Randall Stutman – Giving Feedback, Followership, and Admired Leadership (EP.497)

Randall Stutman is the founder of Admired Leadership and one of the most sought-after executive coaches in the world. He's known across Wall Street, the hedge fund community, professional sports, the Olympics, and the White House entirely by word of mouth. Randall was a past guest on the show six years ago in a rare public appearance, and that conversation is replayed in the feed. Our conversation covers the framework for uncovering the behaviors and best practices of admired leaders and then dives into examples around giving feedback. We also discuss how admired leaders both generate results and develop followership, and a few extra behavioral gems for investment leaders. Last year, Randall launched ALEX, an insane AI coaching tool trained solely on his insights. It's effectively an executive coach available 24/7 for only $400/year. We use it regularly, and always for situations with elevated stakes. Give it a try at leadwithalex.com http://leadwithalex.com/. Learn more about our Strategic Investments: OWL https://www.oldwell-labs.com/ted. Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides https://twitter.com/tseides?lang=en or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedseides/ Subscribe to the mailing list https://capitalallocators.com/ Access Transcript with Premium Membership https://capitalallocators.com/signup Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠ https://thepodcastconsultant.com/https://thepodcastconsultant.com https://thepodcastconsultant.com/⁠ https://thepodcastconsultant.com/)

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Why do we call something feedback to begin with? The reason we do it comes from a place of power, comes from expertise, comes from experience, comes from knowledge, comes from legitimate status. In other words, I have the position, the right, the role to give you information that will improve your performance and or change your behavior. When I give you feedback, I call it feedback. The expectation that both of us have, especially that I have as a leader, is you're supposed to take it seriously, you're supposed to yield to it. In other words, at least pretend you're going to engage this. Why? Because of power. That power has a consequence. It creates resistance. People naturally become a little bit reluctant, if not totally defensive, to things that come at them from power.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  So if I say to you, "Listen, you've been late to meetings a lot. Team really needs you to be here on time because they want to hear what you have to say." I can say, "I have some feedback for you." As soon as I say, "I have some feedback for you," you may not dig in, but you're going to get a little bit defensive. That's the nature of power. All power produces that. Well, what happens if I take the same message, but I lower its power? The next piece below feedback is called advice. I could say the same thing. I could say, "Can I offer you some advice?" Person says, "Well, what's your advice?" And say, "Well, you need to get to the team meetings on time. People want to hear your opinion. My advice is you're missing a big opportunity." Same message. The only difference is I lowered my power.

• 1:29Ted Seides?

  I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. My guest on today's show is Randall Stutman, the founder of Admired Leadership and one of the most sought-after executive coaches in the world. He's known across Wall Street, the hedge fund community, professional sports, the Olympics, and the White House entirely by word of mouth. Randall was a past guest on the show six years ago in a rare public appearance, and that conversation is replayed in the feed. Our conversation covers the framework for uncovering the behaviors and best practices of admired leaders, and then dives into examples around giving feedback. We also

• 2:11Ted Seides?

  discuss how admired leaders both generate results and develop followership, and a few extra behavioral gems for investment leaders. Last year, Randall launched Alex, an insane AI coaching tool trained solely on his insights. It's effectively an executive coach, available 24/7 for only $300 a year. We use it regularly and always for situations with elevated stakes. Give it a try at leadwithalex.com. Before we get going, it's travel season. Partner meetings, board meetings, the Capital

• 2:49Ted Seides?

  Allocators CIO Summit, Omaha for Berkshire, and Milken. Across planes, trains, and automobiles, you're bound to run into a few snacks. When they're unavoidable, I try to remember Will Godaro's story of the pilot who lifted everyone's spirits by bringing families into the cockpit. But it's not always easy, which leads to my most recent pet peeve. I was on a flight with some unfortunate delays. We were scheduled to land from a cross-country journey at 11:30 PM, but got diverted from New York to Philadelphia because of weather at just the wrong time. After a gas-and-go stop that took about an hour, we finally landed at 3 a.m., and at

• 3:34Ted Seides?

  that time, there's only a scant crew working at hangars, so we waited another hour on the tarmac. None of that was anyone's fault, but after a long flight and equally long day, you can imagine everyone was ready to go home. All the passengers queued up to depart one by one in an orderly fashion. It's actually uncanny how respectful people are when getting off planes. But there's a moment when it's your turn to get moving, and on this particular flight, after eight and a half hours, the person in the row in front of me seemed oblivious to the cadence of the queue. When it was his turn, he arose seemingly clueless and forced everyone behind him to

• 4:17Ted Seides?

  wait. Of course, this wasn't just a grab your bag and go. Two bags, maybe three, come down from above, then he pauses to put on his jacket, then reorganizes his bags to put a backpack on top of his wheelbag, and then, without as much as "I'm sorry," he slowly started walking off the plane. Not a single movement in his deplaning occurred until after the person in front of him had started walking. So there you have it, my new recent pet peeve. Don't be that person who isn't ready to deboard a plane when it's your turn. It's just not that hard. And thank you for spreading the word about my

• 4:57Ted Seides?

  most recent pet peeve, which you'll only hear by tuning in to Capital Allocators. Capital Allocators is brought to you by AlphaSense. Every allocator sits at their desk for hours preparing the work around investment decisions, getting up to speed on a new theme, prepping for the next investment committee meeting, and tracking what changes across an entire portfolio. AlphaSense just launched something built to help. It's called SuperAnalyst, an always-on agent that works like a power user on your behalf. It draws on over 500 million premium sources, including broker research, expert transcripts, company

• 5:37Ted Seides?

