TKP Insights: Leadership

In the third installment in a series of episodes, The Knowledge Project curates essential segments from five guests revolving around one theme: leadership. This episode helps put a unique definition on leadership and examines whether or not good leaders are context-dependent, the differences between a great leader and an average leader, how great leaders should balance feedback, the difference between being right and doing right, a playbook for managing teams, and the importance of radical candor. The guests on this episode are author Jim Collins (Episode 61, 110), author and leadership expert Jennifer Garvey Berger (Episode 43), co-founder of the Admired Leadership Institute Randall Stutman (Episode 96), the President and COO of Athletic Greens Kat Cole (Episode 117), the former CEO of Ford Alan Mulally (Episode 151), and co-founder of the Conscious Leadership Group Diana Chapman (Episode 130). -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Our Sponsors: MetaLab: Helping the world’s top companies design, build, and ship amazing products and services. https://www.metalab.com Aeropress: Press your perfect cup, every time. https://aeropress.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:15Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to the Knowledge Project Podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this show is to master the best of what other people have already figured out. To do that, I sit down with people at the top of their game to uncover the useful lessons that you can learn and apply in life and business. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member-only episodes, access before anyone else, hand-edited transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Over the last five years, I've been lucky enough to speak with some of the most incredible people in the world. When I listen to past episodes, one thing that stands out is how well the insights from these conversations stand the test of time.

• 1:00Shane Parrish?

  They're as relevant and insightful today as when they were originally recorded. And in a world that encourages a treadmill of perishable information, it's worth revisiting wisdom that doesn't expire. So a few times a year, we'll go back to earlier episodes, some of which you may have missed, some of which you may have forgotten, and pull out some timeless gems around a single theme. The theme for this episode is leadership. You'll hear from Jim Collins, who defines leadership and examines history to see how context-dependent good leadership really is. Then, leadership coach Jennifer Berger shares the practical insights that separate average and great leaders. Randall Stutman from the admired Leadership Institute discusses the importance of giving

• 1:45Shane Parrish?

  feedback, something, he says, everyone knows how to do, but in reality, they get very wrong. It's not enough to give feedback. How you do it makes all the difference. Kat Cole, the president and COO of Athletic Greens, talks about the importance of doing right versus being right, the challenges of leading a business in different cultures, and a unique heuristic for accepting criticism.

• 2:10Shane Parrish?

  Alan Mulally, the former CEO of Ford, will teach us the elements of his working together management system that helps you lead any team through principles and empowerment. And finally, Diana Chapman, co-founder of the Conscious Leadership Group, teaches us some crucial advice about running a team, the importance of unrelenting candor, and how teams can more effectively make decisions. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:43Shane Parrish?

  From episode 67, here's Jim Collins.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I don't know if someone else can make someone a leader. I don't know if you can teach leadership, but I'm pretty sure you can learn it. And I think that distinction is key. I think it's very arrogant to say that you or I or anyone else could take someone and I'm going to teach you leadership. But I've watched people learn it. And I think a big part of what it takes to learn it, there's kind of two things that would... Let me highlight one for the moment. Embracing the idea of seeing what has to be done and then exercising the art of getting people to want to join you in getting it done. But it starts with clarity of something's got to be done and I am not going to be a bystander. So when I look at, for example,

• 3:32Speaker 01

  the school principals that I studied, I know this one superintendent, let me just tell you this story, who sort of grew into a leader, takes over a school district, sees that that school district had kids from previous years before this person was in charge, not really in charge, but was superintendent, where there'd been low graduation rates. A whole bunch of kids had not graduated from high school. And he takes one look at it and says, this is just wrong. Somebody's got to do something. So you would think, well, then, great. That person's going to lead people to do what's necessary to increase graduation rates. But here was the extra leadership step. When you recognize something is just wrong, something's just got to be done. Somebody's got to step forward.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  I can't be a bystander, right? He looks at it and he says, "We have to take responsibility for the kids before I was superintendent who didn't graduate. And we're going to go find them." And we're going to create a program to bring them back into the schools. And we're going to make sure that they get out with their high school degree. I'm going to take responsibility to make sure that happens for the kids who were here before I was even superintendent. And I'm going to walk down to a building in this town. And I'm going to say, we need space for this. You have an extra floor in your building. You need to help these kids because somebody's got to do something. Will you join me and give us space so we can bring them back and get them their degrees? So what is leadership?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Eisenhower put it as leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. It's an art form and everybody is a different kind of an artist. Some are painters, some are sculptors, some are orators, some are good at like just getting the right people together around the table. Some are good at admonition, some are really good at asking the right question, right? There's different kinds of art, but it's an art. And you learn from others, you don't copy them. You you get your own artistry of getting people to want to join you and not being a bystander about what's got to be done. Those people are coming over the hill, someone's got to do something. Those kids didn't get their education, someone's got to do something. This product has incredible potential, someone's got to do something.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And you infuse that in folks to be able to to do that. That is, I think, where the real start of the leadership begins. Hey, we got this computer, we made it for ourselves. Somebody's got to do something to bring this to a whole bunch of other people because it's so cool. We can sit here and think it's cool, or we can do something. And I think that's the seabed of where the leading really begins. Second, one of the people, and I think I've actually asked him if I could write this, so I think I can share this story. One of the great four-star general officers, fellow named General Austin, who really had a profound impact on me when I ventured off to West Point. And he held the chair two times after me.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  He was actually the most recent chair holder for the class of 51 chair. He was one of the only four-star generals to come out of his era, his class at West Point. He might be the only one, but certainly one of the only ones. Ended up with a very storied career, spectacular leader. And he told me the story about partway through his career. He was worried a little bit about promotions. Is he getting promoted fast enough? His career, right? And one day he just woke up and changed. And he said, I'm not going to take care of my career anymore. I'm going to take care of my people.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And the moment I did that, everything changed because they wouldn't let me fail. When young people come to me asking, I'd like some career advice. My first response is let's just stop asking that question.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  What have you done for someone else?

