#227 Dr. Randall Stutman – Episode Transcript

0:00:01.8 Sean: Randall welcome to What got you there? How are you doing today?

0:00:04.6 Randall: Great, how are you… 

0:00:06.5 Sean: I am doing really well. This is a fun one for me. I’ve had the opportunity to take your admired leadership course, and it was one of the most profound paradigm shifts I’ve had around leadership, so this is one of those conversations where I get to learn a ton. I’m hoping listeners can as well. One of the questions I’ve started with around 100 plus guests so far are around the routines and routines throughout the day, just to set them up for success, and you’re someone who’s studied so much around this space, I would love to know what type of routines you have throughout your day, you found the most success with?

0:00:37.4 Randall: Yeah, I’m not sure I’m gonna be all that interesting about routines. I have a couple of things that I do in particular that I’ve learned from other leaders. The first thing that I do is I don’t start today processing information or responding to it, and so the cadence, once you get into it, when you start processing right away, as you stay there, you stay in that rhythm, and so I make it a habit… Not to allow my phone anywhere near me when I sleep, and then it’s not there when I wake up, so I go about my morning for a little while, and then I’m more than about 30 minutes or so before I ever engage emails or texts or anything else, and so that kinda creates… And I start on productivity, I start being productive all the way from the beginning, so that’s… I guess that’s a routine. What else do I do? At the end of the day, if I’ve actually listened to things or read things, which is most days, or I’ve engaged other people in some way and I’ve taken notes I distill those notes down to key insights, and then I usually place those insights someplace in one of my journals, and some days I don’t have any insights.

0:01:52.8 Randall: It doesn’t mean I don’t have notes. But that’s just the way it goes. Other days, it takes me a little bit of time to be able to distill those and put those in the right places and so forth, so I can review them later. Those would probably be the only really two routines that I probably would say I’m religious about after that, the day is what the day is. I try to, throughout the day, create enough white space so I can actually move from a conversation to a conversation, ’cause that’s what I’m doing most days, is having conversations, and it’s not easy to make the transitions quickly enough fast enough in order to really focus on the next conversation, making fast transitions is really important, at least in my view. So I guess another thing that I do is I try to find segways or transition points, so I don’t move exactly from one conversation to another conversation, at least instantaneously. I create as much of that white space that I can create… That’s a good thing. And I try to do that fairly purposefully all day long, I think that’s where I am. I don’t think I have any other routine…

0:03:08.3 Sean: I’d love to jump into your distillation of knowledge, and  hoping we can walk away from this conversation with some wisdom. I know that’s a focus for you, really distilling things down to wisdom. What is that actual process you mentioned when you’re coming across things throughout the day, is that going just in one specific journal or notebook… How do you organize that?

0:03:29.3 Randall: So it’s a behavior that we actually talk about in Admired Leadership around making personal change, and it’s one that really changes a lot of things for people, and it certainly changed me a long time ago when I first uncovered it in a variety of leaders, and I thought Why don’t I do this? And I started doing it. And it’s been amazing. So the idea goes like this, so first of all, if you’re somebody that’s a learning machine like a lot of us wanna be and aspire to be, you’re constantly gathering information, data, you’re trying to gather new knowledge all day long, you’re reading things, you’re listening to podcasts, you’re talking to people, you’re hearing a quote, all those things, and if you’re like me, if you go to some presentation, you take eight pages of notes, it’s not like somebody says only one smart thing, they see lots of smart things, and so you’re writing all those things. The problem is what most people do it is they collect all those notes and they have no ability to use any of that knowledge or wisdom at all, because all those notes  do is collect either some dust in a file cabinet or in a folder, or they just simply stay buried and hidden inside your phone or inside your laptop, so the key is, first of all, to understand that collecting information is just the first step, and if you’re good and you spend a lot of time doing it…

0:04:54.7 Randall: And I have a lot of colleagues that are really good at taking better notes than I do, you have a lot of it all day long, every day, but then the next step is to be able to distill it down to make it and look and say, What are the real insights? What’s the wisdom here? Is there anything I wanna really keep? And what is it? And can I re-articulate it? In a way where I can remember it. And so now you’re engaged in the distilling process, you’re taking 8 pages, 10 pages, 20 pages of notes and scribbles, and you’re moving many things in 2, 3, or 4 sentences.  In many cases, it’s rare that I would actually distill something and grab a whole page of something that would be really unusual. I want the process to create a kernel of what’s the insight?  What’s the thing that I wanna eventually remember? And then initially, the way that I started, you should put it in one spot, but then what you realize is that first of all that journal grows pretty fast, unless you’re not an active learner, but second then it doesn’t enable you to access the things that you really want, ’cause you gotta go searching for them.

0:06:12.5 Randall: So now, after a couple of several decades of doing this, I have about 36 different journals where if I get a nugget around how people give feedback, then it goes into my feedback journal. If I get a nugget around some just really interesting wordage, diction to some language that I really think of metaphor that I think is cool, it goes into my language journal and so forth and so on. Stories I collect, stories that I think are really powerful. So now, all of this is just the preamble to what really matters, and that is when you are able to with some level of consistency, review those insights. And so I try to go through all of my journals once a month, and I just simply scan them and just run right down, run down all those insights. Now, one of the first things you’ll do is you’ll occasionally run into something that you’ve written down as an insight recently and go, Why did I think that was interesting? Like, what was I thinking there? And so you’ll call that out, you’ll simply scratch it out, cross it out in some way, no reason to review it anymore, whatever you were thinking it didn’t hold up, but the rest of it, you’re making it available to yourself. Wisdom is only wisdom if in fact, you can act on it.

0:07:30.6 Randall: And so now what you’re doing by the review processes, you’re making it available for what’s in your mind to be able to actually act on this stuff, and so you can remember those stories, you can instantly engage in those behaviors, you can think about things… And they come right to you. Most of us actually hear really smart things, and within a short period of time, they’re gone, we have… They’re not available to us at all, we would have to get lucky to cross them again to go… Yes, that was a really important insight. We’ll imagine if you for decades at a time, we’re always distilling things down and then reviewing all those things, people will think you’re really smart by the way, when in fact, all you’re really doing is having a very specific process of creating and using wisdom. And so, wisdom isn’t wisdom , unless you can act on it, unless you can actually use it, and the only way that I know that you can actually use it, especially if there’s a lot of it… And by the way, there’s a lot of wisdom in the world, it’s just hard to keep it available to yourself, it’s all about the review, the review is what enables you to be able to find it and find its power and to make it part of your own and make it so that you’ve got the ability to act on that wisdom, and so that’s a behavior that I teach lots of leaders when I coach and advise them. I think so strongly of it, I actually put it in the change model in our Admired Leadership course, and kind of explain it and have a few other people explain how they do it too, and it’s just very powerful.

0:09:04.9 Randall: In fact, I know that you’re like this. I have quite a few colleagues that are like this, I have many, many clients that are like this, and we’re just… We’re learning junkies. We wanna get wiser. We think the whole idea here is not just not to make the same mistakes over and over again, but to actually do things as effectively and as efficiently as we possibly can, and to actually act smartly. And so the only way you can pull that off is to be a collector of insights, to distill those insights down, to review those insights on a periodic basis. There’s no magic in terms of how it gets structured. Like my 36 notebooks will turn into 37 or 38 one day, not because I’m getting so much because I’ll find an area where I go, I wanna access that more quickly, and so I’m gonna put all that stuff in there in a particular spot. Now, I still use physical journals and I like that. I like the rewriting process that requires me to re-write and distill my ideas down. I don’t like things electronically because at least in that sphere, because it doesn’t require me to look at it, these journals sit right behind my desk, when I wake up in the morning and I first go to my desk, I can pull them out any given time. I can always copy them if I’m worried about losing them or something of that nature, but they forced me to deal with them, ’cause they’re physical and I see them all the time.

