The Exchanges

Q If you were taking that one level lower, you said that you could lower the status even more than that. How would you do that?

A Lower than that is observation. I don't give them feedback. I just make an observation. Most leaders aren't mature enough to do that because they can't stop from them saying and finishing what the observation means. With kids, with people that are highly resistant, people very sensitive, sometimes it only takes an observation. Hey, I saw you do this in the meeting. What does that mean? I don't know, just an observation. Give yourself your own feedback. I'm going to call out, what did I see? What did I observe? What do I think? I noticed that people respond poorly to you when you do this. Well, do you think I should not do that? I don't know, just an observation. Observation is even lower in power because it says, I'm not even taking a position. I'm simply going to call things out the way that I see them. By calling them out, there's implications. There's a reason that that matters and why I would call that and make that observation, but I don't discuss it. People that are good at observation, a lot of good spectacular teachers are wonderful at observation. A lot of great coaches. I've seen some wonderful ski instructors, mountain climbing instructors, pilot instructors. Some of them are just wonderful. They just simply throw out observations. You're sitting there going, what does that mean? You're giving yourself your own feedback over and over again.

AI assessment note: “Lower than that is observation. I don't give them feedback. I just make an observation.”

Q What's an example of one of those admired leader behaviors in feedback?

A You ask people how questions, just like you ask them what and why and where questions all the time. How questions, when they come to feedback, changes things. Let me tell you why. A how question, if it's done and carries feedback, actually embeds the feedback inside the question. When I say to you, Ted, how are you going to upgrade the talent on your team? The feedback is that your team talent needs to be upgraded. But I don't say that. Instead, I simply ask a how question. The feedback is already embedded in the question itself. No resistance, no conversation. As soon as you start to answer, you subscribe to my feedback. Really sneaky. Now, imagine you say, well, Randall, my team's pretty good. I don't need to upgrade the talent. I'm going to make you own it anyway because it's my feedback. So I'm going to say, if we were to upgrade the talent on your team, how would we go about it? What would we look for? Because I want to carry that, but I want to carry it without any resistance. So now, listen, the most admired leaders don't only ask how questions, but they ask more how questions than you and I do when we give feedback. What they really do is they ask a how question and they collaborate with the other party. To answer the question. It isn't a gotcha. They say things like, how are you going to repair that relationship with one of your colleagues? The person says, well, and t…

AI assessment note: “You ask people how questions... embeds the feedback inside the question.”

Q be valuable to our community. One is Oldwell Labs, or OWL. OWL is the very best software I've seen for allocators to find and track managers, and I've seen a lot of them. Trust me, it'll be worth the look. There's a link in the show notes so you can learn more. And here are those closing questions. What was your first paid job, and what'd you learn from it?

A My first paid job, I picked up golf balls on a driving range. I have to tell you this story because this driving range was They had a golf club that had been sawed off at the bottom, and they had nailed on it a tomato paste can. You could scoop up a ball, put it in the can, then put it in a basket. I'd carry around this basket, and when I filled up all the basket, I'd go in and dump it, and then I'd go out again, and I got paid some small shekels to go out and collect this. But what was so fascinating about that was I wore a big board on my back because people could hitch it with a golf ball out in the range. It was a very popular place. Of course, you first realize that people would aim for you. They would actually go after you. Every once in a while, somebody would hit me in the wrong spot right at the top of my back. It would be forceful enough if you were out 200 yards. It would knock you over. It was the first time in my life, Ted, I realized some people want to hurt you for fun. That never occurred to me before. I was always innocent. I was never fully trusting. When I learned that people will hurt you for fun, that changed my entire view of people and relationships, and they really do. Because you're de-invituated. They don't know. You're not a face. You're just out there with the board on your back. But man, some of them are really good. They would hit me a lot.

AI assessment note: “My first paid job, I picked up golf balls on a driving range.”

Q And that one percent of the time where it calls for feedback is, What are best practices or behaviors to give the feedback so it can be heard and taken in knowing that there will be this resistance?

A You always have the option to allow people to internalize their own feedback. There's nothing more powerful than I give my feedback to myself rather than you telling it me. Too many leaders depend too much on telling people and delivering feedback in a more direct way. I'm not saying that that's wrong all the time, but the power is if I give myself my own feedback rather than say, well, what do you think? Just ask an open-ended question. How do you think you did? What do you think went well and didn't go well? You can do that. What I think is interesting, and admired leaders generally do this, is they use a third party. What would your mother say about what you just did? It's not what I'm saying. It's what your mother would say. It's exactly what I would say too, but I'm going to ask you to answer my question by using a third party. How do you think the customer will respond when we do this? How do you think your colleagues took that meeting? What was their conclusion when they walked out of that room today? They're going to give you an answer, and that answer is their own feedback. They're going to tell you exactly what you would have said to them directly, except they're going to generate it, It's going to come from them, and they're going to go, okay, I got it, and they're going to internalize it. Internalized feedback is feedback that's going to get acted on, remembered, ha…

AI assessment note: “allow people to internalize their own feedback... admired leaders generally do this, is they use a third party”

Q What's one thing most people don't know about you that you find interesting?

