to make us believe that we’re smarter, wiser, more able, more insightful than we actually are, and so often our advice is just our projection around, “This is what I did once or what I thought of once. This should work for you as well.” So, there’s your second issue which is not only is often solving the wrong problem but, secondly, even if you’re solving the right problem, the advice you’re offering up isn’t nearly as good as you think it is.

But let’s just say, for the sake of argument, the knowledge you have the right challenge at hand but you have this awesome piece of advice, I mean, it’s brilliant, it’s gold dust, it’s pearls of wisdom, you’re like, “This is amazing.” The third challenge with advice is, “Is this the right form of leadership? Is this the right way of showing up and supporting the person you’re in conversation with right now?” Because there’s a deep insight to say that the idea, the solution, the advice that a person gives themselves is a much more powerful intervention than the advice that you give them.

Even if their idea isn’t quite as good as your idea, and our cognitive biases will have us believe that that’s almost always the case, but there’s something really powerful as a leader, and by a leader it doesn’t mean that you’re actually literally managing a team or if you just interact with other human beings, if you show up with other people and you help people figure out their own stuff. What you’re doing is you’re empowering them to get smarter, to own the idea, to get the wisdom, rather than having it coming down from you because, honestly, when you have somebody giving you an idea, your natural reaction is just to push back against the idea even if it’s well-meant, as it so often is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s the advice monster and what is problematic about just letting it roam. So, your book is called The Advice Trap. Is it fair to say the trap is just that you have a temptation to give advice and then you fall into it and that’s a bad thing? Okay.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, basically, again, advice, fine. The default response to going, “Look, my job here is to give advice.” That’s the advice trap, into seducing to thinking that that’s your role. In fact, it goes a little deeper than that. So, the double-click on this whole advice monster thing, it turns out the advice monster has three different personas, and each one of it kind of feeds a deeper need for us, which makes it hard for us to step into this way of behaving which is around the power of being more curious.

So, I’ll take you through the three advice monster personas because people like this. And for the folks listening in, listen up because you’ll hear the advice monster persona that resonates most for you. So, number one is tell-it, and tell-it has convinced you that the way you add value, in fact, the only way you add value is to have the answers. In fact, you need to have all the answers. In fact, you probably need to have all the answers to all the problems all the time. And if you don’t have all the answers, you fail. So, that’s the first one, that sort of sense of that weight, that obligation of, “I’ve got to know everything. I’ve got to always be providing answers or else I’m not adding value.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s a persona, “My persona is tell-it and I’m telling it.” Okay.

Michael Bungay Stanier
You’ve got it. Number two, save-it. So, save-it, a little more subtle than tell-it which is a noisy one. Save-it, you put a time around you, “Pete, your job is to keep everybody safe at all times. You can’t let anybody stumble, you can’t let them struggle, you can’t let them fail, you can’t make them sweat. Your job is to keep everybody protected, keep everybody safe, keep everybody comfortable. If they struggle, if they stumble, if they fail at all, you fail.” So, that’s that second piece, that kind of that weight of going, “I’ve got to make sure everybody is okay all the time.”

And then the third advice monster, which is the slipperiest, the sneakiest of the three, is control-it. So, control-it has convinced you that your job, the only way you win, is to maintain control, keep control at all times. Don’t give up control. Don’t let others have control because if that happens, you fail. You’ll definitely fail. So, you got those three different advice monsters: the tell-it, the save-it, and the control-it. And each one of them speaks to a deeper need that we hold onto that keeps us stuck in the advice-giving mode because we’re like, “You know what, I feel obliged to have the answer. I feel obliged to save the person. I feel obliged to control the situation.” And when you do that, you don’t let curiosity really blossom.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. And so, you call these personas because…well, I guess, I think of them as verbs, “So, I want to tell it, I want to save it, I want to control it.” So, it’s a persona in so far as there’s kind of like a personality or a character associated with the kind of person who feels the need to tell it, to save it, to control it?

Michael Bungay Stanier
That’s a really good question. On the website TheAdviceTrap.com, we’ve actually got a questionnaire which is like 20 questions or so, five minutes to do, and you can follow it through and you’ll actually end up with the advice monster that kind of is your go-to, your default, the one that you’re kind of most familiar with. When I was writing the book, I’m like, “Do we have three advice monsters, and each of them is a different advice monster? Or is it one advice monster but kind of shows up in different ways with different traits depending on who you are and depending on the situation?” In the end, I was like, “No, I think it’s better as a persona. We all have the advice monster. How it shows up, the clothes it wears, the behavior it has, is different for different people.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then let’s see, we’ve got three personas but we’ve all got an advice monster. So, I imagine you probably have some universal solutions and some particular prescriptions, given which persona you fall into. So, yeah, what do we do? So, someone is telling us something, we’ve got that urge, the impulse, to pour forth the advice, so what’s the appropriate response?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, you can guess that the easy solution here is to just stay curious a little bit longer because curiosity is the light that holds back the advice monster. I mean, questions are the kindling of curiosity. So, the easy, fast answer for people is go, “Look, just ask them good questions. Stay curious a little bit longer.” But, Pete, this is actually what took me to writing The Advice Trap because the first book, the one we talked about when we did the previous interview is called The Coaching Habit. Well, The Coaching Habit is like, “Here we go, I’m trying to unweird coaching for you. I’m trying to make curiosity feel like a useful everyday skill. Seven good questions can take you a long way down the path.”

And we’ve had a lot of people go, “These questions are fantastic. I’ve started using them with my spouse, with my kids, with the people I work with, with the team that I lead, and things are getting better.” And I’m like, “I love that.”

There’s also a lot of people out there who go, “You know, Michael, I like your questions, I like your book, I like the podcast you did with Pete, it’s all great, and I’m finding it really hard to change my behavior. I’m finding it really hard to shift from being advice-driven to being curiosity-led.” And so, there’s kind of a deeper piece of work that’s required.

In the book, this is kind of the opening part of the book, I talk about this difference between easy change and hard change. We are all good at easy change, that’s why it’s called easy change. And the metaphor I’d give you is it’s a little bit like downloading an app on your phone, it’s adding a little bit of knowledge to the current version of you. So, easy change, anytime you get a new phone, or walk into a new hotel room, like I’m in at the moment, or show up in a new place, you’re like, “Okay, I’ve just got to figure this stuff out.” And you do. You listen to a podcast, you watch a video, you read a book, you go and talk to a teenager who explains it to you, and you’re like, “Okay, I kind of get it.”

Pete Mockaitis
I go to Amazon.com and buy a little something. Well, this problem’s solved for $15. Thank you. All right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. So, you kind of figure it out and you start off and you’re a little bit incompetent when you do it the first time, but you quickly get competent, and then you quickly get to a point where you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve got it. I’m fine with it.” So, that’s easy change. No problem with that.

Hard change, obviously, is trickier, harder, slipperier, and we all know this because we’ve all tried to take on something where you’re like, “This should be relatively straightforward,” and for some reason it’s really difficult. For some reason, it just seems to be elusive for you. You keep trying, you keep reading more books, you listen to more podcasts, you watch more videos, you buy some more stuff from Amazon, and it just isn’t enough to help you crack this dilemma, this piece around, “I’m trying to figure out how to do this.”

If you’ve ever had a New Year’s resolution where you’re like, “Okay, I’ve made this resolution for the last seven years, but I’m going to make it again this year because, damn it, I’m actually going to get it sorted out this time around.” Well, this is what hard change is. And if easy change is downloading the app on your phone, hard change is when you realize that an app won’t do it. You need a new operating system. The other way of talking about this, Pete, is like if easy change is about tweaking current you, present you, hard change is a commitment to future you. It’s like, “You know what, to do this, I need to become a bigger, different, better version of myself. So, what needs to change so that I can actually step into that way of doing it?”

And that’s a very long answer around your question around, “Okay, we notice your advice monster, what do you do about that?” Well, for some of us, it’s easy change, which is like just ask some questions, and some of us it’s hard change, which is like, “Oh, you’ve got to learn to tame your advice monster.” And that can be tricky, that can be difficult, and that’s absolutely worth the battle because you get to show up in a whole different way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, it’s going to take some hard change, and it’s not a matter of downloading the app. So, what is it a matter of doing?

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, step number one is going, “Are you up for this? Are you actually committed for actually going to do this?” Because some people are like, “Yeah, in theory, I kind of wouldn’t mind being a bit more curious, but in practice, I can’t be bothered.” So, the first step is to go, “You know what, it’s really worth it. It’s now irritating me how much I give advice. It’s irritating the people I work with how much I give advice. I want to do this change.”

Step number two is to actually say to yourself, “Look, I’ve got to start recognizing my advice monster because until I start seeing it, until I start knowing how it shows up, then it’s really hard to tame something that you’re not quite sure where and how it exists in the world.” So, there’s a way for you to actually take the time and going, “So, when does my advice monster really get loose where they go crazy? What’s the situation and with whom is the person?”

So, it might be when I have my weekly check-in with Pete, “Oh, that man drives me crazy. He starts talking and my advice monster is absolutely loose.” So, the next step is for you to identify when your advice monster is on the loose, so you’re not trying to do a generic, “I’m just trying to be more curious.” You’re like, “No, this is the moment where I’m trying to change my behavior.” And, Pete, this comes from our last conversation, actually, which this ties in with what it takes to build a new habit, which is like be specific, be singular, be focused, don’t be generic but actually pick a moment, pick a new behavior, pick a context, so that you can actually change your behavior in this way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, step number one, declare the battle is on. Step number two, identify the moment where your advice monster shows up. Step number three, it gets a little more personal. It’s a little deeper dive. And it’s to understand the prizes and the punishments of your current behavior. This is the thing. You give advice because you get something from it. It’s actually a win for you. So, there’s a way of actually identifying how you’re showing up, “What do I get out of that?” And it’s like, “You know what, I feel smart. I feel in control. I get them out of my office faster. I feel like I’m adding value to the conversation. I feel like I’m in control of what’s going on.” It speaks to some of those three different types of advice monsters that we talked about before.

Pete Mockaitis
Or there’s like this pressure, I feel this in my brain sometimes. It’s like if I don’t somehow capture what’s in my head, either by saying it out loud, or writing it down, or sticking it somewhere, then it’s just going to have a piece of me, and that’s uncomfortable, and it’s like I need the resolution and breadth and peace associated with knowing that it’s been captured, otherwise it might disappear forever, and it’s a treasure trove that I can’t allow to just run away, Michael.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. I love that. That’s pretty powerful insight, Pete. That sense of, “Oh, no, no. What I’ve got is essential and it’s vital, and it’s like, honestly, it’s genius, so I can’t not offer that up to the world, that would be irresponsible.” So, it’s really helpful to see that. And, actually, I love how you talked about that because you can see, in you saying it, there’s an honesty and a kind of vulnerability and a self-awareness around, “I can see how this is a little bit ego-driven, but it’s also true. It’s kind of what’s there for me.”

