Pod Insights Summation with Auren Hoffman Patrick Lencioni - the six types of working genius About this episode Patrick Lencioni is one of the founders of The Table Group and is the pioneer of the organizational health movement. He is the author of 13 books, which have sold over 9 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. As President of the Table Group, Pat spends his time speaking and writing about leadership, teamwork, and organizational health and consulting with executives and their teams. After more than twenty years in print, his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of...
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Auren Hoffman? Hello fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdas.com. That's world of das, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Patrick Lencioni. Patrick is the founder and CEO of The Table Group, a management consulting firm and author of 12 business books that have sold for over nine million copies worldwide. His book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, has remained a bestseller for over a decade. It is a book that I have read multiple times, actually, so I'm a big fan. Prior to founding his firm in 1997, he worked at Oracle, Sybase,
0:47 Auren Hoffman? and Bain and Company. Patrick, welcome to World of DAS.
0:50 Speaker 01 It's great to be here.
0:51 Auren Hoffman? Super excited. Now, most tech companies are obsessed with like being smart and the optimized for strategy and product innovation. Why do smart companies still fail so often?
1:03 Speaker 01 It's one of those crazy things. And it's actually how I got into this field, Orin. I used to work at a management consulting firm called Bain and Company. And essentially, what we did is we helped companies be smarter. And we would go there and do all this data analysis and present it to them. And by the way, it's really important and really interesting. But I went to a client that had all these internal political issues and they were just using our data to compete with another department within the company that was also doing data. So they weren't really using the information. It was just this internal politics.
1:36 Auren Hoffman? Isn't that what they always use consulting firms for is just to do something they already want to do?
1:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, they were just trying to, our firm versus another firm, one department versus another. And I remember saying, hey, maybe we should help them fix the political problem they have, because I think we're wasting their time and money. And they said, well, this is what we do. We don't do that. And I remember at that point, I thought, well, I want to help companies solve that problem so they can actually use the data and the knowledge they have. Because so often, And it's only gotten more so this way or in over time. So often, people have all the intelligence they need, but they don't know how to work together to use it.
2:13 Auren Hoffman? As companies get potentially smaller, let's say, revenue per person goes up because of AI and because of other types of things out there. Is it more important to work as a team? Or is it becoming less important as these teams get smaller?
2:28 Speaker 01 I don't think it will be less important by any means. And if you have fewer employees, the potential for politics to really thwart things is probably even greater. So as we get smarter, it might very well be that intelligence becomes less of a differentiator. As every company learns how to use data, it might be, well, what's our strategic advantage? Because it used to be 30 years ago, you could maintain a competitive advantage based on things you knew. Today, if there's going to be access to information for everyone, now some will use it better than others. We can talk about that. But I think that the cultural differentiations might actually become more important.
3:07 Auren Hoffman? We wrote five dyslexia team, I don't know, a long time ago, because I remember reading it quite a long time ago. Of those five, is there one that is just more prominent with all the AI stuff that's coming? One that is really taking over?
3:20 Speaker 01 We've been using AI more and more here at our company. And what I've found is that arguing about how to use the information is actually more important than I realized. Because everybody thinks, well, AI is going to tell you what decisions to make. It's not, it gives you more information about how to make those decisions. But knowing what to ask for and how to use that is still just as important. And if you don't create an environment of trust and conflict, you could find yourself just following the data and not actually wrestling with it. So I think trust and conflict, the first two are going to be critical to make sure that we're not just ceding responsibility to whatever the data says.
3:57 Auren Hoffman? Most people shy away from conflict. How does one engage in it in a productive way?
4:04 Speaker 01 Conflict is a good thing because it allows us to make better decisions. And it's not personal conflict. That's the problem. Everybody thinks it's about going after each other. It's about actually disagreeing with passion around ideas. And the problem is it's always uncomfortable, Orin. No two people, even if you're debating something really objective, there is an element of personal risk involved in that. And most people are like, oh, I want to avoid that at all costs.
4:31 Auren Hoffman? I don't want to be wrong. I don't want people to tell me I'm wrong.
4:34 Speaker 01 So we avoid it at our own peril. What I say is you better get comfortable being uncomfortable. And every time you get through it, you go, man, I'm every meeting I've led a CEO and their team through, and they had arguments. And at the end, they were like, man, that was really good. You made us talk about that. But the next time it happens, there's still the tendency to go, can we just avoid this? Can we just email each other and kind of avoid having to have a passionate discussion or argument?
5:00 Auren Hoffman? Most meetings, at least most meetings I've been in suck. Is there like one easy way to just make that meeting way better?
5:09 Speaker 01 It's funny. I just saw that McKinsey came out with a list of the books people should read this year. And they picked one of my books from more than 15 years ago called Death by Meeting. In that book, first of all, meetings do suck. And it's for two reasons. One, they're boring. Nobody likes anything that's boring. And the reason they're boring is because there's no conflict. Because nobody ever goes to a movie or reads a book and says it's boring if there's actually something going on there. And our meetings should be like that, too. We should be actually debating and trying to solve problems that matter. So a boring meeting just means we're not doing our job as a leader.
5:41 Auren Hoffman? Or if it's status update, why have a meeting? There's other ways to get the status update.