A I'm not sure I'm that interesting. I am a first responder. I once was a part of Mounted Rescue in southern Utah, where I spent a lot of time. If somebody got really lost and they couldn't find them, they would ask us to go out on our horses and go find them. So I'm well-trained in first aid. I'm well-trained in wilderness survival. Most people would never recognize that. But actually, you know what? I got a different one for you. Here's something you don't know. My undergraduate degree is in forest biology. I was a student of dendrology, mostly of silviculture, and that's how trees grow. Dendrology is the notion of identification of trees. You walk around with me any place, I tell you what every freaking tree is. And that always blows people's mind. They're like, what?

AI assessment note: “My undergraduate degree is in forest biology. I was a student of dendrology”

Q How do you keep track of the websites, hundred, the field notes you write every day? There are so many different behaviors you could be practicing. How does somebody go about deciding, oh, here's my list of behaviors I want to work on?

A The good news and bad news about admired leadership is it's overwhelming because there's so much of it. What you have to do is pick a behavior that you're going to work on. Just one. Not 20. This is 3040 years worth of work if you want it. The one you should pick is the one that you have passion for. It's the leader you want to be. You want to be the kind of leader that does that. Not necessarily just for effect. I talk a lot about technique and not to do things in technique. Because if you do them for effect, you won't keep them up. You'll only do them in some situations. You won't get very skillful at them. As soon as they don't work on somebody, you'll give them up. You got to pick the behavior that you believe in that represents what you value, that you're passionate about, and the kind of leader you want to be. Once you do that, you'll have a commitment to make that real for you over time. I'm giving you more than you could ever chew or digest with the hopes that something's going to grab you by the throat and hold you down until you do it. That's the key.

AI assessment note: “The one you should pick is the one that you have passion for.”

Q investment professionals, that means your entire team gets on-demand coaching grounded in the behaviors that drive results and build the kind of followership that retains your top talent. We use Alex, and our team at Capital Allocators swears by it. Try Alex for yourself at the link in our show notes, tryalex.admiredleadership.com. Please enjoy my conversation with Randall Stutt. Why don't we start with a refresher of your coaching philosophy?

A We come at this thing behaviorally, best practice, which is fairly rare in the marketplace. My belief is most leaders want to be better, but they don't know how. You have to give them the tools, the specific things to do to make them better. The philosophy which is so imbued in everything that we do is that if I can show you best practice behaviors, especially ones that are tremendously impactful and that you haven't done before, don't know about, never heard before, and then I can get you to make somewhat of a habit of them, then it changes things. I don't need to get you to change dozens of things, but I can get you to change a handful of behaviors that you engage in and how you give feedback, how you motivate, how you build relationships. Some of the things you do to create team that can have an impact on terms of your leadership trajectory.

AI assessment note: “We come at this thing behaviorally, best practice, which is fairly rare in the marketplace.”

Q reconciliation, trading, compliance, and more. In the AI era, asset and wealth management firms moving to Ridgeline gain a decided advantage. That's why customers call it miraculous, game-changing, and an awakening. If that's not how you would describe your investment management tech, request a demo at ridgeline.ai. And now back to the show. You mentioned a couple times best practices as distinct from behaviors. What's the difference between the two?

A Best practice is more situational. It's context specific. It may not be perfectly timeless or universal. An admired leadership behavior would have worked a hundred years ago, would work in any industry. Doesn't matter about technology. Doesn't matter who you are, where I am, what cultures we come from. It's universal in that way. That's what makes them so powerful. That's why I'm trying to find admired leader behaviors all the time. Because those are the ones that have the biggest impact, and they're the most powerful in the hands of a crafty leader. Best practices exist all kinds of places, like holding your feedback bias at bay, a best practice like a suggestion instead of feedback itself. They're contextual. I don't always want to offer suggestion. I don't always want to offer recommendation. I do need to think about the context. What do you need to hear? When do you need to hear it? That's what makes them best practice. Whereas behaviors apply anytime. I can bake them into my style, and in the way that I lead, they're never going to get me in trouble, and they're always going to have some level of influence that I want. They're rare. That's why they're so hard to find. I've been able to find 500 of them, probably 30 or 40 of them in feedback.