• 7:24Shane Parrish?

  How can I be useful?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, how can I be useful? How can I take care of my people? Take care of your people, not your career. And then General Austin ended up as a spectacular leader. And I think those two sorts of things, if you're sort of thinking about seed beds of how we would help young people grow into the leaders that our world desperately needs in all walks of life. It's one, don't be a bystander. See what has to be done. And someone's got to do something. And if you feel someone's got to do something, then you can exercise the art of getting people to want to do what you see must be done with you. The second is stop taking care of your career. Start taking care of your people. And if you do that, then they won't let you fail.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  So I don't know if an outside entity, you know, I certainly couldn't like make somebody a leader, but I think people can learn it. And I think that's kind of some of the catalyst and the leavening of the bread based on what I've seen. And I'm really optimistic. I mean, I think that if I stand back and I look at the young leaders that are coming up, the ones I met at West Point, a lot of the ones that I've, that are on my research team, young people that I meet in life. We live in an era when it's easy for people to feel pessimistic. I absolutely reject. I'm incredibly optimistic. And my reason I'm optimistic is because what I see in the leadership capabilities of the generations that are coming. And I think we'll be in very good hands.

• 8:56Shane Parrish?

  One more question about leadership because I just can't help myself. But like, how much of leadership do you think is contextual? Or as somebody we think of as an exemplary leader in one situation would be mediocre or below in another situation?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  So obviously, there's a contextual element to everything. And I think that's something you talked earlier about, about even decision making. There's this idea that there isn't kind of an isolated, perfect universe. We don't live on a Euclidean grid and there's context and there's certainly social context. We know from social psychology that almost everything is affected by social context. And you never know how you're going to behave, how you're going to react in any given situation until you're there. And that's why we should always be very humble about our own sense of ourselves, knowing that we'll always act in a certain way because you actually don't know under certain pressures. So you should be very humble about that.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 9:57Speaker 03

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• 10:00Speaker 02

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• 10:25Speaker 03

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• 10:56Speaker 01

  So context matters a lot. That said, I think what the evidence very clearly shows me is that I can see leaders who learn how to be effective across very different kinds of contexts. And so, for example, let's take Eisenhower, phenomenal example. You're Supreme Commander of Allied Forces. Before that, you were relatively undistinguished major. You were brought up by General Marshall and so forth. But you know, being a five star, which have only been five five star generals, I believe, in the history of the US military, but being a five star general is a very different leadership context than being president in a political system. And now, but what's also interesting is along the way, he also went to be a president of a university and really struggled there.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  So what you have with Eisenhower is you've got a two wins and one, which was not as much of a win, which is the presidency of the university. What does Eisenhower's case show? It shows, number one, that two very different contexts, he could be enormously successful. He was successful in both military and presidential. But in a university setting, he was less successful.

• 12:01Shane Parrish?

  From episode 43, Jennifer Garvey Berger.

• 12:05Speaker 04

  So much of leadership ability is about how other people experience themselves in your presence, right? So a great leader has a presence that makes other people bigger. I was, I have a client who's a chief executive of a big company, and I was with him a couple of weeks ago, watching him as he met with people and as he had his meeting. And the way he speaks to people brings out their goodness, right? You can see people actually kind of, kind of grow in his presence. They, they feel more comfortable to take risks.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  They feel more comfortable to say a thing that maybe is controversial. They, they have more room to play. And you can actually watch it kind of physically happen in their bodies. They stand a little straighter, they look them in the eye, they smile, they've got this kind of resonance that I think a truly stupendous leader brings into the world.

• 13:11Shane Parrish?

  And are you differentiating this between a charismatic leader, as we're kind of taught, and this sort of amplifying leader that you're, you're kind of talking about? Or do I have that wrong?

• 13:23Speaker 04

  No, you're totally right. A charismatic leader, when he walks into the room or she walks into the room, makes you feel good about her or him, right? Like, I walk into the room and I'm a charismatic leader and you think, wow, and you think about that person. A great leader, I think, you are, that great leader walks into the room and you feel bigger. Like, you don't think, wow, what a great leader. You think, wow, I'm willing to say this thing. I feel more comfortable in my own skin. I'm just having ideas I haven't had before. Like, a great leader makes other people better. And I think that's the fundamental difference between kind of the charismatic, heroic image

• 14:07Speaker 04

  of leadership that has gotten, that has been a help for us and also a hindrance for us as a human race for a long time. And the kind of leadership that we need now, the kind of leadership that the world is calling for from us now, which is not about having one person and following that one person, but having someone who can create the conditions that make us all better, make us all bigger, smarter, more creative, more moral, just better.

• 14:39Shane Parrish?

  I want to come back to the variable, other, any other variables. But before we get there, why is it different right now? Like, what has changed that causes that maybe the type of leadership that is required going forward is not the type of leadership that maybe we historically got us to where we are?