5:46 Speaker 01 Exactly. Plenty of good technology for doing that. The other thing, the reason why meetings are bad is because we tend to have four different conversations in one meeting. We're reviewing something and we're debating something and we're solving a short term problem. And then we're brainstorming and you can't do that all at once. And half the people in the room think they're making a decision. The other people think they're brainstorming. Everybody gets equally pissed off when the meeting doesn't turn out. So we've got to get more clear. Right now, all we're doing is updating and we're going to do it in 10 minutes. Right now, we're brainstorming. Don't evaluate this. Right now, we need to make a decision.
6:18 Auren Hoffman? Those be actual separate meetings? Or should it just be like the agenda is update and then the agenda is brainstorm or something?
6:27 Speaker 01 It's not black or white, although you need to really reposition. Human beings cannot shift that easily in context. So you need clarity of context. And what we say is every day you should have a five to 10 minute stand up with the people in your office, if you all work together. Okay, a lot of engineers do that. What are we working on? And then every week you need to have a tactical meeting where all you're doing is going through, what are our goals? How are we doing? What do we need to adjust? Where do we stand? But then you have to have these strategic meetings, we call them ad hoc meetings where a big issue comes up and we gotta get in a room and roll up our sleeves and argue and throw things against the wall. That's the most fun meeting we have. But when we try to have that meeting in a 15 minute increment in the middle of our weekly staff meeting, you just can't do it.
7:11 Speaker 01 People can't really adjust the context that well. I had this saying in the book about my wife and I getting ready for the day. We're in the bathroom brushing our teeth and she says, hey, who's picking the kids up from school? Hey, where are we going on vacation this year? Should we have another baby? What are we having for dinner? Well, you can't have those conversations in one thing, but we do it all the time in our families. And at work, we need to separate out. Are we planning the future? Are we solving near term problems? Are we brainstorming? Are we reporting? Try to separate those things out. So when people are engaging in those, they're not confused.
7:44 Auren Hoffman? I find that you have a half hour meeting on the calendar or something like that. And then 25 minutes in, there's something really meaty that gets brought up or something. And then you like, look at the clock here. I'm like, there's no way we're gonna be. And then what do we do? And you start talking about it, then you have to cut off mid sentence because people have to rush off to other things.
8:04 Speaker 01 That happens all the time. So you go to a meeting, you have an agenda and you're going through it and somebody goes, hey, did you read that article about this competitor and what they're doing? You gotta go right there and go, okay, we're not gonna derail this meeting and we're not gonna try to talk about that important thing in 10 minutes. We are going to get our calendars out and find an hour and a half. I don't care what we have to cancel. That's too important not to do. And we're gonna go into a room and really wrestle with that. That's why we call it a strategic ad hoc, because they come up and you can't wait till the quarterly ops review to talk about it.
8:36 Auren Hoffman? There are these standing meetings that we have on our calendar and there's definitely some real goodness in those standing meetings. Those are important. You have them with your team or whatever. So you've got a seven-person standing meeting, let's say, once a week or once every other week or something. But a lot of times, people aren't engaged in those meetings. A lot of times, you finish it, you're like, okay, that wasn't a good use of my time. But I would say at least one out of three, it really was a good use of your time. You can't just like not go to the meeting. Is there a way to somehow make it better or somehow keep the agenda better?
9:11 Speaker 01 What we need to do is we need to go into that meeting and not necessarily have an agenda ahead of time, know what our top goals are, and then review how we're doing very quickly. We literally go through, and Alan Mulally at Ford used to do this at Ford, at the beginning of the meeting, you go through your key objectives and you go, is it green, yellow, or red? And then at the end of that 10-minute review of all the things going on, you go, are we going to talk about the red things? Or are we going to go through and peanut butter our time out among the green ones and the yellow ones? By arriving and setting the stage for the meeting by reviewing things, usually the real important issues come up to the top and you go, well, let's take those issues on first because if we do anything, we have to do that. Too often, we go around, we go, okay, you're the marketing person, give us your 20-minute report on marketing.
9:55 Speaker 01 And if marketing's not the biggest issue going on right now, let's take your time and spend a bunch of it on this. Come up with what we call a real-time agenda based on what's really going on in the organization and what deserves the most time.
10:07 Auren Hoffman? Let's say you have this standing meeting with seven people and really, you need four of those seven to be in the meeting and the other three might find it a little bit of a waste of time. Should you somehow know it ahead of time and say to the other three, hey, Bob, you should skip this meeting. You don't need to be in it. That way, Bob doesn't feel like he's totally bored and et cetera.
10:30 Speaker 01 Bob probably needs to watch the sausage being made. If it's a real team and the decision they're making is going to influence the rest of the team. And a classic one is the chief legal counsel would be there. And they'd be talking about something and the lawyer would be checked out and they'd be signing papers or something. And we go, hey, if you're really a strategic part of this team, then you're more than just the lawyer. You're actually supposed to be thinking about this. If not, then maybe you shouldn't be on the team and you should just be doing this other function. So it kind of depends on what kind of a team it is. I like to think that whatever your job is, you should actually be trying to add value. Cause sometimes the best ideas come from people really outside of the responsibility going on there. Generally, when in doubt, be in the meeting and be engaged.