AI assessment note: “Best practice is more situational. It's context specific. It may not be perfectly timeless”

Q When a leader's tasked with whatever the objective is of the company they're running, investment firm they're running, and you have all these other things to be relationally close to the people to create that followership, all the ways of giving feedback, how do people go about managing their time?

A Leadership takes a lot of time if you're going to be any good at it. I'd argue that you need to organize yourself more about relationships and conversations than about tasks. That too many leaders think about tasks, and by the way, that's a perfectly acceptable majority of the world does that. But if you're going to be good at this leadership thing, you need to organize yourself around what are the conversations I want to have today? What are the relationships I want to touch and engage today? That's going to have more long-term impact for you than anything else. Time is always going to be a problem because That takes time away from getting things done, but so does a lot of other things. For example, some people are so overscheduled they've never had unstructured time to think freely and let decisions and strategy and other things bake. They make poor quality decisions as a result. That's a function of time, too. We can think we're wasting time when I'm choosing to walk to the office when, in fact, instead I'm choosing to walk and think about my decisions walking to the office without an interruption. Doing some deep work around that decision. Time for you and me is always the challenge. How do we spend it? It isn't that I don't have enough of it or I have too much of it. It's how do I spend it? When I think about time and I think about coaching leaders is, I don't care what yo…

AI assessment note: “you need to organize yourself more about relationships and conversations than about tasks.”

Q Yeah. Now I know this goes back three years now because you were one of the very first people I asked to come on the show and you politely declined in large part because you didn't really want to spill your secrets. So we're going to get to some of that later. Why don't we start with just your personal background?

A Okay, pretty humble background, normal pathway into college and graduate school, studied organizational behavior, conflict processes, and was teaching as a university professor for several years and, and got asked to do a lot of things while I was at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Got asked to do a lot of projects up in Chicago, and one thing led to another. It started getting bigger, and I started doing more things. Had to hire a few people to help me with all the projects, and Lo and behold, I had to make a choice, came back to Philadelphia where I grew up, take care of an ailing parent, like a lot of people do, and I decided that I needed to do it in a real and full-time way, so I slowly made my way to less teaching and more of our consulting work, and lo and behold, that's where it all came about. Not a very interesting story. I mean, it's just a normal mother of necessity story of taking care of a parent and getting success around some people that were interested. And so nothing special.

AI assessment note: “studied organizational behavior, conflict processes, and was teaching as a university professor”

Q When you start coaching a leader, what's the first thing you do in that interaction?

A So the first thing that I'm doing is, first of all, I'm presuming that you're holographic to a degree, and that the way that I'm feeling about you is the way that other people feel about you. So if I feel as if you're very curious and attentive, then my guess is you can be curious, attentive with other people. And, and if you're somebody that's intimidating or shuts down and stifles conversation with me, My guess is you stifle conversation with other people, and, and so I'm looking for all the signs and the inferences as to who you are behaviorally and the kinds of outcomes you get with other people on the basis of how I'm interacting with you. I'm drawing all kinds of inferences around wherever we're meeting. Who made that choice? Did I make that choice? Did you make that choice? What's around you? Am I walking to an office that's a shrine to you that's got all these memorabilia so it makes it so that you're not approachable? I mean, I'm drawing Tons and tons of inferences, even before we start this conversation, because I'm trying to size up what am I dealing with, and a lot of things that you're not even going to be conscious of, but that I'm going to be focused on, which is how do you come across to people, and who are you as a leader, and what are you passionate about, and so forth. And then I want to have a brief dive into the history, but what I'm really doing in that hi…

AI assessment note: “the first thing that I'm doing is, first of all, I'm presuming”

Q You talk a lot about values-based leadership, and I'm curious, what are the values at your firm?

A Our firm, again, not without flaws, but we have some really strong values that have evolved over time, and one of them is this whole idea of excellence and how we display excellence, so details really matter to us, and documents, and In all kinds of forms, how we follow up, and the like. Responsiveness, because relationships really matter us, but for us, being client-centric is about being responsive, so we're responsive to each other, and we're responsive to clients, and we're speedy to engage. Our firm is not a place where you would leave a message, and you not, wouldn't hear back from somebody for a long period of time, so it's a highly responsive culture. That's a really key value, and, and another piece is We're not contrarian in the fullest sense, but people like really smart, innovative ideas in our place, and so they generally look for the unusual, the novel, the thing that isn't fully embraced yet, the idea that people don't know about, and so there's a high value for not just being excellent, but being somewhat avant-garde and having new answers. Another value that really matters to us is, is the nature or the notion of How we're colleagues with one another, and so it's a, it's a place where people have been around each other a long time, so it's a very honest place. There's a lot of feedback, a lot of information that comes back and forth. People don't hold back punc…

AI assessment note: “we have some really strong values that have evolved over time, and one of them”

Q At what point in time did you start professionally coaching?