• 14:58Speaker 04

  I think the world is just so complex, Shane, right? That, that it used to be that if you had a really smart, charismatic leader, that person could know enough about the market, the market was going to be similar over time, that person could predict things pretty well, and that person could say, let's go that away and be pretty sure that that way was good. And so, we talk about leaders with these strong visions and, you know, all that kind of stuff. Right now, like, who knows, right? Who knows what's going to happen next? Anybody who tells you they know what's going to happen next with the media or with professional

• 15:38Speaker 04

  services firms or in the tech industry or the insurance industry or whatever, like, those people are delusional. We don't know what's going to happen next. The thing that we know is it's going to be different from now. And so, we need a different kind of leadership to lead us into the unknown and to, and that sort of leadership needs to help other people be bigger because we need more collective force of leadership than any one human being can hold.

• 16:05Shane Parrish?

  Okay, I want to come back to that. And I think we can explore that when we talk more about complexity and the Keneffin framework a little bit later in the conversation. So going back to the variables that you would kind of look at to assess leadership ability, the amplification is one. What are the others?

• 16:25Speaker 04

  I think a leader needs to have a real curiosity about the world, right? A curiosity about other people's perspectives. A leader who feels certain cannot be learning from other people. So the more sure you are as a leader about exactly what's right and what's wrong, exactly where you're going, the less open you will be to hearing that you're wrong until it's too late. Whereas a leader with more curiosity, more openness to other people's perspective, which can be totally cultivated, right? You don't have to be born that way. You can achieve that with effort. A leader with more curiosity about those things is much more likely to be able to

• 17:09Speaker 04

  pick up on little signals that make a big difference before bad things happen. Like, history is filled with leaders who were told in whispers that there was disaster ahead and who were so certain about their own

• 17:27Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  ...perspective that they marched into disaster headlong, right? A curious leader listens to whispers and begins to make sense of them, not necessarily to believe them all, but to know that there's something going on to be attuned to.

• 17:45Shane Parrish?

  Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Amplification, curiosity, not being certain about their own beliefs, I guess. But that also conflicts with what we think of as leadership. I mean, when we look at political leaders, you know, they do amplify, but they're, you know, I don't know if they're curious, but they appear very certain when they're up there debating that they have all the answers. I can't remember the last time I heard a politician go, "I don't know." And they're asked a variety of questions, from like healthcare to budgeting, and they seemingly have all these answers. How do you look at that?

• 18:23Speaker 04

  With trepidation. I think that this world of, I mean, particularly in politics, but the world of the soundbite has not been our friend, right? The soundbite that tries to put in a sentence or a phrase, the complexity of an actual issue is necessarily misleading and partial. And the more addicted we get to soundbites and the more hyped up we get by them, then the more simple our leadership will be as opposed to the more complex.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  It takes, it takes a little bit of effort and a little bit of slowing down and a little bit of breathing to get your head around a really complex situation. You can't do it instantly and you can't do it in a soundbite. And so that's why we have these like bizarre challenges these days about this super simplistic problem solving that in a complex world just tends to create bigger and bigger problems.

• 19:33Shane Parrish?

  From episode 96, Randall Stutman.

• 19:36Speaker 05

  So feedback's really difficult because, you know, 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 a 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

• 20:19Speaker 05

  to a view that says, oh, there's something there, I can do better at that. That's a really important part. The other piece is, is when, when I look to the practical literature of feedback. What you generally get is some useful ideas without any question, 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 what I normally call technique and routine. 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 I should ask you for permission for me to give you feedback. Now, I can see the conditions by which that would be a good idea or not a

• 21:01Speaker 05

  good idea. It speaks to relationships and power and all kinds of things. So I like the behavior. It's a fairly broad piece of advice that's given inside there. But it doesn't work in all situations. There's a lot of cases where you shouldn't ask for permission. There's a lot of cases where you've given people feedback over and over again, they haven't acted on it. There's cases where, in situations you'll find yourself in where people want to deflect and want to resist the feedback that you want. So asking permission, they'll never find the right time or energy to do that and the like. A routine is something you do because you want to be that person. That's the kind of way that you want to give feedback as an example. You want to commit to that this is, and so you master it, you do it all the time and all the feedback that you give. And you become

• 21:46Speaker 05

  masterful at that piece. And you do it on a consistent basis. People come to know it as part of your style. So they don't see it as out of the ordinary. And now you become more and more skillful at it until it's almost second nature and it becomes a habit. So we're after trying to teach leaders how to move things to routine and not do them for the point of technique.

• 22:06Shane Parrish?

  So can you give me?

• 22:07Speaker 05

  You want to get into one?

• 22:07Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, give me an example of one of these behaviors.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Let's take the idea of balance, the simple balance. 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 it's going to take me a 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 no surprise, we all have a natural and intuitive understanding that negative information carries a lot more impact and weight than positive

• 22:38Speaker 05

  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 that one piece." You'll start out with some softening of the blow. All right, because number one, 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 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 a negative tinge to it. And so, not all of it, but more of it. When you're trying to improve people's performance,

• 23:21Speaker 05

  you're giving them at least constructive criticism around, "Try this differently, do this," and so forth. So because we know that the negative and the positive are very different, and because we know the negative is overweighted, it's called the negativity effect, by the way, not my research, we naturally buffer almost everything we say on a scale. We start with a little bit of positive, and then we offer a little negative. And then we get to our negative. Now, if I do that consistently, if I give you one little positive, and then I give you my four criticisms, the balance is not there. It's actually out of balance, right? So let's take an example of that, just real simply. Let's just say, let's take the idea example of a presentation. I'm just gonna make it up on top of my head. But let me give you two pieces of feedback presentation, right?