0:10:33.5 Randall: And that’s an important part of learning, in my opinion too. So I actually prefer to write things on paper… I have a few colleagues that have learned this behavior and that are really good at it, and they swear digitally, they’re able to pull this off, and I don’t doubt it. By the way, it wouldn’t work for me. So that’s what I do, and it’s a pretty important process for me every day, by the way, and at least once a month, usually what I don’t do is I don’t spend an entire day going through all the journals, what I’ll do is I’ll usually spend some point during the weekend, just about an hour and I’ll go through a handful of the journals and just scan through and peruse the insights and boy, they’re powerful. Once you grab them and you keep them in, now they’re yours and you can use them, and it’s easy to regal or your friends, if you’re a good collector of stories and quotes, I’ll tell you that. I might even have a joke book, and so any joke that I’ve ever heard that I think is really, really, really funny, it goes in the joke book, and so I literally, if you ever ask some of my friends, I could tell jokes for probably a whole day, and they’d go, How could you remember all that…Well, I see them every month. Right, I’m scanning them all the time, or I’m calling them out, so that’s more than you wanted to know, but that’s kind of what I think is really important in terms of wisdom.

0:11:55.6 Sean: If we ever do a part two, it might be “stand up with Randall”, but I love this. the collector of wisdom, I’m really intrigued by this. I shared something yesterday with my team and one of my team members, it was probably about five bullet points from an excellent podcast with Danny Meyer, the restaurateur, and he said, “What’s the one piece of wisdom if I was gonna collect this and put this down?” So I’m just curious about how you share what you’ve uncovered with the team members?

0:12:21.6 Randall: So before we did our digital course, it was actually an oral tradition, so I would spend about a weeks worth of time in a learning kind of environment, a sharing environment, a dialogue environment with any of my colleagues, and we would go through a lot of the behaviors and routines that we’ve been able to find that we think counts leadership was no, and so they would write things down and catalog them and engage in them just like anyone else, and so I believe in the oral tradition, very much out of the Greek philosophy of, if you hear it and you’re able to write in your own words, it has a bigger impact on you, and so I’ve never been a big fan of passing out notes or doing note journals or notebooks for other people, and cataloging things for other people, but that doesn’t mean that that’s not powerful. I just have never been a fan of it. So we’ve always had this oral tradition now, of the several hundred behaviors we’ve been able to find over the years by studying leaders, the kinds of things that make them what we consider admired. Now we do it and we have a digital course so people can catch up on 100 with some degree of speed and review them and learn them at their own pace and see examples and exercises and things of that nature.

0:13:39.5 Randall: You’ve gone through it, you understand how enriching that is, and that’s only a fraction of what we know as it is probably the most important fraction. However, we try to pick the things that really matter and can move other people and make them a whole lot better, really quickly, but there’s lots more than that, and so now they at least get that start and then the rest of it’s an oral tradition again.

0:14:01.6 Sean: I love that. Something I certainly can work on with my team. I would love knowing a little bit about the back story though, and how did you first become interested in leadership?

0:14:11.2 Randall: So it was something I did in graduate school, and I was fascinated, first by conflict processes and conflict in large organizations, groups, relationships, then I got into group dynamics and how groups make decisions and some of the things that happened during that decision-making process… And that’s a really fascinating literature area in the last two decades, that area has exploded and so really, really cool. And from that, I got into influence and organizations and how people influence and advocate and organizations, and slowly the idea of Organizational Behavior and leadership became a primary way that I wanted to understand the world and make it better, and so I both went to school for those things, I started teaching those things, and then I started to research instead of research projects around leadership and the literature is not that old, but it’s full of ideas of theories and frameworks and perspectives, and I started at least at a certain time, I was very contemporary and knew most of the things that were being written. I was writing a lot of things at the time, and I got asked to start working with a couple of leaders in a large organization, some senior leaders, and I brought that information and that knowledge to bear and it was very useful.

0:15:41.0 Randall: It had an impact, but I got asked a lot of questions that I knew I didn’t have answers to. Most of the questions were usually practical questions, and the frameworks and the perspective didn’t match up all that well, and I didn’t feel like a fraud, but I felt like I wasn’t this expert as I wanted it to be… And so I started a new research program where when I was studying leaders, I asked a different question. And the question that I simply asked was, What did they do that you and I don’t do? The exceptional leaders, and that started the long pathway and the journey that we now call it, Admired Leadership, and that was more than three decades ago, and I’ve been engaged in that research ever since, and so it’s been a fun journey and process, but that’s how it all started.

0:16:32.2 Sean: I know you’ve mentioned to me offline, you had two big aha moments throughout your career that really shaped you, I’d love for you just to dive into these and then we can segway from there… 

0:16:47.5 Randall: You know, I’m not sure, I have only two. I’ve had a lot of, I’m not too smart. Every once in a while something hits me and I go how did I miss that… So the first one was… Well, and I just described it just briefly to you, I mean, it was surprising to me that no one else asked that question, in other words, the paradigm of individual differences, which is what dominates the leadership literature, which is that people are really different, granted that other people that you aren’t gonna engage in as a leader are very different than you. You gotta know yourself first, you gotta understand yourself, and then your job is to understand that the difference is that other people bring to bear, and then you need to adapt and flex those differences. And so that’s the idea that leadership is highly situational and highly contingent.  It’s very psychologically based, if you will, and by the way, really valuable, there’s no one that gets to be a better leader without understanding themselves and understanding the differences that they have, but the big aha was when I would bring that information, those classification schemes, these diagnostics, when I would operate from the advice and practical wisdom of that idea or that approach, I wasn’t making people much better, they really weren’t changing, and I wasn’t very powerful in the advice and the council that I could give people.

0:18:12.8 Randall: So my first big aha was when I started asking the question and studying and when first of all, had to find fabulous leaders, and so I had to define what fabulous looked like, and one aha was really kind of a smaller aha, but a big one for me in terms of its long-term impact, was that followership as equal as a result… We all define leadership as being able to get things done and producing results, whether those be macro results in terms of earnings and market share and things of that nature, or smaller micro results, which are really simply just being effective with people and the likes of. Results really matter, and in our culture in particular, we almost define leadership as synonymous with the results, but the idea of actually having followership, that people want and respect you and want to be around you, want to follow you from place to place, willing to do anything you ask of them because they believe in you and they trust and respect you, and in particular, they believe there’s a reciprocal relationship of loyalty that exists that you would do anything for them. And so therefore, they reciprocate with that, that followership pieces are a really big deal. So there’s a lot of result leaders that don’t have it at all, and as a result don’t get nearly as much done as they could. And so I started looking and one big Aha, small, long-term, big A-ha, 

0:19:40.9 Randall: Let’s define leadership not just as results, but as having an important part of followership also. So let’s look for both of those qualities when you define great leaders. Then I start asking this question, What do those kinds of leaders that actually have results and followership are mostly admired by the people around them? What do they do that other people don’t do on an everyday basis, how do they make decisions, how do they give feedback, how do they build relationships, what are some of the things they do stylistically? What makes them credible? And so when I started asking that question, I was shocked that question doesn’t really exist from a research program, and so I thought, Well, jeez either I’m really wrong or I’m really right. What’s going on? And so the aha was that I’m really right, that I started learning tremendous amounts of ideas that were really practical and powerful that I could coach and teach other people, and so that was an aha… But then the really big a-ha was, I found my first two admired leaders in a very large energy organization, all the way back in the middle 80s in Chicago, where I was working…

0:20:49.9 Randall: I was a professor at the University of Illinois. I had a particular CEO that I had a relationship with, he had found me through the literature and wanted to talk with me, and we built a kind of a relationship, even though he was 20 plus years my senior. And so he gave me a carte blanche to go into study leaders. I went in and with the idea of looking for the leaders that had both results and followership, and that’s where the admired word came from for us, because when I found these particular two leaders, when I talk to the people around them that knew them very well with friends and family and colleagues and peers, and even some customers, everybody used the admired word, I admire them for this… I admire the way they do that. I did that, so I started using that label to describe them, and so when I found these first two Admired leaders, I thought, Wow, this is really, really fascinating because I’m learning all kinds of things by trying to figure out what they do that other people don’t do, but the big insight was I thought that there was a quality about both of them that I thought was an anomaly, I thought, Okay, well, that just happens to be a coincidence.

