EntreLeadership - #368: How to Always Add Value with Adam Grant

Episode Date: March 30, 2020

Organizational psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant shares insight from his research on what qualities really add the most value to a team. Hint, narcissism isn’t one of them. In fact, having a blinding, high regard of yourself or your abilities tends to make a business less efficient and less effective—no matter how great the individual performances of the team members may be. Listen and learn how to always add value, learn from your limitations, and build a humble team culture.   entreleadership.com/podcast Adam Grant's website Shane Battier & Adam Grant Keynote Conversation: People Analytics Conference 2015 #264: Alan Mulally—Live From Summit Menlo Innovations website Give and Take by Adam Grant The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle WorkLife with Adam Grant podcast The Ultimate EntreLeadership Reading Guide 13 Ways to Build a High Performing Remote Team from BELAY   Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are the character qualities that you think of when you hear the word leader? Integrity, drive, vision, charisma, energy, focus, passion, loyalty? Those are all really good. But there's another word that, although less visible, maybe exponentially more important. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Alex Judd, and that quality, it's humility. And today's guest, Adam Grant, is going to make the case for why this often overlooked trait is invaluable to your business. Adam is an organizational psychologist, professor at Wharton Business School, bestselling author, and hosted the podcast, Work Life.

But the example of humility that typifies his findings, it didn't come from the classroom or from a consulting session. It came straight from the NBA. My favorite example is somebody I'd been observing and rooting for and then studying for years, who's become a friend, Shane Badiere. I'm sure you know Shane's backstory, but for anyone who doesn't, Shane grew up a star basketball player. He ended up going to Duke and winning a national championship. He was a lottery pick then in the NBA.

And then when he got to the NBA, something happened. he discovered that all the players at that elite level were more athletically talented than him. So, you know, they were faster, they could jump higher, people made fun of Shane because he was slow and he couldn't dribble. And he saw the writing on the wall and realized that for the first time in his life, he was not only not the best player on the team, but he was in danger of maybe not even being able to add value to the team.

And so, you know, Shane, I think, did what very few people have the humility to do. He took an honest look in the mirror. He said, okay, what are my strengths? What are my limitations? And then how do I learn to play in a way that, you know, that leverages those strengths and overcomes the limitations? And one of the things that he ended up doing was saying, all right, look, you know, what I can't do with my body, I can make up with my mind. So he started studying game statistics. Shane was like the, you know, one of the, I guess one of the early champions of the moneyball movement in basketball. And so, you know, he started, you know, he started, you, he would know when he had to guard a player

exactly what spot on the court he wanted to avoid because they always hit their shots from that place. He'd know where they were most inefficient or ineffective. And his job as a defender was to try to get them there. I think the other thing he did, which was really powerful, is he focused on intangibles that other players with big egos just did not have the humility to really concern themselves with.

So he was the guy who would die for the loose ball. He's the guy who'd do all sorts of, things on the court that weren't even measured, but were ultimately valuable. And Michael Lewis ended up writing an article about him calling him the no-stats All-Star. That's insane. Because even though he wasn't a great score or rebounder or shot blocker, when he was on the court, his team was more likely to win. That's pretty remarkable to call him an All-Star because a lot of times we think of the All-Star

as the person that is in the center of attention and is getting all of the publicity because of their stats. And it sounds like what you're saying is the thing that stands out about Shane is the fact that he did almost the complete opposite of that. Yeah, I think he did in a lot of ways. He went for the, you know, sort of all of the thankless jobs that exist on a basketball team, which is kind of amazing. And, you know, I don't think we'll ever know how indispensable he was. But it is interesting to look back and say, okay, you know, the year that you put together the dream team on the Miami Heat. and you had LeBron James with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosch. They really struggled in that first season.