11:12 Speaker 01 Occasionally, yes, you should take something offline and go, hey, let's the three of us go off and take care of that. But there's something really good about people watching the sausage getting made. So they can then represent what's actually going on and add value.
11:24 Auren Hoffman? So it has to be obviously still very interesting. So there is more conflict. So they're like, oh, I'm going to watch Suzie and Ann go at it or something.
11:33 Speaker 01 Here's what happens in meetings. It's so interesting, Aron, and I've seen this for so many years. You're in a meeting and you're the leader and you see two people that don't agree. And instead of going, you know something, you guys don't agree, do you? And they're going, no, no, I think we're pretty close. No, no, no, no, no, I want you to make an argument. We should be, we call it mining for conflict because conflict is good. It makes it interesting and we get at the underlying issues. But many leaders will try to smooth things over and think they did a good job.
12:03 Auren Hoffman? I've done that.
12:04 Speaker 01 We all have, and we always pay for it later when we're like, yeah, we should have taken on that issue right there.
12:10 Auren Hoffman? When you're in person, it's kind of rude to have like your laptop open and stuff. And it's just a lot easier to be more engaged. When you're doing a video meeting, which nowadays we do so often, even if you have an in-person culture in your company, if you have offices around the country or something, you're going to have meetings from the management team that are video. And then of course, once you're video, wow, you've got other things on your desktop right in front of you that will distract you very easily. It's very easy to go through a few emails or catch up on Twitter, X, or look at some other random things for your kids that pop up. I feel like the burden for meetings is even like way higher when we're remote.
12:55 Auren Hoffman? How does one do things there?
12:58 Speaker 01 The key there is, and this is where if you're the leader, and this is going to sound so painful, you have to call people out when you think they're not paying attention. Alan Mulally ran the Ford Motor Company and he would say to people, hey, what are you doing there? A guy would literally have his phone out and he'd go, no phones in here. I'm serious. And it sounds like something a fifth grade teacher would say to a kid, but it really matters to know that everybody's engaged and paying attention.
13:21 Auren Hoffman? That means the leader has to be really engaged. That might be the person who's most likely to be multitasking on something.
13:29 Speaker 01 Well, if the leader's doing it, everybody else is going to do it too. And I've seen that.
13:32 Auren Hoffman? For sure. I'm so guilty. I literally have a Post-it note on my monitor that says, focus, don't do something else. You literally have the most engaging thing ever built in the history of the universe with your computer right in front of you. It's very hard to like stay engaged.
13:50 Speaker 01 We've all thought this for years. We think it's great that we have this one device that allows us to do everything and our phone is even worse. And sometimes you just wish it only did one thing. I'm a screenwriter for fun and I write fiction books, but when I write fiction, it's not good that messages pop up there. I should have a laptop just for writing books.
14:11 Auren Hoffman? Oh, you don't just turn off your notifications? You just have like a separate air gapped thing in a way?
14:17 Speaker 01 I do. I'm pretty good at avoiding that, but even still I do get distracted and that's not good.
14:24 Auren Hoffman? Now, you're also involved in dealing with Doge stuff, making federal government more, less dysfunctional. I imagine this is next level more difficult than making a company. What does one have to do there?
14:40 Speaker 01 That's one of those things that every one of us who's a taxpayer and looks at the budget and looks at our debt and everything else. And especially if you've worked in private enterprise, you understand how much you need to justify what are we spending money on and people on and time on and is it producing a return? I just got to think that so much of what happens in government, based on my own experience and people I've talked to that worked there and the way I see things. And here's the thing, the people that work there, They're not happy. They're not going to volunteer necessarily to get laid off. But how much would it suck to work in a job where you know, nobody was actually using what you were doing? And it really wasn't making a difference? I just think it's actually a service to everyone.
15:22 Speaker 01 If we get really good at assessing how productive, how focused and how much ROI is there to what we're doing. The best employees hate working someplace where there's a lot of slacking going on. So I worry that the very best people wouldn't want to work in government.
15:38 Auren Hoffman? They hate it when it's slacking and they hate when there's just bureaucratic things that stop them from doing their job. Less time they have to spend actually doing real work. They hate that.
15:48 Speaker 01 I hope that we can be aggressive and astute in how we cut back on things. I know it's hard. The purpose of any bureaucracy becomes the perpetuation of the bureaucracy. So it's hard. It's a service to everyone, including the people who work there that know that they're not productive, to help them find a way to be productive.
16:06 Auren Hoffman? When you call Comcast customer service and they keep you there for an extra hour or something, it is what it is and Comcast is making some sort of determination on that. But when citizens interact with the government and it takes longer for the citizens, it literally hurts the GDP of the country and the productivity and the happiness of the overall country. Is there a way we can somehow get that ethos to help everybody who's engaging with it, which of course, all of us?
16:36 Speaker 01 It's so interesting because everybody knows that needs to happen and we've all been in that situation. There's actually a slight comparison to like Comcast because the problem with your cable companies and things like that is you kind of don't have a choice almost. So when you feel like I don't have a choice, you go to the DMV. You can't go, I'll tell you what, DMV, I'm going to go to the other DMV that's better and we're going to put you out of business. There needs to be something at stake for the people that run those organizations. But if we're not going to get rid of the person who runs the DMV poorly, and we're not going to get rid of a department within the government, and everybody knows it needs to be done, but then somehow congresspeople go and then they vote to keep funding for things. So I don't know what the solution is. Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention.