0:21:59.6 Randall: But now, fast forward 38 years later, I now know that this is a quality of leadership, and that is when I first studied those two leaders, I found that they were not only admired in the workplace, but they were admired by their kids, they were admired by their spouse, they were admired by their friends, they were admired in their community, they were admired in the places they worship, they were admired every place they went, and that’s because they learn to do some things all the time. That this idea of behaviors and routines that they were wedded and committed to… Were the things that helped create that aura of admiration in other people’s eyes, so while they knew themselves and they adapted and flexed and were continuing in situations, they also did some things all the time, and… The big aha was, you mean if you know how to give feedback to a 58-year-old, it really should work with an eight-year-old too, and if it doesn’t, it’s probably not all that effective with the 58-year-old. So the idea of the whole leader is that when you teach somebody and you understand, you actually have leadership wisdom around something to say like if giving feedback, it works in every aspect of your life, and the best leaders do it in every aspect of their life…

0:23:20.3 Randall: Again, they may do it differently. Obviously, when you make decisions in a strategic setting in an organization, it’s not the same as making a decision for where the family is going on vacation at holiday next year, but actually the process is not all that dissimilar, just some of the data and maybe the way you go about it. And enact, it is. So when you’re really good at leadership, you do it, you do the things that you believe in everywhere, and that was a big aha, the idea that I can find behaviors and routines, and they make you a better parent, they make you a better spouse, they make you better friend and a better team leader and better with the person that you report to, and better with your clients and customers like that was such a mind-blowing thing to me that we could then help and figure out, we had to approach the entire wholeness of a leader and a person, that was just the biggest a-ha. It just floored me. In fact, 38 years later, it still floors me. I’m still like, Wow, that’s so… So profound and insightful. And so true in my experience since then. Excellence doesn’t get turned on and turned off. You’ve never met anyone that runs fast, and then one day wakes up and runs slow. You’ve met anybody that’s really smart, and one day is really dumb. People who are really good at something don’t turn it off. Well, doesn’t it make sense then that leaders that really have an insight as to how to do something that’s a little more effective than anyone else, how to build a relationship, same with clients that they would actually bring that same idea to their marriage, and that same idea to their friends and build the relationship with their friends, and the same idea in other spheres, ’cause once you really have an insight in a practice that works, you don’t turn it off. It becomes a part of who you are. That’s just to me. Gosh, how does everybody else miss that, I don’t know… I’m glad they missed that, it’s given me a great livelihood, but how do they miss that? I don’t know. 

0:25:24.4 Sean: When I took your course, I think that was the biggest aha for me. It’s this wholeness that you talk about. How I operate in the business world is the exact same for my family dynamic relationships as well. That’s what I absolutely love. Any idea why other people weren’t asking those questions?

0:25:47.2 Randall: They still don’t ask those questions, all these decades later that I’ve been doing this, I…Listen, I think the… The real reason is the other paradigm is too strong, it’s too seductive. We try to understand why human beings are, why people… Why do people do things like, Let’s figure out what makes you tick in your talk, and so we like the theories and the explanations as to why things occur, what we miss is that understanding why it doesn’t necessarily make you better, that you still need tools in order to act and so… But the other paradigm, the individual difference is paradigm, which is so predominant, every university, every corporate HR department across the world, by the way, subscribes to that viewpoint, it’s the primary way to think about leadership and about being effective as a leader. It’s so powerful and so seductive that it shuts down the conversation or the way to look at other leadership from another angle. People tell me all the time, Well, if you’re looking for commonality around the best leaders, you’re not gonna find anything… Well, I can tell you, and you now know, just by looking at the course. We know hundreds of routines and behaviors that are not well known, many of them unknown that all the best leaders subscribe to and use. In fact, they’ve never met each other, they’re from different countries or different generations and the like, and they all do some of the same stuff. Most of the academics that I’m still in contact with will say, “Well, if you find universals, they’re self-evident, they’re walking the talk and keeping your promises and showing up in a crisis and admitting your mistakes or the things that we’ve always known, we’ve known them for decades, and there’s nothing powerful about the reminders”, and my response is, Well, you’ve been eating canned vegetables all your life it’s time for you to have some fresh vegetables.

0:27:38.3 Randall: If you ask a different question, you find some really insightful things. Behaviors and routines that are in fact universal, timeless, contextually free in the sense that they operate in almost all contexts, that they are somewhat insightful… Profound. And mentally actionable. And here’s the beautiful part, when you understand a real routine and behavior that meets those criteria, you should be able to explain it in about three or four minutes, and I can… I can explain any of the behaviors in three or four minutes, it might take you a little bit longer to get examples and other things in your head to really bring it alive for you, but the wisdom is brought to a really small point where we can simply articulate it very quickly. So I think it’s that the other paradigm is just so darn strong and seductive, and even in our own team, people like to ask psychological questions, individual different questions, because they’re curious and they should be… So I’ll describe a behavior and then somebody will say, do you think that different generations deal with that behavior differently, and I’m going, Okay, you just entered the Dark Side, right? You went, you went to the other side.

0:28:53.6 Randall: And by the way, the other side is really important, but can’t we just stay on this side for a little while and talk about the commonalities and the universality of excellence and leadership excellence rather than moving toward differences all the time, and people are well-trained to do the opposite. And so I think that the other paradigm is just so strong and it’s gonna continue to be strong.

0:29:15.0 Sean: How do you run into the problem then, and this is around talent acquisition and talent development, bringing new people into the organization that are willing to look at things from a different prism.

0:29:27.0 Randall: Yeah, well, to a degree, I’ll give you a little insight baseball, because I wind up having to insult people when I bring them into our organization, and the reason I do is ’cause I have to shake them up and because I have to know that they’re willing to wanna learn a whole new way. So the majority of people that join our organization are somewhat senior people, they’ve been doing either coaching or advising work for quite a long time in many cases, and I’ll sit down with them and I like their aptitude, I’ll like their approach or their general style, I like everything about them, but now I have to convince them they don’t know anything, which is not a fun thing because it’s not just from a standpoint of humerus, it’s a standpoint of, If I don’t convince them that they don’t have the power they need to have… And there’s no reason for them to be in our organization, so what I typically do is I’ll say to a perspective coach to decision-making, pretty powerful stuff is you don’t know anybody that’s a great leader, it isn’t also a great decision maker, and it’s central to being considered a leader of prose.

0:30:33.7 Randall: Would you agree with me? And they, of course they agree. And I say, Okay, so I have an assignment for you. I have a CEO that I’m gonna give you to coach and their main, by the way, they’re really talented, this is their fourth or fifth running the CEO thing, they’ve made some fabulous decisions, but they wanna be world class, they wanna improve their decision making. So in the process that I’m gonna sit you with them and I’m gonna ask you to make them better decision makers, so give me an outline of what some of the conversations and some of the topics, as well as some of the advice and counsel that you’re gonna give them… And please, before you answer me, don’t be giving me some rational model of decision-making, we’re telling me the three heuristics… Or the three biases, don’t tell me confirmation bias, by the way, they know that one. Okay, and so they’ve been… They’ve been to all the great executive education around the country, and so tell me something that you’re gonna tell them that they don’t know, that’s gonna propel them forward as decision-makers, and they can’t answer…

0:31:35.8 Randall: And there’s a reason because they don’t have that level of practical wisdom in their head, and now… Okay, I can say, okay, so now you and I can admit that deep down, you know lots about decision-making, but you don’t know anything powerful about decision-making that can make people better. Would you agree with me? And they reluctantly go, in most cases, yeah. Okay, you’ve made your point. You’ve embarrassed me. Like, what’s your point? I go, How about if I… We spend the rest of your career, and I show you those things. And then you start teaching other people… And that’s how we get there. And it’s not all that, initially it was fun, but it’s not fun anymore. It’s a little bit painful, in fact, and some people wrestle with that conversation and they get annoyed at themselves, I’ve even had some people go away upset after that conversation and then come back to me and say, Okay, I admit it now, alright, alright. I don’t have anything powerfully practical to teach people about decision-making… What do you know that I don’t know? And again, it’s not about me, I’m not smarter than anybody else, but we’ve been uncovering this stuff for years, and I could literally spend two years in an advisory capacity with any given leader just on decision-maker, never discuss anything else and never processing their own insights so that idea of processing people from a coaching standpoint is really an expert, in my opinion, the idea that all the wisdom exists in their head, and that’s where I’m gonna try to find it.

0:33:03.5 Randall: And how do you go about making decisions? What do you think about here on any day that’s useful to a degree, but it’s not as powerful as people think… I mean, the best leaders in the world, if they’re coming to you for advice and counsel, that they want some practical wisdom, and if you can’t produce it, then they’re not all that interested in the conversation. And by the way, if you went to a tennis professional to be a better tennis player, and they started asking you… And only like, what do you think about tennis? How do you play tennis? Right, and they never had any advice for how to improve your backhand and or your forehand, or how to show you to serve where your feet work, ’cause they didn’t have any insight, you would say, Well, they’re not a very good tennis professional. I think that’s true of the majority of people that about leadership, I don’t know how you can be that proud of yourself and that good, unless you know some really deep practical things about the advice and counsel you give other people.

