The Exchanges

Q How did you define The best leaders and what is leadership? Maybe just so we're all operating with a common understanding for this conversation.

A Yeah. Well, I mean, what, what a, what a loaded question because it's imbued with so many charged assumptions, if you will. So, so Dozens of definitions of leadership and leaders, but, but, but after reading all that literature for years and years and working with people for as many decades as I have, I've landed on a really simple idea that I think is fairly self-evident. What, what leaders do is they make situations And people better. That at the essence of end of the day, the essence of what they do is they strategically, practically, um, engage in some level of message, decision, action, routine, but also some level of symbolism sometimes that actually moves people to be different. So when, when you offer a, an individual that is feeling grief, um, comfort, you're leading. When, when you, uh, help a, a group that's experiencing lots of conflict to deescalate that conflict, even though you're not the team leader, but you're, you're doing things like you interject humor, you're leading. So leadership can happen any place. It happens anytime someone makes the choice to make the situation or people better. It doesn't always work just like anything else that we do. Sometimes it actually can blow up in your face. You can make a choice that actually makes things worse. I'm always amazed that, you know, that people can, no matter what, you can always make the situation worse by you…

AI assessment note: “What, what leaders do is they make situations And people better.”

Q phone, uh, last, you had mentioned that There's certain types of leaders that just naturally don't give positive feedback. You mentioned, um, the standards that they have for themselves and sort of like, they don't want to say something cause it seems inauthentic, right? Like they don't want to just find something. It needs to be like really amazing. You want to talk to me a little bit about that?

A Yeah. Well, um, you know, praise is tough for some people because they, they don't personally need it. So talk, go back to the individual difference piece. I don't need it. So why would I give it to you? Um, but the most common reason that I find, uh, that leaders don't give praise is because they have really high standards that when they say excellence, they really want people to, to, to do excellent work. Um, they withhold that. They, they watch people, um, seek their approval to get that praise and that Makes them feel powerful a little bit, makes them feel a little bit more as if they're having the influence they want. And so that even encourages them to withhold it more. I've been around very few, uh, leaders who get too much praise from the people above them, um, in almost any organization. Now you will see that, um, I think it was the, I think it was Einstein that wrote the quote, you know, uh, can't wait for us to get over this praise so I can get back to my work. People that are super dedicated to achievement Um, will oftentimes tell you that they don't need praise because their intrinsic motivation is so powerful and so strong that the external kind of praise approval recognition doesn't, doesn't have much impact on them. But for the most part, most of us want more praise that we get and leaders are stingy about it because either they don't need it or because their st…

AI assessment note: “most common reason that I find, uh, that leaders don't give praise is because”

Q Is, is that a common thing or? It is.

A Yeah, it is. I mean, because the larger culture and the talent in that organization is what is influencing whether, um, different kinds of processes or acts or strategies are going to be enacted in a way that produces sustainable outcomes. I believe it was Peter Drucker that said, uh, culture eats strategy for lunch. I would tell you that talent, um, sets the table. Um, and so without talent, you've got nothing. If I'm trying to influence an organization at the deepest level, I want to deal with talent first. Um, but, but culture has a big impact and that's what you're really describing. You're describing a culture that is either self-satisfied or that believes everything's going to be a fad. They're going to wait new leaders out. They're, they're, they're, they're really, they like the outcomes they're getting by being dysfunctional. You know, I, I have to tell you a fun story for me. So when I was first starting to work with senior leaders in organizations, I was working in a large insurance company. And, um, they had a problem that had been a perennial problem for them, and the CEO had asked me to work on this problem with the team, and I worked on the problem, and I came up with what I thought was a very practical, a very powerful, very elegant solution. Um, I presented it in front of the, uh, the executive team. They all believed, similar to me, that it was really a beauti…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it is. I mean, because the larger culture and the talent in that organization”

Q How would you answer that question? Our family values.