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s just so fun, it’s like, “Ooh, this is a really interesting idea. It’d be fun to explore it and maybe we’re going to do that right now with the person since they brought it up or maybe we’ll do it later. It’s a little uncomfortable for me to imagine. Well, maybe we’ll just never get to explore, and that fun thought is just going to run away because I put all my attention back towards listening and being curious.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
And miss that moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, understanding the benefits you get from it sets you up for the next piece, which is, “What’s the price that you and others pay for your need to share this little piece of genius?” And all parts of equation kind of can suffer as part of this. You can pay the price of being the person who feels that they have to always have the answer, or they always have to have the little genius idea, or they’ve become the bottleneck to the conversation, or they disempower the other people because they’re like, “You know what, is there a point in coming to Pete with ideas because he’s always got his own little genius idea that he always has to share with us and he’s always telling, well, that’s kind of the thing we should be doing?” So, there’s a way that both you and the other person can pay a price around that.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
And having done that, you’re actually at a bit of a crossroads, which is to go, “You know what, do the prizes outweigh the punishments, or is it vice versa?” And until you get to a point where you’re like, “The punishment of my advice monster, the price I pay and the price other people pay, are now sufficiently significant enough that they outweigh the more short-term,” you know, in the book we call them winds not wins, that short term, “Oh, I get to be genius, I get to be smart, I get to have the answers.” When you see the punishment outweigh the prizes, you’re like, “Okay, I’m up for the change here because the current equation isn’t working as well as it used to.”

Then you go a little deeper. And I will say, Pete, at TheAdviceTrap.com, there’s actually a way, a little video of me facilitating people through this process. So, if people are going, “Yeah, I’m kind of following this but I would like it a bit more.” There’s a video and there’s a worksheet and stuff that people can grab at TheAdviceTrap.com.

We get to that next level down where you’re like, okay, so if what you’ve done with prizes and punishments is kind of figure out the equation for present you, let’s go down to future you and kind of go, “All right, two things to look at here. If you were to tame your advice monster, if you were to stay curious a bit longer, what would you be worried about? What would make you anxious about that?” Because you’ve got to acknowledge which is like, and you’ve got to talk about it, which is like, “I don’t feel like I’m adding value. My little bits of genius might never see the light of day and a little bit of me dies if I don’t get to be a genius every time I show up. That other person might struggle. I might lose control of the conversation. I might not get to be the smart person in the room.”

You get to see all of those kinds of anxieties that you have but then you weigh that against them. But what would future you gain from this new way of behaving? What would you find? It’s like, “Oh, I get to allow other people to be brilliant. I get other people to share their genius with me. And I’m a catalyst and a space for them to be brilliant rather than me to be brilliant. I get to not be a bottleneck. I get to have other people be more confident and more competent and more self-sufficient and more autonomous so I, honestly, I work less hard because they’re all doing their own stuff without having to come to me for their blessing or the idea or whatever it might be.”

And then when you kind of weigh that up, you’re like going, “Okay, I see the choice now.” And it’s actually only when you do that, people work, Peter, that you kind of go, “Right. Now, this is setting me up for a place where I can go. It’s worth me asking a question because I’ve actually kind of gone deeper into the kind of the complexity of the behavior change that’s required.” And you’re going, “You know what, now is the time for me to invest in this future-you state so that I can have more impact as a human being in the life that I live.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I really like that process, that framework, in terms of I think you can use that anytime you think about a behavior change or a should, “Oh, I should work out more,” or, “I should eat better.” It’s like, “Well, maybe, but I think what’s probably most appropriate is rather than just sort of have a kneejerk reaction if you’re guilty for doing or not doing all the things, to really zero in on, all right, a true sense of the cost and benefit and opportunity that is awaiting you if you embark upon that kind of a change.” And so, I think that’s super handy that a lot of things you think maybe that you should do, you can realize, “Hey, you know what, actually not worth it. Not worth the cost so I can just sort of let go of that peacefully and move onto something else.”

At the same time, let’s say maybe you do get that perfect clarity and conviction that, “Yes, this is the thing. It needs to happen. I can absolutely see it’s worth doing. The benefits massively justify that investment.” And, nonetheless, much like a diet exercise, temptations arise. What do you recommend for in the moment, you’re committed and yet, ooh, you’re feeling it? What do you do there?

Michael Bungay Stanier
I would go back to some of the stuff I talked about in the opening chapter of The Coaching Habit book. I’m like, “You know what, pick a person, pick a moment, pick a question. Don’t go, ‘Look, I’m just trying to be more coach-like. I’m committed to being more curious in every aspect of my life.’” All that does is set you up for failure.

What I’m saying instead is like, you know what, pick a question and go, “I’m going to try and ask that a few more times per day than I currently do.” And if you’re going to pick one of the seven questions I talked about in The Coaching Habit book, I might go for number two, which is the shortest and the most powerful of the seven questions, which is “And what else?” Like, “What else?” So, the acronym of that is AWE, so it’s literally an awesome question which I love.

And what I found is that what that question has is it kind of built within it is the insight that the person’s first answer is never their only answer and it’s rarely their best answer. But what happens in this is our advice monsters, you ask a question, somebody comes up with an idea, and you’re like, “Nailed it. We’ve got something. Let’s go with it. Let’s run with it. Let’s implement it. Let’s make it actionable,” or whatever it might be.

And what I would encourage people to go is like, “You know what, their first answer is almost never their only answer.” So, ask “And what else?” because it will mean that you get more, you squeeze more out of the lemon of any question that you’ve asked them, and you’ll get better and more diverse answers from the person that you’re working with. So, I think there’s my generic piece of advice on how not to give advice, which is like, “Hey, if you only got one question, make it ‘And what else?’” Because you know what, you can slip that into almost any kind conversation. People won’t even notice.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I think that I’ve been using a lot of the questions that’s come up with a few guests, it’s comparable although you’ve got a knack, Michael, for identifying the nuances between how one question is, in fact, quite different from another given the words and the triggers that it does for people, so let me put you on the spot with this. I’ve been loving “Tell me more about that.” Let’s compare or contrast. Are those interchangeable or do those have some nuances that you’d like to discuss?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, “Tell me more about that” has some inherent landmines built into it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I’ll tell you why. So, if I go, “All right, Pete, what’s on your mind?” And you give me something, I go, “Great.”

Pete Mockaitis
This coffee, I’ve been so engaged, I have barely sipped it.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I know about that. And you go, “Okay, here, Michael, here’s a thing that’s on my mind.” And I go, “Oh, interesting. Tell me more about that.” Now, this question feels like it’s in service of me rather than you because I’m going, “I want to find out more about what’s going on secretly because the more I know about that situation, probably the better advice I can give you when it comes to actually my time to give you advice.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael Bungay Stanier
And one of the nuances about asking questions, and this is kind of a real step towards mastery, is to go, “In whose service is this question? Is this more for me or is it more for them?” Because if I go, “Well, tell me more about that,” you’re like, “Well, I already know a bunch about it, but sure, now I’m helping you out by telling you more.”

Pete Mockaitis
I see.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Whereas, if I go, “All right, that’s interesting. I hear what’s on your mind. Tell me what’s the real challenge here for you.” Now this question is in service of you. It’s for you to go, “Well, what is the hard thing here? What is the challenge? Where am I struggling with this?” And then I go, “What else is a challenge here for you?” You’re like, “Oh, yeah, what else?” And as you go deeper, then I go, “Great. So, Pete, of all of that stuff, what’s the real challenge here for you?” Now you’re working and you’re figuring stuff out, because the stance I hold is, look, if I’m in a conversation with you or I’m asking you questions, I don’t need to know a whole lot about what’s going on.

I mean, when we finish this conversation, I’m in Anaheim at the moment to speak at a big tech conference for a big tech company, and I’m going to coach a very senior leader on stage in front of about, I think it’s 1500 people. Now, what do I know about the impossible job of being an executive vice president of one the top three tech companies in the world? The answer is I know nothing. I know absolutely nothing. So, if I sit down with this person, and I go, “What’s on your mind?” and they tell me, and I go, “Well, tell me more about that.” Now, they’re like, “Okay. Well, you don’t know anything about this anyway, and I’m not sure that this covered under our NDA, but I’ll give you some topline stuff.” And I’m like, “Okay, tell me more about that. What else can you tell me about that?”

And now he’s explaining to me what the situation is so I can try and figure out a solution. But if I go, “Yeah, okay, I don’t even know what that means. But what’s the real challenge here for you around this?” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, it’s this.” I’m like, “Great. What else is a challenge here for you around this?” And they’re like, “Amazing.” It’s them, they’re in the spotlight, I’m in service to them. And “Tell me more about that” is often in service to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a powerful distinction there in terms of who’s the question in service to. And, also, when we’re reviewing coaching contexts in terms of, hey, on stage and such, that’s really handy. I think in previous contexts, “Tell me more about that” was handy in terms of someone said something to you that made you kind of angry, like they’re volunteering some feedback or they’re about to let you know just how you’ve screwed up. “Tell me more about that” is great for disarming versus “And what else?” It’s sort of like, “Oh, really? You’re going to dismiss what I’ve just said?” So, that’s perfect in terms of the different contexts, making one versus the other a bullseye.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, in the context of somebody said something, feedback, or aggravating, or something like that, the power of “Tell me more about that” is it’s a self-management tool to stop you leaping…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that too, yeah.

Michael Bungay Stanier
You know, strangling, you’re like, “You’re triggering me here. I want to kill you.” Here’s a nuance then in that context, which is like, “Tell me more about that” is a pretty broad question. There’s a way that you might direct that conversation to become more useful for you. And here’s how it could look like. You could say, “What’s the data for this?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Because when people give you feedback, it tends to be a mix of a little bit of fact and a whole bunch of judgment, and a whole bunch of unspoken feeling, and an unspoken want or need, and there’s a way that “Tell me more about that” you may get a bit more of a repeat of what you’ve already heard, which is the same kind of mess of all of that stuff. But you could take it in different ways, you go, “Okay, I hear there’s something going on here. Tell me what the data is. Tell me what the facts are around this because I’m curious to know what’s making you think that.”

You could say, “I hear what’s going on. Just so I’m clear, what do you want here? What do you want from me? What do you want from this conversation? What do you want from this outcome?” Because sometimes actually everything they’ve told you is entirely separate from what they’re really trying to get out of this, and knowing what they want is a much more specific and useful question to actually figure out.

And then the third question that you could ask around that, you could ask, I mean, I love putting feelings and judgments together. In my head, I’ve got this model which is like every conversation has four parts to it: data, feelings, judgments, and the wants and the needs. And the context of like a tough conversation, I’m like, I’m trying to get clear on what falls into what bucket.  So, it’s like I’m just trying to find the right articulation of the question, Pete. It’s like, “If that’s the fact, if that’s the data, what are your assumptions based on that? What do you assume to be true about me, about you, about this situation at hand?”