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• 6:21Ted Seides?

  and see what it has ready for you. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by RidgeLine, the investment management platform built for firms who are rethinking how work gets done. You're at your desk looking at a line graph of your firm's growth. The line is moving sideways, linear growth, and you know exactly why. You're constrained by your operational bandwidth that's been the same for so long, it just feels like the cost of doing business. RidgeLine is built to change that line's trajectory, to be the inflection point that takes your growth from incremental to accelerated with the team you already have in place. RidgeLine is the only AI-native investment management platform that brings together

• 7:05Ted Seides?

  the front, middle, and back office with one set of data and powerful AI agents that automate away operational drudgery, so your talent can shift from managing old technology to materializing new ideas. RidgeLine helps asset and wealth managers understand and improve their firm's growth trajectory. To see how your firm compares to 16,000 of your peers, visit ridgeline.ai/trajectory. If you file Form ADV, your firm is already there. Then talk to RidgeLine about how you can do more with the team you already have. Capital Allocators is also brought to you by Juniper Square, the operations partner trusted by the leading private market GPs.

• 7:50Ted Seides?

  One theme that keeps coming up on the show is GPs that build the strongest and most durable relationships with LPs are the ones that have both strong returns and strong operations. AI raises the stakes on operations, and having Juniper Square as your operations partner helps ensure your data is organized, accurate, and accessible, so you can unlock operational alpha. That's why thousands of GPs trust Juniper Square. Learn more at junipersquare.com/capitalallocators. Please enjoy my conversation with Randall Stud.

• 8:29Ted Seides?

  Why don't we start with a refresher of your coaching philosophy?

• 8:34Speaker 00

  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,

• 9:18Speaker 00

  some of the things you do to create team that can have an impact in terms of your leadership trajectory.

• 9:25Ted Seides?

  How do you go about uncovering what works?

• 9:28Speaker 00

  I have my own methodology in terms of studying leaders. I've studied over 3,500 admired leaders, people that we believe have results and followership at the same time. Most good leaders, iconic leaders, are results-based leaders. That's wonderful. You have to get results to lead. The really special people are able to get those results and then create followership, where people would do anything for them. They feel as if they have a deep connection with them. They feel as if that connection is reciprocally loyal. As a result, they feel differently about themselves and they feel connected in a way that other people don't. Therefore, they have staying power. They'll follow those people from job to job, role to role. They'll do anything for them.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  When I find somebody that has those kinds of results and then has followership, we'll normally call that person an admired leader. If you have followership without results, which is also not uncommon, it doesn't mean you don't have any results, it just means you don't have sustained extraordinary results over time. We still want to talk to those people and study them. I have spent time with over 15,000 leaders trying to figure out their leadership, but about 3,500 admired leaders. When we study them, the first thing we do is we'll interview them. We normally don't Don't learn all that much when you interview leaders, just like a great ball player. They don't know what they do, the good ones. We'll interview the people around them. That's where you learn some things. Generally, the behaviors are baked into the stories that are told by them and about them.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  There's a reason that a certain stories get told over and over and over again about them. The hard part is discerning what in that story actually reflects what they do. Behaviorally, then how do you find it past that? That's the hard part. We look at artifacts, emails, performance reviews, outlines, presentations. I call it creating a jacket for someone. Sometimes I can get a lot of data. Sometimes I don't get as much. Up until the 1950s, you couldn't get any behavioral data on anyone. I can't go backwards and study leaders historically very well. But contemporary leaders have lots of things. They give lots of interviews. The people around them are usually fairly verbose.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  If you ask them to describe what this leader does, can get lots of artifacts. And so we can go deep with the leader. I have a particular way that I look at that data, discern certain kinds of things that they do differently. Then, once I find something, I need to find other examples of it in the rest of my data set. In other words, if all of a sudden I study a leader, Ted, and I recognize that they do something very differently. And I go, that's really interesting. It's really cool. Everything that I know about leadership suggests that that should be highly effective. I don't make it worth teaching anybody else yet until I can find 30 examples elsewhere by other leaders. I couldn't see it until I saw that leader do it. But now, once I see it, I can hear it and find it in other leaders.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  And I find a pattern like that and it's strong enough, then I want to teach everybody in the whole world about it.

• 12:20Ted Seides?

  What's an example recently of a story you heard from someone you were studying? That gave you that aha moment that you then triangulate and said, aha, here's something I want to share.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  It's NCAA tournament time right now. It's March Madness. Tom Izzo is a famous Michigan State coach. He's been to so many Sweet Sixteens and Elite Eights and Final Fours. What's fascinating is there's a story about him where he'll show up to his players' dorms and walk with them to class, not to make sure they get to class or anything like that, just to say, "Hey, I'm your friend. I want to just talk. If you've got something on your mind, I want to chat about it. I'm just going to show up. I'm here. You don't want to talk about anything. We're just going to walk to class together because we're colleagues. We're in this together." Not many people with his level of success show up at their athletes' dorms and walk them to class. He does that consistently. I recently heard that story. There's something there.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  I'm not sure it's magical, but there's something about reducing your status, making yourself every day, being able to create the comfort so that people want to talk to you, spending the time and the effort, showing up at their place rather than them showing up at your place, walking with them. And it's amazing, the research about being side by side and walking with people. People get much more discursive when they're actually walking shoulder to shoulder than they ever are face to face. There's something about that. That's a fun story. It's not a story that I'll probably find anything deep in, but I'm collecting stories like that all the time.

• 13:49Ted Seides?

  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?