A Oh, I, I think every family values different things, but at a certain point, I think when kids are young and they're very impressionable and they haven't had a big peer influence yet, and education hasn't, hasn't decided to take our parenting from us and, and so forth and so on, I, I think it's important that they have a common sense of what the family stands for. Um, one of the most common things that families stand for is the family comes first. Uh, that's a very common value that we, you know, it's about us first. We stand together We, we have solidarity as a family. We're always here for each other. We have unconditional love, which is another value that's part of that. I think that's a common one, but there's no right set of values, but I think it's early on while the kids are younger and they, they don't have the ability to form their own values or, or have their own experiences where they can generate their own independent views. You've got to have, you've got to say, this is what we all value together right now. You'll be able to make up your choice on your own soon enough, but for right now, that's who we are and what we stand for. And, and by the way, you, you and I both know that it has a tremendous influence on what eventually shapes their, their, their independent values.

AI assessment note: “one of the most common things that families stand for is the family comes first.”

Q away from this episode with some tools you can put into practice today to make you a better leader, partner, and parent. It's time to listen and learn. You're the founder of the Admired Leadership Institute, and one of the interesting things that we had talked about before on the phone was your sort of view of leadership as behavioral and not psychological. Can we just dive right into that?

A Listen, for very good reasons, because people are very different from one another. It's no surprise that leadership and the way that people academically and professionally have looked at leadership focuses on those differences. And so anyone that's ever had a team or had been in a marriage or had a partner or simply had multiple children realize that the differences are marked between people. And then what you realize very quickly is that You yourself stand out in very distinctive ways. We're all unique. And so what the psychological individual difference view suggests is that the first step to becoming better as a leader, um, or as even as a person is to understand who you are and then to understand the differences on your team or, or with your spouse or with your friends and like, and then, and then to adapt and flex to those differences. And that makes perfect sense. And in fact, it's a, it's a requisite A piece that I would say we should all respect our psychology and literally just about everyone's trained to think about leadership in that way. But over a really long period of time, having learned a lot of the classic classification schemes and, and ways of diagnosing and assessing people's differences and so forth, the more experience you have, the more you realize that people don't, they, they understand themselves better, but they don't change. They don't actually get b…

AI assessment note: “in contrast, not necessarily as a replacement, but as an addition to the psychological view”

Q Can you make that real? Like you did with the, the other example for the behavior?

A I had a teenager once. I mean, he's older now, but I had a teenager once. And I remember distinctly him coming home and I would say, and I said to him one day, what's your priority this week? And he said, he was a lacrosse player and he, he was looking forward to a particular game. He said, um, it's the big game on Friday. That's my priority. I'm working out. I'm practicing. I'm really focused. And I saw that's great. I said, um, As far as I remember, you know, your calculus exam is like, 50% of your grade is on Friday's exam. And he said, yeah. And I said, I think that's a lot higher priority, and let me make something clear to you. If we don't do well on that exam, we're not prepared, you're not even going to play in the lacrosse game, right? I mean, that's a much higher priority. That's a simple, fun one for me, but it makes the point. Sometimes people have self-interest that holds something up higher that, in fact, misses the point. Too many times they don't have priorities. But I'll give you another example, which I think is more concrete than that. In an organization that I'm in, I've recently asked a senior leader of all the things going on with their team, what is the highest priority? What are they really focused on? And he gave me a much longer range piece. And I said, well, short term, what, what is it? So the long-term goal was around, of course, achieving certain k…

AI assessment note: “I'll give you another example, which I think is more concrete than that.”

Q Was it surprising to you to find that there was so much commonality as you studied sort of the best leaders in terms of their actions?

A Hugely surprised. Yeah. I mean, again, cause I was trained like everyone else. I was trained to look for differences and, and once you look for differences, you can find them any place you look, but finding things that are in common that people share is not easy. Now, let me say it's really easy to find the self-evidence stuff. It's easy that, you know, good leaders Keep their promises. They admit their mistakes. They show themselves to be human. They show up in a crisis. The stuff that's been fairly self-evident, and by the way, it wasn't always self-evident, but in the last, um, 50 years, a hundred years, we know a lot of the basics, but to find commonalities, the routines of excellence of leadership, or better said, the routines of leadership excellence, to find those things that we don't know, that aren't as common, that we didn't learn in third grade. That, that was really hard, and it surprised me when we study really fabulous leaders and we ask that question, what do they do that other people don't do, how quickly you can find certain things, but I'm always surprised of how many leaders who don't know each other have come from different places, different experiences, different generations, and they all do some of the same things that you and I have never been taught to do, and so that's always surprising to me. Every time I find a new admired leadership behavior, I'm alw…

AI assessment note: “Hugely surprised. Yeah. I mean, again, cause I was trained like everyone else.”