And what you’re doing is you’re effectively asking the same question you’re asking, which is “Tell me more about that” but you’re being a little more direct, it’s like, “I want to find out about the data. I want to find out what you want. I want to find out what you assume to be true.” And all of those questions can be helpful but one in particular might particularly serve you in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great. And so then, maybe could you give us an example of disaggregating those four components there in terms of let’s just say I’m saying…? Okay, I just looked at your hotel room, so I’ll just say, “You go up to the front desk and you tell them that your bed is unacceptable.” Can you disaggregate that for us?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah. And if they go, “I can hear you’re frustrated there, sir. What is it that you want?” “You know what, I just need a bed, a pillow.” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s easy. We’ll just send over there a pillow.” Or I’m like, “I’ve got a colony of bedbugs.” And they’re like, “Oh, okay. Well, we’ll move you to a different room.” Or, it’s a hammock and I don’t sleep in hammocks, “I thought I was getting a king-sized bed and you put me in the nautical-themed room, and there’s like pictures of pirates on the wall, and it smells of brine, and I don’t like hammocks.” So, that curiosity can help.

Now, it might be for them, they’re like, “Tell us more. What seems to be the issue, sir?” But you’re like, the bigger insight in all of this is that piece around curiosity and the power of it, because “Tell me more about that” is an invitation to stay curious. And that’s the big win around that.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, I’m thinking like a more complex situation because with the hotel and the hotel bed, it’s a transactional relationship, like, “We’re just talking about a bed and then we’re never going to talk to each other again.” If it’s somebody I have a relationship, like it’s my wife, and I go, “Well, I’m just curious. What makes you think that? What’s the data behind what you’ve just said?” And she goes, “Well, I just saw the rubbish bins, the trash cans, out on the pavement, and they were this and they were that.” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, actually those aren’t our trash cans. Our trash cans are on the back. I brought them in.” And she’s like, “Oh, all right. My mistake.” And that data diffuses the whole situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael Bungay Stanier
But if I’m like, “Tell me more about that,” she’s like, “I never liked you. You’ve never been good at household chores. You’ve been a burden to the family for 30 years,” and I’m like, “Okay, this has gone really dark really quickly.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oops.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, in that trash can example, that’s actually really handy because if we look at those four components, so the data are “I witnessed some trash cans that were askew.” Their feelings are “That’s gross and I hate looking at it and it’s very unpleasant.” The judgment is “You’re unresponsive in doing your chores, Michael, and my need is for you to fix that.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
It actually goes deeper than that, which is that, “You’re bad at your chores. You’re a roundabout lazy man. You’re a parasite. You’re sucking me dry. You never carry your weight in this relationship. You don’t love me.” That stuff can kind of escalate pretty quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so then, Michael, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things here?

Michael Bungay Stanier
No, I think that’s it. There’s a bunch of good resources at TheAdviceTrap.com, there’s a questionnaire around which of the three advice monsters is the one that you’re most familiar with, there’s that process around going into hard change versus easy change. All that resources that people can make the most of it they’d like.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
I have so many good quotes. I will point to that I’m sitting with at the moment is from Muhammad Ali, and somebody once said this is the shortest poem ever written. And it is, “Me, we.” And I love the profundity of that which is to say we are all connected. There’s no me without the context of us. And what you do here for you is in service to us, and remember that connection. So, me, we. Muhammad Ali.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share with us a favorite book?

Michael Bungay Stanier
The book that I keep coming to because it’s an amazing combination of science and just the kind of celebration of the miracle of this planet, being a planet that we can live on, is Bill Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything. It’s hilarious. That man can write a metaphor better than anybody else I know. And, really, it just opens up the kind of the unlikelihood of being this life on this planet at this time where you and I are able to do a podcast together. It’s like spectacularly unlikely that this could ever happen, and yet here we are.

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

 

Michael Bungay Stanier
The thing that I am enjoying most is a pen given to me by the people that are helping me publish the book, it’s by a company called Baronfig, which are a New York stationary cover. And it just is a beautiful pen.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
TheAdviceTrap.com is a place to find out about the book. But if you’re going to go to a singular place, basically, a newish website called MBS.works, and that’s kind of a collection of my works, all the stuff that I’m working on, so you can access the books I’ve written. So, MBS.works is a good place to go.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, add a question, just one question per day to your conversation. Make it “And what else?” Make it any other question but I would love you to take one small step in the direction of curiosity.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, this has been fun. I wish you lots of luck with The Advice Trap and all your adventures.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Pete, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for the great conversation. I appreciate we kind of went deep and interesting, and you threw yourself in the mix there as well, so thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you. It’s my pleasure.

Mar 09
0

552: The Foundational Principle that Separates Good Leaders from Bad Ones with Pat Lencioni

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Patrick Lencioni explores why so many leaders fall short–and how to resolve it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The mentality that separates great leaders from the rest
  2. Why you shouldn’t be afraid of micromanaging
  3. How leaders can have more joyful difficult conversations

About Patrick:

Pat is the founder of The Table Group and the author of 11 books which have sold over 5 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. The Wall Street Journal called him “one of the most in demand speakers in America.” He has addressed millions of people at conferences and events around the world over the past 15 years. Pat has written for or been featured in numerous publications including Harvard Business Review, Inc., Fortune, Fast Company, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek.

As CEO, Pat spends his time writing books and articles related to leadership and organizational health, speaking to audiences interested in those topics and consulting to CEOs and their teams.

Prior to founding The Table Group, Pat worked at Bain & Company, Oracle Corporation and Sybase. Pat lives in the Bay Area with his wife and four boys.

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Patrick Lencioni Interview Transcript

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

Patrick Lencioni
It’s great to be with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’ve been so excited to chat with you here, and I’ve read several of your books over many years, so I think we’re going to have a good one. I’d love to start by hearing, so you spent a lot of years working with leaders and teams. If there’s a particularly surprising, counterintuitive, fascinating discovery you’ve made across your career in terms of what makes teams successful or unsuccessful, what is that thing?

Patrick Lencioni
Wow, there’s a lot there.

Pete Mockaitis
Just breaking the ice.

Patrick Lencioni
I think the thing I would say is it’s messier than people realize, and the very best teams, the very best organizations, the very best marriages, the very best things in the world are far messier than people like to think they are, and that you have to kind of accept that and be good with that, and that’s what makes it interesting. It’s never neat and tidy and perfect. So, I would say that might be one of the meta things I’ve learned.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, and I think that kind of goes right into what I was going to ask about next. So, within that, what do you think is the core fundamental root of leaders when they fail to achieve organizational health? What’s behind that?

Patrick Lencioni
Well, there’s a lot of different things, but, as an individual, I would say a lack of humility and vulnerability is probably the single greatest thing. It really takes a leader to be vulnerable enough to admit what they’re not good at and what they don’t know, and humble enough to realize they’re not more important than the people they lead, and that it’s good to be vulnerable and transparent. And so many leaders, if they’re either insecure or self-protective, they really limit their ability to be successful and the organization’s as well. So, I would say it’s humility and vulnerability is at the core.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, yeah, that really tees up and something I’ve been so curious about. The humility, the vulnerability, when you open the book The Advantage, with a really great story in which, I can just visualize the scene, you’re sitting with the CEO and watching the different programs that their workers have initiated across the year.

Patrick Lencioni
This is about Southwest Airlines.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So, it’s Southwest Airlines, there we go.

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you’re hearing some really cool story after really cool story, there’s clearly a lot of good organizational health and vibes going on there, and you asked the CEO, “Hey, so how come your competitors aren’t doing this?” And he says, “Honestly, I think they believe it’s beneath them.” And those words just really stuck with me. And so, what are some examples of things that people don’t do that they think maybe are beneath them that, really, we should start doing?

Patrick Lencioni
That’s a great question. In fact, my last book, my most recent book, which is just out now, is called The Motive. And what it talks about is if you’re not a humble leader, if you’re not doing it for service and for responsibility, but for yourself, you’re probably not going to do many of these things. And the things that leaders who are motivated by the wrong things, they don’t like to repeat themselves. That sounds crazy but the leader at Southwest Airlines, I’ve seen him over the course of almost 20 years in various settings, and he has no problem standing up and reiterating the same messages to his people again and again and again, because he realizes it’s not about looking cool and it’s not about entertaining him. It’s about helping his people stay on topic and reinforcing what matters.

And so, here is probably one of the most successful CEOs in the last 50 years, a guy who, by the way, if he walked into your office right now, you wouldn’t knew who he was, and you might not even know his name if I asked you right now, and yet he’s ran the most successful company in America over the last, you know, he’s been doing this for 25 years. It’s not about him, he constantly repeats himself. He is the CRO of Southwest Airlines, which I call the Chief Reminding Officer, and he’s good with that. So, that’s one of the things that people don’t do, and that’s not beneath him. It’s not beneath him to get up and constantly tell the stories and reinforce the messages in different ways.

One of the other things that’s not beneath him is to actually manage his people. It sounds crazy but a lot of CEOs are like, “You know, I’ve been doing this for a long time, I shouldn’t have to manage people anymore. So, I’m going to hire people, I’m going to trust them to do their jobs, and I’m going to just go focus on the stuff I want to do.” That’s not what a great leader does. A great leader realizes, “Whether I’m running a billion-dollar company and I’m a senior executive, or whether I’m running a startup and I have 12 people sitting around me, I have to manage my people. It might sound tedious but I have to do it.”

Another thing that great leaders have to do is run great meetings. So many leaders say, “I hate meetings,” and as a result, they just kind of mail it in, or they avoid them, or try to go to as few as possible. But a great leader has to make meetings great.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that’s a good list there. And I want to talk about the management bit for a moment. So, we had Bruce Tulgan on the show, back in episode 302, who discussed what he called the crisis of undermanagement.

Patrick Lencioni
I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
And I thought that was very resonant. We kind of covered some similar themes here. And you’ve got a quote, I think it’s from The Motive, when you say, “Hey, it’s not babysitting. It’s management and it’s your job.” Can you sort of dig into this, this misconception between babysitting, micromanagement, management sort of? Where is the line? What should be done? And what’s not being done enough?

Patrick Lencioni
Well, I want to connect with that guy. I’ve never heard of that. Did he say that, because I feel the same way of crisis of undermanagement? You know, we live in a world where I think people don’t like be held accountable. I think that’s a social phenomenon as well. And so, what they do is they throw out the idea of, “You’re micromanaging me.” And managers, that’s like, I don’t know, that’s like one of those unanswerable things that people go on.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, I’m sorry.”

Patrick Lencioni
And managers back off. And the problem is, no, we’re undermanaging people. And if micromanaging means, “I know what my people are working on, I know how they’re doing, I’m available to give them coaching. I’m checking in with them to see how they’re doing,” then let’s all micromanage more. And I think that we’ve come to that place where too many people get away with trying to justify not being held accountable by accusing people of being a micromanager. No good leader is afraid of that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Patrick Lencioni
And so, I just, I agree completely with what Bruce said. And I think that it’s our job. And if we don’t really want to know what people are working on and coach them and be responsible for making sure they’re successful, then we don’t want to be a manager or a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. And so then, so you laid out a couple of things. You understand what they’re working on, and the status of those things, and you are available to chime in and do some coaching as necessary. And so then, what is too much in terms of managing? What is true micromanagement look, sound, feel like?

Patrick Lencioni
You know, that’s a great question. And it’s one of those things like we promote conflict, and people say, “Well, what’s too much conflict?” And I would like to say, well, here’s the deal, 95% of people engage in too little conflict. So, rather than worrying about what’s too much, let’s realize that’s a high-class problem.