0:33:55.7 Sean: Have you improved in terms of spotting that? Spot the people who are willing to say, “What do you know that I don’t know?” Can you tap into that earlier to understand if this person is someone who can develop quickly within an organization? 

0:34:08.6 Randall: No the answer is no, but now, because of the digital course, ’cause of Admired leadership digital… We’re having people come to us and say, This stuff is amazing. How do I learn more of it? And how do I become associated with that kind of programmatic research as well as advising, and so it’s helping us a little bit, some people are finding us now that are interested, that doesn’t mean they have right aptitude or style or things that could do this for a living like so many other people in our firm do, but at least that helps a little, but no, we’ve not been great at it, to be 100% honest. Like anything else, if you go look at some of the largest consulting firms in the world, they will tell you that they probably get and have deep interviews and go deep with 50, 60, 70 people before they find one they think is capable of doing the deal. And we certainly would fall into that same category, it’s a volume game for us and has been, but we’ll see… This is new for us and is admired leadership digital, so we’ll see if it produces and attracts some new people. They kind of screen themselves for us a little bit, but that’s where we are.

0:35:22.7 Sean: You’re someone, from my understanding, in terms of seeing things differently than others and having paradigm type of shift. So I’m wondering, even in terms of vetting out that aptitude within people, are there certain things that you’ve uncovered that you find these people tend to work out best within your organization? 

Randall:I don’t know, Sean, nothing that comes right to mind, and by the way, I’m no paradigm. I had one in big insight around asking a different question.I haven’t been all that insightful since then, just so that you do, and so I’m no thought leader, at least not in my view, but yeah, there’s nothing in particular that comes right to mind to that question, 

Sean: Randall, ever since I finished my athletic career which has been a decade plus, I’ve tried to study the best leaders, people who I admire, people from a distance, and your course was the best leadership course I’ve ever taken bar none. I think your paradigm shifting is more apparent to others, maybe that we can move on from that, but I do appreciate and hope listeners to check it out too…I’m not incentivized at all. It’s truly something that I took a great deal away from.

0:36:35.8 Randall: Nothing pleases me more. And listen, it was a big struggle to ever produce this thing and put it out, and I was against it for decades, and most days I wake up and I’m really glad that it exists, and I’m really pleased that you found so much value and a lot of other people are too. So that makes me very happy.

0:36:56.4 Sean: So I’d even love to dive into the behavior’s just a bit more and understand the process, the research process around uncovering one of these behaviors. What does that look like in a little bit more depth?

0:37:09.5 Randall: So first, we go about trying to understand if somebody is potentially admired, so are they an admired leader, do they have a track record of extraordinary results by what objective measure, can we make sense of that, and then do they have the level of followership that we would say constitutes an unusual level of people trusting and respecting them in the like, and so first we have to identify somebody, worthy the of study that’s gotten a lot easier because the literature and the general media helps identify people, and there’s lots of data around people… It wasn’t as easy when I first started doing all of this, and we have a couple of other shortcuts now that we can use to identify an admired leader, so now you find somebody that have investor admired leader at worse, they’re either a results face leader in black followership at an extraordinary level or their followership leader and lack results in an external levels, so there somebody were say… So that’s where we start the next is we treat them as a case study… A case study of one. We’re trying to now collect data about who they are and what they are, and so by that, I mean we’re looking at in any interviews that they’ve ever given, anything that’s been written about them, and some of those things can pop up in some agent kinds of documents and journals and magazines and the like, and then we’re looking for artifacts, speeches, outlines, performance reviews, emails, whatever artifacts we can get our hands on, and then we’re also…

0:38:53.4 Randall: If we can interview people that know them very well, if we get total permission, we’ll interview everybody around them, including friends and family, which are usually very insightful, by the way, to people that get a chance to see them the best and the most often, including their own leaders and then we’ll interview them, although you’ll be surprised at how the few of the best leaders know exactly what they do, just like great ball players, great athletes, they oftentimes don’t know what makes them so good, what they actually do, if we can… We’ll actually observe them in different settings, and so… That’s wonderful. So every leader we study, we have either a big file or a small file, depending on what kind of access we can get, and whether we’re able to study them more regular, rigorously or from a distance, and from that we’re really discerning, trying to discern two things. Number one, what do they do as leaders every day, what’s their process, what are the things that they’re engaged in, what kind of style do they have… Who are they as leaders? I’m not interested in who they are as historical people, demographically, they are born…I couldn’t care less. I just wanna know what they do. And then the next thing, of course, we’re looking at is what do they do differently that other people don’t do, and that’s what we really focus on, in fact, … Those are the kinds of questions we’re asking all the people that surround them, so I’ll ask people, a friend or a family member or a colleague, what did they do that you’ve not seen other people do, what are the kinds of ways that they motivate people? How did they make that change, what are some of the steps they took that you don’t think are that common is there something they believe, that you don’t think other people believe, have you seen them give coach more junior people to success, what do they do every day how have they given that feedback and so forth, so that process… So now you’ve got a case of one person, and then what happens, of course, is you can go backwards and look at all of those individual leaders and then start to look for patterns, and by the patterns aren’t always obvious, and once you see them, they smack you in the head, but until you see them, they’re really blind…

0:41:09.3 Randall: I just did this last weekend. I found a routine. Now, it tends to be, this routine tended to be situated, not universal, not what we would consider or something that would be something we would coach on because it doesn’t apply in all contexts, but it actually solves a particular problem, so it becomes advice, really good advice. Powerful advice for us. So you find this routine, and now that I’ve found that, I found… Just by going through some of our data, I found probably 30-40 different examples of it, and prior to seeing the pattern, I couldn’t see it at all, I didn’t know what those examples were, those, which is words on a piece of paper or telling me something that other people did. And so that’s how it works. And then once we have a behavioral routine that we think really matters, that there’s a real pattern, we will then go really deep in the data and see, can we find dozens of examples and see it in others… Of the cases that we have, we have tens of thousands of cases, over 15000 leaders that we’ve studied, and in the process of that, then once we find that pattern, now I have to be able to put it into and articulate it in a way that makes sense instantly to somebody else so that it has instant face validity, because I’m not making a causal claim in our grounded theory approach to studying admired leaders, what I’m making is a claim of empirical pattern that is… This is what the best leaders do, the best leaders do this, maybe you should think about emulating that, but that’s your call, your call. I’m not making the claim that if you do this, then you’ll become admired, that if you do this, you’ll be more effective. What I’ll say is, If I study leaders who are absolutely exceptional at building relationships, here is something that many of them do that other people don’t do, and if on t he face of that, you find that powerful worth emulating work doing yourself, then I think it’s worth me sharing it with you, right. And that’s our approach to this entire piece now that upsets a lot of academics and empirical scientists because they only think in case the relationships and correlations, and I’m totally uninterested because my experience has been like those things are far and few between… And we can spend an entire lifetime only focusing on something really, really small that has no practical value forever, and even when we find one of those calls or relationships, people generally don’t believe it or do it in any kind of consistent way, even across the old culture, and so my view is, no, I just wanna find the patterns of what the best leaders do and share what those best leaders do with other people, and then put that in my own life and hopefully impact other people’s lives with it, and so that’s the whole process of what we do.

0:44:02.7 Sean: You mentioned that new routine.. Could you dive into that just briefly, ’cause I feel like that would really add some clarity…

0:44:16.7 Randall:It’s not developed enough. I don’t even know how to articulate very well. I’ll share it with you, but I’m gonna wreck the whole process here because it just isn’t ready for prime time, but the inkling of it is this notion of debt in relationships. So when we’re in a relationship, the best relationships are equal, the best relationships are mutually influential. They’re highly reciprocal Now, that’s an attainment, we’re trying to get… We do don’t get there with all most of our relationships, but most people that study relationships and engage in relationships would say “The best authentic rich relationships are ones where, if I ask the question Who benefits most from this relationship, both parties would say, ‘You know, I do it’s Me’, there’s a reciprocal exchange of value in the relationship.” So the idea of debt that one individual inside a relationship owes the other at debt creates an inbound, creates a discomfort. So if all of a sudden, Sean, you and I know each other, but not very well. All of a sudden I did you a big favor, I did this master favor for you, and you were moving from one house to another house in your community, and I was in town and I said, I’ll show up and I’ll help you move.