17:19 Speaker 01 I almost feel like we need some forcing function to go. And this is kind of what's happening now. Some people are saying, hey, if we eliminated that whole department, what would actually happen? Maybe just going through that exercise will be good and people will go, oh, maybe it's only 20% of it that we actually need. I'm fascinated by this because people that work in the private sector have to prove that they're adding value. And I think that we should have a similar look at people that work for the government.
17:44 Auren Hoffman? In the private sector, my belief is that 99% of companies over 100 people, there's at least 20, 25% of people in the company that are adding negative value. If you got rid of them just immediately, the company would be better. My guess is that's just as true in government. There's just people who are not helping, actively hurting the mission of the company, actively making things go slower, et cetera.
18:12 Speaker 01 In New York City, they couldn't fire teachers because of the teachers' union. So you know what they were doing with bad teachers? They were sending them to a big warehouse and letting them do crossword puzzles all day.
18:21 Auren Hoffman? It's actually probably a good thing.
18:23 Speaker 01 Exactly. It's a good thing because having them around the school actually distracted. So if you can't get rid of them, better than to move them away from the classroom. Which of course, it's preposterous that we can't let somebody go who's not good at their job. But I think the same thing in companies, there's people that, do we need that? The other one is, are they actually making it worse? And a good CEO, based on clarity about the culture and productivity, will actually find those people that are negative drags on productivity and kindly, with respect, remove them. And you know what happens when you remove somebody who does that? The rest of people's productivity and morale go through the roof.
19:02 Auren Hoffman? And people love it. Their satisfaction goes up so much.
19:06 Speaker 01 And do it with kindness, just like in the government. We should be kind and if there's things that need to be removed to make everything else work better, we should do it.
19:13 Auren Hoffman? One thing I thought was interesting was Meta did a series of layoffs a few years ago. And usually the advice is do like one big layoff and then tell everyone, you're not going to have any more of these because obviously it's very worrisome to people when you see people being laid off, like, oh, am I going to be the one next? But what Meta did is they did a series of very surgical three to 7% layoffs because I believe they just didn't know who to lay off. And they had to slowly learn that. And it took 18 months of layoffs, which in some ways is bad, but in some ways they were able to lay off the exact right person.
19:51 Speaker 01 And of course, if you already know who they are, doing it in one fell swoop is easier. But if you're not sure, doing it poorly in one fell swoop, you're going to eliminate the wrong people. And that sends a message to the company, too. And I'm guessing that if they were doing it well, the fact that over time, it took a while, probably everybody else got more effective because they were like, they're going to come look at this. Let's actually figure out if we're using our resources well. And I bet there was secondary benefits to the delayed process.
20:23 Auren Hoffman? Interesting. What other advice would you give to like the Doge team?
20:27 Speaker 01 I would say, don't read the newspaper. Do the right thing to do because, oh, my gosh, politics is just such a bad environment for getting things done. This should not be a political thing. This should be a functional thing. This shouldn't be about one party or the other. It should be, do we need this and are we financially running our country well?
20:45 Auren Hoffman? You have a newer framework, which identifies six types of genius. Can you walk us through that?
20:51 Speaker 01 This is the most exciting thing we've ever done. For years, people said the five dysfunctions of a team was going to be the biggest thing we ever did. And then five years ago, we accidentally discovered a new way to look at work. And I love this for people in data as well, because one technology person is not the same as another, is not the same as another, and everybody thinks they're the same. So we discovered that when it comes to getting work done, not personality, but the kind of work we do, there are six things, and everybody has a genius in two of those six. Genius means they get joy and energy out of doing those. But the other four, they don't get joy and energy from, and in fact, two of them, they lose energy. It drains them. The six types of working genius are very simple.
21:34 Speaker 01 It starts up at 50,000 feet with the genius of wonder. There's people that love to ponder things and ask the big question. Every great idea came from somebody saying, there must be a better way. Is there a better way? And then somebody else comes along with the next genius and invents a solution. That's the inventing genius. I have that one. I can't help it. I do it just because it gives me joy and energy. I wake up inventing things all the time. It's not because I'm smart. It's that I have a God given ability to come up with new ideas. But not every new idea is a good one. And that's why we need the next genius, which is called discernment. And these are people that have this ability to evaluate things using data, not data like information, but gut feel, pattern recognition.
22:16 Auren Hoffman? That would be like the investor, maybe in some ways.