Now, I’ll answer the question though, but I would say that most managers undermanage. What’s too much? I suppose too much is asking somebody to give you a daily accounting of how they’re spending their time, and asking them to prove every day what they’ve accomplished, and questioning every decision they make, and not giving them any freedom and autonomy. The truth though is I think in all the jobs I’ve ever had, and most of the people I talk to, there’s actually very little of that that goes on in the world. Most people are undermanaged.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny, I actually do ask for a daily accounting of my people’s time, but it’s because they’re in another country and we don’t have much face to face.

Patrick Lencioni
That’s different.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s like six lines long most of the time, “I did this and then this and then this, and tomorrow I plan to do that.” It’s like, “Perfect. Thank you.”

Patrick Lencioni
Hey, you’re not micromanaging. You’re saying, “I just want to know what you’re doing so we can make sure that we’re all rowing in the same direction.” You’re not doing it because you’re questioning whether they’re golfing or watching too much TV.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, not at all.

Patrick Lencioni
Right. And, by the way, you doing that at the risk of saying you’re overmanaging is far better than say, “Well, once a month or so, we check in and I see how they’re doing.” Successful businesses don’t undermanage. They know what everybody is doing and they help each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so we’re situated there. Let’s dig into more about your latest book here. So, we’re talking about The Motive and so your core message there is that there are different motives that drive leaders. And can you break this down for us a little more?

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, this is the 12th book I’ve written, and if somebody were to say, “Which book should I start with?” I would say this one because this is the first book where, instead of talking about how to lead or how to manage an organization, I address the first question, which is “Why?” Why do you want to be a leader in the first place? And some people have the wrong motivation for that. And I realize that because years ago, Pete, I was talking to a bunch of CEOs and giving them advice, like it was at a conference.

And I was giving them just straightforward advice about how to deal with things, and there were a handful of them that weren’t writing anything down, they were just dismissing everything, and some of the advice seemed really straightforward and other people were getting it. And I thought, I was starting to figure out what was going on with them, and I realized, “You know, if they’re doing this for the wrong reason, none of my advice makes sense to them.”

And the wrong reason is this, “I want to be a leader because it’s a reward for a lifetime of hard work. I’ve arrived, it’s a title, it allows me to focus on the things I like to do, and it’s kind of cool that I get to be the leader.” And there are a lot of people that go into leadership, young and old, for that reason, and that’s a terrible reason to be a leader.

You know, when I go to college graduations, people say to these people, “Go out and be a leader.” I want to yell, “No, please don’t be a leader unless you’re doing it for the right reasons.” You see, the right reason to be a leader is to say, “I’m taking on a burden and a responsibility. It’s a responsibility. And the economics of it are going to be very bad. I’m going to pour far more of my energy into being a leader so I can serve these people than I’m going to get back from it. And I have my eyes wide open. I realize it’s a responsibility and a duty, and it’s going to be hard.” If you do that, then you’re going to do the right things as a leader.

You’re going to say, “Yeah, I don’t want to have to have a difficult conversation.” That’s one of the other things leaders don’t do. “I have to have hard conversations with people. It is my job.” You know how many CEOs I worked with, Pete, who do it for the wrong reasons, who will do anything to avoid having a hard conversation with somebody? They’ll even fire somebody without that conversation just so they never have to have it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I wanted you to actually go deeper into this, so I think it was in The Motive in which there was a tale of someone replaced a chief information officer, so one of the CEO’s direct reports, you called him Fred. Give us the whole story. It’s a winner.

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, and that’s not fiction. All my books are fiction but that’s not fiction. That’s in the back of the book where I talk. So, a true story, a famous CEO of a big company, who I don’t think was a great leader, for obvious reasons when I tell the story, he had a chief technology officer, actually. I think I changed it too, and I knew the guy because we were doing some consulting in the organization, and the CEO wanted to bring in a different CTO, chief technology officer. And, instead of sitting down with the old one and explaining that, “I’m going to hire somebody to replace you,” he just hired a new one.

And one day, the old CTO comes to work and sees an email that goes out to the company saying, “Hey, John Jackson is our new CTO. Let’s all welcome him.” And this guy is like, “I thought I was the CTO.” And so, he calls the administrative assistant. I can’t make this up, right? In fact, this happened about 20 years ago, and I just wonder if I’m making it up because this seems too crazy. Somebody sitting here in the room listening to this is going, “Nope, you didn’t make it up. It was true.”

So, this guy calls the executive assistant to the CEO and says, “I’d like to meet with the CEO,” and they just can’t find any time to meet with him, “Oh, he’s busy.” Weeks, literally, like weeks go by. This guy is coming to work knowing that there’s another guy in the company with his title. Finally, he’s about to get on a private plane with the CEO, small private plane, he says, “I’ll finally have a chance to talk to him.” They get on the plane, the CEO closes his eyes, pretends to sleep the entire time, never speaks to him. Finally, the CTO just quits.

And that’s not just an interesting, wacky story. It goes to show you there are certain people that are leaders but they don’t have the courage or the character to sit down with somebody and say, “I need to give you some tough feedback,” or, “I need to let you know what’s going on.” Now, I get it, all of us are tempted to do that, and I’m not saying we should go around, like, “Hey, all I want to do is have difficult conversations with people.” But that’s our job.

And if a leader isn’t willing to do that, it’s probably because they’re doing it for the wrong reason, they’re like, “Hey, I’m supposed to have fun. Hey, I’m the leader of this department or this organization.” “I’m the principal of this school, the pastor of this church, the CEO of this company, I should get to pick and choose what I spend my time on, and that doesn’t sound interesting to me.” That’s a fundamental problem in organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ll tell you, even though my team is small, those words really resonated and echoed back to me in terms of, “Wait, am I just doing this because it’s fun? Am I just not doing that because it’s not fun?” And it’s really quite a look in the mirror in terms of like, “Yeah, oops.”

Patrick Lencioni
One of the people that endorsed the book, we sent the book to a CEO of a company, and he sent it back and he said, “Yeah, I’ll endorse it.” And his quote was, “This book rocked me to my core. I wish I had read it 20 years ago.” Hey, we all are tempted to do things for the wrong reasons. I look back at my tenure here at my own consulting firm and realized there were times when I was largely doing it for myself, and I wasn’t good.

And so, we can read this and go, “Okay, I don’t want to do that anymore. I have to do it for the right reasons.” So, life isn’t black and white, we’re not binary. We’re capable of changing, but sometimes we have to be asked that question or ask ourselves that question, “Is my motive really the right one?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. So, thank you for that. That’s good. And then, at the same time, you talk about there’s suffering, there’s sacrifice associated with leadership, and yet you’ve also got a concept called joyful accountability. How does that fall into things?

Patrick Lencioni
Well, that question is a great one, and the answer to both of those comes back to a very famous CEO, who’s become a friend of mine, named Alan Mulally. Now, Alan Mulally was the guy who turned the Ford Motor Company about, I don’t know, 10 years ago. He took over the company when they were hemorrhaging money and they were about to go out of business, and he took it over and didn’t take any money from the government. He’s an amazing leader.

I mention him because both of the questions you just asked me relate to him. First of all, he came to visit us after he retired, and he said, “I don’t like that part in your book, Pat, The Advantage, when you talked about management being a sacrifice, that there’s suffering involved. It’s a privilege.” And I was like, “Alan, that’s not how the world works anymore.” He was like a Boy Scout from Kansas. I think I even said, “You’re not in Kansas anymore, Alan.” And he thought, “Well, why would anybody not see that job as a privilege?” And I said, “You know how many people want to be the CEO because they think it’s cool and because they have the right to do whatever they want?”

And if we don’t help people understand the hard part, we’re inviting them to take a job that they don’t want. So, he got that. But the thing about Alan was he had this way of holding people accountable. I mean, here, he turned the Ford Motor Company around. I think he said he only fired one or two people. So, you’re thinking, “Wait a second. How do you turn a company…?” This was the DMV, basically, that he was taking over.

And he said, you know what he would do, he’d see somebody behave in a way that was contrary to what he wanted, he would go to them and he’d say, “Hey, I noticed that you were doing that,” and they’d say, “Yeah, I don’t really want to do this thing you asked me.” And he’d go, “That’s okay.” And they go, “Really?” And he goes, “Oh, yeah, we could still be friends but you can’t work here if you’re not going to behave that way, so it’s up to you. Let me know. You can either opt in and act this way, or you don’t have to, and honestly we can still be friends.” He wasn’t being snarky. And people opted out or they opted in, and very times did he actually have to manage them out of the organization because the point of the matter is, if you hold people accountable and tell them there’s no breathing room there, they’re going to choose the right path.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Patrick Lencioni
In or out. And so, he had this way of joyfully, he wasn’t afraid to do it. And I think that’s why he was able to turn that company around. He would have hard conversations that other people would just agonize over, and he’d go, “What’s the big deal? They can work someplace else.” And I think it’s a great lesson.

Pete Mockaitis
No, and I think that is great and I think there’s, I don’t know, just fear in the mix or maybe litigation, lawyers, lawsuits, wrongful termination. It seems like, I guess, those things do happen, but I have a feeling that these are kind of hobgoblins of the mind that are just sort of just trying to feed the justification to avoid doing the hard thing. So, yeah. So, I’d love to maybe zoom in there. So, let’s say, hey, you know you got to have a conversation, you don’t want to have the conversation, but here you are, you’re tempted to pretend you’re asleep on a plane or duck it by any means necessary, how do you summon the stuff from inside to do what needs to be done?

Patrick Lencioni
You mentioned the word justification. I think the false justification we use, and I’ve certainly done this in the past, because I’m a wus, I’m going to tell you I’m a wus. I don’t like doing this either. If we justify it by saying, “Man, I really care about the people that work for me, and I just don’t want them to feel bad so I’m going to avoid telling them this thing because it can make them really sad.” That’s a lie. And I used to do that. And then, one day, I realized, “Oh, wait a second. You know who I’m really wanting to avoid feeling bad? Me, because I’m going to be uncomfortable. They’re not going to feel better when I don’t tell them because it’s going to come back to bite them later.”

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Either they’re fired, or their career doesn’t progress, or they get less cool, fun, interesting responsibilities. One way or the other it hurts.

Patrick Lencioni
Exactly. And so, I was like, “If I love these people,” and I used the word L, “I should love the people that work for me. Even if I don’t like them all the time, I should love them. And if I love them, I have to tell them the truth.” I mean, I have four sons, right? Do I think that I’m doing them any favor by not telling them the truth about things they need to get better at? No, I love my children. To deprive them of that is crazy. If I’m a manager, I should feel the same way. So, once I kind of debunked that myth that I was actually a nice manager by not saying things to people, it gave me the courage to do it. And I still have to do that and I struggle with it all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s excellent. And so, when you say that you need to love your people but not necessarily to like your people, how are you defining love in this context?

Patrick Lencioni
Love means I’m willing to do something that benefits them even at my own expense. I think love is a verb. I’m committed to them. I’m not even enjoying their company right now, and maybe that’s my own fault or whatever else, but I am willing to do what’s in their best interest ahead of mine. You and I are both Catholic, it’s a biblical definition, right, to…

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Patrick Lencioni
I was just reading in the Bible today about loving your enemies, right? Well, first of all, so love our enemies, and the person who works for me, who actually, they’re on my team, and I have to tell them something that’s going to be hard for them to hear, I think I should be able to love them for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And as we talk about your sons, I’m thinking about my son right now. He’s two years old.