0:45:28.6 Randall: You go like, Randall, I really don’t even know you. And now I come and I help you move dirty boxes all day long, it gets sweaty and lift things and even hurt my back and all these things, now you feel indebted to me. Now, the people that study things like cognitive distance will say, Well, that’s a good thing for your relationship, because Sean, you’re gonna feel more committed to Randall, I would say. Well, I don’t doubt that but that’s not the point here is that the Debt actually creates a discomfort in an imbalance in that relationship that is not mutual and reciprocal, and it’s a problem now in that relationship because it creates an awkwardness and you’ll feel like… First of all, you don’t really know me. So why did I do that? So there must be some intention, I have some motive, I have something that maybe even inimical going on here, right. And so you might avoid me or you might even treat me, not closer, but even further away because I’ve created this discomfort by doing something extreme, like in this case of favor, that I shouldn’t have done that early in the relationship, same thing is true in a really well-developed relationship, by the way, if all of a sudden we’re in a really well-developed relationship when we go on vacation and I pay for it all, it’s my treat, well, that we’ve been peers, we’ve been colleagues.

0:46:42.6 Randall: Why would you pay for me? That’s insulting. That’s right. And so the behavior that I started finding, and again, it’s not ready for prime time, is this notion of what happens if I actually… Before I do you a favor, I actually asked you for a favor, so imagine Sean, say to you, listen, I’m out of shape and I need some exercise, and I’ve been looking away or to exercise and really, really have a day where I do nothing but sweat and really pound it. I would love to come over and help you move boxes all day, and I know that’s a little early in our relationship for me to offer that, but you’d be doing me a big favor, you’d be doing me a great service, if you would let me do that, so let me do me this favor and let me come over and help, and what that does is it reduces the level of debt, it reduces the level of imbalance… Well, what I started to find early on now and again to start ready, and I’ll say, Well, more time, not right for prime time, is that there’s lots of examples of giving and doing a favor or asking for a favor as a way of giving a favor to create that, to keep that balance in a relationship.

0:47:53.1 Randall: Now, that’s a very situated problem, most of us aren’t having issues with debt and imbalance in relationships, but it’s not unusual to me, totally unusual for early in a relationship or later or relationship, or all of a sudden we wanna do something extreme for somebody because it lends itself to that right now. And we’re good people and like… And so this is the way the admired leader would probably go about doing it. They wouldn’t just simply do the favor and give you the case of wine in their cellar to say you, congratulations. They’d say, My cellar is just absolutely packed and I wanna break out and clear out some inventory in so I can buy some new wine… you’re doing me a favor, if you’ll accept my gift of a couple of cases of great wine because it’s something that helps me, and so they’ll ask for a favor in order to give a favor. Now, how powerful is that? Again, it’s very situations, not like an admired leadership behavior that we would go out and coach, I advise about, but it’s the inkling to something, and at some point I’ll be able to articulate that in a much more powerful way, and I’ll be able to then bring it as advice to people who are…

0:49:09.1 Randall: It’s almost like for… It’s the inversion of relationships, but if you’re really good at relationships, those kinds of nuances, those kinds of things, right on the edge of what it really means to create details really matter all of a sudden. That will be meaningful to you. It won’t be something that is ever seen in an admired leadership course because it’s very much about a particular problem in a relationship rather than relationships in general, but it’s that kind of next order understanding that people who are already of achieved mastery… I go, That’s really interesting. Let me play with that. And that’s one of those.

0:49:46.7 Sean: I love that. I love playing at the margins there, that’s an excellent example, and Randall, if you’re clearing out the cellar, please feel free to send it down here to south Florida.I’m a big, big advocate of wine… And I actually really like that that you dug into that, so I appreciate it because it dehumanizes it. I almost thought for a second here, you have decades and decades of experience that you come across something and you’ve got it perfectly distilled down. So that was fantastic. This has me thinking a lot around mentorship, and I’ve even found this in my own life that when someone’s been a great mentor for me, I just feel the need that I could never bring them the amount that they brought me… How should I be thinking through that?

0:50:27.4 Randall: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I think the reciprocal exchange in a mentor relationship is for you to take people seriously, for you to be highly thankful and for you to actually use the advice and wisdom that you get on purpose and to make sure that people know about the examples of it. They need to realize that they’re having the influence. People wanna know that they’ve had the influence on you, that they hope that they’re having… So I always like the old story, one of my colleagues told me a point, they were running for an airplane and not in the old days, but in not that long ago, and so they came to the counter at the check-in, and they were really close and they didn’t have bags, so they got Their ticket and so forth. And they went up and the Agent and the gate agent, not the one agent at the check-in, had said to them, you might be able to make it, please hurry, here’s how you can get there a little faster, and so forth on so… And so that person went and got through security, made it to their gate just before they closed the door, got on the plane, and made the plane.

0:51:37.4 Randall: Well, a couple of weeks later, they were going through the same airport and they went up to the gate and they said, by the way, thank you so much I made the plane that day, and she remembered and she said, Thank you so much for telling me… I have so many people that have experience, but I never know whether they make it or not, I never know whether they actually make it on a plane, and it’s so dissatisfying ’cause I never know. And so thank you for taking the time and the energy to tell me that you made the plane, that’s really what… What mentors want… Did you make the plane… I did. I say what works, did it have influence in five years later, did something I say mean something to you, that’s the big reward for the mentor, that’s how you reciprocate with a mentor, is you make sure that their influences known not falsely by the way, not everything they say and do is gonna have an impact, but when it does make sure that you tell them, and that’s the biggest reward for them as a mentor.

0:52:36.6 Sean: How important is storytelling? You tell these great stories here today on the show and throughout the course, and they really resonate, and then I tend to remember them so much more, is that one of the key things great leaders do?

0:52:50.5 Randall: Probably… I don’t think there’s anything about storytelling per se, I think it’s more about the human condition than it is about leadership, I think we remember things, we store things, there’s lots of data that suggests that episodes and stories are the way that we recall and retain information, and we can make sense of random information by putting it in a story kind of frames and frameworks, and so I think stories matter, I’ve never seen anything in particular, I could show you, not our data, but other people’s data around how better storytellers tell stories better. But I’ve not seen anything pervasive around leaders anyway, about whether they tell stories at this particular time, or they tell stories in this particular way, but I agree with you, I think the ability to bring ideas alive and have them remembered falls on one of two things. Either stories or models. And that’s how we learn, we learn through stories and we learn through models, now, I find models even more interesting from a leadership standpoint, but stories are really, really powerful, I like to tell them, and I think every other human being likes to tell them… We have home cultures that are grounded in the storytelling or ours included, and so stories are just ubiquitous to the human condition, but nothing that I’ve been able to see so far anyway, around how stories operate differently for the best leaders other than then they tell them like everyone else. And use them powerfully..

0:54:28.5 Sean: I wanna circle back to something we were bringing up the start of the show, and that’s around knowing yourself, and I feel like if you don’t know yourself, you don’t know values, you’re really operating on a weak foundation. So I’m wondering for you, someone who’s much more experienced and has been in this game way longer, how long have you known yourself… And then how does that change over time?