• 14:02Speaker 00

  I thought you were going to ask me how long it's taken 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 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 screensaver, 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.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Hopefully initially, low consequence situation, trusted relationship. You gotta 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 liked the way I did that, and how did I do that? They'll sometimes keep a journal for other people. Like my leader, what opportunities did they miss today? They don't know this behavior, but they're missing it all the time. What would I have said or done differently if I were them? Once you do that for a handful of weeks, three, four, five, six weeks, it'd become a routine, it'd become a habit, and then it will be yours.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  You want it to think about it very much. Until you get lazy, like everybody else, there's lots of habits you and I build. Then over time, we lose them. I have behaviors that I mastered early in my career that I have found, and I realized 10 years later, I don't have them anymore. I had to go back and redo them, recreate the habit of them. But that's how you do it. It's going to take you two months at the most to build and inculcate a behavior.

• 15:57Ted Seides?

  How do you keep track of the websites, 100, 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?

• 16:10Speaker 00

  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 30, 40 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- 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 gotta 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.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 17:06Ted Seides?

  Over the last couple of years, what have you observed changing in the experience of the leaders you work with from different environments or different behaviors that you've noticed?

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Leadership is leadership. Most of it doesn't change. Of course, the pace of change is nothing we've ever seen before. There are certain behaviors and things you have to do to adapt. Not necessarily admired leader behaviors, but there are things that you have to adapt in order to create the urgency and the speed and deal with the level of pace that's going on. Topically, I would have told you 20 years ago that it was more about style and executive presence than I've ever seen. I would have told you maybe 10 years ago, it was about talent selection and about creating and forging the right team. But I don't see any real one pattern that matters more than another right now. I coach something like 60 to 70 people at the same time, and I have for 30 plus years.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Sometimes you'll see a theme that generates, but I don't see any theme other than everybody in the world talks about AI too much. AI, the most overhyped and the most underhyped phenomenon that we've ever seen. Amazing, crazy possibilities in what it does already, but overhyped in lots of other ways. Leaders are fixated on it right now, and they'll probably be fixated on it for the next few years for sure, if not forever.

• 18:24Ted Seides?

  It's probably a good opportunity for me to ask you about your application of AI, which admired leadership Alex is the craziest, best coach I've ever experienced. I'd love to hear about your journey in creating Alex.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Alex is so unbelievable. It is hard to make sense of. First of all, Alex stands for admired leadership excellence. That's why we call it Alex. Alex, of course, is gender neutral. Who knew that I was spending 40 years of my life preparing to put my content into an AI? People asked me for years, why aren't you writing books? I didn't want to write books. I wanted to coach people. I didn't want to be that guy, that sage on the stage. Now it's turned out to make it look like I'm a genius because none of our stuff has ever been out in a real way. I have hundreds of behaviors and thousands of best practices that no one has access to, except now we've taught everything to Alex. Alex operates from Anthropics Claude as a base, but it has no access to the internet.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  It only answers from our data and we have a couple of million words in it. I have a team that is amazing in terms of being able to train it and gauge it with heuristics. Alex will disagree with you, will create context with you. It operates like a real coach. In many cases, you can't tell that you're not talking to a coach. You're not talking to a live person. Shortly, it's going to have voice. It's going to even be spookier. In essence, it's like talking to me. You might not want to talk to me, but Alex knows everything that I know, pretty much, and has the subtleties. Now Alex can't care about you, doesn't have conviction. It's not going to replace me as a coach or any of the good coaches in our firm. It can't work through a multi-level problem the way that I can.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  In terms of clarifying, creating, illustrating best practice, enannling people to role play and practice things, it's unbelievably good. My partner likes to tease me and says, talking to Alex is like talking to Randall, except it actually cares about what you think.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  And that's probably true. Alex is cool and it only gets better because we're putting more data in it all the time, but it's only our data. I'm very guarded in terms of what I put in there. It has to be really special and actionable. It doesn't have any nonsense in it or mediocre advice or lists of things, and that's what makes it so special.

• 20:39Ted Seides?

  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 of my leadership as a business?

• 20:50Speaker 00

  It makes us stronger. It gives people 24/7 access to our content and to the way we think about things. At 2 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

• 21:35Speaker 00

  done that many times. It's an LLM, but 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 he 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 might surprise you with what I come up with that would represent, certainly be consistent with what you would think, but would be different. I'm like, who are you? It's so scary. This is where we are now. Imagine where we're going to be in two or three years from now. It's so very cool.

• 22:20Ted Seides?

  How do you think about the different categories of behaviors when you're organizing all of this?

• 22:26Speaker 00

  When you find an admired leadership behavior or a best practice, in most cases, it's not perfectly identifiable. Is it a behavior of credibility or is it a behavior of relationship? Is it a behavior of motivation? Or is it behavior of team dynamic? You have to bucket these things in order to make sense of them. There's no perfect bucket. What we'll do is we normally think of the functions of leadership. Good leaders are good at giving feedback. They're good at building teams. They're good at propelling change. They make quality decisions. You can bucket things relative to what are the topics and functions that leadership serves. Occasionally you'll miss a behavior. Your behavior could probably fit in four or five categories. I can tell you this, Ted, I'm not very special, but what we know is really special. And we know so much of it.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  The real thing is to find a place where it will shine in that particular topical area, where it's going to be taking notice. People will take notice of it in that spice because it fits the kinds of problems and situations that they confront when they think of that issue.

• 23:28Ted Seides?