22:19 Speaker 01 In the investment community, they will look at an idea and go, this one's a winner. And people go, how do you know? You haven't even run the numbers. And they're like, I've seen this movie before. I see patterns here. And they can't really justify it in detail sometimes, but they just have a gut for what that is. That's called discernment. That's a genius some people have. But then there's another genius called galvanizing. There's people in the world who love to get up and rally the troops and push people out of their comfort zone and get people to do things. It's one of the geniuses a lot of people hate, but it's so valuable in organizations. There's two final geniuses. One is called enablement, and they're the people that just love to come alongside and help people. And
23:02 Speaker 01 when you ask them for something and they're like, yeah, absolutely. Tell me what you need from me. They're so valuable. They're not just nice. They're not just malleable. They actually get joy and energy out of answering the call. When you get up in front of them and say, I need somebody to help me with this. They're like, I'm in. And the last one is called tenacity, and they're people who finish things. They get joy and energy out of doing the last part of the work and getting it done and ensuring it meets its goals. Hey, Aron, I have no enablement and tenacity. So I don't like finishing things. I would have written zero books if it had been up to me. But I had people on my team with tenacity who said, you need to finish this and we're going to hold you accountable to a high standard. On any team, I don't care if it's a group of developers, a bunch of people in a startup,
23:46 Speaker 01 or people analyzing data, there's gonna be different geniuses. And if you're missing any, it's gonna cost you. We have this assessment, the working genius assessment. It takes 12 minutes. And people look at the team report and they're like, oh, no wonder we failed at the last project. We didn't have a galvanizer. That's what happened. Or, no wonder I hate it when I get assigned to these kinds of things. You should be doing that, and I should be doing this. It is crazy how teams naturally reorganize themselves around their geniuses as soon as they find out. And most people do not know what their geniuses are until they figure it out.
24:21 Auren Hoffman? It's interesting, because there are some special people. If I think of Elon Musk, he seems to have five of the six. He's not the enabler, but he might be in the top 1% of the other five.
24:31 Speaker 01 He probably has an amazing drive that overcomes weaknesses based on pure desire, but he will have two that he's best at. I've not worked with him behind the scenes. I know what he does publicly, but my guess is he has invention. Unless he's the kind of guy who looks at other people's invention and says, that's a winner, I'm gonna get behind it. Maybe he's not the guy who comes up with them. That's very possible. He also has to have galvanizing, because he looks at something, he goes, let's do that, and sells it and gets people excited. So I don't know if he's an IG, an inventor galvanizer, which is called the evangelistic ideator, or if he's a DG, which is the intuitive activator. He's one of those two, though, almost certain.
25:15 Auren Hoffman? It's also very possible that most people have zero of those. They might be better at some, but my guess is a lot of people are not in the 50th percentile on any of them.
25:24 Speaker 01 I think that everybody has the latent potential for some. Some have not developed it. Some people are just not motivated. They have wounds in their life or other things. And yeah, there are people that aren't motivated to use even their geniuses. And then there are other people that use four of the six. But there's two that we love naturally. Sometimes they get out of a career doing something that, I'm doing this because my dad did it, and my uncle did it, and I don't like it. Yeah, you're not meant to do that. 12 minutes, and people fill this out, and they're like, I wish I'd known this when I was in college, but it's good to know it now.
25:57 Auren Hoffman? Have you ever thought about how people interact with time?
26:01 Speaker 01 Oh, yes. On the deepest level, I think it's interesting how people visualize time. Time in my mind is a counterclockwise circle with months and weeks on it.
26:13 Auren Hoffman? Oh, yeah. Mine is exactly the same. You're the first person I've ever met that does that.
26:17 Speaker 01 I've never met anybody else who said that.
26:19 Auren Hoffman? That's exactly the way I think about both the months and the days of the week. When I think of December, I literally think of it as a clock right there.
26:28 Speaker 01 Me too. And then goes January and down here is July, August.
26:33 Auren Hoffman? Exactly. I'm very good at memorizing dates for that one reason is I just put on the clock.
26:37 Speaker 01 I see it. People go, what are you doing on December 21st? I'm like, oh, let me think.
26:42 Auren Hoffman? Yeah, exactly.
26:43 Speaker 01 And then different working geniuses look at time differently, too. So my wife and three of my sons have the first working genius of wonder, which is they ponder things and they're up in their head. They lose time so much.
26:57 Auren Hoffman? That would be the one where you could spend months doing something and then come up with, this would be like the person who writes Guns, Germs, and Steel or something.
27:07 Speaker 01 So there are certain types, people that are the last two geniuses, which are closest to the ground, which is enablement and tenacity, they're usually very aware of time because they're like, I'm trying to please you. I'm trying to get it done. The standards matter. I'm not up here in the clouds. I have to land this plane and landing a plane means I have to do it on time and in this way. Working genius really informs that. And now when I have employees and I know they have a task to do, based on their working genius, I'll know whether I need to remind them of the timeframe or whether they're going to be all over that and they need to remind me.
27:40 Auren Hoffman? World of DAS isn't just a podcast. World of DAS membership is a private invite-only community for founders and executives of important data and AI businesses. It's a place for off-the-record, high-trust conversations focused on the biggest questions data leaders are facing. The community is about peer learning, curated intros, and access to private events. Everyone in the group is building or leading something meaningful in data. If that sounds like you, apply to join at worldofdas.com. That's world of D A A S dot com.
28:22 Auren Hoffman? So there are certain people I've met who can make decisions in different timeframes. So if you think of like a professional athlete or a video game player, they can make a decision in microseconds. They can decide where to pass the LeBron James can make this incredible decision in microseconds. And then you get to improv comedy person, and then you get to like maybe a salesperson who can think on their feet. Then maybe a CEO has to make decisions in hours or I don't know, days or something. And then you get to the big thinker that needs to make decisions in months or years. Is there a way of people understanding the time and is that somehow related to their genius?