Yeah. No, not at all. And that tracks with this evidence that I think is fascinating, that basketball teams and soccer teams that have, quote, unquote, too many stars are actually less likely to win because, you know, everybody wants that center of attention. And, you know, it's hard to have a successful team when everybody wants to hog the ball. And I think it's amazing that then,

the year that Shane joined, the dynamics of that team really changed. And I think he had a huge effect on that. And you said you know Shane personally, is that correct? Yeah, I actually, I got to know him probably now four or five years ago. I was hosting a people analytics conference at Wharton. It dawned us that it would be great to learn from him, given that he'd taken data and actually used them on the court. So I reached out. It turned out we shared a Speakers Bureau, and he sent me an email the next day saying, hey, I'd be happy to come to your conference. So we did a nice fireside chat on stage and then we've gotten to know each other. He, I actually, I didn't know if that would be the end of our interactions, but I got an email

from him a couple months later saying, hey, I read your book and I have a bunch of questions for you. Gosh. That's the most Shane Battier thing I've ever seen. The guy is always looking to learn. What NBA player is emailing an author saying, I read your book and I want to sit down with you to discuss it? Like, you just don't picture that happening.

That's, okay. So unheard of. You know, it's so, number one, it's encouraging to hear that you read about this guy, you heard about this guy, you were obviously a fan of this guy, and simultaneously you then became his friend, and the word that you keep using to describe him is humility. So what do you mean when you use that word humility to describe Shane? I think humility gets a bad rap in a lot of conversations, because it sounds like you lack self-esteem or confidence, and, you know, it feels like admitting weakness. But if you actually go back to the root of the word, I guess it comes from Latin, and it translates to from the earth, which to me means humble people are grounded. They don't think little of themselves. They just want to have a realistic sense of themselves. And I think that's what Shane is about, right? It's not like he thought he was incapable of playing basketball. He knew he was good enough to lead a national championship team in college and to make the NBA. But he had a he had to take a hard look in the mirror and say, okay, you know, what are the limitations that are really going to hold me back? And then what can I do to try to get better? And I think one of the

things that that's really interesting about that is, if you think about the opposite of humility, it's narcissism. And there's a study that came out last year, which essentially showed that if you had more narcissists on an NBA team, your team was less successful. And the way that the narcissism was measured as hilarious in this study. You actually take a sample of the player's tweets, and then you code them for how self-centered and grandiose they are. And one of the tweets that scored high on narcissism was an NBA player who tweeted a picture of himself. And the caption was, when I look in the mirror, what I see staring back at me is greatness. Oh, my word. So, gosh. I mean, there are other parts of the world where you would expect people to say things like

that. But I thought the results were really interesting that if you had more narcissists on your team, you actually had less efficient passing dynamics. So there was less team coordination, fewer assists, for example, and that actually hurt team performance over time. And the way it played out was most teams got better over time through the season as they practiced together. Teams with a bunch of narcissists didn't. They basically stagnated. That was especially true if you had a narcissist in a pivotal role like point card, who's sort of responsible for helping the team gel together. So I looked at Shane and thought he's just the opposite of that.

What's so interesting, too, I've read some of your work on this and listened to some of your work on this as well, is that just because they are tweeting something as ridiculous as that doesn't mean necessarily that they are a poor individual performer, though. It just sounds like that they are a poor collaborator, is that right? Yeah, I think that's a fair summary. I think that very often narcissists are good at maximizing their own individual performance, right? Because they want to be great. And they frequently lose sight of what's the impact of my behavior on the people around me? So one of the ways you can see is Shane really contrasting with that is he wasn't just mastering statistics for his own benefit. He also used them to elevate his teammates. One of my favorite stories. that he shared is when he was teaming up with LeBron, he had this little dilemma of how do you tell the best player in the world

that his game isn't perfect and could get better? And he definitely didn't want to come in and say, you know, LeBron, I've been studying all the game stats and, you know, let me tell you you're playing the game wrong. I don't think that's going to go so well. No, but he said, look, LeBron loves to learn. He's always trying to get better. And so I just need to find a way to capture what I'd seen

in the data in a way that would resonate with him. And so he said one day before a big game against Kevin Durant, LeBron was a little bit, I don't know if he was nervous, but he was putting a lot of time into preparing how to defend him. And Shane said, hey, you know, hey, LeBron, why don't you make him shoot over his left shoulder? And LeBron's like, all right, I'll give it a try. And Shane was thrilled because LeBron did it, and he missed.

and, you know, Shane didn't have the heart to say, you know, the law of small numbers. Maybe this wouldn't have been effective the next time you tried it. But that's right. Because it was effective, LeBron went back to him and said, you know, hey, Shane's nickname was Batman from Batier. And he said, hey, Batman, what else he got? And that opened the door for Shane to be sharing his knowledge and teaching what he'd learned to the rest of the team. And, you know, I think when you can get LeBron to want to learn. from game stats, that becomes contagious pretty quickly. And I think that's one of the things

that's most powerful about the kind of humility we see in a player like Shane Batier is, it does tend to be contagious. I love that story too, because it kind of connects humility to effectiveness in a pretty clear way. I would like to know, just in terms of what you've observed with Shane and what you've observed in the NBA, have you seen areas where those trends and patterns transcend the NBA and can be applied to the marketplace? Yeah, definitely. So I didn't get first interested in this topic as a basketball fan, although I am a basketball fan.