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, wow.

Pete Mockaitis
And he’s in a habit of doing some screaming when he can’t get what he wants, and so we keep…

Patrick Lencioni
So, my advice to you is never discipline him, always let him do whatever he wants, and then when he’s 20, he’s going to be great. We would never do that.

Pete Mockaitis
No.

Patrick Lencioni
But so many leaders are like, “Oh, I don’t want to tell this person.”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “I would have to remove this from you and it’s for your own good, and it’s going to cause you to scream, which is going to cause me to feel stressed and unhappy, but here I am making that sacrifice on your behalf. Much like I‘m going to share some feedback with a person and that’s going to make me uncomfortable. And if I make them uncomfortable, maybe yes, maybe no, in the moment, but ultimately has positive consequences downstream.

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, I absolutely agree. You know, Pete, I’m going to tell you. So, my kids are 21, 21, 17, and 13. I have four boys. I know I’ve learned more about being a leader by being a parent, I think half of these books come about because of the crossover between being a parent and a leader at work and team work and all the things. There’s so much in family life that crosses over the business, and around humility, and around accountability, and around all these different things. So, it’s fascinating. My poor wife, because we have to apply this together, luckily, she’s interested in it too. And my kids are now, even my 13-year old, the other day said, “Yeah, this stuff is really interesting.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool.

Patrick Lencioni
So, it’s going to be fun watching. What’s your two-year old’s name?

Pete Mockaitis
Jonathan.

Patrick Lencioni
Jonathan. It’s going to be fun talking to you in five years when he’s seven.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Yes, I think so too.

Patrick Lencioni
That’s an exciting thing.

Pete Mockaitis
So, here’s a scenario I thought I might run by you just because I was thinking about our upcoming interview and prepping some stuff, and I was also doing some training for an organization, we’ll keep it broad, in the health space. And so, right before the training started, we’re sort of chatting a little bit, and then I heard someone ask an assistant who’s helping us out, “Oh, hey, what’s up with all the contractors and stuff next door?” They said, “Oh, there’s this executive and they’re building out a suite on this floor for his office.” And then they said, “Really? So, we’re cramped on space, we always have to do this and this and this, and this guy needs a suite and so we’re going to have even less space.” And then the assistant said, “Oh, yeah, and they might actually take over this conference room that we’re in too. They still have to decide that.” And they just sort of shook their heads.

And so then, I got you in my ear, thinking about organizational health and conflict and all these things, and I just thought, I said this out loud, it was like, “Wow! So, it seems like you perceive some sort of wrong or injustice is occurring here, and yet I have a feeling that they’re probably never going to know about it and you’re just going to feel a little bit miffed, a little bit resentful over it over time.” And it’s like, “Is that accurate or am I right way off based here? It’s like I’m pontificating.” And they said, and a couple more people chimed in, it’s like, “Well, yeah, I’m not going to say anything about it but it’s because they didn’t ask and they don’t care.” And I thought, “Man, this is the stuff. I think this is kind of like where the rubber meets the road in organizational health.”

It’s like on the one hand you could say, “Hey, this executive, it was hard to recruit him. He needs some things to be one over.” And then it’s like, “Is it really their job, or duty, or responsibility to explain every decision they make to the people who also dwell in the office?” But, at the same time, if you don’t get into that messy stuff, you’re just going to have this resentment and bitterness and stuff unspoken in the mix, and it’s harmful. So, Pat, putting you on the spot, how should healthy organizations deal with just these everyday kinds of things that need to be addressed?

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, yeah. Well, first of all, those people are right to wonder what’s going on. Secondly, it’s not their job to go ask why this is going on. Somebody else knows this and they’re not doing it. And so, I would say either somebody is letting that CEO or that executive down by not questioning it and preventing him or her from doing something that looks really bad.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and that person’s going to have poor relationships with all the people that are kind of miffed because he’s taking all the space.

Patrick Lencioni
Or he knows and he doesn’t care.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, possible.

Patrick Lencioni
Okay, this happened to me once. In fact, the first book I wrote, and the first part of that first book, came from this too. So, I worked with a CEO of a company, and he took over when the company was kind of in trouble, and they were laying people off literally, and so offices were coming open. And an office would come open and people go, “Ooh, can I have Fred’s office now that he’s gone?” And so, the facilities people, their numbers were actually going up because they were doing all these moves at a time when the company was hurting. So, the CEO rightly said, “Okay, it’s time for a little adult supervision,” and he announced that there would be a freeze on all office moves and facilities. Okay, that made sense.

The very next week there were contractors in the main headquarters, in the lobby where people came, building out the conference room that they use for customers and for meetings and turning it into his office. And the reason why they had to make it bigger was because he was having office furniture flown in from the East Coast and they needed to make it fit so they had to change the shape of the conference room. And I didn’t know at the time but we look at it now, his motivation was not to serve others. His motivation was about himself and it was completely consistent with who he was, and that is the problem.

Now, if he’s doing that and he’s just clueless, boy, somebody could be his hero and say, “Hey, do you realize what kind of a message you’re sending?” And that’s why a leader’s job is to surround themselves with people that are going to tell them the truth and push on them. And so, I think that’s a fantastic example that you gave, one that I’ve seen too, and I think it’s probably is an issue of motive.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s quite likely. And so, I’m wondering, in this kind of a situation, what would be the ideal healthy way for leadership and teams to address this issue? It’s like, “Hey, we’ve got some competing demands on our limited space,” how do we hash that out optimally?

Patrick Lencioni
Right. What I would say is this, so that executive, his team, it’s a he it sounds like, his team, the question is, “Do they have the kind of trust, vulnerability, and conflict on their team to put these things on the table?” because that’s where it belongs. And he has to be the one to be vulnerable enough to say, “Hey, you guys could ask me any question and challenge me. Even if I disagree with you, I’m going to be honest with you about how I feel. I’m not going to punish you for that.” So, the question is, “Why isn’t that team having those honest conversations?” And the leader has to take it upon himself to create that kind of trust.

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

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, no, but I’m going to go back to the question you asked at the beginning, and you said, “What’s one of the big insights?” The big insight, and I touched on it before, is this, what I’ve come to realize is that if you’re a leader and you constantly remind people about what they need to do to improve, 95% of the time, more, they’re going to either improve or they’re going to go someplace else where they fit better. And I think if I could give any leader advice, it would be become completely immune to your fear of saying to somebody, “Hey, you did that thing.” You talk too much during meetings, “Hey, you did it again. Hey, you did it again.” Most human beings, if they’re constantly reminded about how they need to improve, are going to do it because they’re tired of being reminded or they’re going to leave because they don’t want to change.

And if every company did that, there’d be far less firings, which are very painful, and far less lawsuits, and companies would actually start attracting the right people and repelling the others. And it usually comes down to a lack of courage on the part of leaders. So, that’s one of the things I’ve learned. So, I think that’s it.

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

Patrick Lencioni
Theodore Roosevelt once said that “Comparison is the thief of joy.” That’s a fantastic quote. And then my favorite Bible verse, it’s “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Sometimes I think we make things harder than they need to be because of our pride and because it’s self-oriented and things like that. So, those would be my favorite two.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Patrick Lencioni
I like the one I learned in social psychology where the person, like if you go on the street, and you ask somebody, “Hey, will you help me do this?” A high percentage of people will say yes. And then if you introduce a financial element to that, fewer people would actually say yes because now they feel like it’s an economic decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so you pay people and then fewer of them want to do it because they’re getting paid.

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, like, you’re unloading things out of your car, and you say, “Hey, can you help me carry this across the street? I need to unload my car,” and like X percentage would say, “Yeah, I’ll help you.” And then you said, “Now, I’ll offer them $5 to do it,” and fewer of them would actually say yes. And I think sometimes we think that people are coin-operated and it’s actually a disincentive to do that. And people’s inclination toward helping others and doing the right thing is much higher because it’s the right thing to do. And I think companies do that too, like, “We need to pay people more.”

It’s like, no, how about treat them well, get to know them, thank them, help them understand why their job matters. People really want to work hard. Great volunteers at a church or a nonprofit work harder than people being paid in a for-profit because they’re doing it for the right reasons. That’s not to say, “Hey, go cut your people’s pay,” or, “Don’t offer people money.” But I think sometimes we overemphasize the financial incentive of behavior and don’t appeal to people’s better nature.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Patrick Lencioni
You know, Dean Koontz is my favorite author, and he wrote a book called Brother Odd. He has a series called Odd Thomas, but there’s a book called Brother Odd which I think is fantastic. It’s funny. It’s mostly really deep and funny and clever.

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

Patrick Lencioni
The whiteboard. You know, in my office here, we just add it onto our office and have a new cottage, and we’re like, “What artwork should we put on the wall?” And we just painted it with that. There’s a new paint that’s like it turns a wall into a whiteboard and, boy, do we use it, and good stuff comes out. I’m looking at stuff right now where we solve problems and then we leave it up there. So, the whiteboard.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Patrick Lencioni
In my house, at home, I should have whiteboards in every wall.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you become more awesome at your job?

Patrick Lencioni
Well, it helps me in my job and it helps me in life, and that’s praying the Rosary.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good.

Patrick Lencioni
Fifteen minutes a day, usually do it in the shower.

Pete Mockaitis
You do the whole Rosary in 15 minutes?

Patrick Lencioni
I could do it for 15 minutes.
usually that’s when I’m flooded with peace and it helps me think through my day and be more charitable and kind.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a particularly resonant nugget, something you share that really seems to connect with folks and they quote it back to you again and again?

Patrick Lencioni
I always like to say, “The truth is don’t make the truth.” I mean, the perfect enemy of the good. And people repeat that back. Because I’m a believer in the 80/20 principle, “Get the first part done and we’ll figure it out from there.” And so, I think that’s one that probably comes back my way.

[36:01]

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

Patrick Lencioni
I would point them to our website, which is TableGroup.com. And we have a podcast also called At The Table with Patrick Lencioni. We just started it this year and we’re having fun. We’re not as professional as you. You said you had a 302, 300 episodes.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that was the Bruce Tulgan episode, 302, yeah.

Patrick Lencioni
Wow! Yeah, I think we’re at like 25 but we’re loving it. We’re loving it. We’re enjoying it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, it’s definitely fun. Well, hopefully, you’re getting better and better as you get in there.

Patrick Lencioni
We’re trying.

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

Patrick Lencioni
You know, I think that take the risk of speaking truth to people in kindness, and good things happen. And we tend to think that the cost is going to be too high to do that, but if you speak truth and love and kindness and humility, you’ll be a leader’s hero, because we’re not all CEOs. But if you can go to the leader, nine times out of ten, they’re going to be glad that you told them, and five times out of ten, they’re actually going to listen to it and make you a hero, and four times, they might ignore you, one time they might not like you, but it’s always the best thing to do. I think people are too risk-averse when it comes to pouring into a leader upwards. So, manage up. Manage up.