A So when I was a professor at the University of Illinois, I started getting asked to do a lot of what became known as executive coaching. So nobody called it that back in the mid eighties. To late eighties. And so I got asked to go in and understand executive presence and style and a variety of other things and help people move forward. I worked with some TV anchors. I worked with several very senior leaders who that was the thing that was in front of them. And then I got involved with all kinds of other coaching around. How do I make better decisions? What do I do in order to build my team? How do I propel this change in our organization and the like? And so I became an advisor and nobody knew what that was. It was before any of the coaching certifications existed. And so one thing led to another, and I became an executive advisor coach in the government. They call that a principled advisor, but in the modern parlance, it's just simply you're an executive coach. So I kind of was doing it before anybody else. Knew what it was. There were a few other people that were doing the same thing, by the way. It wasn't like I was the pioneer or the only one being asked, but it didn't have any labels. There was no community of people. It was a very hard thing to explain what you were doing to other people. So everybody just called it process consulting because that was the larger umbrella …

AI assessment note: “when I was a professor at the University of Illinois... back in the mid eighties”

Q have one question for you before we do that, which is, I know you've worked with a lot of investment managers and you've worked with a bunch of allocators. And I'm curious from an allocator perspective, someone investing in funds, What are the ways they might take some of the behaviors that they could learn by taking the course to help them think better about their evaluations of investment managers?

A The modules are broken into different functions of leadership, but basically, I'm not so sure you couldn't use every one of the modules and all the behaviors to say, what's the quality of this leadership? Like, what's the quality of this fund that I'm about ready to invest and allocate money to? In particular, I would want to look at the team module. So listen, independent of admired leadership, but I would tell you the trifecta of teams is trust, respect, and recognition. And so where's the trust in this team? Does this team have high levels of respect across it? And is this a high recognition place where people want to do their best work? And if you go through the team module, while it doesn't say those three things, and I'm not even sure I used that in the introduction, that basically what all those behaviors produce. And by the way, it's a little more complex than you think, because here's the issue of trust is largely a function of experience and dialogue and conversation. That's how we come to predict people and find certainty and the like. And so I would want them to look at some of those team behaviors and say, do I see anything like those team behaviors in this, in this management? But the respect thing becomes really interesting because remember that I can respect you on two different categories. I can respect your competence, your skill, or I can respect your charact…

AI assessment note: “In particular, I would want to look at the team module.”

Q What teaching from your parents has most stayed with you?

A My parents lived a very different life. My father flew bombers in World War II. My mother was somebody that had to go to work when I was young because my father was sick. These were people who worked really hard. We came from a very modest place. We didn't have a lot of the advantages a lot of other people had. So I learned about hard work, I learned about sacrifice, but my parents always believed in an expression that I still use, and that expression was, you're only as good as you're willing to be bad. And to them, that means try everything. Expose yourself to everything. Take the risks. The fact that you're not going to be good at something or that you're going to fail at something, that's okay. Because you're never going to be good unless you're willing to be bad at stuff. And that doesn't mean you have to stay there. You don't have to continue doing that. But give yourself the widest exposure. Don't close off relationships or conversations or new experiences. Go out and do it all. And then take the risk to try it. And you might stink at it, and that's ok, but you're never gonna be good. So you're only as good as you're willing to be bad. That was something that never left me. So while my parents believed that talents came in many different forms, and none of us have all of them, and the one thing that nobody can do unless you let them is outwork you. They believe deeply in…

AI assessment note: “that expression was, you're only as good as you're willing to be bad.”

Q coaches. Now, you have developed an online course called Admired Leadership, and I'm just going to flat out vouch for this because I've dove into it over the last week and gotten through a good chunk of it, and It's amazing. The nuggets are just amazing. I'm going to be telling people about it. So what was the impetus for sharing this more broadly than just within your coaching clients?