I got interested in it because I was sick of coaching and advising founders and leaders who were extremely narcissistic. And it was easy to see up close the harm that they did. But when I really felt confident that narcissism was a problem was when I started reading the research on the effects of having a narcissistic CEO, So one of my all-time favorite studies, a study by Chatterjian Hamburg. First of all, they measure CEO narcissism by looking at cues that you could pick up without even working in the company or knowing the CEO. So they start by asking Wall Street analysts to rate CEOs based on

observing them and interacting with them in earnings calls, on, you know, how selfish, egotistical, and narcissistic each CEO is. And then they find that there are three different clues they correlate with those ratings. The first one is, if you look at the words that the CEOs use, the narcissistic CEOs are much more likely to use

I and me, but not across the board just when talking about the company's success. You know, the less narcissistic CEOs are much more likely to use us and we. The second clue

is in the compensation, which is, if you look at the average CEO, the study was done in the computer hardware and software industry. The average CEO in the study made about two to two and a half times the total annual compensation of their number two executive. The average narcissistic

CEO made seven times the annual comp of that second highest paid exec. So they're literally taking more money. And then my favorite one was the third clue, which is if you look at the annual reports that the company's put out, the narcissistic CEOs were more likely to have a giant photo of their own faces, which sent a pretty clear signal. I'm the most important person in this company, it's all about me. And when you aggregate those three factors, when you measure the eyes and me's, the relative compensation, and the size of the CEOs photograph, those combined actually correlated 0.86 with the Wall Street analyst ratings, which is a whopping correlation in the social sciences where it can only range from minus one to plus one. So that is outrageous.

You look at that and you say, wow, we can see this. Yeah, no kidding. It doesn't work. It doesn't work to operate that way. You said that you personally hated being around narcissistic CEOs and seeing what they were doing to their companies. What were the results that you were seeing that make you use that word hate, Adam? Oh, I mean, we can make a long list. So overconfidence was a huge problem, unethical behavior. You know, just even if the behavior wasn't outside the lines of what you might consider a moral code, just being demeaning and degrading to other people.

And, you know, that was really backed up in the data. So if you look at those narcissistic CEOs, their companies actually had more fluctuating and volatile performance if you track their financial returns in total shareholder returns or return on assets. Because, you know, the narcissists were convinced that they had all the answers. And so they would basically wind up and swing for the fences. And, you know, occasionally those risks would pay off, but for the most part, they were destroying their companies. And a lot of the evidence following that, there's a study showing that If you're a bank after the 2008 financial crisis, if a narcissist is at the helm, you actually recover more slowly in your financial performance.

There's evidence that narcissists are more tolerant of unethical behavior from their subordinates and sometimes even encourage it. And so, you know, that just tracked with what I'd seen in so many CEOs where, you know, a CEO would walk into a company and say, good morning and almost expect people to come back and say, great point. I agree with you all the time. I agree with you no matter what. Yeah, we can all think of examples, I think,

because we see them on the news a lot of times whenever they're failing. So contrasts those observations with the outrageously humble leaders that you've witnessed and seen and worked with. What are the big difference makers there? When I think about the most impressive humble leaders, there are a few things that come to mind. The first one is that they are not afraid to hide their flaws and limitations. One of my favorite examples of that is the marketing leaders,

named Carolyn Everson. So Carolyn one day got a performance review from her boss and said, you know what? I never really thought of doing this before, but I might as well let other people know, you know, where I'm trying to improve. And so she took her performance review and she shared it with her team and said, look, here's what I'm working on.

You know, if you have further suggestions, if you see blind spots for me, let me know. And that's unusual. But even more unusual is there are over 2,000 people who work under her. Wow. And so she basically open-sourced her performance reviews. Okay, and so she was sharing it not just with her peers. She was sharing it with her direct reports that report to her.