  I think universally in our industry, people struggle with feedback. Would love to hear your favorite behaviors tied to giving feedback.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  First one isn't a behavior. It's just a best practice, but it's such a cool best practice. It starts like this. Why do we call something feedback to begin with? The reason we do it comes from a place of power, comes from expertise, comes from experience, comes from knowledge, comes from legitimate status. In other words, I have the position, the right, the role to give you information that will improve your performance and or change your behavior. When I give you feedback, I call it feedback. The expectation that both of us have, especially that I have as a leader, is you're supposed to take it seriously and you're supposed to yield to it. In other words, at least pretend you're going to engage this. Why? Because of power. That power has a consequence. It creates resistance.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  People naturally become a little bit reluctant, if not totally defensive, to things that come at them from power. So if I say to you, listen, you've been late to meetings a lot. Team really needs you to be here on time because they want to hear what you have to say. I can say, I have some feedback for you. As soon as I say, I have some feedback for you. You may not dig in, but you're going to get a little bit defensive. That's the nature of power. All power produces that. What happens if I take the same message, but I lower its power? The next piece below feedback is called advice. I could say the same thing. I could say, can I offer you some advice? Person says, well, what's your advice? And say, well, you need to get to the team meetings on time. People want to hear your opinion. My advice is you're missing a big opportunity. Same message.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  The only difference is I lowered my power and by lowering my power, I've reduced resistance. Why is it we don't call most feedback advice? Because most leaders don't want you to have a choice. Advice is accepted or rejected. Truth is they can accept or reject your feedback too. Let's not pretend too hard that they can't. That's the notion of advice. Let's lower power one more time. I could actually lower power two or three more times, by the way. But let's lower power one more time. What do we call it? Recommendation suggestion. Now, what's cool about recommendation suggestion is it's lower power. So it produces less resistance and very few people will reject it. Unlike advice where they hear it as accept or reject. Recommendation suggestion is, okay, I'll take it under consideration. Again, they're taking your general feedback under consideration.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Instead of saying have some feedback for you or can I offer you some advice? Say, hey, I have a suggestion. I know very few people that would go, oh, I don't want your suggestion. Now, all of a sudden, my suggestion is you get to the meetings on time. Same exact message, except I've reduced resistance entirely. What I tell leaders all the time, Ted, is they need to get out of the feedback business and get in the recommendation and suggestion business. They're going to be able to give a lot more feedback, a lot more often with a lot less resistance and defensiveness, just by what they call it, by how they introduce it and frame it. I know very few people that if I said to you, I have some feedback for you, they'd go, I can't wait to hear your feedback. But if I say, hey, I've been thinking about this. I have a suggestion or recommendation. Most people would go, if you have any level of credibility with me at all, what is it? They want it.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  They don't want your feedback, but they want your recommendations, suggestions. And when you frame things like that, you're somebody that as a leader can offer feedback all the time. You're always offering suggestions, always offering recommendations. Some leaders don't like that because their notion is recommendations. My feedback is stronger than recommendations. The truth is people can take it that way anyway. They don't have to yield to what you say because you come from power. Now, there are times where I only want you to give feedback. Performance reviews, things have gone tremendously off rail. We need to talk about feedback because I need to use my power and authority to convince you of the seriousness, the gravity of this and it beseech you to act on it. But that's not the case 99% of the time.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Get out of the feedback business, get in the recommendation suggestion business. You'll see that it changes everything. So simple.

• 27:24Ted Seides?

  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?

• 27:30Speaker 00

  Lower than that is observation. I don't give in 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.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 28:42Ted Seides?

  In that 1% of the time where it calls for feedback. 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?

• 28:56Speaker 00

  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 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 my 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.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  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, has real duration to it and has a longer term impact. Anytime I can get you to give yourself your own feedback and using a third party is the easiest way to do it.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  There's always a user or a customer or a colleague or another parent or a friend. What do you think they would say? I don't have the objective view. I don't have the perfect view as to what they would say. Whatever you said, you're giving yourself your own feedback when you answer the question. That's tremendously powerful and good leaders do it all the time.

• 30:38Ted Seides?

  One of the ongoing challenges to see in the investment world is giving feedback to high performers. How have you found admired leaders deal with the person who's performing, who might not be fitting the culture, the way you want the culture to move forward?

• 30:56Speaker 00

  First of all, independent of admired leadership, let's think about best practice when it comes to feedback. There's two things I'd want you to think about in terms of that world. Number one is right after success, right after mission accomplished, right after tasks have been achieved, people are much more receptive to feedback. Why? Cause they've just succeeded. They've got an armor to them because of their success, their effectiveness. They're much more sensitive right after defeat, right after mistake, right after inaccuracy. Yet that's when leaders want to give feedback. They want to give feedback right when the person doesn't want it, when they're going to be most resistant to it. You've got to remember, there is not a lot of timing issues relative to feedback, best practice wise, but that's one of them.