Q I want to get back to some of these behaviors in a second, but a brief sort of tangent here. What is the hardest behavior that you teach or offer to transfer to others?

A Yeah, I'm not sure there is one. I mean, because it, lots going to come down to how committed and passionate you are to change that thing Sometimes that's going to be a function of whether, um, you've gotten a lot of resistance or you haven't been very effectual in that area and so forth. But I would turn your question around to say, um, why are some people coachable and other people not coachable in any given behavior? And what my experience is some people like themselves too much. They aren't open to making change because they like the outcomes they're getting. They've been very successful. They, when they look in the mirror, they like what they see. By the way, most of those people get almost their advice, all their advice and counsel in that same mirror. They are very comfortable with the kinds of responses and reactions they get. They're good enough. And so when I come to them and say, we should probably work on X or, you know, you want to change Y, their response is, yeah, and they'll dabble at it, but they won't really be committed to it. So I find that this whole issue of, of ego, of vanity, of success, of, of being comfortable, of, of being good enough is a, is big an impediment. And that makes it true of any behavior that I'm trying to teach them or show them or get them to do differently. And some people have just been rewarded by the wrong, to the wrong things. They…

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure there is one... lots going to come down to how committed”

Q So can you get into one? Yeah. Give me an example of one of these behaviors.

A Let's take the idea of balance, the simple balance. And, and, and, and by the way, you know, this one, this is in your head. I'm just going to be very specific about it. Okay. And, and it's going to take me a little, little while to really unpack this one because it's got a lot of different pieces to it, but I think you'll find it rather fascinating. So, so no surprise. We all have a natural and intuitive understanding that negative information carries a lot more impact and weight than positive information. So even when I think you've done a lousy job, I'll normally start it with some throwaway, like, oh, that went pretty well. Like, yeah, you really worked hard at that. Like, oh, you know, the audience seemed to really like, like that one piece. Um, you know, you'll start out with some softening of the blow. All right. Because number one, you, you want people to hear you, but number two, you naturally know that if you go negative to start with, that people withdraw, they shut down, they don't, they react, they do all kinds of things. So, so, so naturally what happens is we start to offer feedback. Most feedback and criticism Most of it other than praise and flattery and so forth has, has a negative tinge to it. And so not all, not all, not all of it, but a lot, but more of it when you, when you're trying to improve people's performance, you're giving them at least constructive…

AI assessment note: “Let's take the idea of balance, the simple balance.”

Q So can you give me an example of one of these behaviors?

A Let's take the idea of balance, the simple balance. And, and, and, and by the way, you know, this one, this is in your head. I'm just going to be very specific about it. Okay. And, and it's going to take me a little, little while to really unpack this one because it's got a lot of different pieces to it, but I think you'll find it rather fascinating. So, so no surprise. Um, we all have a natural and intuitive, um, understanding that negative information carries a lot more impact and weight than positive information. So even when I think you've done a lousy job, I'll normally start it with some throwaway, like, oh, that went pretty well. Like, yeah, you really worked hard at that. Like, oh, you know, the audience seemed to really like, like that one piece. Um, you know, you'll start out with some softening of the blow. All right. Because number one, you, you want people to hear you, but number two, you naturally know that if you go negative to start with, that people withdraw, they shut down, they don't, they react, they do all kinds of things. So, so, so naturally what happens is we start to offer feedback, most feedback and criticism Most of it other than praise and flattery and so forth has, has a negative tinge to it. And so not all, not all, not all of it, but a lot, but more of it when you, when you're trying to improve people's performance, you're giving them at least con…

AI assessment note: “Let's take the idea of balance... you'll start out with some softening of the blow”

Q that's a really good way to frame it. How, like, it seems easy when everything's positive. How, how do you deal with, um, bad news and still be somebody's fan? Like, how do you have a tough conversation with your, your spouse or somebody at work when you want to be their fan, but you know, the, the end result is going to sort of not be what they want.