And all the way down below them. And when you say performance review, too, I feel like sometimes people share their performance review whenever it's a glowing review, right? Then it's like, oh, I got fives on everything. You should see this. But you're saying she was sharing her limitations and weaknesses. Yeah, she just said, look. you know, here's my review. It tells you what I'm doing well

and what I need to improve on. And I want all of you to know what I'm working on so that you can help me improve. What an amazing way to open the feedback channel and say, look, you shouldn't be afraid of criticizing me or letting me know when you see something I'm doing that's not effective. And by the way, it makes it a lot easier than

when you see her do something that you think is ineffective, she's already aware of it if it's in the performance review. And so you don't have to be afraid that you're calling her out on something that she's oblivious to. But then also, if you see something that's not in the performance review, it reinforces how important it is for you to raise it because it's clear that it's not on her radar right now. So that to me was a first step. And we could talk about some others if you want. Yeah, yeah. So you said awareness of limitations, what was something else that stood out about the really humble leaders? So I think a second thing you see in extremely humble

leaders is they actually recognize that their own strengths can become weaknesses. One of the things I've seen with narcissists is they tend to believe that when they're good at something, the more they use that strength, the better. So let's say you're a narcissist and you've been told you're great at public speaking. All of a sudden, every meeting turns into, you know, an inspiring speech. And pretty soon you've silenced everybody on your team and you've closed the door to your own learning. So what humble leaders would often do is say, look, I've gotten feedback that I'm, I'm, you know, sometimes seen as charismatic, but I don't want that to be a crutch. And so when I come into a meeting, I'm going to frame a discussion or a dialogue, and I'm actually then going to shut up

and speak last. And that'll make sure that I get everybody else's opinions and ideas on the table before I bias them and put them in a situation where they want to conform to what sometimes called the hippo effect where the highest paid person's opinion dominates. It sounds like so much of what you're talking about is directly related to self-awareness. And I think that there's this point with self-awareness and certainly with humility that the minute I call myself self-aware or the minute I call myself really humble, I'm probably not very humble. And at the same point, we want to be able to self-evaluate or at least to evaluate how we're doing

in these arenas. So how would you suggest leaders go about doing that, Adam? Well, I think the starting point for me actually really comes out of the time I've spent inside Bridgewater, the hedge fund that Ray Dalio is built. And, you know, there's some practices at Bridgewater that I would not necessarily recommend to most organizations. But they've been the most successful firm in the history of their industry. And I think one of the ways they've done it is they believe, look, if you want to beat the market, you have to think differently from. everyone else. And if you want to think differently, then you can't have a giant ego. You actually have to be open to being challenged and admitting when you're wrong. And one of the ways they make that

real is in their performance reviews, they actually evaluate people on whether they're disagreeing with those above them and criticizing their superiors. So you could get fired out from Bridgewater if you'd never criticize your boss's boss, which is kind of remarkable. And I would love to see more of that. Is that an exaggeration or can that actually happen? People have actually been told that they're not a good fit for the company because they're not doing enough to build a culture where there's radical transparency and an idea meritocracy. They don't believe a company should be run like a democracy, right? They actually want the best ideas to win. And if you're 25, there's actually, there's an incredible example from Bridgewater of Jim Comey, the now famous Jim Comey, was actually

senior executive there. Wow. And there was at one point a 25-year-old guy, I think fresh out of law school, who came in and basically said, you don't even know what you're talking about, and criticized a bunch of Comey's reasoning. And he was promoted for that. And people who haven't been willing to, it's called, and sometimes they call it sticking your hand in the fan, people who are afraid to do that are told that they're not adding value there. Man, sticking your hand into the fan. That is a great name for it, because that's probably a little bit of what it feels like. It's like I'm going to go in and give this feedback and how it's going to be received.

I don't know, but it sounds like what you're saying is the leader or the organization needs to be open to poor feedback from every level of the org chart if they're going to be humble and then stay humble. I think that's key. And I think, you know, it's one thing to say you're open. It's another thing to demonstrate it. Yeah.