• 31:37Speaker 00

  Right after success or effectiveness, you can get feedback pretty fast and people will Absorb it and take it in and want to deal with it. After defeat or after a mistake, after error, you probably want to give some people some buffer. Give them some time to reflect and get them emotionally ready so that they're capable of dealing with that feedback as a result. Too many leaders correct people too fast. Too many leaders deal with mistakes too quickly. The whole point of feedback is change behavior and improve performance. It isn't just for you to get it off your chest and have catharsis. That's a big mistake that most leaders make. Another big mistake that leaders make. There's a bias that almost everybody has across the whole world. You have it, I have it, everybody has it.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  And that is, we're generally more critical of people based on our own strengths. Whatever it is that we're good at, we're more critical about other people about it. Yet we know that there's lots of ways to get to the outcomes. Doesn't have to be our way. But if you're somebody that's really analytical, you'll be more critical of other people's smarts. If you're somebody that's really organized, you'll be very critical of people that aren't as organized. If you're somebody that's creative, you'll be critical of creative. You do this to your kids, you do it to your spouse, you do it to your team. You generally over-index and over-emphasize the things that you're best at. And that's what you generally get critical of people with. That's something you really got to fight. You got to fight the bias to go, I need to be more objective than that. I need to focus on the strengths, weaknesses that they have and the feedback they need, not reflection of me.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  The question you asked, which I think is fascinating is, I have somebody that has maybe a great performance, but they have a lousy attitude or in some way they're affected. It's quite common because people feel bigger than life in some of these organizations. The deal is, you've got to keep up a cadence of feedback with those people. You can't save it up. Because the reason that people don't give feedback to those people is because they generate those results. Because they're dependent on that outcome. Because they don't want to turn those people off. What would happen if all of a sudden that person copped an attitude? Or they got disinfectant and they left and went to another fund? So we generally hold it up. And even when we give it, we're so indirect and we walk such a delicate line.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  The result of that is people learn the shitty attitude I have, it's okay, as long as I perform. We reward all the wrong stuff. The answer is, hey, get in the suggestion feedback business, but in particular, I need an ongoing small issue. Let's talk about the smallest things. I don't have to deal with your attitude generally. Let's talk about how you engage with this person. Let's talk about how you're learning this. Let's talk about how you share that. You need a ongoing, high cadence of feedback on the smallest issues over time. What you'll see is you'll slowly move people from negative to positive in terms of climate, attitude, other kinds of affect. That's the key. If I save it up and I never give it to you and never really deliver the hard message,

• 34:32Speaker 00

  then I'm rewarding you for all the wrong stuff. I'm going to get more of it. That's how prima donnas become prima donnas.

• 34:39Ted Seides?

  You mentioned a couple of times, best practices as distinct from behaviors. What's the difference between the two?

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Best practice is more situational. It's context specific. It may not be perfectly timeless or universal. An admired leadership behavior would have worked 100 years ago, would work in any industry. Doesn't matter about technology. Doesn't matter who you are, where I, what culture 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 are 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.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:51Ted Seides?

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

• 35:55Speaker 00

  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

• 36:39Speaker 00

  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 they go, let's talk about it. They figure out a strategy, a solution going forward. All the while, instead of sitting down and saying, hey, I need to give you some feedback. You got a rocky relationship with one of your colleagues. And you go, well, it's not

• 37:23Speaker 00

  that rocky. And then we start to argue and get nowhere. How questions, they embed feedback inside them. And you study admired leaders, they use them all the time to carry feedback. They carry more feedback with how questions in order to reduce resistance and to stop people from arguing with them and instead engaging them and making them own the feedback. They make people accountable to their feedback instantaneously by using a how question instead. If we went back in time and we studied great leaders in the history of the universe, male and female, culture to culture, we'd find a lot more how questions than you think. Because instinctively, intuitively, or just that they learned it, they've learned that

• 38:05Speaker 00

  resistance is their enemy with feedback, defensiveness is their enemy in feedback, arguing over the reality of the facts and that's happened in the past, enemy of change. How do I get past all that? Ask my feedback. Let it get carried with a how.

• 38:19Ted Seides?

  How about one more?

• 38:20Speaker 00

  There's something that I call an echo question. An echo question is a question that I would ask that has no right answer. It's not a rhetorical question, but I want you to think about it and I'm going to think about it. I say to you, you're up for promotion this year. There's pluses and there's minuses. There's people that will advocate for you and people that probably would want other people to be promoted over you. I want you to think about the reasons that you have for being promoted and the things that are in your way. You think about it, I'll think about it. Let's talk next week about it. In that week that transpires, that question will echo in your head. You'll first think, why did Randall ask me that? Second thing is, what's my answer? Third thing is, what's his answer? You will eventually land so that when we sit down and talk about it, you will have given yourself almost all the feedback that I would want it.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  You'll say, well, here are the pluses and here are the minuses. And I can see any gap between how you see it and I see it. It's so fascinating because you've prepared yourself with my feedback and I never gave you any yet. You're already half the way there, maybe all the way there. When you study admired leaders, they always have an echo question going on with somebody about something. I don't mean that they're asking the same person over and over again, an echo question. But they're always asking people, hey, you think about this, I'm going to think about this question. Let's explore our answers. If it's going to create anxiety, they might talk about that afternoon. They don't let people be anxious all weekend. What they'll do is they'll say, what's the feedback that you really need? Is there an echo question that I might be able to get you thinking about it?

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Criteria of success, rewards, punishments, promotions, hiring, selection, people's reactions, response to you, all ripe for echo questions. Echo questions are really cool. Imagine sitting down with your child and saying, hey, I want to talk about how things are going on your team, how the coaches are thinking of you in terms of your skill and your attitude, as well as your friends and your teammates are engaging. Or why don't you think about, what are your big assets? What are the things that you're really bringing to this team? And what are the things that you could work on? I haven't thought about it completely. I want you to think about it, let's talk about it tomorrow. Now, first thing that'll happen is your son, daughter, colleague, teammate will go, let's talk about it right now. You go, no.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  I want to think about it. I don't have clarity yet. What you don't say out loud is, I want this question to echo. Okay, I need it to echo in your head. By the time we show up and talk about it tomorrow, you'll have generated all kinds of thoughts and energy and activity, and you'll have your own feedback, most of which I'll agree with. Occasionally, I need to push something and then whatever I push will be directly the gap between how you see it and how I see it. So cool. Echo questions, a known number in the literature, very common with admired leaders and feedback.

• 41:00Ted Seides?