0:54:49.0 Randall: So there’s a lot of different ways to come to that question, and I’m a poor one to ask because I am not led to that paradigm, but I understand. So first of all, I think there’s lots of different dimensions and qualities you can learn about yourself, so you should know some of your pre-dispositions and some of the things that are big, deep in your DNA that you’ve probably inherited from your family, and biologically that you carry with you. And so they’re definitely those things, and I think for you not to know them means that you’re kind of operating at a deficit, but I think there’s other things that you know about yourself or like in terms of your values that are evolving all the time. There are things to know about the things that you like and dislike, the things that bother you and don’t bother you, those things really matter too, but those are much more infemmeral, they’re moving all the time and changing to some degree, now, maybe values aren’t… They’re fairly stable, but the things like what brings you pleasure can change quite drastically as you age and like what’s important to you, what really matters and…

0:55:56.5 Randall: So I think it’s important to know, but there’s a lot of things that other people can bring to you that all of a sudden shake you up. I remember when I first had an epiphany and another for me, is that success in life is really about how many people you matter to… ’cause I always thought success and life was about having influence, and that’s the particular kind of influence. But the idea that in relationships, like who really matters, who do you really matter to and who really matters to you? And that at the end of your life, that’s how you’re gonna judge yourself. Because I’ve interviewed lots of people at the end of their lives, by the way, you’re gonna judge yourself not by what strategies, what decisions, but by the quality of the relationships that you still have where you matter to those people… And I don’t mean in terms of just the influence you had on them. Again, that’s how I always saw it before, but that right now, this moment, you’re important to those people because of who you are and what you are, and how you engage them. When I had that idea around that, that’s what success is, it changed a lot of things for me now that that’s all of a sudden that’s something I’ve been able to keep for ever since I decided that really is what success is…

0:57:12.8 S2: By the way, I’m not making that argument to other people, that’s how I’m defining success, I hope you find it compelling… But that’s up to you, but that’s about knowing myself now that I know that… And I’ve decided that that’s what I’m committed to. No surprise, I’m trying to matter to more people, and so there’s a lot of things about knowing yourself that also happen in the experience of life, where you say, You know what I really know, I know that this matters, or This is important to me, and I’m now going to commit to it, that’s a different kind of knowing, and so I think they go both the hand-in hand, The knowing of who you are psychologically and respecting that knowledge, how you get angry, why do you react to certain things… Why is it that you find certain things so bothersome, what about your personality makes it so that you don’t like large parties and groups, you prefer to find your energy from a book and from yourself, you know what, those are things that are about your psychology, and I want you to know them, and respect them, but I also want you to understand that part of knowing is about creating yourself through experience and then committing to things just like you would commit to a relationship, and in that process, that commitment requires you to think about it deeply and then to act on it. And that’s a different way of knowing yourself and I think both sides really matter…

0:58:44.0 Sean: Now, that’s really helpful. You mentioned you’ve interviewed a lot of people at the end of their lives, what particular stage in life of the people that you’ve interviewed, you think has been most insightful for you?

0:58:57.5 Randall: I can tell where it hasn’t been insightful, and that is when people are first nascent and inexperienced and just becoming leaders for the first time. They don’t know what they don’t know in a really big way, and so I haven’t been able to find a lot of help in that… Now, that doesn’t mean there’s no value there, but I haven’t been able to find it, and obviously the more experience people have, sometimes experience shuts down, things stops you from seeing things. This requires you to make assumptions, but in the leadership world, I find that wisdom and experience comes together, and so at least in my personal experience, I’m more likely to find insight with people that are either right in the throes of an issue or that have seen that issue many, many times. When you’ve seen something many, many times, you start to see your own patterns as to what works and what doesn’t work, or what is important and isn’t important. And so when I can find somebody later in their careers or after their careers that are still cerebral, connected to their work, to those ideas, and then I can ask them for their insights I can find sometimes much more insightful things, but again, it’s a pretty big mix. I’ll learn from anybody from anywhere and they see something valuable, I couldn’t care less where they are in their life journey, if they do something valuable and I can see it then great but it’s not the most…

1:00:25.9 Randall: We don’t just study senior leaders, and I’m not only focused on people that are after their careers. I really like people that are in the throes of a problem that are making that particular kind of decision or decision set or that are dealing with problematic… I’m parenting the most ubiquitous leadership active in the world. Listen, teenagers. Wow. No, simple task. I love to understand how people are dealing with teenagers because it brings out the best and worst in them, but in terms of their actions, they’re trying everything in their power to have influence in… I’m gonna learn some really interesting stuff, and most people that I teenagers are really, still fairly young in their careers in their lives, so there’s all kinds of things, all kinds of places to find wisdom. 

1:01:12.6 Sean: About finding wisdom…. behind you. There appears to be a large bookshelf. Are there any books that you’ve enjoyed throughout the years, you tend to go back to…

1:01:23.2 Randall: Yeah, there’s a… Gosh, you got another show for me and it goes through all the books, and there are so many books that have been impactful, I’ll give you one or two that are not as well known, I’m really a big fan of a book called Management of the Absurd, 1990s like six or so, it’s a really unknown book, really, really smart, the author, and I’ll mess up his name, so I’m not great on names. I’m about the idea… It’s not the names. The author makes one of the small, really small books. By the way, one of them makes the distinction between problems and dilemmas and the difference between the two, and that was really insightful to me when I read it. That’s a really great book. A guy named Sample used to be the president at USC, wrote a book in 2002 called A Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. Another really unknown book. It’s really good, really, really a special book has a chapter in there on thinking Gray. I love that chapter. I make everybody who I come in contact with read that chapter because it’s all about thinking gray, but it’s also about thinking black and white, you have to balance both of those things, and so can make decisions unless you start putting it in blacks and whites, but thinking gray really matters.

1:02:46.0 Randall: And so there’s books like that, I tend to… I’m a contrarian generally. And so I like those things that are not as well-known. But if you think about really well-known books or that are pretty popular books, again, I’m not highbrow, so if somebody says something in Sifler or that has a bunch of wisdom in it, I don’t care if it’s written in a sophomore way or it’s very popular or not… So I like The Talent Code. I think that’s a really insightful book, I wish it was written a little differently and like… But read that book, I think it’s Daniel Coyle I always say coin coil. That’s a really smart book. I like that book, I could give you 20 others like that. So I’m always looking for those things like that… There’s just so much to read and so much to go through, and people think… People reading as much. Well, people are writing a lot, I can tell you that, and so my Amazon account is way up there every month, just trying to stay abreast of everything that’s going on out there, but there’s lots of great things to read.

1:04:02.5 Sean: Yeah, we can dive into some more of those over a nice bottle of wine, I would love the one contrarian biography

1:04:09.9 S2: Contrarian biography. Read the both, read the most recent Bruce Springsteen biography. Fascinating that somebody at his level of success and startup could have that much self-doubt and that much paranoia about his own skills of the way that he prepares and practices in love… Let Love and luck. No, not a lot of deep wisdom in that book, but a lot of confirming wisdom in that book, and I love that. That fire. Awesome.

1:04:41.0 Sean: I almost picked that up the other day, I didn’t… So now regarding that, I will have to… You mentioned self-doubt, I have to assume the majority of the leaders you work with, many responsible for some of the largest deals in Wall Street, they’re almost on the other spectrum, right, where they almost have too much self-belief?

1:04:58.9 Randall: Sometimes… I mean, it can be a real problem. Listen, the number one thing that gets on everybody’s way is ego, Ryan Holiday, in Ego is the Enemy, a perfect title. Ego is definitely the enemy, and it closes down a lot of things, it makes it so that people feel like they own things in, they don’t reach and seek information, when you become senior in an organization, everything is filtered for you… You get very small pieces of truth, and so if you’re not out there pushing against that and trying to find the more candid and unbridled views of things, and you’re gonna wind up operating from limited data in much of it, false. And so hubris and ego and vanity, they’re a big deal. Profile, that’s a really big deal with some of the best leaders, the best leaders that I admire, they want nothing to do with being well-known or being on, they don’t want their face on the coin at all, they look at their profile as totally the enemy. Profile makes you a target for scrutiny and pure jealousy, it makes you a target for media investigation and targets for lawsuits, profile does nothing but makes you feel good about yourself, and then it gets you in trouble.

1:06:17.3 Randall: So there’s one that’s really contrarian, the best leaders I’ve been around, I’ve actually tried to either they already have a low profile, or I try to reduce their profile of purpose and I’ve been successful in some cases, And they think, you, thank me for it later. I had a leader say to me, You’re only famous and truly famous from somebody who’s crazy thinks they’re you, and there’s no upside to that, and I buy that. I love that line for that exact reason, and so profile, vanity, ego, those are all things that get in people’s way, they shut down conversations. I can’t tell you how many organizations I’ve gone into where I’ve met the most senior leaders or leader, and I walk into their office and it’s a shrine… You literally feel like you should…,when you walk in, and my first conversation with them is… And let me get to straight is leadership about you or is about the other people… Should I feel comfortable? Should I wanna be able to open up and do find you approachable and to discuss anything I want inside your office, or should I feel like is if in fact you are the most amazing, spectacular human being that’s ever walked the planet, and I should pretty much be cowled by you as soon as I walk in this office like, what are you trying to project here? ’cause they don’t even recognize that.