So one of the things I've seen a lot of leaders do is say, look, you know, I really do want to improve, I want to get better, let me ask for feedback. But I recently finished an experiment in a couple of companies with a doctoral student, Konstantino's Cuda Ferris, and we said, look, asking for feedback is not enough. Because when you make the request, people don't know how you're going to react. Are you going to listen, or are you going to bite their heads off and get really defensive? So we tested whether it would help to go an extra step, and we randomly assigned dozens and dozens of managers, some of them to just ask for feedback, others to say, here's a time

when I've been criticized in the past, and here's how I benefited from it. And that second group, over the next year, their teams actually experienced more psychological safety. So they felt like they could take a risk in challenging, criticizing, speaking up. Whereas the leaders who asked for feedback, but didn't kind of prove that they'd been willing to listen to it in the past, they got a temporary boost in the psychological safety in their team, and then it it fell right back to baseline. Wow. So if they just give almost like proof text for this can work, I want you to be critical, then it's more likely to actually occur in the future. That's pretty powerful. I'd like to know if we're talking to a plumbing company with 20 team members,

I don't think the business owner is going to walk into that company and say, okay, I have established an idea meritocracy now, right? I don't know that that's going to happen. So what would the next action item be for that business owner that's saying, I want to make sure that I'm staying grounded and I'm staying humble, and I want to establish an organization where that occurs? I think one of the most effective things you can do is you can invite people to criticize you in public and then demonstrate in real time that you're willing to take it. There's an interesting example of this from a colleague of mine, Tom Garrity.

He was running a company that started growing, and when they were about 100 people, he noticed that people weren't giving him the honest, unfiltered feedback that they used to. And, you know, he felt like all of a sudden there was too much power distance in the organization, especially with the people who didn't know him when he was a peer. You know, they just kind of saw him as the CEO. And so Tom actually called, he called a meeting. It was an all-hands meeting. So 100 people show up.

Wow. And he says, you know, I don't think we're getting enough criticism on the table. I feel like I need to find out how I can improve in order to be effective. and he said, we're going to stay here until everybody tells me what they think I can do better. And, you know, a lot of people were hesitant at first, not knowing how it would go, but he had prepared a few of his colleagues beforehand and said, look, you know, take the gloves off. I really want to know what you think. And I'm going to try to model the way I would most love to react to criticism on my best day. And he said it was kind of a watershed moment in his culture, you know, that after seeing the way that he was, you know, that after seeing the way that he was, was willing to listen. People are not only more likely to confront him with areas for improvement,

but they also sought out that kind of feedback from one another. And I don't know that everyone wants to go to that extreme and say, all right, let me stand up in front of a firing squad. That's right. But I think, you know, even doing that in small groups just to demonstrate that you're willing to listen and learn, to me is a powerful step. Well, and that you're a human being. Because everyone else knows you're a human being, is just do you know you're a human being that everyone's looking for. I was having a conversation with a business owner. It was actually yesterday, and she was in a really tough position. She has made over the past 90 days or so, she has made some really tough changes to compensation structures and some certain policies in the business that

have been standing for a long time, but it was necessary for the sustainability and forward motion of the business that she had to make these changes because they were unsustainable. And we don't need to talk about this practice because I don't know that I necessarily agree with this practice. She had a suggestion box. And in the suggestion box, she was going through all the comments left anonymously by employees. And one of the employees, I guess in the midst of all this change, just kind of lashed out and wrote, the ship is sinking in all caps. And she's sitting there. And every Monday at her staff meeting, she addresses the suggestions in the suggestion box. she came to this coaching call and she was like, I don't know what to do.

I had to make these changes, and I hate that it affected their compensation, and I gave them warning. And at the same time, I've got to lay in the line and be like, I hear your feedback, but this is what we have to do for the business. And at the same time, I don't want to be an arrogant snob. What do I do? I'm going to throw that question to you, Adam. What does she do? Let's start, Alex, by saying there are not any easy answers to a situation like this. And there's a reason I study these dynamics as opposed to actually having a leadership role.

So you should take everything I say with a few grains of salt. But if she came to me with that dilemma, my starting point would be to think about what does the evidence tell us? You know, I think a lot of leaders are focused on learning from experience. And for me, as an organizational psychologist, I just think about evidence as being able to learn from lots of people's experiences at one time and saying, okay, you know, what works for most of the people most of the time in a situation like this. And one of the themes and the evidence that I've been gathering and also reviewing is sometimes people want to have a say, even if they don't get their way. Right.