Pete Mockaitis
Pat, this has been a treat. I wish you lots and lots of luck and blessings as you’re pursuing these adventures.

Patrick Lencioni
Thank you, Pete. And have fun with Jonathan and your family. God bless.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. You, too.

Feb 17
0

546: Choosing Better Words for Better Leadership with David Marquet

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

David Marquet says: "You want to be curious before compelling."

Former nuclear submarine commander David Marquet shares how subtle language changes can make a huge impact.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How language impacts your leadership
  2. How to use dissent in the workplace to your advantage
  3. How we’re mistaking coercion for leadership

About David:

David Marquet is a student of leadership and organizational design and a former nuclear submarine Commander. He was named one of the Top 100 Leadership Speakers by Inc. Magazine and is the author of the Amazon #1 Best Seller: Turn the Ship Around!, and The Turn the Ship Around Workbook.  David’s new book, Leadership is Language was released recently by Penguin Random House.

Items Mentioned in the Show

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David Marquet Interview Transcript

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

David Marquet
Thanks for having me on your show, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think the first thing I need to address is have you, in fact, crossed the United States on your bicycle?

David Marquet
Yeah, I have done segments of it, not all at the same time, but I’ve done various things. So, last summer, I went from Boise, Idaho to Casper, Wyoming which was epic because it took me over the Tetons and through Teton Pass. I live in Florida, like an overpass is a hill. So, I’m out there, and as I turn left, summit 20 miles that way, 4,000 feet that way, I just looked at that, and I was like, “Are you kidding me?” But I made it through.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, good work. Good work.

David Marquet
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
My dad was a big bicyclist and so respect. We have hosted bicyclists at our childhood home, I recall, as they were crossing the nation. They were from Australia. My mom said, “They sure eat a lot.”

David Marquet
Yeah, that’s why you’re a cyclist so you can eat a lot. You broke a code.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so speaking of breaking the code, just as we were chitchatting before pushing record, you keyed in on my bookshelf, Stephen Covey’s “The 8th Habit,” and you’ve got a cool Stephen Covey connection. Can you lay it on us?

David Marquet
Yeah. So, when I was a submarine commander on the Santa Fe, we were doing a lot of seven habits stuff, and in some respects, everything that we did, which I write about in “Turn Your Ship Around” was simply applying the seven habits which is kind of written at the individual level and an organizational level. So, level one, be proactive, and we kept asking the question, “What would it sound like if everybody in the organization acted proactively?” And then we would put some words to it, then we practiced those words. Imagine, it worked, and so we would do that.

And so, when we started winning all these awards, the story got out, and Dr. Covey was doing this work with the Navy back on the East Coast, and he heard about it. And I get this phone call, “Dr. Covey wants to come ride your submarine.” And I’m like, “Doggone, Dr. Covey!” and I was just like running around in circles, like, “Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.” And he came, it was such an amazing day. We picked him up off of Maui, it was crystal clear, dolphins were jumping. I mean, it was just one of those magic moments.

And he’s really quiet and kind of nervous, and he walks around the ship. And he finally comes up to me at the end, we’re driving into Pearl Harbor, standing on the bridge, and he says, “I know, I’ve figured it out.” First, he said, “It’s the most empowering workplace I’ve ever seen.” I said, “Well, thank you very much.”

Pete Mockaitis
There you go. Superlative from the man who’s seen a lot. That’s awesome. Congrats.

David Marquet
Yeah, right. Right. But I didn’t like the word empowerment. I didn’t use it because I thought it’s…I labeled it a polluted word because it meant everyone had already attached meaning to it, so it was…when you said the word, you’ve got whatever you got. I mean, everyone sort of look at it through their own lens.

But, anyway, and we talked, but it was magic, and he said, “I’m going to write about you.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, sure.” And then in “The 8th Habit,” which I see on your bookshelf behind you, I was like this spy, looking at the bookshelf behind, and I see “The 8th Habit.” And that was really amazing. And then he wrote the Foreword for “Turn Your Ship Around.” Unfortunately, he passed away, like a month after he wrote. We got the Foreword like on the 1st of April, and he went in, he had his bicycle rides. Later that month, this was like 20th or something, about three weeks later, really tragic. He never came out of his coma.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, his legacy is living on through those who he teaches and he’s taught and touched, and you’re a shining example. And you, in turn, are passing the wisdom along, and one of your big areas of focus is the language, the actual word choice that folks use. Can you kind of lay that on us? Like, what’s your big kind of aha or insight or discovery into the notion of language and leading?

David Marquet
So, here’s the deal, all the words that seem natural and normal to us, they sound normal in our ear, like, “All-hands meeting,” or, “We have a can-do organization.” All those words, the reason they’re natural is because we’ve heard from our bosses and our parents, who heard them from their bosses and their parents, which means they’re from the industrial age.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

David Marquet
And, essentially, it amounts to a programming, a playbook, I like to think of it, so that in a certain situation we’re going to react in a certain way. So, someone comes up to you and tells you, give you news that you don’t like, like, “Hey, I think we should delay product release next week,” and this comes as unwelcome news, of course. People react in different ways, but I predict it’s going to be react, response, reply. They’re going to either explain why they’re wrong, they’re going to defend themselves, or something like that.

Rarely, will I see curiosity, “Oh, what do you see that I’m missing? What do you know that I don’t know?” And the question is, that I was always struggling with is, “Why does my programming take me in the unhelpful direction?” Here’s another example, we tend to ask binary questions, and especially the least helpful binary question is a self-affirming binary question, “Does that make sense?” “Right?”

Pete Mockaitis
Does that make sense?

David Marquet
“Are we good?” “Right?” So, it’s not really a question. I just want to get everyone to agree and go along with me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m just thinking about how lame my podcast would be if those were the questions I ask, “This is really the Pete Show, you’re just an accessory.”

David Marquet
Right. Exactly. But I see leaders doing it, I hear doing this all the time, and I think the reason is because, in the industrial age, that’s what you wanted. You just wanted people to do what you wanted them to do. You didn’t want a big discussion, and I didn’t need the workers to be involved in decision-making. But, of course, now that doesn’t work anymore. We need to let the people doing the work be involved in making decisions about the work. And so, what this means is all these language patterns, which we’ve been programmed to do, are no longer helpful. So, we have to go through the great reprogramming of the English language.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so can you lay it on us in terms of we have a few examples of things that don’t work, “Are we good?” “Yup.” “Makes sense?”

David Marquet
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, those are not ideal, not optimal, and the principle is that it doesn’t encourage conversation, engagement, discussion. It’s just sort of like, “Okay, let’s move it along here.”

David Marquet
And, in particular, dissenting, diverse, and outline opinions. These things reduce the likelihood, they don’t squish it to zero, but these are biases, one direction or the other. They just make it a little bit harder for the person who doesn’t agree with the group to speak up, and it’s a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, I think it is a problem. And, it’s funny, as we record these words, Mitt Romney got some attention for a dissenting opinion.

David Marquet
Yeah, but look at the reaction, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

David Marquet
Well, Pete, I didn’t hear anybody. I was flying today so I missed a bunch of the news. But I didn’t hear any responses, “Oh, Mitt, tell us more about that. I’m so curious about your perspective.” I didn’t hear that. What I heard was, “Oh, you’re wrong. You screwed up. You’re blah, blah, blah, blah,” or, “You’re right. We agree with you, blah, blah, blah.” So, this is a good example of these programmed responses and you see it all the time and everywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, yes, there seems to be a bias against dissent. So, let’s dig in. So, how do we get better language? Can you give us some core fundamental principles as well as some particular examples of, “Hey, let’s stop saying this, and say that instead”?

David Marquet
Yeah. So, the key way, one way to think about it is, “Are you embracing variability or are you reducing variability?” Now, there are things, there are lots of work following a procedure, manufacturing a part, that benefit from reducing variability. Actually, this is a problem because this is what we’ve inherited from the industrial age.

Imagine making Lego blocks, “I don’t want the holes to be like a little bit fatter or a little bit skinnier because it really won’t stack up very well. I want it always the same,” so variability is an enemy, and we’ve even gotten really good at tuning out variability. But decision-making and thinking benefits from embracing variability. The fact that we have special rules when we go, “Hey, guys, we’re going to do a brainstorming session. We have some special rules so we can invoke creativity.” What that means is the normal way we do work at work kills creativity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there you go.

David Marquet
It’s just an admission of that. So, what we need to do is have the language of work which allows dissenting opinions. So, here’s one thing that a lot of people are doing wrong. If you’re doing a decision meeting, what you want to do is vote first then discuss. But what most people do is they’ll talk about it, all this does is serve to anchor the group, that’s group-think build up, less the people who think different than the group, they start shrinking down in their chair and it becomes very hard to disagree, “Well, I don’t think 737 Max software is safe. I don’t think we should do the launch,” or whatever happened.

Every innovation starts as an outline and dissenting opinion. The water in Flint, Michigan is poisoned, whatever. They always start on the fringes, and sometimes they deserve to stay out there on the fringes, but sometimes they don’t, but you don’t know that if, A, you suppress them so you don’t even hear them, or, B, you don’t listen to them or their voice. So, what you want to do is vote in a probabilistic way. Here’s the trick, start the question with the word how, “How sure are you?” “How strongly do you support this?” “How likely is this assumption to be true?” Not, “Will it be true?” “Is it safe?” “Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?” Any question about the future is going to be probabilistic, should be probabilistic because we don’t know.

And then, after the vote, you look for the people who voted highest for and highest against. These are the outliers, they’re on the fringes, and you invite them to speak.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, timeout there. So, highest for and highest against, so then it’s not a simple “I’m for this” “I’m against this,” but rather “I’m a zero” “I’m a 100.” Or, how are you thinking about the voting?

David Marquet
Yeah. So, you can use your hand. If it’s just really quick, you’re out on the field, it’s a team, a construction site team, “Hey, we’re ready to start the next phase, we’re ready to pour concrete. How ready are we to do this?” and people put their hands up, five, five, five, four, five, five, four.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

David Marquet
It’s a lot easier because it’s easy for someone to say four instead of five but it’s very difficult for someone to actually put their hand up than do a thumbs down.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it.

David Marquet
There’s a big cultural stigma to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s awesome.

David Marquet
Yeah, yeah. and in the office, we have a set of cards that go 1 to 99; 1, 5, 20, 50, 80, 95, 99, 1 to 99, because you don’t want to do 0 and 100 because what you’re trying to do is reprogram people’s brains to think probabilistically so that nothing is a 100 or 1. It’s like there’s never a zero chance and there’s never a hundred chance of something happening, “Will this product work?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, David, I am loving this so much. And I just, recently, with my team, as we’re assessing, this is pretty meta, a podcast guest. I said, “Okay, this numbering system might not make sense to you but it’d be really easy for me if in our system you were to give me a number between 0 and 100 based upon the probability, your best guess that this guest will be in the top 10% of engagement amongst all of our guests.”

David Marquet
Yeah, beautiful.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, then it makes it easy for me. I just sort, like, “All right. These are the people my team loves. Let’s start at the top and move on down.”

David Marquet
Yeah, that’s so much better than saying, “Will this be in the top 10%?” which is impossible.