A Yeah, you're not being a fan in that moment. I mean, you're being a fan generally in the sense of, if I look at the composite of our relationship, is, is the composite the tenor of our relationship? Is it one where you're a fan of mine? Can I tell by all your behaviors? That doesn't mean that you're trying to be a fan when you give me hard feedback, or that when you're holding me accountable, or when my performance has really been in the basement, and you have to have that conversation with me. I know a very few people that can be a fan when, when we're having those conversations, but the question is, at the end of those conversations, Where is it that, you know, I can feel about our relationship and what's the composite in my, do I feel your fairness most of the time? So I would just have to tell you that again, leadership has different functions. Being inspirational, motivational as an example is a really important function, but it's not all of leadership. If the only thing you were was inspirational, but you couldn't make great decisions, you couldn't hold me accountable. You couldn't elevate my performance. You didn't offer me good feedback so I could get better. You weren't able to establish a connective relationship with me. Well, then your inspiration motivation is not horrible, but it's not enough. What I find is the opposite, though, that more leaders are better at mak…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, you're not being a fan in that moment.”

Q How do you repair a relationship that's broken? Like, do you go to that person and do you just start with like, Hey, I feel like our relationship is broken. It's out of balance and we need to fix that. Or do you just start to fix it?

A That's a great question. And by the way, that's not a bad strategy. It's what's called what the academic literature called going meta. Having a conversation about our conversations and the like. There's a lot of different things you could do, but if you were in a relationship that was out of balance, you know, you're just gonna, it's gonna take some time to get it back into balance. Let me give you a, uh, an example for me that's, that's real and personal. So, so I had a, um, a chief financial officer that I, I worked with in a very large organization. They had joined this organization about six months before I had started working with them. And, um, they had gotten themselves embroiled in, in all the, The lack of performance of this organization. One of the reasons they were brought in was to help turn this thing around. And almost all the metrics, almost everything about this organization was negative. Almost all the conversations with their peers was also negative. And this person, um, she was very talented, but almost every conversation, you know, she walked in your office, you knew you were going to get blasted about something that your team and your performance numbers weren't revealing or doing and the like. So people quickly got, came to, to, to both see her negatively as well as avoid her like crazy. So when I first got involved, I looked at it and I thought, wow, I me…

AI assessment note: “that's not a bad strategy. It's what's called what the academic literature called going meta.”

Q Let's start with feedback. I mean, everybody needs the right feedback at the right time, but how do, how do we convey that in a way to maximize the impact?

A So feedback's really difficult because, you know, um, there's no question that what we say And mostly when we say it is pretty contextual. Like no one would ever be able to come up with the universal that says always say this in this situation or always do this. And even when The timing of things really is, is very precise to what's happening, what already happened, what's going to happen, and so forth. So, but when we, when you study really fabulous leaders, what you learn is that the universal of feedback is how they carry messages. So how do they offer criticism? How do they offer feedback? What are some of the things that they do that are very specific? And then you start to learn things that once you hear them, you naturally start to subscribe to a view that says, ooh, there's something there. I can do better at That. That's a really important part. The other pieces is when, when I look to the practical literature of feedback, What you generally get is some useful ideas without any question, but, but they don't have that universal applicability where I can practice them and they work all the time. So I don't become very masterful at them. So it's the difference between, um, what I normally call technique and routine. So, so feedback is the classic area that that occurs in. And that is, so let's just say that I subscribe to the idea that, um, I should ask you for permission

AI assessment note: “the universal of feedback is how they carry messages”

Q And are these behaviors that the best leaders use at work or are they just behaviors that are ingrained into them as people and they transfer to relationships outside of work like friendships or?

A Well, you know, it's such a wonderful softball question because there's so many ways I can answer that. So, so let me tell you a story. Several decades ago, I first started studying what I considered to be the best leaders that I could inside one organization. And we all know that the way the popular culture as well as the academic cultures Um, define leadership always has something to do with results, getting things done, performing at a high level, whether that's measured or not, um, being good at what you do. And so results really matter. And in fact, what you find in, in our society in particular, that results really define leadership in a, in a very, um, uh, systemic way.

AI assessment note: “such a wonderful softball question because there's so many ways I can answer that”