  Every time you mention a behavior or best practice, it feels totally intuitive. I'm curious if there are behaviors or best practices that you found that are counterintuitive.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Oh, there's quite a few counterintuitive behaviors, lots of them. Once we articulate them, most of them are pretty obvious. You've been around how questions your whole life, carrying feedback with them, that's a wholly different thing. Now that I've said to you that how questions embed feedback inside them, makes perfect sense. It's a fact. There are some behaviors that are somewhat counterintuitive. Let me give you one. When you think about high performing teams, they operate differently in terms of their relationship with the leader. There's an old idea around matrix, a two by two grid that says, the relationship I have with my leader is about my relational closeness with the leader. How close am I? Do they know me? Do they care about me? Do they understand me? At the top of that matrix is the notion of expectation standard, focus on details.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Most high results leaders are more focused on standards than they are focused on relational closeness. But we know that high performing teams require both. The highest performing teams are the ones where the leaders have really high standards, really high expectations, unusual focus on certain kinds of details, and people feel relational closeness. Problem is, most of the people that are really high standard leaders don't like to be relationally close. They're not warm and fuzzy people. They're not very empathetic. People that are empathetic generally don't have high standards. They generally don't have the attention to details, which is why so many teams underperform or get inconsistent, or the team members get defensive over time. They'll get defensive because the leader has high expectations,

• 42:39Speaker 00

  but they won't have relational closeness. They won't feel as if they're cared about. Then the opposite occurs. I know my leader cares about me, but they don't stand for much. They don't push me hard. They don't challenge me. You would think that the normal pathway is I gotta teach people how to be more empathetic, warm and fuzzy. But my experience is, most people that are high-energy, high-charging, results-based leaders, they're incapable of being warm and empathetic and fuzzy. But there's a different pathway. That is, you can understand people more deeply in order to create the same relational closeness. I can invest in understanding the experiences that have made you up as a human being, has got you to be where... I can understand your judgments, your decisions, the quality of your decisions over time. I can understand geographically what's important to you. Where do you find solace? Where do you vacation?

• 43:23Speaker 00

  I can understand what bothers you, what makes you happy. I can understand your talents and skills. I can understand your passions. I can understand your kids' passions. I can invest in you. You show me a leader that you think has got fabulous team results, and you say, "This person's grumpy. This person is not anything warm and fuzzy." I'll show you somebody that has found the counterintuitive pathway. They've learned to create relational closeness without empathy. They've learned to create it without being warm and fuzzy and giving people a lot of couch time. What they've done is they've invested deeply in those people and understanding them. They keep notes, and they continually build a book of understanding about those people. Those people say, "That person is invested in understanding me. They get me. I feel relationally close." They can have

• 44:06Speaker 00

  as high standards as they want. That's counterintuitive to me. I would have never imagined that. You show me a coach like Bill Belichick, or Nick Saban, or Pat Summitt, and these people with high expectations, you go, "These are not warm and friendly people." I will show you every time. Nick Saban invested tremendously in terms of understanding. Talked to every coach that you ever played for, if you played for him. Looked at every piece of game film, knew physically everything about you, could tell you the width of your palm. Wow. You're gonna invest in me like that? You care about me in a different way. Belichick, famous for knowing your kids, the sports your kids play, the positions of the sports your kids play, and he goes out of his way to talk to those coaches that coach your kids. This

• 44:51Speaker 00

  guy cares about me, even though he's a grumpy guy. Every high-performing team leader has a combination of those two things. How do they create relational closeness? How do they have high expectations and standards? It's not intuitive, but there's a second pathway to relational closeness that's not intuitive to me, and that is deep understanding.

• 45:11Ted Seides?

  On the margin, how important is tone?

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Tone is style, and style is the way that you express yourself. And you can express yourself positively or negatively. We generally overemphasize athletic coaches because it's something we all know, and they're out there in the marketplace. They don't have a lot in common with most corporate leaders. We don't get fiery halftime talks. We can't kick people off our team instantaneously, bring somebody new in. We don't have two-hour games. There's so many things. Most athletic coaches can have a bigger range of tone and style than you and I can as team leaders. We need to have a more positive, it doesn't have to be warm, but more engaging, more validating style to the way that we engage people. You can have a fairly negative style without recognizing it.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  Example, where do you start when you start talking with people? Do you start on the negative or you start on the positive? That's a trained thing, by the way. You weren't born that way. Most smart people start on the negative because it's a differentiator, because it illustrates differentiation and distinction, as well as it illustrates, at least in most people's mind, that you understand something at a deeper level. What you normally do is go right to the negative. But there's not an optimism in that. Have you trained yourself to start positive? Or do you start yourself on the negative? What you're going to find is that's a tone. It sets a tone. It sets a climate. Most leaders don't realize that that's the case. They don't realize they're doing it. When they start giving feedback, they immediately go for the criticism. And then they go, oh, I feel bad about this. And then they end with some weak throwaway positive,

• 46:42Speaker 00

  where people that have a better tone will say, I need to emphasize the positive, not just to make you feel better, but just to be objective and to set the right tone so you're ready to hear my negative feedback. Tone matters, but I think of it as more of a style and approach. It's got affect. It's either positive or negative. And I can get there in lots of different ways.

• 47:01Ted Seides?

  I want to circle back to something you started talking about at the beginning, which is followership. You hear about that word, and it creates energy. It's exciting, the thought of a leader that you just want to follow anywhere. How have you gone about teasing out what creates that followership?

• 47:17Speaker 00

  It's mostly a function of the way you motivate and inspire people and build relationships. If I find followership leader that doesn't have results, I can still learn a lot of stuff from them. Not as much as I would from an admired leader, but pretty cool. When I talk to people around you who you lead, how do they feel about your relationship? Do they feel as if you're adding value to them? Do they feel if there's a high frequency of contact? Do they feel that the investment you're making is significant? Do they feel that you're making them better and challenging them in that way? High talent wants that. The relationship piece is a big deal relative to followership. But so is motivation and inspiration. Do I want you to succeed? Am I showing you that I'm rooting for your success? Would I do anything for you to succeed?