29:02 Speaker 01 I think so. So I am an improv person. When I give a speech to 10,000 people, I want to take questions and I always do. And I'm actually at my best when somebody asks a question that I wasn't anticipating. Coming on this podcast, I looked at everything and I was like, I don't need to write any notes down. And I'm very comfortable with that. And that's because I am a discerner, which means I'm informed by my gut. If I didn't have discernment, I would go, I want to go check the data.
29:29 Auren Hoffman? By the way, are you better because traditionally people who make decisions in sub-seconds, those people are best in their twenties and you're no longer in your twenties. So is that something you've gotten better at and it just happens to be, or is that something you were just even more amazing at in your twenties?
29:45 Speaker 01 I'm getting better at it only because I've known that and I put myself in a position to use it a lot. And I think what happens as we get older, we start to think, well, that's no longer appropriate. I need to grow up and be more structured. So I've not grown up.
30:01 Auren Hoffman? I saw a recent tweet of yours that says effective leaders aren't cool. What did you mean by that?
30:07 Speaker 01 They did a study recently, Arin, about what makes a person cool. Literally three universities studied people across cultures, languages, countries, nations all over the world. And they said, what does cool mean? And they came up with six adjectives, autonomous and adventurous and open and all these things. But the last two were powerful and hedonistic.
30:30 Auren Hoffman? What's hedonistic mean really?
30:31 Speaker 01 Hedonism is my pleasure over everything else. Hedonist says, I do this because it gives me pleasure and that drives me. I thought of that when that came out and they covered it in the news. Hey, isn't this great? Now people know how to be cool. They actually codified it. You want to be cool? Here's the six ways to do it. And I thought, oh my gosh, somebody who is powerful and hedonistic is a dangerous leader. Because if they're all like, I'm here to please myself and I'm going to exercise power over others. You should run from those people.
31:06 Auren Hoffman? But so many well-known leaders are that.
31:08 Speaker 01 They want to be. You know what I think is interesting about them? Most of them weren't when they were younger. And then they become powerful and they start to think, man, I should cash in on this. They were dorks when they were younger and people are telling them they're wonderful. And women are paying attention to them if it's a guy. And they're like, hey, this is great. And I think that's dangerous. And sometimes in the tech world, those are the most scary ones. To be a great leader, you need to be driven, but humble. You need to realize I'm no more important than anybody else in my organization. But my actions are really important because it's for in their best interest if I do the right thing. And you and I talked about this in meetings. We have to focus. And I love the thing you have your thing which says focus.
31:53 Speaker 01 Because even though you're the leader and you could go, yeah, I could just dick around and look at my email and surf the net while I'm in a meeting. You're like, no, for the people that I'm supposed to be leading, I have to humble myself to focus. And it's a decision we make. And I think leaders who don't feel like they have to do that can take advantage of others.
32:10 Auren Hoffman? What about leadership you think was true or wasn't true 25 years ago that now is true? Obviously there's eternal things that are eternal, but what has radically changed?
32:21 Speaker 01 I think this is coming back right now. So I think we've seen a full cycle. I'm hoping we have. I think that there was a little bit more understanding that leadership 30 years ago, you were supposed to be humble. And then I don't know if it's social media or culture, where I think we tolerate an idea that is one of the most important things we can have. Not being self-aware in any job is a real problem. And I meet people that have no sense of their own strengths and weaknesses. And usually they go together.
32:50 Auren Hoffman? I thought EQ was being able to understand what other people are. You're saying EQ is about understanding yourself?
32:57 Speaker 01 Well, it's also about understanding how other people perceive you. So if you're in a meeting and you can understand others, you know, wow, when I say that, it really pisses them off. So I understand that I do that. EQ definitely has self-awareness in it, too.
33:10 Auren Hoffman? Because I find that if you ask someone to assess their own IQ, they're usually quite accurate. Someone says they're in the top 10% of IQ, they're almost always in the top 25% of IQ. But I find when I ask people to assess their EQ, and if someone says they're top 10% of EQ, they could be anywhere. It's not statistically relevant at all. They're not as good at assessing their EQ as they are assessing their IQ.
33:37 Speaker 01 And Arin, I would even go so far as to say, if they tell you confidently they're in the top 10%, they're almost certainly in the bottom 20%. Because a person with high EQ would go, I think I'm pretty good at that, but I don't want to be cocky about that because if I'm wrong, I should know.
33:53 Auren Hoffman? Whereas IQ, it seems like people are pretty accurate. They're like, okay, I'm in top 10. Okay, yeah, then they're probably in the top 25%.
34:01 Speaker 01 It's that smart and healthy thing. If you ask somebody, are you handsome? They're probably like, well, okay, I can tell. Do you think that you have a good personality? And some of the biggest jerks in the world will go, oh, yeah, I have a great personality. That's not as easy to measure, but you don't know.
34:15 Auren Hoffman? I find that a lot of the most successful CEOs are low EQ. At least the founder CEOs are low EQ.
34:25 Speaker 01 You work in tech.
34:26 Auren Hoffman? Yes, I work in tech.
34:27 Speaker 01 And I've done a lot of work in tech.
34:29 Auren Hoffman? I would say founder CEOs across many things. Obviously, to work your way up through an organization, you need extremely high EQ to be able to understand the political machinations.