• 24:07Speaker 05

  So my first feedback goes, "Hey, the presentation went pretty well. I think the audience was engaged. But listen, you know, your slide in the deck, slide 10, it was like, not really understandable. And slide 15 confused everybody. You know, I didn't think you tied the introduction to your conclusion, so you lost people when, at the end. When you got to Q and A, you started out okay, but, boy, you were really flat-fitting on the second question, and your answer was really weak. And I thought the audience was not as responsive at the end as they should have been across the presentation." And you're thinking, wow, okay, I mean, really, you thought the thing went okay and that the audience was fairly engaged. Like, I don't remember that, but I remember you just, you just crapped a lot on everything that I just did. And I don't hear much of that,

• 24:50Speaker 05

  by the way, but let me give you a different one. Different view. Let me give you the same feedback, but in balance. So the individuals instead, the leader says to you, listen, I think that the audience was was engaged across your your presentation. I think it went pretty well. I want to tell you that I never saw slide eight before, and I thought it was masterful. I thought you took something really complex and made it simple. I thought when you reached, before you got to Q and A, when you reached your main point, I thought that you hit it hard several times to the point where it resonated with the group. I think they were excited to get to Q and A to ask you questions. I thought you started out Q and A really well. And and I believe that your answer to the fourth question, which was the hardest question of all around,

• 25:34Speaker 05

  like, why we do what we do, you you just hit it out of the park. Now, let me be critical on the other side. Okay, you know, your slide five was was indecipherable. We got to do something about that. Your slide 10, like, really made took something that was was complex and made it even more complex. I didn't think you tied the introduction inclusion nearly strongly enough. I thought when you got to the Q and A, your second answer to the second question was really flat footed and really left people wanting. And I think the overall people could have been a lot more engaged if some of those things were fixed. That's an example of the difference between feedback imbalance versus feedback being totally out of bounds. Because I don't know anybody that wants the first one. There are a lot of people that don't want the

• 26:17Speaker 05

  second one either, by the way. But if you really want to get better, you want the second one. And you can deal with the balance of it. So now, what is what did we learn? I'm not telling you anything yet. I haven't told you the behavior yet. So the behavior is not just about being in balance. It's about how you're in balance. And when we study the really best leaders, the best leaders on the planet, the most admired leaders and everywhere, they all do the same thing. They all start positive, just like we all do intuitively when we're going to be critical. But their positive is as vivid, elaborate, and as detailed as the negatives are going to be. And they generally match in terms of number. So if I'm going to give you five criticisms, I probably need to have three or four or five

• 27:02Speaker 05

  really positive things. But they can't just be at a level of vividness or detail that is not equal to what I'm going to do in a second. So if I'm going to focus, I'm going to start positive and I'm going to go as, as deep into that positive as I can. And then, by the way, if, if I tell this to leaders all the time, they'll say, well, I have five criticisms, but I only have one really good positive that I can focus on. Well, first of all, I'll tell them, stretch yourself, right? See if you can come up with two, right? But more importantly, they're only ready to hear from you two criticisms right now. Because the only way to keep that in balance, and again, it doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be two to two or three to three, but it needs to be slowly or somewhat in balance to do so.

• 27:44Speaker 05

  Now, what I also think is interesting about that behavior is when you become masterful at it, you practice it all the time, there is no criticism that you can't give that's in balance. None. And the balance is not about what you say, it's about how, again, starting positive, how detailed, how vivid, how elaborate are, are you in the positive as well as the negative? But let's look at a different aspect of the balance issue, which I think is equally fascinating, which is all relationships are in balance, either in positive or negative, because almost everything that a leader says to somebody that reports to them or works with them is either positive or negative. There's not a lot of neutral. And that's true with teachers and, and students, it's true with parents and children.

• 28:30Speaker 05

  Where the power relationship exists, almost everything. So, so I'll leave it to people like John Gottman and other people to talk about marriages, because the same thing would apply to marriages. But let's just talk about leader relationships. How quickly they can get out of balance. Every time I talk to you, I'm focused on trying to get you to be better, but in the process, I'm giving you negative feedback. I'm giving you criticism. Yeah, I might spike on a couple of things that, that I say are positive, but I'm out of balance. And so what happens is when you have a relationship that has almost always negative information, negative feedback versus positive, then what happens is people withdraw. They basically stop listening, or they react. And so, you know, I can't tell you how many leaders I've dealt with in my life who will

• 29:13Speaker 05

  say, I have a team member, or I have a child in my life, and every time I say something, even before I get it out, they're defensive, they're counter arguing, they're, right? And, and, and I know immediately it's because they feel as if their relationship with that person is out of balance, that they have to defend themselves because the, the equation is hugely negative to positive. And so they're, they know criticism is coming their way, and they're bracing against it, which is why they're counter arguing, or they're turning off, or they're sulking before you even finish, or they shake their head before you, you even get the, the whole idea. And so anytime a relationship is out of balance, negative to positive, in terms of the general feedback and criticisms that are offered in that relationship, you're going to get,

• 29:57Speaker 05

  you're going to have that evaluative climate, and it's going to go hugely negative. Now, the opposite is equally problematic, by the way, especially with children. You can have a relationship that is really, really positive. All you say is positive stuff, there's very little negative, so it's out of balance that way. And most people would say to me, well, how can that be a problem? It's a problem because what happens is when I do offer a piece of criticism, or somebody else does, people freak out. They, they, they're not ready for it because they've only heard positives. Several examples, one of my favorite examples is.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the.