Pete Mockaitis
“Yes or no to David,” you know, it’s much broader.

David Marquet
Right, “What’s your sense?” Yeah. So, yeah, I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, so all right, I’m jiving here. So, we’re thinking probabilistically, we’re voting in advance. What are some of the other best practices?

David Marquet
So, when it comes to asking questions, there’s a whole bunch of things. The key is when you’re asking questions, most people ask questions, they’re either actively inserting their own viewpoint in the question, like, “Why would you want to do that?” “Hey, I think we should delay launch, product launch?” “Why would you want…?” So, you’re sending the signal, “Hey, you’re wrong. This is unwelcome news. You need to defend it.” Versus, “Oh, what do you see that’s behind that thinking?” in a very sort of neutral way.

So, the idea is you want to be curious before compelling. You want to ask questions. You want to wipe your mind clean and not inject your point of view. Even when you’re not deliberately trying to inject your point of view, we sometimes inject our point of view. There’s this sub-school of asking questions called Clean Language, which I pulled some inspirations from, really interesting. So, for example, if your friend comes up to you and says, “I’m having trouble with this coworker,” you might say, “Well, do you have the guts to stand up to them?”

Well, this implies a whole bunch of things, like, A, “You should…” like standing up to them is the right thing to do, it’s the right metaphor, not punch them in the face, or not let them alone, and, “Do you have the guts?” suggest that the limiting resource is courage not maybe it’s time. So, you’re injecting all these…all your basic experience of what you think they’re saying into the question. So, what you want to try and do is just say, “Oh, tell me more,” or, “What kind of a problem is that?” and just be as neutral as possible about it.

The way I think about it is I wipe my mind clean, which is easier some days. I just try and make a big white tableau in my head and say, “I don’t know anything, and my job is to learn as much as possible in the next couple of minutes.” Now, I’m not saying you have to agree. They can often say, “Hey, I think we should delay product launch.” I’m not saying automatically delay product launch. Not at all. What I’m saying is make the decision after you’ve listened to them. If you find yourself saying the words, “I hear you but…” that’s code for “I’m not listening to you,” because the only reason you feel compelled to say “I heard you” is because you have a sense that they think you’re not hearing them so you feel compelled to say “I hear you.” No one ever felt more heard because someone said, “Oh, I hear you,” so just listen to them and you’ll never feel that compulsion to say “I hear you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that is awesome.

David Marquet
“Trust me” is another one. If you find yourself saying “Trust me,” then you’re on the wrong track. You should never have to say that, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, these are…keep it going. So, you’re sharing some phrases that are indicative of something beneath the surface that’s not working and it’s hitting home. I think I’ve said “I hear you.”

David Marquet
Me too. All the time. So, it goes back to the industrial age, and what I’m calling this playbook. So, the key thing in the industrial age, the key play, so to speak, is I label “obey the clock.” That’s why we have words like clockwork, that’s why we pay people by the hour, especially the people, the workers. You can pay the thinkers by a salary, but the workers get paid by the hour because of so obey the clock. So, there’s all these cultural statements, again, saying, “Time out. I think we got to delay product launch because it runs against the ‘obey the clock’ play.”

Now the problem to obey the clock is, of course, it’s very hard to think when you have the pressure of the clock, tick, tick, tick, and you got to make so many wishes per hour. So, what leaders wanted to do is what I call control the clock. Leaders need to say, “Hey, time out. You guys are doing a great job chopping down this fort. Now I want to talk about is this the right fort and should we be chopping at that?” And let’s give the team the ability to say, “Time out.”

Now, it’s not enough to just say, “Oh, team, everyone can say time out.” I’ve seen this in, say, for example, in a hospital situation or…

Pete Mockaitis
Or some manufacturing plants that’s a rule.

David Marquet
Yeah, a manufacturing plant, with the power plant. Then there’s this lip service, “Oh, anyone can stop.” But if you don’t actually give them a mechanism, “Okay, here’s a yellow card. If you think we need to take a pause, raise it, or say the following code word.” And practice. If it’s never practiced, the same stigmas will build up. But if we practice it, and then it’s like, “Oh, it’s not a big deal. Time out. Quit.” It doesn’t need to be a long time, you have to make it easy to exit production and go into thinking, but you also have to make it easy to say, “Okay, we’re done thinking. Now we’re going to go back to work,” otherwise we end up biased in one direction or the other.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. And so, you encourage it, you practice it, you give a mechanism, and I think you appreciate it I guess when they use the mechanism, as oppose to, “Oh, dang it, David. What is it now?”

David Marquet
Yeah. So, a perfect example of this is the Andon cord in the Toyota Production System. This is Andon, it’s the Japanese word for lantern. And so, they’ve equipped the stations with what used to be a cord, now a button, for the workers. They’re in the production line, parts are moving past them, they have a problem. So, they can’t solve the problem while the parts are moving, there’s too much time pressure, so they have to push the button which signals, “Hey, I’ve got a problem. I need to shift into problem-solving mode. I need to pause. I need to call a pause and shift to problem-solving mode.” And so, that’s what that serves. That serves as a way for them.

So, you go to a construction site and say, “Well, how do the guys signal that they have a problem?” The guys on the third floor installing windows and they’ve got a problem, there’s no way, we haven’t instituted a mechanism like Toyota Production System so there’s no way for the workers.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re still yelling, “Hey!”

David Marquet
Yeah, they just yell at each other, right. Or we come down at the end of shift to say, “Yeah, I had to bang a few windows in because they really didn’t fit quite right. Oh, it would’ve been nice to actually solve the root problem.” No. So, that’s obey the clock.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, so that’s about the clock.

David Marquet
So, yeah, that’s the core play. So, everything kind of stems out of that. And the second thing about the industrial age organization is we separate thinkers from doers, that’s why we have these phrases like white collar, blue collars, leaders, followers, thinkers, doers, salary.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s some terms in Hebrew like rosh gadol and the other one. Anyway, so, we’ve got these dichotomies, yeah.

David Marquet
Yeah, exactly. They’re binary dichotomies and we bend people into one of two tribes. And so, when I think about, “Well, what’s it like to be a doer?” Well, all you do is do. Do what you’re told. So, all leadership is coercive because it’s one group of people choosing what the other group of people how to do it. And then their role is to then comply and continue the production line as long as possible. And so, again, these are unhelpful patterns because coercion isn’t a good way to treat people. It’s much better to have collaboration and commitment.

Now, here’s the trick. We talked about the meeting thing. So, I had 10 executives from a big company, two tables of five, and I gave them a problem. It was like, “How many countries are in Africa? You can’t look it up.” And someone at the end of one table blurts a number, let’s say they say 50, and pretty soon that table comes at 50. And here’s the other thing, your table has to agree, so it’s a decision-making exercise for a group. Your table has to agree so they have to decide their number. Pretty soon 50. And guess what? Thirty seconds later the other table said 50. And who’s the person who said 50? It was the CEO and the co-founder.

So, that person is paying a lot of people a lot of money simply to echo back what that person is thinking. Now, here’s the key. When I said, “Oh, did you guys collaborate on this?” “Oh, yeah, sure. Everyone’s voice was heard.” No, it wasn’t. This is called coercion. And so, people use the word influence, inspire, but it’s really coercion. Like, let’s not pretend it’s not coercion. I’m getting you to do what I want you to do, and that’s coercion.

So, what you want is true collaboration and that happens first, say, “Everybody write down what you think the number is before we contaminate you with any group-think. Then everyone flips their cards up and, just like before, let’s look at the high and the low. Okay, how did you come up with your number? How did you come up with your number? And now we can call us on a number.” The maximum amount of variability in the group, the maximum amount of cognitive diversity will occur before any conversation, and you want to capture that moment in time.

David Marquet
Yes. I should know the answer to that. I think it’s 89. No, that’s 54. Sorry, my bad. Yeah, 54.
Now, here’s another thing that’s interesting. If you ask people, say, “Okay, write down the last two digits of your phone number. Now, write down how many countries there are you think in Africa. Do those number correlate?” Answer? Yes. “Should they?” No. And this is anchoring. Even when you explain to people that anchoring is a phenomenon, it will still happen. So, these are the perils of throwing out your answer first but we do it because we want to move so quickly away from that uncertainty and variability. We want to collapse variability prematurely without giving it the cognitive respect that it’s owed.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, David, this is so good. This is just really getting my wheels turning here.

David Marquet
I’m so glad. That’s the highest praise.

Pete Mockaitis
And anchoring, well, I heard another study about anchoring, like, that even judges, right, like perhaps the most impartial of all would be anchored by the address on a piece of stationery or in like a mock case that they presented to them, in terms of like, “What should the settlement amount or judgment arbitration amount be in a case?” Like, it has nothing to do with that. These are supposed to be our most impartial and brilliant arbiters of decision-making that we have in our society, and they succumb to it, so nobody is immune.

David Marquet
Yeah. So, we all have these biases and they’re wired into us, and you want to inoculate yourself and your team as much as possible, but it’s very difficult. Here’s another thing. The bias is called escalation of commitment, which means that if you made a decision, you’ve basically tainted yourself from evaluating that decision. And in the face of evidence that the decision was not a good one, basically you double-down. Now, we have phrases like “in for a penny, in for a pound” “sunk cost fallacy” but the way this plays out in organizations is let’s say the captain of a crew ship makes a decision to do something and someone low on the team starts to…or there’s evidence that this is not a good idea. It’s going to be very difficult for that person to reverse their decision.

On the other hand, if you separate decision-maker from the decision-evaluator, so the senior person should reserve their cognitive efforts to simply evaluate, but that means the team has got to be making decisions. Another way to think about it is the senior person should only ever break pedal. The next tier below needs to have a gas pedal and a break pedal. But as soon as the senior person starts stepping on the gas, they then tainted themselves, “Hey, we all should keep selling print film,” “Hey, we should all rent DVDs,” whatever it is, we taint ourselves, and it’s very, very difficult to then reverse. So, think about that, “Am I decision-maker or a decision-evaluator?” And if you want to be the decision-evaluator, you really got to work hard not to be the maker of the decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. I’m thinking back to consulting at Bain where we would have a decision-making tool for teams called RAPID in terms of different roles and decision, who recommends something, who approves something, who performs inputs, decides, it’s an acronym RAPID. And then I thought that was great. It’s like the approve is like you have veto power and that, indeed, makes great sense to put in sort of senior leadership level, and you just add another layer there in terms of if they’re also the one sort of putting forward, “Hey, this would be really cool, don’t you think?” it’s going to taint things.

David Marquet
Yeah, and obviously they don’t do it that obviously but everybody knows the CEO wants the product to launch, or everybody knows the situation when we have the meeting, “The purpose of the meeting…” Really? It’s so the CEO can later say, “Oh, you all were there. You had a chance to say no but you didn’t,” that’s the real purpose mainly.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, David, you’ve laid out a couple of what you’re calling the six plays for all leaders about the clock and collaborating instead of coercing. Let’s go ahead just rock out the others since we’re on a hot streak?