34:41 Speaker 01 If we were comparing it to somebody who had to work their way up, a founder might have the opportunity to have lower EQ and make it work because they're coming up with the idea and it might just be put again. So that I will agree with you on. But I think when people finally become a CEO, even in relatively small companies, if they're successful, I think EQ is actually more important than IQ. And one of the reasons why, it gets back to the working genius thing we talked about, Arun, and that is that if you have high EQ, you know what you're bad at and you surround yourself with people that are better than you at the things you suffer at. And if you're low in EQ, you probably don't even realize it and there are gaps. So I would agree with you, founder versus somebody who's worked their way up, that might be true. And technology is interesting, too.
35:26 Speaker 01 When you're talking about IPOs and early-stage companies, you can get away with more purely based on a really great idea.
35:33 Auren Hoffman? I think of the successful hedge fund and private equity managers I know, often they have, not all of them, but often they have pretty low EQ.
35:41 Speaker 01 The founders who built a company up to bigger, I bet they said, oh, my gosh, it was painful, but I had to develop EQ along the way. I think if you talk to people like Zuckerberg and all those kind of people like that.
35:52 Auren Hoffman? Do you think EQ is more important today or less important than it was 25 years ago?
35:57 Speaker 01 More important.
35:58 Auren Hoffman? Interesting. I would have said for sure less.
36:01 Speaker 01 The reason why is because what's happened to me in my life is that information has become so ubiquitous. When I started my firm, I figured that I would meet plenty of leadership teams that were just too dumb. I thought I'd sit down and go, man, they just don't know their industry well enough. That just never happens now because everybody's got access to information. I mean, when I was in college, I used to go and use the microfiche. At a library and my first job out of Bain, when I did research, I was literally getting physical reports from the government and have to pour through data. My kids, one's still in college and they can get information better than I could have when I was at Bain. So I think the competitive advantage based on just information is not what it used to be.
36:46 Speaker 01 Now, the ability to know how to use that information is critical today. But that judgment goes more with EQ. We're in the old days that I remember this guy at a company, a very data-driven company. And he had such low EQ and they literally just gave him a different office. He was the mad scientist. They locked him in a room and didn't let him interact with people. I don't think you can do that anymore. I could be wrong.
37:12 Auren Hoffman? If you just think of the peak EQ US president was probably Bill Clinton. I feel your pain. That was in the nineties. And then you move to Obama, much more cerebral, lower EQ, doesn't want to interact with members of Congress. You have Clinton's wife who runs for president, who's much lower EQ than he has. Most successful politicians don't seem to have as high EQ as they used to.
37:38 Speaker 01 Politics has become more like celebrity and celebrities. We actually like people that are extreme almost. We like people that are over the top. But I think when it comes to leading a team and managing a company, if you're in a meeting with those kind of people, it can be really hard. We hear these stories about people in Congress or in leadership positions like that, who are really rough on their staff. I just heard a story the other day about this politician and she's just terrible to the people that work for her. She wouldn't be successful in a business where they actually had to accomplish something.
38:10 Auren Hoffman? One of the interesting things in tech, which I've spent all my career in is I have never met a yeller, ever.
38:17 Speaker 01 Isn't that interesting?
38:19 Auren Hoffman? I see them in the movies, tech yellers, but I've never met one in real life.
38:24 Speaker 01 But how many boring meetings have you been in where people didn't speak their mind? And then went out in the parking lot and said.
38:29 Auren Hoffman? Plenty of those, whereas you hear about someone who berates their staff as the politician. Or in entertainment, you hear about all these things happening all the time, or even in finance. But I've never seen it in tech. I'm sure it happens, but I have never witnessed it.
38:45 Speaker 01 I feel the same way. People say to me all the time, tell me about the most outlandish thing. Those are movies. I am always convincing people to have more conflict, not less. For every person that I've had to have them tone down their conflict, there's a thousand that I said, you have to get more engaged and passionate and realize you can recover from that. So many of them avoid it. You know what other kind of organizations people don't yell at each other? Churches. But you know what happens? They go out in the parking lot and complain about each other because they go to meetings and they smile and they nod. Oh, they're being nice, but they're not being honest.
39:20 Auren Hoffman? My wife had this anecdote where if you're in San Francisco and you have a flat tire, people will drive by and like, oh, are you okay? But they'll just keep driving. In New York, they'll come to you and you'll say, hey, what's the matter with you? You don't know how to change your flat tire? They'll start screaming at you, but they'll actually help you change it.
39:37 Speaker 01 Totally. I saw a cartoon years ago that showed a guy in Los Angeles and he says to somebody on the street, good morning. But the bubble that he's thinking really says, screw you, essentially. And then it shows a guy in New York going, hey, screw you. And then the bubble says, good morning. That's what he's thinking.
39:53 Auren Hoffman? Totally.
39:54 Speaker 01 I love it. I'm in the South now. I'm in Tennessee. I have to say, people are very, very friendly and generous here. But there's that old saying, they say, oh, bless your heart.
40:05 Auren Hoffman? Exactly.
40:05 Speaker 01 She's ugly. She's a hag. Bless her heart.
40:08 Auren Hoffman? Or what I do is invest in companies. How can I understand their organizational health better to make better investments?
40:17 Speaker 01 Go to a meeting.