• 30:31Speaker 03

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• 30:33Speaker 02

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  There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game every week. Unbelievable. And now NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

• 31:29Speaker 05

  I sat down with a leader who had gotten 15 years of positive performance reviews. Got a brand new leader and that leader was fairly critical. And that leader in their first review gave them a very honest, what I thought was an honest and fair review, but they couldn't see it as honest and fair because they had been used to so much superlative for so many years from so many leaders that were not courageous enough to be honest with them, that they absolutely went catatonic when they saw this particular feedback, which I thought was just objective. That happens with kids all the time, too. If you want to really prepare children for success, you have to give them a nice balance of feedback, positive, negative. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect, but too much positive makes it so that people

• 32:11Speaker 05

  get alarmist when they hear negative, and too much negative means people defend themselves on a good basis. You and I can do better by striving to be more in balance in our relationships. And then when we are going to be specifically in a critical moment, trying to make somebody better with feedback, we need to start positive and make that that positive set of remarks be as vivid and elaborate and as detailed as the negative is going to be. That's a behavior that you'll find that almost everybody that's great at feedback, athletic coaches that are fabulous, dance instructors, leaders we've studied in corporates and the like, they all tend to do it in some form or another. They're in better balance than everybody else, which is why people accept their feedback a lot differently.

• 32:56Speaker 05

  You and I could start doing that better tomorrow. We could look at any of our relationships right now and say, which of my relationships is out of balance? Which ones do I have more negative to positive? More positive to negative? Am I in balance with my marriage? Am I in balance with my kids? Am I in balance with each of my team members? And then we also had the ability then to say, okay, tomorrow I'm going to be preparing to give you some feedback on something that just happened. How do I prepare myself? What are the positives? And what are the? And how do I describe them vividly? Let me, I don't have to rehearse. Let me get ready to be in balance so that I can practice this and make this a natural part of my leadership. That's a behavior that we consider an admired leader of feedback.

• 33:38Shane Parrish?

  From episode 117, Kat Cole.

• 33:42Speaker 06

  When I was in Argentina with Hooters, I was 19 and it was only the second opening I had led fully. And I get down to Buenos Aires. And of course, the franchisee had gone through training and we had a menu and specifications and equipment that they were supposed to have for the business. And I get down there and they had done everything we told them. Bought all the kitchen equipment. Almost identical menu as in the US. And as we started training the cooks, it became apparent that there was a problem. They were disgruntled, saying this food is bad. And I can't believe we have to do this.

• 34:26Speaker 06

  And at first I was like, what's going on? I realized by talking to the cooks and the trainers that we had brought down that Argentina, I would then learn, is the beef capital, one of the beef capitals of the world. And we had an embarrassingly low quality ribeye steak sandwich that we were requiring them to cook on a flat top grill, which was an abomination in Argentina. In the US, if you want a steak sandwich, take a ribeye, slap it on a flat top grill, a little bit of olive oil, sear it, how do you want it cooked? Medium, medium well, put it on your Texas toast sandwich with some cheese and onions and there you go. It was, it was so viewed as so low quality that it was insulting there.

• 35:11Speaker 06

  Not only the choice of the beef, which should have been alternatively hyper local source to be of the quality that is expected even in casual dining there. It was the equipment. It was that it wasn't on open flame. And I remember that fork in the road where I thought, what do I do? I'm here representing the company. These are the franchise standards. They clearly signed up for it. They bought it. It's here. Do I just toe the line and say, nope, sorry? This is the menu. Get over it. Or do I listen and take that feedback and make a decision to change? Oh, by the way, this is before iPhones were really prominent.

• 35:56Speaker 06

  And I think I had a pager at that point and we were still using fax to communicate any changes. So it was very difficult for me to communicate with the corporate office. And so I didn't have the permission or the experience with such a situation to know exactly what I should do. But I sat down with the franchisee and I said, uh, here's all the criticism. And there is a pattern. It's not one else. There were many other things like having beans on the menu. Baked beans are really popular in the U.S. At that time, it was considered a poor person's food, a pauper's food in Argentina. And if it was on the menu, it meant you were a lower grade restaurant. And so there were many of these situations that were clearly the result, now I can say, of us not having deep local cultural knowledge.

• 36:41Speaker 06

  And so I talked to him about it. I was very honest about the struggle that I'm hearing it. I believe it. I want to do something about it. I understand it has financial implications and I don't even know if it's going to be approved. And he looked at me and he said, anytime, it's one of my favorite pieces of advice. Anytime you are criticized, assume first it's correct. Just allow yourself to digest that and then respond. And either you will, you will reaffirm that the criticism is not correct. And you can focus more on the why and a productive relationship. Or you realize there's at least some grain of truth and you will work intensely to address that issue.

• 37:21Speaker 06

  And it was so helpful and so inspiring because the right thing to do for the customer. And the employees, not necessarily the head of marketing of Hooters Restaurants at the time, who probably would have said no if I had asked. The right thing to do for the right people, the right stakeholders, was to make the change, was to get in a new piece of equipment that was a flame, you know, an open flame piece of equipment on which to cook meat, allow the franchisee to help us locally source better cuts of meat, make some changes, take beans off the menu, do a few things differently, reprint the menus, and open with that new menu. And that's what we did.

• 38:00Shane Parrish?

  Is there an example where you ever did that and you got in trouble after?