David Marquet
Okay. So, on the industrial-age side, we have “obey the clock,” which leads to coercing and the team complying with the purpose of continuing the production line as long as possible. When Henry Ford started making Model Ts in 1904, he made the same car for almost 20 years. If you worked on that line, you basically didn’t have to learn any new tools, any new skills, you’d work there almost 20 years making the same car.

What you want to do now is control the clock, collaborate, then commit, because commitment comes from within. True collaboration will result in the team making a commitment with the idea of completing, so doing the work in chunks, “Hey, we’re going to do a segment.” So, I like to think of it in terms of an expiration date or running experiments, “Hey, we’re going to do…we’re going to change the process. We’re going to run an ad campaign but not we just want to run an ad campaign. It almost feels like we’re going to stop running it. We’re going to run this ad campaign for three months and then we’ll see not only what we’ve achieved but what we learned.”

And that gets us to the fifth play which is improve versus just prove. We have this approach during the industrial age, “I got to get it done. I got to show. I got to demonstrate competence. I got to feel good. I got to justify my salary,” but that moves us away from this idea of, “How can I learn? How can I be curious? How can I get better?” And a lot of cold companies have these quarterly goals, and when you look at them, they’re goals, like, “What are we going to do? We’re going to sell 8% more of this and we’re going to ship this,” but they’re lacking when I ask them, “Well, show me what you’re going to learn this quarter.”

Even university, I worked with a university, like, even they didn’t have learning goals. So, I’m not saying don’t have doing goals. Do, but balance them, “Here’s what we’re going to do and here’s what we’re going to learn, and then we’re going to pause, complete.” Complete allows two things. It allows you to pause and reflect and improve the work, but it also allows you to celebrate. No completion, no celebration. No celebration, no sense of progress. No sense of progress, no fun at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. And what’s interesting, when it comes to doing versus learning, I guess in my brain I see maybe an overlap in a Venn diagram stuff, like, if I’m saying, “Hey, want to learn about audio, and what I want to do is make our podcast sound as amazing as possible,” sort of both are happening, learning and doing.

David Marquet
Yeah. So, here’s what I think the formula is. Learning results from thinking about something. So, you had the thought, “I want the podcast to be amazing.” Then you say, “You know what, if we tried a different kind of microphone, or if we tried SquadCast as opposed to Skype,” so you have a hypothesis. But then you actually have to do it. Just thinking about it doesn’t result in learning. Then you do it. You can’t just do one because it might’ve been a one-off, like maybe the internet connection to Pittsburgh was bad that day, who knows.

So, you say, “Let’s do 10. Now, we’re going to pause with complete. First of all, we’re going to celebrate what we achieved.” Then we’re going to say, “Hey, what did we learn?” “Well, nine out of ten of them were significantly better. One was worse. It was some special case.” So, that’s it. So, I think this is the cycle of learning: thinking, doing, reflecting. It’s like this, I draw an H because thinking is broad perspective, doing is focused, because once you made the commitment, you don’t want to say, “We’re going to use SquadCast most of the time. Well, a couple of them we did Skype but I wasn’t really sure.” No, you want to be precise, you want to do SquadCast 10 out of 10.

Then we’re going to pause, not while in the middle of podcast but, “Okay, we’ve done ten, now let’s pause. What does everybody think?” Best to do that, and that, that, that.

Pete Mockaitis
I see what you’re saying.

David Marquet
So, it’s this flip between reducing focus which means reducing variability, reducing perspective, of being focused, and embracing variability, and it’s this flip that we have to do. If we don’t recognize that we’re using our brains in two different ways, what I see is people are sort of crappily-focused and then sort of broadly expansive but their expansiveness is like this, it’s like looking through a periscope on a submarine, there’s a whole world out there, “Oh, yeah, we’re embracing new ideas,” but they’re four to six when I could be one to nine. How do you know there’s a world beyond my tennis line?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, David, so many of your ideas are really resonating for me here. I guess I’d love to hear if it’s a client or someone who just took and ran with these easy ideas and saw cool results as a result of doing so, can you give us a transformation tip?
David Marquet
Yeah, I’ll tell you another story. So, one that might resonate with readers is McDonald’s. We’re working with their franchise out in Oregon and they have 15 stores, and the ops manager was stressed, and she would, every morning, “Oh, do this, check on that, do that,” and she drives from store to store frantically, telling what to do, and checking in on them. We flipped the whole thing around, so she now would get these texts every morning and the store managers would be checking in with her, “Hey, here’s what I got, here’s what I see, here’s what I intend to do about it. Come on by if you want. We’d love to see you. Invite your feedback, but we don’t need you. We’ll do it anyway.”

And she had so much less stress over the next 12 months she lost 50 pounds, a pound a week. And she had some bad health markers and were sort of prediabetic, and all that stuff went away because we simply flipped it, we got rid of that old industrial-age playbook.

Pete Mockaitis
And she may be eating at places other than McDonald’s because she didn’t have to go there often. You can smell those fries.

David Marquet
Yeah, it’s so hard. They’re so good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I can follow up, so that sounds like a tidy little framework there. So, each person said, “Here’s what I got, here’s what I see, here’s what I’m going to do.” Can you lay that out for us?

David Marquet
Yeah. So, we have a framework that we applied to empowerment, which we call the ladder of leadership, and it’s simply the words that you say. We cast away the word empowerment, and it sounds like this, “At the bottom, they tell me what to do.” That’s obviously very low. And then there’s, “Here’s what I see, here’s what I think, here’s what I would like to do.” Now, the key there is unless you get approval, you don’t do it, so you wait.

And then level five is, “Here’s what I intend to do. Tomorrow at noontime, I intend to launch a new ad campaign. Next week on Wednesday, I intend to launch a product as scheduled.” Now, the key about intent is unless you say no, it’s going to happen. So, if you don’t get your email that day, you’re not holding the team up. And here’s the key, the team, knowing that there is going to happen, it’s on them. They can never…they own it. They can’t say, “Oh, well, the boss told me. I knew it was a bad idea but blah, blah, blah.”

So, it’s a trick, so to speak, mechanism better. It’s a mechanism to get thinking, because when you know, if you say something, and your boss gets a little in email, it’s going to happen, you become…you check with the person, “Hey, does everyone this is a good idea? I want to make sure it’s good because it’s going to be on me if we do this.” So, the way we would make reports is, so imagine in a submarine, or oil refinery, nuclear power plant, operating room, we always report in that sequence, “Here’s what we see,” so it’s description, “And then here’s what I think,” which is analysis, “And then here’s what I think we should do,” action.

So, the first step is detect, “I have to notice something,” so it’s D2A2, detect, describe, assess, act. And we always go in that order because we’re moving from safe to less safe because description is pretty safe, “Hey, I notice the patient is turning yellow.”

Pete Mockaitis
Can’t argue with that.

David Marquet
You may not know what you need to do. That’s okay. If you couple, if you say, “Don’t bring me a problem without a solution,” guess what you’re going to get?

Pete Mockaitis
Crickets.

David Marquet
Fewer people telling you problems. That’s what you’re going to get because every time you make a speedbump to a behavior you want. You’re going to get less of a behavior that you want. So, you just put a speedbump on the behavior of reporting problems. So, you say, “Bring me problems. You don’t have to have a solution. If you have a solution, bonus points for you.” So, anyway. And studies have showed that’s exactly the impact. Because we have these well-meaning words but they often counterfire.
Pete Mockaitis
And what’s the final play?

David Marquet
So, the final play is in the industrial age, because leaders were coercing workers what to do, the final play in the industrial age is conform. We don’t want to appear approachable because that just makes it harder for us to get them to do what we want them to do, so we conform to our role in hierarchy. The new play is connect, connect as humans. If you’re going to ask people to make decisions, decisions passed through the emotional wiring in our brain, we want to think that we’re all rational but we’re not. I mean, “Who am I going to marry? Where am I going to school? What’s my…?” At the end of the day, always an emotional complement to that decision.

Healthy decisions come from healthy emotions. Healthy emotions come from feeling human at work, which means we have to connect as human beings. And so, there’s a lot of legacy behavior at work, posturing. And I was in a big global corporation. You could tell you’re getting closer to the more important people because the carpet was getting thicker. And there’s all these trappings of hierarchy. We don’t need to reinforce hierarchy. What you want to do is actually reduce hierarchy, not to zero, A, you can’t, B, I don’t think you want to. But we’ve got to get the humanity, the connection of humanity back into work if you want your people to be involved in decision-making. If you’re going to ask them what they think, then that’s decision-making. So, that’s what the final play is.

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

David Marquet
Yeah, I really like, I sound maybe like I’m a geek, but I really love Churchill’s use of a language, and so when you take your quote like this, “We shall fight on the beaches,” and you look at the words he used. Now, I had an opportunity to see a museum exhibit where he had some drafts of his speeches, and he had different words. And the pattern was he was always going back to the Anglo-Saxon variance. So, he could’ve said, “We shall travois on the shoreline,” but those are French.

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

David Marquet
What’s popping in my head right now “Mindset” by Carol Dweck. She talks about having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Kahneman. Tversky is so good. I just read also Michael Lewis’ book “The Undoing Project” which is about the work that Kahneman and Tversky did where they came up with a lot of these biases. There’s a guy, here’s one of most of your listeners might not have heard of, a guy named Panksepp, a psychologist who tickles rats to hear them laugh.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sounds like fun.

David Marquet
Anyone who does that has got to be interesting. And he’s got a number of books. I don’t understand half of what he says, but one of the things he talks about is we’re wired with…one of the systems that we’re wired with is called the seeking system, this is the curious system. This is the one that says, “I wonder what’s behind that corner? I wonder what’s over that mountain range?” And a lot of our social ills can be traced to some sort of dysfunction in our seeking system. And I just think this stuff is really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Hmm, intriguing. And, tell me is there a particular nugget you share that people quote back to you and you’re known for?

David Marquet
Well, we say build leaders at every level. One of the things I’ve been saying, recently I’ve been hearing all that back, is “Push authority to information not information to authority.” And what we’re referring to is in a hierarchy, oh, hierarchy is the same characteristic, which is the information rest that’s peripheral of the hierarchy at the people at the periphery of the hierarchy, the ones in the coat, talking to the client face to face, in the operating room, flying the airplane, whatever. But the authority for making decisions rest typically in the middle.

So, the 20th century approach was to create systems and scorecards and software where we aggregated the information from the periphery and channeled it into the middle for a decision, and what we say is what you’d want to do is take the authority for making decisions and push it out to the periphery as close to the person, people, who natively have that information and you’d get much faster feedback loops, you get much more resilience, agility, adaptability, and you get more responsible behavior by those people, and it’s more fun and they feel like their jobs matter.

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

David Marquet
So, our program is called intent-based leadership, so go to the website Intent Based Leadership. And I am on social media. I give myself a grade of like D+ for social media but I’m on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn at L. David Marquet. And the other thing we have is a thing called leadership nudges, we have almost 300 now, come out once a week, a one-minute…a lot of these things we talked about are in these little leadership nudges, so one-minute video, low-production quality, me just talking into the camera, saying, “Hey, when you got to ask the question, start the question with how. It’ll be impossible to ask a binary question and it’ll be a better question.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, David, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck and keep up the good stuff you’re doing.

David Marquet
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.