40:18 Auren Hoffman? Somehow be like a fly on a wall in a meeting. Or look at their recorded meetings or something.
40:23 Speaker 01 And if you were to ask them, hey, tell me about your staff meetings. And they go, oh, yeah, I hate going to those meetings. It means they're not making great decisions.
40:33 Auren Hoffman? I really haven't been to that many great meetings in my life. So I'd be the pot calling the kettle black there.
40:39 Speaker 01 But in this case, you want to be the tallest of the short people. Does anybody go, our meetings are a party. I love going every time. If they're not tired after the meeting for any reason other than being bored, they should be like, they're kind of exhausting and we get into all this, kind of tense. But if they're like, oh yeah, they're just going through the motions. If you were to say, which football team is going to be better? I'd say, go watch them at practice. And are they working hard at practice? I would want to find out if the best employees are staying. I always scare CEOs. I go, if you don't manage that person who's not a good employee out, you know what's going to happen? Your best people will leave first. And they're like, oh, crap.
41:19 Auren Hoffman? What about board meetings? I have run many board meetings. I've been on boards, been in board meetings. Honestly, including all the ones I've run, they're all crappy. I've never run a good board meeting. I've never been to a good board meeting. How does one make a good board meeting?
41:33 Speaker 01 I get asked to be on boards all the time and I'll say, yes, but I'm not coming to meetings. If you want to put me on the document that says I'm on your board, I will. And you can call me anytime and I'll give you advice, but I'm not going to be on the finance committee. Boards are the equivalent of government. I think that the nature of a board is oversight and safety. They probably need to be focused and well-run. What I tell CEOs is, don't try to please your board. Humor your board, respect them, but you can do everything your board members want you to do and they'll still fire you. If the business doesn't go well, you can ignore their advice. And if the business goes well, they're going to thank you. And I've seen too many CEOs spend most of their time preparing for board presentations.
42:16 Speaker 01 And it's one of the worst uses of time they can have.
42:19 Auren Hoffman? One board I was on, they just did so well. I literally added no value at all on the board. All I would say every like board meeting is you guys are doing a good job. And then it would go to the next one. Literally I had nothing to this whole company.
42:33 Speaker 01 And your job was to look for red flags or for smoke. I was on the board of directors at a company at the Make-A-Wish Foundation. This was 20 years ago and what a great organization that was. And what I realized when I went to those meetings is I felt this pressure to add value. And the best thing a board member can do in a meeting is sit there and go, you don't need anything from me. I'm going to let you keep going. But board members like, well, this is where I'm supposed to play God and prove how smart I am. You want to feel useful. So I'm not saying lie to your board. No, no, no. But humor them in that your job isn't to jump through hopes to please them. Cause they have a life where they go back and do their thing. You have to run your company.
43:08 Auren Hoffman? All right, a couple of questions we ask all of our guests. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?
43:14 Speaker 01 Kennedy did not get killed by a lone gunman. I'm convinced of that.
43:17 Auren Hoffman? You're convinced?
43:18 Speaker 01 I'm convinced that there was many people within and outside of politics involved in that.
43:24 Auren Hoffman? Do you think there was more than one gunman?
43:26 Speaker 01 I think he was used by CIA slash Cuba slash the mob. I don't know.
43:32 Auren Hoffman? But there still could have just been him as the gunman, even if he was used. But you think there was another gunman, like on the grassy knoll or something?
43:39 Speaker 01 Well, I've seen that and that seems pretty credible, too, but I'm not sure about that.
43:44 Auren Hoffman? You just think there are other people involved?
43:46 Speaker 01 And then I don't think Epstein killed himself.
43:49 Auren Hoffman? Well, that's probably a conspiracy theory that many people believe at this point. All right, last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?
44:00 Speaker 01 Remember that old deodorant commercial? Don't let them see you sweat. When you're a leader, the truth is people know you're sweating, even if you think you're covering it up. And it's much better to be the guy that goes, check this out. And then they're go, so you know, and you're comfortable enough about yourself to show that. People really trust people and admire people that are actually very vulnerable.
44:21 Auren Hoffman? What does that mean? Obviously you can say, I don't know if you get a question and like, I gotta think about that. But what do you mean by let them see you sweat? You have to still portray some confidence in things.
44:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, and if all you do is sweat, then you probably shouldn't be in the role you're in. But when you have concerns, when you make a mistake, or when you're a little bit afraid of something, you actually gain credibility, not by going and quit, but by just saying, hey, I'm a little concerned about this. Or I think I messed this up, or I think you're smarter than I am. Don't pretend to be stronger, smarter, or more capable than you really are. Because when you do that, you lose credibility. And some of the most capable leaders, I love when a basketball player turns to people on the court and says, my bad. I'm like, you rule. That was my fault. And when in doubt, say my bad.
45:10 Auren Hoffman? Okay, this has been great. Thank you, Patrick Lencioni, for joining us on World of the Desk. I follow you at Patrick Lencioni on X. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been super interesting and a ton of fun.
45:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's been really fun. And theworkinggenius.com is the life changer. So I would encourage people to do that.
45:27 Auren Hoffman? I highly recommend everyone check that out as well. This has been great.
45:31 Speaker 01 All right, thank you.
45:35 Auren Hoffman? Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review. And check out worldofdas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren, that's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.
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