• 38:04Speaker 06

  Oh, I got in trouble for that. The head of supply chain and purchasing, who managed the food specs, he let me know that that was not my job, that I was out of line, that this is not, I do not own this brand and do not have the right to make these changes. I mean, it made me teary, you know, like, I'm a young employee and I thought I was doing the right thing and I had some reinforcement from some executives, but the one who's like approving the specification sheet and who, by the way, when I come back to the US, I need to keep working with, was angry, was audibly angry. Luckily, I leaned on the vice president of training, her name's Cheryl, and I remember calling her and I was upset. And I felt comfortable being upset with her.

• 38:49Speaker 06

  And I was like, I'm so sorry, you know, I thought I was doing the right thing. I know you support it, but this other executive is really upset and I don't know what to do because I can't, I'm down, I'm down here, you guys aren't, I can't undo this decision that I still think is the right decision. And just, you know, allies and advocates and mentors and all the words you want to use are so important. She said, "Don't worry, he's just crotchety, he'll get over it, you're doing the best you can." We'll get better at this as we do more of it. The company was growing and I was caught in the crosshairs of the company growing faster than it was ready to grow.

• 39:31Speaker 06

  And having those human centered executives can really keep top employees kind of in the game despite the fact that they're causing friction. And because I was the one going into these countries, I was known for friction. You know, I got to the point where after I did it enough, I was mature enough to go, look, you guys need to be better at this, right? I'm down here dealing with this reactively. And then when I became an executive at 26, now running these departments, I had the drive and the mission to get much, much better proactively as a result.

• 40:05Shane Parrish?

  From episode 151, Alan Mulally.

• 40:08Speaker 07

  And then think about a Venn diagram, another circle, just like the one life, life's work. So you draw a circle and that's the working together management system is what's inside the circle. So at the top, put a circle and that says principles and practices. Then put another circle going around to the right and put another circle and put governance process in there. Then put, go down a little further and put another circle and put leadership team. Then go, start going back up, put another circle and it says creating value roadmap. Then go one more, your last circle then is business plan review. In the bottom of the circle, put our culture.

• 40:53Shane Parrish?

  And we'll put this diagram on the website for the show notes so everybody can just pop up and see it. Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 07

  That's great that you're going to do that because it's a gift and we worked on it forever to describe it like this. And so again, when you look at these five elements and you can see how they work together to create this, this environment. So we covered the principles and practices and the manage, in the governance process, that's the way we manage the overall business. So that includes our, our, all the shareholders, the stakeholders, the board of directors, the leadership team.

• 41:27Speaker 07

  And then the process of the creative value roadmap and the business plan review. Then when you look at the leadership team, and remember the word leader is inside leadership. So it starts with the leader because you can imagine if you don't have a leader that is actually committed to these, this character and skills, that it's going to be very hard to have this operating system and these expected behaviors. So the things that that are clear there is you're going to include all of the stakeholders. You're going to coach and facilitate as opposed to telling everybody what to do. You're going to be leading with humility and love and service and courage and discipline and resilience and civility.

• 42:10Speaker 07

  Authenticity, meaning that your behaviors are aligned with your beliefs and your values. And also positive mindsets. And you're going to be responsible for the working of the management system with zero tolerance for violating it. So everybody's, that's, that's our job or these things. And then your performance management and your continuous improvement in your lifelong learning. Then when you move over to the creative value roadmap, that's the strategy. For example, the strategy of Boeing was to make a complete family of vehicles that can go point to point and nonstop all around the world safely and efficiently. To get people together or Ford, Henry Ford was opening the highways to all mankind.

• 42:51Speaker 07

  Two compelling visions and now what's the strategy for accomplishing that? And that's, so that deals with the product, the process of doing it, the people and the working together, a strategy. Then going up to the business plan review, okay, well, we have the strategy now, we have the plan. Now every week, we're going to go over the vision, the strategy and the plan. The red, the yellow, the green, and the orange, any special attention. Then you're right back up to operating with those principles and practices.

• 43:20Shane Parrish?

  I love it. It's self reinforcing and there's natural feedback loops in it. What, what's the leader's role in that system?

• 43:28Speaker 07

  The most important thing is to hold the team themselves and the team. Responsible and accountable for following this process, all five of those elements. We just got to follow the process. And so, holding ourselves accountable for that, on the other hand, leading by example. I mean, I started out as an engineer, working on, on commercial airplanes. And as you are asked to take more and more service, as you move in that direction, what I, what I found, just because of who I am and what I learned at Boeing on, on large scale, projects and systems integration is, is that you're going to move to the place where you're facilitating and you're coaching. Because somebody has to keep getting us aligned.

• 44:13Speaker 07

  Like if we have a new issue on the strategy, well, we need our special attention meeting to deal with that. And so, as you get to the place where you're on this leadership team at this level, you have responsibility for a large portion of the organization, like engineering and manufacturing procurement. But you're really leading with aligning with the rest of the team. And you're facilitating and you're coaching with your team. I always have like maybe 12 or 13 people reporting to me, which a lot of people always wondered how I did that. But I had to have every discipline need to be on that team. Because if not, then if you have the haves and the have nots on the leadership team, you gotta keep explaining to the people you haven't, around the meeting, what's going on. As opposed to everybody's being there.

• 44:57Speaker 07

  And now, everybody is leading with an example. Where everybody in the entire organization reports to one of those people. So you're not leaving anybody any out. And if you follow this discipline, it really doesn't make any difference how many people you have there. Because when you do a business plan, you, you run it on a very tight schedule. And you, because you're going to be there again next week. So you're looking for the changes, offers to help. And you're going to be back together next week. So that's the most important thing about the leadership team. Is to, is the be and the do. Who you are and what you do. You know, the only thing about that, Shane, is that because this is so visible on the behaviors, and the process is so reliable.