1:07:29.6 Randall: They don’t even see they’re proud of themselves, and they should be, by the way, but I tell them, Guess what, take that to your home office, put it in your basement, have your dog come in. Right, but in your office, this needs to be about other people, just needs to be… The leadership is not about you, it’s about them. And so let’s create an environment that’s about them, and so let’s get rid of all these famous pictures and all these magazine and newspaper clippings and all this nonsense, and let’s get a conference table and in a place where they can feel curable… I mean, so he goes, a big deal and Hubris is a big deal, and that not just on Wall Street, I go lots of other places, and so it’s a problem almost every place, it’s easy when you get to a certain level where you feel self-important and the object is to fight that, and sometimes as an advisor, my whole purpose, my whole role is to help people fight that and to see things more accurately and candidly, what’s that old line angels fly because they operate lightly. They see themselves lightly. I think you have to see yourself as they get to see your work is tremendously serious and important, and you have to see yourself as less so… And that’s what great leaders do. And so that’s a big issue now on Wall Street, and those kinds of leaders, you’ll find difference is just like you find any place else, and of the leaders I’ve ever been around have been in hedge fund managers and private equity leaders and bank leaders, and some of the worst leaders I’ve ever been around, have been in that same camp, they tend to be more extreme in that environment, but you can find some really good ones…

1:09:12.9 Sean: I don’t want to limit your work. Just that you operate within all different leadership fields. Multiple times here you mentioned the importance of being about the other people within your organization. This is something I’m just so fascinated with in developing and skilling up, right, you want elite performance, what do you do differently within CRA that just helps those people once in the organization develop their talents quicker?

1:09:39.4 Randall:  It’s a series of conversations and it’s all about… I’m a big believer in an emergent meeting in dialogue. I believe that all the real powerful things happen in dialogue, happen in conversation, and so it’s about being purposeful around those conversations. It’s about having a set of structured conversations, you don’t know exactly what’s gonna get said or done, you have a general framework, but it’s about… And so we design a set of conversations that last usually more than a quarter of time weekly where those conversations occur, and then we do clinics all the time where everybody pitches in and starts to ask certain questions about a given situation. If you find yourself in this situation or with this kind of an issue, what advice would you bring to bear? Is there anything about it admired leadership you bring to bear, how would we think about the problem, and so when you get a lot of other smart people that are really experienced talking about something, all of a sudden, light bulbs go off and people get better really fast. So to me, that’s one. The second one is models, when you have great models, so that you’re able to video tape, for example, record a great dialogue, a great group to dialogue, and then I can watch that, and then I can say, Well, what was really good in there? Obviously, you’ve held this up, I’ve held us up as a piece of excellence, how do I do it differently right now…

1:11:06.8 S2: Where is that excellence in? The more models you can collect and create for other people, the better they get really fast, and so if you had a child, for example, and they wanted to learn how to ride a horse or throw a lacrosse ball, have a certain dance move or learn a dismount off of a jumping and gymnastics or whatever it is, you know you have YouTube. And you can see 50 models. How cool is that from a learning standpoint? Well, the same thing is true, almost every place else, if you’re a firm that does propose scopes of work like ours does, where you have coaching conversations, there’s no reason that you can collect exemplars, and when you put exemplars in the hands of smart people, they are not just gonna play derive the… They’re gonna look and find and say, How do I find myself at this thing, and they can get better really fast. So we’re big on two things, conversations on the one side and structured conversations, and then models on the other side. And I think if you put those together. They’re really powerful.

1:12:09.0 Sean: I love those two very clear examples there. Yeah, it’s funny. What’s available now, I’m sure even on YouTube, you can find someone dismounting off of the horse into a dance move with a lacrosse stick. So it’s pretty remarkable what we find there. I know you have a sports background, you played golf, so this is purely a selfish question, I’m always intrigued by this and we always hear about the person, they just have the “it factor”… Are you familiar with people being titles, they just have it. Sure. Distill this down for me. What is this? 

1:12:38.6 Randall: I always like the description and Paul Bear Bryant, the Alabama football coach, I don’t know who said it, but somebody said, We don’t know what he has, but he has a lot of it. Right, I think that’s true, right? So when you wanna distill down the it factor, there’s lots of different things that people are honing into, but what I would tell you is the majority of people that have it from a leadership standpoint, have executive presence or gravitas, and that’s a behavioral thing that I can show you how to do it right, now you might take a lot of practice and you’re gonna do it differently than somebody else will do it, but it’s all about the way that you balance this idea of markers or cues of status, and then markers or cues of being relationally attractive to other people, and when you’re too far on one side of the other, which most of us are, we lose a sense of a blended balance, and so when we don’t have new, the presence that other people don’t have, now that also requires us to be cool under pressure, to articulate ourselves. Well, there’s other things about presence that matters, but the it factor at least in leadership tends to be presence, and that is we can break that down and make people better in presence without a whole lot of theory or framework and a life, and so that’s fun.

1:13:57.9 Randall: But to me, that’s the it factor… Now, if you start talking about athletes that have the ‘it’ factor, they make things that are really, really hard, look really easy, because their skillful-ness is at a different level or different tier, and… So when you watch somebody who’s really, really athletically superior, what you’re gonna find is they do the most common things uncommonly, and as a result, it’s very difficult for you and I to discern that stuff because they’re making it look really easy. That to me is the it factor… And now I can’t teach you how to do that. Athletically, I’ve never worked with athletes in that particular kind of way, I mean maybe a little bit from a golfing standpoint, but that’s really the thing that we talk about and it’s something we’re compelled to try to understand better, but I’m really speaking it from… As an outcome, rather than the process to get to that spot, but you’re really talking about people that are just a practice, their deliberate practices happened. It was such a degree of purpose and intention, and they’ve been able to acquire a level of skill so much more superior than everyone else, that now they have it, and the way we know they have it is they just…

1:15:13.4 Randall: They do these things and it looks seamless, it looks fluid, it looks effortless, and now we know they have it, and so that’s kind of cool and… And certainly it’s true in golf, that for sure also.

1:15:27.7 Sean: It has me thinking about a basketball example with James Harden, who’s one of the best players in the league, and so they did all the data points around every athletic movement he does, and he was 100% average on every single thing he did along with the rest the NBA, except for one thing, and that was how quickly he could stop, and it was the top 99% percentile. I just thought it was fantastic. 

1:15:48.1 Randall: What a cool example, really cool. I love that.

1:15:51.5 Sean: I know we’re gonna round it out here in a minute. I am wondering though, you’re a high performer with what you’ve done for multiple decades, where do you find the most challenge with your work? 

1:16:06.0 Randall: Listen, I have quite a few gatekeepers that are between me and working with the most senior leaders in the industry, and oftentimes those gatekeepers will say… Or ask me the question, Where are you best? Now, I give them a wrong answer because I want the challenge, ’cause what I tell him I’m best at, which is also true, is I’m best at the people that think coaching, advising and getting better as leaders is a bunch of horse shit. That it’s… This is just a soft feeling, touchy-feely stuff that nobody really… Doesn’t really matter. People don’t get that much better, who you are is who you are. And the idea of actually having a coach and advisor is for other people that probably need a crutch, but they don’t need that crutch, I love talking to people like that, because in an hour, I will totally change their mind because what they know really matters to them, and they’re really expert at whatever it is they know, and I’ll have them articulate that for me really fast, but once we start talking about issues around leadership, and they realize that there’s somebody else out there, in this case me, that knows as much about leadership and about how to be effective as they know about what they know, they go, Okay, now I want an advisor.

1:17:34.0 Randall: Or, now I wanna coach. So I find the most challenging situations, those where I have to turn people from… No-go, Not interested. In fact, it’s more than not interested. I think this is all nonsense, and I have to turn them quickly within one conversation to a point of saying, Let’s keep talking, I like this. This is not what I expected. That is both a challenge and something that I think is really fun, most people would not find that fun, by the way, if I gave those assignments to most of my colleagues, they would say That is not fun, I don’t enjoy those people at all. I love talking to those people because I find it a personal challenge to turn them… And so that’s fun. That’s fun and challenging for me, it’s probably not what I’m best at, but I’m definitely good at and have proven that over a lot of years and so forth, and so have turned and made a lot of advocates out of people that couldn’t have been more resistant to begin with. So that would probably be my first response, and probably one that I… Been consistent for me. 

1:18:47.2 Sean: Randall, have you ever seen the movie, The Princess Bride? Yes. So this reminds me of the scene, the sword-fighting scene where he goes and then he flips it over and he goes, I’m not left-handed, he’d been sword-fighting with his left hand the entire time which was his weak hand… So glad you were a negotiator there. Two more quick ones here before we round out, get everyone connected with Admired leadership, this might be one of those questions that just annoys you and pisses you off, but we’ll see… You mentioned you study over 15000 leaders, I’m wondering, is there one leader who’s just exemplified the most amount of these behaviors overall?