• 48:00Speaker 00

  Or do I put hurdles up in front of you to make you earn my trust, earn my respect, earn my desire? Followership is more an orientation that we have toward people. Good followership leaders tend to be high fans of other people. They tend to be relationally close to other people. But in particular, they tend to invest in other people in a multitude of ways. And that builds a sense of loyalty and a connection that they get to enjoy the benefits or the fruits of.

• 48:28Ted Seides?

  When a leader is 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?

• 48:45Speaker 00

  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 over-scheduled, 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.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  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 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 you value, but is there a time value congruency? If you tell me your family's important, I want to be able to look at your field of time and how you spend it and know that you're spending a good portion of your time with your family. Because if you're not, then that value is nonsense.

• 50:09Speaker 00

  In case good leaders have time value congruence, they schedule their priorities rather than let their priorities schedule them. You raise the ultimate problem, which we all face, which is we have to decide how we spend our time and there's nobody that's telling us it's perfectly right and we're going to see short and long-term benefits or effects of those choices. We can be really bad at them or really good at them. A lot of things that look like they're productive and effective right now are probably bad choices of time.

• 50:36Ted Seides?

  As you've thought about scaling your time from being private with your clients for many years to six years ago, when we talked to you or launching admiredleadership.com and started writing field notes, what's been the impact of those first two initiatives?

• 50:52Speaker 00

  I do nothing but sit around and write every day. It's crazy. It's no simple task writing, even a short little email every day that hopefully is articulate and makes sense, especially as a best practice. I spend an enormous amount of my time writing now where I never did before. I spent most of my time talking before. I'm writing every day, which makes it easier because you get more fluid. I've had a couple of days where I go, oh crap, I get no field note for tomorrow and I'm not in the mood, but that doesn't happen very often. It's back to this notion of have to versus get to. I constantly remind myself, I get to write these field notes. I get to have hundreds of thousands of people read my stuff. I get to coach wonderfully successful people, people that need me to get to the next spot where they're trying to get to.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  I get to do those things. I don't have to. I'm still fairly private. This is the first podcast I've given in five, six years. I gave a bunch when we first started doing all this because I had to. I'm really a big fan of yours, so I'm happy to do this one, but it's not something I'm lining up to do. I spend most of my time coaching and talking to my clients, perspective as well as real, and talking to people because I have literally hundreds of people that are former clients of mine that I worked with for years. There's no reason for me to maintain the same level of cadence, but they still call me looking for a sounding board and advice and counsel. So I'm constantly engaged. I'm probably busier now than I've ever been.

• 52:17Ted Seides?

  How's the uptake been on the website?

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Really good. Both FieldNote readership, Alex accept, Alex use our base platform, admireleadership.com, and that platform, that playbook that's in there with behaviors, all of it continues to grow and expand. And all go organically. We chug along with revenue to continually invest in growing the place. And it's been growing very nicely and has since inception 40 years ago.

• 52:43Ted Seides?

  If you were giving advice to a chief investment officer, head of an investment firm, about one behavior you think they should consciously practice over the next couple of weeks? Curious what comes to the top of your mind?

• 52:58Speaker 00

  When I think of a chief investment officer, I immediately think of decision making. I think of somebody that's making critical decisions over and over and over again. If there's one thing that I would want a chief investment officer to do is to separate decision process from decision outcome. Those are different things. You don't control the outcome perfectly. In many cases, you don't control the outcome much at all. You always control the process. The idea of being able to make for a great process, knowing the difference between one and two-way decisions, that is, one-way decisions, I can't revoke that easily, going to cost a lot of money or time and energy. Two-way decisions, I can revoke that if I need to. I need different processes for those things. In order to create a robust and vigorous process, for those one-way decisions especially, here's the key, to reward the process, not the outcome.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  We get to lots of investment outcomes by luck. Beshear Market, things that happened that we had no control over, and you celebrate and you go, what are you celebrating? Because are we celebrating luck? We don't say that. We're celebrating skill. We wouldn't have even thought of it, but that's not the case. Start celebrating decision processes that are great processes that produce bad outcomes. What you're going to find is you make for people willing to take more risk, willing to invest their time and energy, hone in and be specific with the process. Long-term, they will make better quality decisions. Why? Because you're focused on the quality of the process. The outcomes are what they are. Good leaders always celebrate and reward process even when outcomes are not great. The best leaders will do that on purpose.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  They will go out of their way to say, wonderful process. Everybody around the room will be scratching their head going, but it didn't turn out well. And you go, you bet. But if we did it 10 more times, it would turn out great eight times. That's something we don't control. We control this all the time. Figure out your decision process, especially with one-way decisions. Codify it and make it consistent and reward and celebrate anybody that does it with rigor. That will create better long-term decisions throughout your whole organization.

• 54:56Ted Seides?

  In the work you do outside of investing, in sports, coaching, other businesses, we'd love to hear your favorite story of something that might not cross over at all. Just something that's come up that you find yourself repeating over and over.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  I coach college golf teams and college golfers for fun. I played in college and I get back to the game and I wish I could still play it at a high level, but I can't. I love working with the kids that want to work on the mental side of things. I don't mess with anybody's swings. You know, it never occurred to me the impact that parents have on these kids. Because my parents were divorced from my playing. They didn't watch me or anything else. I developed on my own, but some of these parents are so vested in their kids. One of my favorite stories is I have one of the teams I worked with and one of the players is what I call a social performer. And he particularly for his parents. His parents follow him on every hole. If he makes a birdie, he looks at his dad, looks at his mom, smiles. You can't play high-level golf that way. You gotta play for yourself. You can't be distracted like that.