So when you speak up with, you know, with an idea or you submit to a suggestion box, you don't always expect that exactly what you recommend is going to be implemented. You just want to know that you've been heard, right? That people took your ideas seriously and took them into case. consideration. I guess I'd say to her, look, you know, if you can sit down with your team and say, here's what I heard in the feedback, here's the piece of it that I'm trying to act on, here's the challenge of putting the rest of it into practice. You know, people respect that, right? They understand that we have to make difficult decisions and that not everybody can be, you know, can be happy in

every situation. And from the standpoint of my experience, Alex, I face a version of this in the classroom when I'm teaching my students at Wharton. So I do feedback forms. about a month into the semester. And, you know, I'll have usually about 100 different suggestions for how to improve the class. And some of it is, there are times when it's just annoying because I'll go through the forums and, you know, there are 30 students who have written lecture less

and then there are 27 who have written lecture more. Like, well, okay, you're all going to be miserable. What am I supposed to do with that? Yeah, that's right. And I think the leader is in the same position a lot of times where it's like, okay, well, I've got customers that are asking me to do one thing, and then leaders that are asking me to do another, and a team that is asking me to do other things, and they all contradict each other. So how do I fix that mess?

Yeah, so I don't know that you do, but one of the things you can do is you can make those contradictions more transparent to your stakeholders so that they understand that this is not as clear-cut as it seems just from their perspective, right? So what I like to do, I guess this is my own version of the firing squad, is I take all the feedback verbatim, and I send it out to the students after class. And then I come in the next class and I say, okay, I've reviewed all your feedback. I've actually done an analysis of the most common themes. And it seems like there are four problems that you all want me to solve. They're usually four or five major issues that they come up over and over again. And then I'll put up

on the slides, okay, you know, a bunch of people want the class to be more educational and a bunch of people want the class to be more interactive. And here are the conflicting suggestions that I've gotten on how to do that. And so if you all have ways of reconciling this, please let me know. I'm happy to act on that. Otherwise, I'm going to try to maintain the same balance I have right now, given that we have a divide in the room. But here's what I'm going to do with some of the other suggestions that I think are more actionable. And I have never, after having that discussion, had a student push back and say, well, no, you have to do what I said, right? They realize they're just one voice in the room and that I care about representing all the voices, not just one.

Man, that's a powerful approach because, I mean, it's a kind of cliche quote now, but leadership is lonely all the time. And I think one of the things that I've observed about what creates that reality that leaders often experience as it being lonely is that they are the only one that bears the weight of all of those contradictions. And they are having to live with those and try and sort them out on their own. And it sounds like what you're saying is that the most humble approach is just to say, hey, there's all. these contradictions and it kind of sucks and I don't know what to do with this and just kind of share the mess. Yeah. And I don't think that everyone should be fully transparent all the time. Okay. So can you go into that some? Because it's like how do you walk that line? Because you don't just want to be a walking dumpster fire everywhere you go. And at the same time, you want to be authentic and real. So what do you do with that, Adam? Yeah. I think there's such a thing as confident humility, right? Which is to say, okay, you know, this is a complicated problem. But here's why I believe that the, you know, the solution that I've identified is in the best interest of the

organization as a whole. And the hope is that people respect that. I think there's a series of questions worth asking. One of my favorite organizational psychologists, his name Victor Vroom, and his license plate on his car actually says Vroom, which is amazing. Of course it does. So is that humble or is that narcissist, given that it's his last name? How does that work? I hope it's neither. I hope it's... I hope it's... That's fun. That's a good answer. I like fun.

That's good. Yeah. So Victor was sort of one of the founding fathers of our field, and he spent most of his career studying how leaders make decisions. And he saw a systematic mistake over and over again, which is leaders would settle on a style, and they would stick to it. So, you know, you might be empowering. I might be more directive.