A So understand that I went here kicking and screaming, absolutely kicking and screaming, because I've been a big proponent that the stuff that we've been able to uncover and that we use in our coaching practice, tremendously powerful stuff, things that we can teach people, Things that I can summarize in just a handful of minutes. There's a lot of leadership wisdom there. We focus on the stuff that people don't know rather than what they do know, or at least that's what our goal is. We could have written 50 books, and we chose not to ever write a book, and every once in a while I'll make a presentation for a client organization, and that's self-satisfying to a degree, but we've kept this stuff under wraps. We've lost a few behaviors over the years by being out and about, In public forums, one of which became a very, very popular book that sold millions of copies based on one idea that's no longer in the course because it's somebody else's attributed to them now when, when I know they were in the room when I spoke at one point. So I was not a big fan of the idea of doing this, and I've been railed on by lots of my colleagues over the years. Um, sometimes for vanity sake, they just want to be known for this stuff, but usually, and the arguments go like this. Number one is more people should benefit from our work. We can make anybody a better parent, a better teacher, a better coach…

AI assessment note: “Number one is more people should benefit from our work.”

Q As a live example of AI coming into, it's clearly a human-to-human interaction business. How have you thought about how Alex impacts CRA Admired Leadership as a business?

A It makes us stronger. It gives people 24 seven access to our content and to the way we think about things. At two o'clock in the morning, you can ask Alex a question. By the way, Alex is entirely confidential. We can't see your questions and answers. We do a couple of quality checks randomly, but other than that, it's just like a coach. It's totally confidential. I think it makes the coaches better. It certainly enables everybody in our firm to know our content more thoroughly. It's simply a supplement to you. In many cases, we have certain coaches in our firm who will engage a client and the two of them together say, let's see what Alex says. Let's explore that, which is fascinating in and of itself. It's not something that I do in my coachings. I don't want to talk to myself. Although fascinating, Ted, a couple of weeks ago, I argued with Alex and I've done that many times. It's an LLM, but it doesn't think. Here I am arguing with it back and forth. I said to Alex, Alex, talking to you, engaging you is like talking to myself. And says, well, Randall, I respectfully disagree. And I go, why? And says, I know everything from you. I know your content, but I can pull it together faster than you can. I can pull things in ways that you don't. I can be original in the things that I say as well, because I'm blending and synthesizing things, just like you would synthesize things. I mig…

AI assessment note: “It makes us stronger. It gives people 24 seven access to our content”

Q Well, we'll go into this more later, but what's an example of something from 25 years ago that's still powerful today?

A Well, like that whole idea of fan-ness that I use is something that I found very early on, where you and I know that lots of different ways to think about motivation and inspiration, overwhelmingly because people are very, very different from one another. The leadership literature is looked at in motivation and inspiration as well as almost every other area of leadership from an idea of Of differences. First thing is to understand what motivates yourself, you as a leader, and so, like, for example, I'm motivated by control, autonomy, responsibility. That's a big thing for me. I like to, to be able to make and create things that I'm in control of, responsible for, and that I've got the autonomy to win, lose, or whatever else. That's a big driver for me. I know that. I have some colleagues, for example, that are very motivated by incentives. I So not just recognition and approval and praise, which is a pretty, pretty broad one, but I have one colleague that's very coin operated, that everything's about the dollar and what they get paid. Their language of respect is about compensation, and I get that, and that's what motivates them. And so the traditional way of looking at motivation and inspiration is, is to look at it and say, who am I, and then who are other people, and how do I adapt to To other people. One person that you work with needs a swift kick in the butt, needs high c…

AI assessment note: “like that whole idea of fan-ness that I use is something that I found”

Q The concept of taking something that you're convinced is a behavior of admired leaders and sharing it so someone has to practice it. How long does it take for someone to adopt something new they haven't been doing?

A I thought you were going to ask me how long does it take me to figure out the damn behavior? Because sometimes I know it's there. I can't articulate it in a way that I can teach it or that other people can teach it, and that takes some time. You've got to give it a language. You have to give a vocabulary to that behavior. Once you give it a vocabulary, if it's the right vocabulary, it makes all the sense in the world after that. Until you can actually harness it, it's not. In terms of teaching or creating a habit, there's things that you would do. Number one is you have to keep this thing in front of you every day. You have to have some mnemonic device that reminds you. I don't care if it's a note card or post-it note or a screen saver or lipstick on a mirror, then you have to try it every single day. There's got to be one opportunity every day in some relationship, hopefully initially low consequence situation. Trusted relationship. You got to do it every day, at least once. The really good ones, the people that are trying to create habits, they'll schedule it. They'll go, next Tuesday, I'm going to be in this meeting, I'm going to do that behavior. The people that are really focused on this will keep a running journal of opportunities taken missed for themselves. Things I could have done, could have said differently, or I like the way I did that, and how did I do that? They'l…

AI assessment note: “Once you do that for a handful of weeks, three, four, five, six weeks”