• 55:55Speaker 00

  You can't be a social performer. Otherwise, you soon you start with excuses and all kinds of weird stuff. He's quite good, even though he does that, he's as good as he's going to get like that. Turns out that team goes to Hawaii on a tournament. And because it travels snafus and everything else, parents can't go. It's the best tournament he ever plays, the best rounds he's ever had. Because his parents aren't there, he's able to create the hyper-focus that he needs. The coach is thinking, wow, this is amazing. So he sits down and he talks to the parents and he says, hey, your son performed unbelievably. He didn't have you there. He wasn't looking for your approval or anything else. He said, we know. We can't believe we missed his best tournament. We're never going to miss another one. We'll never ever miss another one. They totally missed it.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  They showed up every time after that and he went right back to where he was. It's funny how those things work. Sometimes people just don't get it. That's such a fun story for me because I always wonder, what am I not getting? Where am I showing up where I go, you bet. And I'm going to double down. I should not just be doubling down. I should actually be removing myself from the situation. So that's a fun one for me.

• 57:02Ted Seides?

  Randall, I want to ask you a couple of fun closing questions. Before we get to the closing questions, I want to tell you about one of our strategic investments. We've made a few and each are working on a product or service we think will 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?

• 57:37Speaker 00

  My first paid job, I picked up golf balls on a driving range. I have to tell you this story because this driving range, they had a golf club that had been salt off at the bottom and they had nailed on 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. 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 these. What was so fascinating about that was I wore a big board on my back because people could hit you 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.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  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. Cause you're deinvaduated, they don't know, you're not a face. You're just out there with a board on your back. But man, some of them are really good. They would hit me a lot.

• 58:48Ted Seides?

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

• 58:52Speaker 00

  I'm not sure I'm that interesting. I am a first responder. I once was a part of Manette 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 and 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 undergrad degree is in forest biology. I was a student of dendrology, mostly of silver culture, and that's how trees grow. Dendrology is the notion of identification of trees. You walk around with me anyplace, I tell you what every frickin' tree is. And that always blows people's mind. They're like, what?

• 59:34Ted Seides?

  What's the best advice you've ever received?

• 59:37Speaker 00

  One of the most impactful pieces of advice that I've ever gotten is not to treat books as sacred. By that, I mean write in them. You don't have to read them. You don't have to finish them. You can start another one. Spend time with books. Spend time with articles rather than feel guilty. I was that person where if I started a book, it'd sit on my nightstand and be like, well, I didn't really get into that, but I gotta finish it. I can't start another one. I had somebody that said, don't take yourself so seriously. Don't take books so seriously. There's something to be learned. Spend a little time. There are a conversation. Write in the margins. You're not going to be that famous. No one's going to ask you for your library collection and look at all your notes. Argue with them. Mark them up. Spend five minutes with them. If you don't like them, then put them on the shelf and then spend time with them again. That changed a lot

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  of things. I can consume a lot of information, a lot of writing and a lot of reading that way, where too many people treat reading as something they have to complete and something that represents them in some physical way. I treat books like they're candy.

• 1:00:37Ted Seides?

  How's your life turned out differently from how you expected it to?

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh, my life is so different than I expected it to be. I expected to play professional golf at a high level. And if I hadn't gotten hurt, who knows? I was damn good putter. I was decent in everything else. But once you lose a sports dream, you have to find something else. I happen to be interested in organizational influence, persuasion. I started studying that and it turned out great. I went from teacher to coach. At one point, our firm got big enough where I had to stop teaching and was a professor for a long time. In that process, that was an identity shift. Now, when I look back, I go, it all worked out perfectly. Who knew I was preparing to create Alex in AI coach? Who knew I was preparing myself to write a field note every day? But very different than I ever thought it was going to be. Getting hurt was the best blessing of my life. Had I

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  stayed, I probably wouldn't have been that good if I had made it. I wouldn't have had as good of impact or wouldn't be able to influence people's lives the way that I do now. It turned out really well, but gosh, very different than I thought.

• 1:01:37Ted Seides?

  All right, Randall, last one. If the next five years are a chapter in your life, what's that chapter about?

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  It's the same chapter. Nothing's changing for me. I have a lot of people who say, you're going to retire? I always say, Frank Sinatra, did he hum for a couple of years and then he stopped singing? And by the way, the answer to that is he never stopped singing. You know why? Because he was a singer. I am an executive coach. I'm going to be coaching people for the rest of my life. I'll be coaching people probably at the last breath of my life, just like I'm guessing Frank Sinatra was thinking about a song he wanted to sing. It's who I've made myself to be. I don't have a next chapter. Do I think I'll travel some more? Maybe? Will I write some things I haven't written? Yeah, maybe. In essence, it's one continual chapter. I'm trying to get better. The gap between who I am and who I need to be is always bigger than I want it to be. At the

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  end of the day, I'm going to do more of the same stuff and I expect the next chapter will be the same. There's not enough good leaders in the world. So I'm about spreading the message. Everybody needs to do better, be the leader that other people need them to be. If we touch one or two people as far as that goes, then this is all worth it.

• 1:02:43Ted Seides?

  Randall, so appreciate you sharing your wisdom and always enjoy it.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  Oh, that's great. You're doing great at this stuff. I always enjoyed listening and I appreciate you taking the time and talking to me.

• 1:02:54Ted Seides?

  Great. Thanks.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:02:56Ted Seides?

  Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can access past shows, join our mailing list, and sign up for premium content. Have a good one and see you next time.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  All opinions expressed by TED and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions in securities discussed on this podcast.