• 45:41Speaker 07

  Everybody keeps moving forward with their beliefs and their values, the things you can't see. You can't see those, you see their behaviors. And, and everybody tells me this, that no matter how they arrived, however they grew up, what their training was, the, the things that went well, the things that were horrible in their life, that once they join this environment and you, and you have these expected behaviors, and they're the right expected behaviors, and you start acting this way, then you start being this way.

• 46:11Shane Parrish?

  Hmm.

• 46:12Speaker 07

  So gradually, your mindsets and your beliefs and your values, they all start to move this direction. That's why that authenticity word is so big, because if you look up the definition of authenticity, three circles again, is, is the alignment of who you are and what you do between your beliefs, your values and your behaviors. Now, we can see the, we can see the, the behaviors, but when I, when we see those behaviors, and you're doing that over and over again, and you're living that way, well, what happened to those values and beliefs? They move in a really positive direction. And that's what people tell, tell me, saying that, like what, they're off a program where they, they, they're, they've moved on to something else.

• 46:56Speaker 07

  And when I see them, they say that wherever they have gone, if they can't see the fundamentals on the working together system, the process and the behaviors, then they make a judgment call really quickly. And, and if they don't see a way it's gonna happen, they move on. Because once you, it's like you said earlier, once you felt this way, and once you are appreciated this way, you're never gonna go back. It's like, uh, you're never gonna tolerate Grendel's mother or Grendel's extended family down there in the, the swamp. Once you, once you've seen the light, once you've felt the heat, the warmth of operating this way, uh, you're never gonna go back. Makes sense?

• 47:38Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, totally. Uh, to your point about the actions becoming who we are, I mean, we are what we repeatedly do.

• 47:44Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 47:45Shane Parrish?

  There's something that you said earlier, I wanna come back to, which is, you said everyone is a leader just by being who they are. What did you mean by that?

• 47:53Speaker 07

  Well, it gets back to the be and the do, but especially you, the are, you see that with their behaviors. Like, let's just take humility, for example, like those three questions that, that we asked. So you can see that. You, you know, when you ask those three questions of yourself about who you're meeting. Right away, that tells you who that person really is and how they and how they operate. That's why we've always started, always started with the behaviors and but having a process that you're following where you have to, you have to exhibit those. You can't hide from them. You can't just not participate. So you have a mechanism now where you have to participate. And now your decision is, are you going to do it with these behaviors or not?

• 48:38Speaker 07

  And if you don't, you're going to meet some interesting people and you're going to get a chance to decide again. So I think the working and management system pulls together the be part and the do part, and everybody eventually gets to see both of those either aligned or not.

• 48:56Shane Parrish?

  And the working together management system isn't just for organizations. I believe you and your wife use a version of this at home. Can you, can you tell me more about this? How does it apply at home?

• 49:07Speaker 07

  My wife just walked by and she walked by. So I, they all, the kids, they all, they all think this is so, so fun. But Nikki and I have been married, I mentioned, for 52 years, and we have five darling children. And when they started to come along, I was at Boeing, I'm program management and lots of people. And I'm watching these seven people now. And so I said to Nikki, I don't even, you know, this is in very more complicated with our size of our family. We need to do a business plan review every week. And she goes, Alan,

• 49:52Speaker 07

  this is not Boeing. This is our family. I waited for a week to reflect on this, and that all made sense. And then, so I said the next week, okay, what if we have a family meeting every week? And she said, well, what would we do in a family meeting? I said, well, my suggestions, and I welcome yours, would be after we come back from mass. On Sunday morning, that we have an agenda for our family meeting. The first agenda I would propose is that all of us, including you and me, we go around the house, we pick up all of our stuff, we take them back to our cubby or back to our room.

• 50:33Speaker 07

  Because after a week with seven people living lives, it looks like a bomb's gone off in the house. And I didn't sign up for a compelling vision of picking up the house every, every week. And neither did any of the participants. She's, okay, like, makes sense. I said, she said, what next? I said, well, then, everybody ought, excuse me, we'll go back to our room and we'll pick up the laundry and we'll take it down to the laundry room. And with five children, we usually always had two washers and dryers because you want to get that stuff done, or that's all you're doing the whole week. And that's not a compelling vision again for our family. Yep. So we do all the laundry together, then everybody would bring the laundry down, dump it out of the kitchen table, and they would all sort the socks and everything else.

• 51:17Speaker 07

  Because it's not a compelling vision to sit there by yourself and try to sort all these things for everybody. I mean, it's impossible. Plus, it takes a long time. So that's done in like five minutes now. Then they take their laundry back to their room. And then they come down with their calendar, Shane, their calendar, little loose notebook or wires down the end. They're in kindergarten, Shane, they're in kindergarten. And they got the calendar and they sit around the round table. And then we go around the room and every member of the family describes what they're going to do this next week and also identify any things that they need our help with. So do they need a taxi cab service, any cheerleading service?