1:19:22.0 Randall: Yes, but not that you know… And so, let me tell you about Dick Morgan. Dick Morgan was really, really special. He was actually an executive at Con Edison utility company in Manhattan, and we had the pleasure of studying him in the late 90s, early 2000s, and he was really just different, we learned more from him in that one case then probably we learned from any single leader he was that special of a human being. And as a leader, he just was just unbelievable, and a utility company of all places with the big union workforce and everything else, and he was so admired that he actually was asked to come out of retirement twice, and so he ran steam operations for Con Edison, which if you were around New York City, you realize this is a very big, big deal, almost all the hotels and big buildings operate and run through steam underneath the city, he ran steam operations retired, and then early in his career, he had had an influence over Emergency Management Services, and so they were having problems at the time, and the CEO actually asked him to come back out of retirement and to run an emergency services and to fix things with the built New York City and the politicians and everything else, when he came back and did it, and so he was just exceptional, and he just was somebody…

1:20:44.4 Randall: Now, you would never know about Dick Morgan unless I told you, and that’s true of the majority of the admired leaders that we’ve studied, they don’t have the iconic status, if you were ever in Con Edison at that time, greed even probably now, you either heard of or knew Dick Morgan, he was just revered. He was a Muhammad Ali, Arnold Palmer level persona. Now, the sad part about Dick Morgan was running emergency services in 2001, still at the end of his career, 911 happened and he went straight to the towers and got all the Con Edison people out except himself, and so he perished in 911 and what a tragedy um… in So many ways, because the world was robbed and one of the great leaders that we had ever been around in life, and I was really honored because I was asked to put together having studied him, his principles that were spoken at his eulogy, and by the way, 8000 people attended his funeral. I’m not even sure I could get eight to show up to mine. That’s how Revered and  admired he was. And he just was amazing. And I think about him all the time. I tell stories about him all the time, and by the way, I don’t just tell stories because he perished and he was part of 911, I was telling the stories like that at the moment, soon after we studied him, he just was that special now, we’ve been around some other really special leaders, some in which you know something which you don’t…

1:22:18.3 Randall: Athletic coaches are the most easy to identify with and see, and we’ve been around some and we’ve studied some really special ones that are special in particular ways that are really just extraordinary, and you know those names, but of all the leaders we’ve studied to Dick Morgan And by the way, at the bottom of the memorial… At World Trade Today, you’ll never see it. Okay, you can see it on the Internet if you want, in the steam room down at the very, very bottom end, there’s a very small platform too, that Con Edison dedicated and quite a long time ago, and the memorial was created, and I got a chance to go down and see it just… I just, I just need to see it. And just really cool. So thanks for asking that. I wish I could give you a list of 15 leaders that you knew instantly and I would if you really needed me to, but I prefer not to because then it’s like, Well, puts them up to scrutiny and so forth, but he was really special…

1:23:24.7 Sean: No, thank you for sharing that. I love hearing the stories, the ones we would have never heard before, so that was special. That was great. Glad you shared that last one. I am wondering if you could go throughout all of history and you could sit there and study and work alongside one leader throughout history, who would that be?

Randall:Oh gosh, there’s so many of them. I mean seriously,  probably the leader that you have in your head, that is… That is in your head, not a great leader and didn’t do things that you would consider to be worth emulating that you have… That the opposite is true is Ghengis Khan was one amazing leader in so many ways, what he did to rally the different tribes, and the kinds of ways that he did war, in the way that he rewarded people and how he acknowledged people. If I could go back and be protected by the way safely, not killed instantly, and be around the leader to learn from, go read about Ghengis Khan  sometime by some of the scholars that actually write about him and read some of the stories. Gosh, I love the data around Ghengis Khan and how he changed the world with some of the ideas that he generated by the way, I could read over and over and over again about his creativity and his insight, but currency, consumer and currency came from Ghengis Khan, prisons and Paroles came from Ghengis Khan.

1:25:01.7 Randall: So many of the modern institutional things that we think that we take for granted, primary education in the US, where the idea of you can get educated to a certain level, it wasn’t the same thing, but that came from that Mongolian time period that dynasty… They came from Genghis Khan. He would be it. Now, that’s a really strange answer, I realize that people go… So this guy you had on the podcast once go be with Ghengis Khan, is contoured about him, you have all the wrong stuff in your head about Ghengis Khan. Now, if I take him out of the soup, because he would be by far above anything else… I mean, I’m a US guy and I’m an American guy. I’m a guy that believes in US History. If I had one other, I would probably be Meriwether Lewis, despite the fact that he ended his life, what he did during the expedition to find the passage is Northwest and his leadership to be able to take 42 people across 2000 miles and back without any revolted and who he was, if you really get into him like that’s somebody else, I would really like to have had that real conversation and learn how did he know to do some of that stuff.

1:26:26.0 Randall: Amazing. And I don’t have a lot of the texture data that I have on more contemporary leaders, so I don’t know for sure if I would learn a whole lot from him, but everything tells me that I would, so that would be more… That’s on contemporary, but that would be Meriwether Lewis.

1:26:42.9 Sean: One of the Admired Leadership modules around Meriwether Lewis that I really enjoyed, ’cause I had not done any research or heard very much about him. Ghengis Khan surprisingly, that is not the first time he’s come up in terms of being one of those leaders and a great introduction to him is Jack Weatherford’s book Making of the Modern World. Randall, this has been such a pleasure. The course is admired leadership dot com. I wanna make sure we talk about it a little bit more. What can someone signing up for this course, what can they expect to receive out of it, in addition to everything you were so kind with over this past last hour and a half…

1:27:27.8 Randall: So what admired leadership is, in the digital courses, we’ve taken 10 modules of leadership, we could have put as many as 25, but we chose10, feedback, inspiration, motivation, relationships, making great decisions, holding people accountable..  Took 10 modules as a leadership, we took 10 behaviors and routines, I think about behavior as an action that we would engage in, a routine is usually either interactions or something that happens over time. So we took 10 behaviors routines in each module, and so 100 behaviors routines themselves, and we cobbled it into a course that we think thematically makes sense. The cool part is no vertical learning there, you don’t have to know one thing to know another thing, you could go any place to simply spend the 10 minutes, all the videos that explain the behaviors in ten minutes or less. Then there’s outlines and examples and exercises and study questions in each one, for all hundred of them, you could just spend time in just one behavior, and you could make a very big impact on your leadership, you change five or six things and really commit yourself to emulate five or six things your entire leadership changes stylistically. I have my favorite pieces in that work of inspiration/ motivation stuff is so different and so powerful, and it’s who I wanna be as a person as a leader, and I was so happy to find that stuff, so admired leadership is a particular set of like… Most of us wanna be better leaders, but we don’t know how, so we read and we talk about it and we attend conferences, and admired leadership is how… It’s the actual actions, great leaders and things that you and I can do tomorrow. And so it’s the collage, the tool, in order to get better, and that’s what it is.

1:29:19.1 Sean: Randall, that’s it, admired leadership dot com. It’ll be linked up here in the show notes, and like I mentioned previously, I have no incentive here. I took this course and I have extremely high standards with what gets my attention, without a doubt, this leadership course was the best leadership course I’ve ever taken, and surprisingly enough, multiple people who actually have been a guest on this podcast who are some of the most elite high performers in the planet here  recommend it as well. So Randall admired leadership dot com. I can’t thank you enough for joining us here on what got you there? This is a true pleasure.

1:29:54.7 Randall: My pleasure, and just recognize that the whole idea is just to get better, that’s what we’re supposed to be, and we’re supposed to do… Most of us aren’t as good as we need to be, we’re a little too self satisfied, we like who we are, which we should, we like the effects and the outcomes that we get, which we probably should also, but the object is never to give up. Always good enough is not good enough, and to get better, and that’s when we put this together for people and to have a bigger influence on more people being better leaders, and so if anybody can get better through this, then we’re happy. Thanks for having me. Pleasure, it’s been great getting to know you, and I’ll make sure you get that case of wine sometime shortly and in the meantime, whatever I can do to help people be better leaders.

1:30:46.2 Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of what got you there. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through, if you found value in this, the best way you can support the show is giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends, and also sharing on social… I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys listening to another episode.