• 51:59Speaker 07

  Are they got teacher, pair of teacher conferences, whatever. And so we all write down things that we can do to help. And I take it back, the things I'd sign up for, I would take it back and give it to my assistant, but she'd build it into the calendar like we mentioned. And so it's just my integrated life. I've just integrated my life, right? Along with the rest of those circles in the integrated life. And then, then, so that was great. And then the next agenda was, we would just reflect. On the behaviors that we've agreed to, because we agreed to a compelling vision for the family that has all growing and contributing and making a difference in service, kind of like what my parents did to me. And so we go through those, any suggestions for improvement, including

• 52:43Speaker 07

  the behaviors. That was really interesting at the first because they were, they got, they were pretty aggressive when they were younger about, well, you, you, you said that you were going to pick me up after football, or, or pretty soon that we also worked on the how you do, how you say that, and how you give that feedback, because you want to do it in a positive way. And so they got really good at that. But we went through that, any clarification there? That was a family meeting. And so every, every time we're together, and they're all grown now, we'll get together once or twice a year. And every time we're together, especially after a drink or two, most of them will bring up things that happened in the family meetings. And I mean, they're so funny. When you look back at the things that were going on. Oh, and one of the family meeting principles

• 53:27Speaker 07

  was if you're going to do something that could embarrass the family, or make us really proud, either way, you have to tell us ahead of time. Can you imagine that scene? So they didn't share everything that they would do that would embarrass us, but they sure thought about it because that was a principle in practice. And so when we reflect on these when they got older, oh my gosh, it was so fun. And it was so funny. Sometimes I couldn't tell whether they really enjoyed it, or whether they thought this was a hassle. And so I would say to them, you guys, if you didn't really enjoy the family meeting, why did you, why did you always keep coming to it? You never missed one. Never, never. And one of them

• 54:12Speaker 07

  says, Dad, do you remember what the last agenda item was on our family meeting? I said, no, I don't. And I said, you handed out the allowances. Of course, of course, we had to come to the family meeting. And now every one of them saying, every one of them is running their version of a family meeting, a business plan review, every week.

• 54:38Shane Parrish?

  From episode 130, Diana Chapman.

• 54:42Speaker 08

  I just think people don't practice nearly enough candor. I think people are withholding so many opinions and stories about one another. And so we're not getting the feedback we need to be able to be more present in the moment in which we can make those decisions. Can we just tell each other our stories that we make up in our heads about each other? Because it's about you and it's good to know what stories people make up about us. Because my experience is there's almost always a gem in every story that somebody has about me. And from presence, I always ask the question, not is it true what you're saying about me? But how is it true?

• 55:24Speaker 08

  How is it true that I'm not as effective as I could be? Or how is it true that I'm not listening to that? Or how is it true? So I'm asking teens to tell each other their stories more often so that they can see, how is it true? And then learn from that to be able to grow and be more effective in their decision making.

• 55:45Shane Parrish?

  Is there sort of like tips and tricks that we can learn as a group? Because often groups are the body making decisions, whether it's preferably a person, but the group has to work together. And in order to get the best information, you need to be able to be honest about things. How do you form that in a group? How do you encourage it?

• 56:08Speaker 08

  I like this practice I use with teens a lot called fact and story. I'll say, let's say Shane, you and I are on a team. And I say, Shane, the facts are that you led a podcast between the two of us earlier today. And then I would say, here's a story I make up about that. And hopefully I'm holding the story with curiosity. And so I, you know, I'll say, I, you know, I make up a story that, and then I tell the story. But I can, as a team member, if I can put a fact and story, it kind of helps the person relax a little bit to go, it's just a story and it gives them a little freedom to speak more candidly to one another. And so I've done this before where I just come into a team and I say, we're just going to go around the circle.

• 56:52Speaker 08

  You have to pick a different person each time, you know, fact and story. And we'd maybe do three rounds of that. And each time you pick somebody new on the team. And reliably, I get feedback that that may have been one of the best practices they've done in a long time, that they learned things that had not been learned. Elephants came out, people got valuable feedback. And they realized like, we don't give any time and attention to being able to reveal these stories in a way that lets us all evolve. And so they all said, like, the decisions they were making, they had a big decision to make about whether they were going to sell the company or not. And that's one of the reasons why I was in there. There was a lot of debate going on. And so I just said, let's do fact and story around.

• 57:34Speaker 08

  And it wasn't even necessarily around whether we sell or not. It was just around each other. And some of it was around that topic. But at the end, they had such clarity about whether, knowing whether to sell or not, once they did that. And I think they felt more comfortable with the decision because they had challenged each other. A story I make up is you're more concerned with money than you are with the wellbeing of the company. Like, that was one of the stories that came out.

• 58:00Speaker 08

  Because the one, somebody who wanted to sell, you know, they were saying, I think you're, and so to be able to recognize, oh, that's a perception you all are having. Well, let me clarify why I do think this is in the best interest. And it's not just because I want more money. So we wouldn't have known it. We wouldn't have been able to even have that conversation if those voices hadn't come out. So fact and story is one of my favorite tips to teach, to teach teams.

• 58:23Shane Parrish?

  I love that. And it comes back to something we talked about right at the start. And it seems to actually be cropping up throughout the entire conversation, which is making the invisible visible.

• 58:33Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 58:33Shane Parrish?

  Because the story I'm telling myself is completely invisible to you. And the way out of this story to a better outcome is to start making what's invisible, visible. So I can course correct, so you can understand me more.

• 58:48Speaker 08

  I do think that's what I'm, that's, since I was a kid, I would. Be nervous because I would say like, doesn't everybody see this stuff? But we're all, they all look like the parents are all trying to make this invisible. And it's not invisible to me. And so I think that's been my whole life, actually. And just getting that aha here and you talk like my whole life has been, I relax more when we make the visible or the invisible visible. It feels like a friendlier world. It feels like we can do something with that. We can't, we can't grow with the invisible.

• 59:24Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts and more, go to fs.blog/podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project. Until next time.