And that's basically how we each choose to operate. And what Victor found was that there wasn't one style that was effective in all the different situations that leaders would face. Rather, the only style that really was consistently effective was a style of being adaptable, which meant my style is, I have different styles depending on what the needs of the problem are. And he studied this on this spectrum of, you know, when should you decide versus when should you delegate. And he found that there were a series of questions that leaders should ask themselves, but I like three in particular from his list. The first one was to ask how much unique information do I have

or how much expertise do I have relevant to making this decision and the more expertise you had, the more appropriate it was to just decide as opposed to get the whole team involved. The second question was how much knowledge to other people

have that I'm missing? You know, that's a fundamental humility question so that, you know, the more you realize other people know things that you don't know, the more you need to start including and involving them. And then the third question

that I've found extremely helpful was to ask, how important is buy-in from my team on this decision? And if the decision could go fine without people getting behind it, it's probably okay to just go forward with it. If you need people's real commitment, and especially if they're already a little bit skeptical, then you know, you want to involve them even if you think you already know the answer because we all know that people are more likely to commit to a decision when they've had a voice in it. So, you know, I think of that as a great way to think about the balance of confidence and humility to say, look, you know what, there are times when I'm going to decide and I hope that you'll trust that I'm doing that with the best information available, with the best interests of the group to serve our mission. And there are times when I'm not going to know the answer and you all are going to have more expertise than I do, I'm going to be as receptive as possible to that.

I think one of the greatest challenges, but also probably opportunities facing business owners and their teams right now is that I, you know, is that I'm going to be as receptive. idea of remote work because I think we're all recognizing that when you have a remote team, whether by choice or by requirement, it can be hard for your team to stay connected to the culture of your business. And I'll tell you, our friends at Belay know about this better than just about anyone because they've worked 100% remote with over 1,000 team members for years. And they recently compiled their best practices and tips in a free resource called 13 ways to build a high-performing remote team. This resource is going to help keep your team connected to the mission,

connect to the values, make sure they're staying communicating and staying healthy just as if you were sharing the same four walls. So whether this is just a season of remote work or this is something that you want to do moving forward, go ahead and get this resource by texting the word belay to 31996. Again, that's the word belay, spelled B-E-L-L-A-Y to 3-9-9-9-6. I can't help but think our founder and CEO here is Dave Ramsey. And I've worked here for four years now. We have a staff meeting every Monday where him and other leaders from the organization address all 900 team members. And it's remarkable over the course of the many seasons that I've been here now in four years, I've seen different versions of Dave Ramsey. His values and his mission and his purpose and his personality stayed the same.

but the way he handles certain situations and adversity and even opportunity, it changes and shifts and the tone shifts. And it sounds like he's doing what you're talking about. He's adjusting the way he deals with different situations situationally. How do you develop that skill? Because that seems like a next echelon of leadership that a lot of people never think about because we're so absorbed with our quote unquote leadership style. That's a great question, Alex. I'm curious. You've had a chance to watch Dave, what would you say? Oh, man, you're putting me on the spot talking about my CEO, Adam. Hey, you started it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, my fault. I take the blame. I think one of the things that I've noticed about him, and in the conversations that I've had with him, too, I've noticed this. He is remarkably introspective and remarkably thoughtful. And I think that he takes the time in the moment, especially whenever the decisions are high-stakes decisions, and the communication to the team is high-stakes communication. He takes the time in the moment to honestly assess, okay, what is needed from me at this time for the team to succeed as a whole.

And so maybe, I guess I would say that his mindset and his posture is not about his style, and it's more about his contribution to the team. Yeah, I love that. So I think that goes, I'll let you off the hook here. Thank you. I don't have any data to support that, Adam, so hopefully you do. It's all good. No, I mean, it goes to the first thing that I was thinking about, which is one of the places where I get to try to test out this idea is in public speaking. I end up giving a lot of keynote speeches on a lot of different stages. And as somebody who started out, terrified of public speaking and very, very bad at it, it's been sort of a lifelong journey to try to figure out how can I become more compelling, more interesting. more thoughtful. And so I made it a practice when I started going on stage regularly that after

every talk I gave, I was going to ask as many people as I could track down afterward, what's the one thing I could do better? And it's such a simple question to ask because, you know, you're not asking somebody for a comprehensive review. You know, you're not asking them to put a lot of work or, you know, or real thought into answering. You're just saying, give me one tip. And I had a funny experience a couple weeks ago. I flew across the country to give a talk at a company where the new CEO spoke right before me. And afterwards, she came up and she was overly, I would say, overly kind and gave me a bunch of compliments. And I said, okay, you know, that's nice. I'll repeat the things I just did the next time I'm asked to give a similar talk. But I'd much rather learn from how I can get better. And so

what's the one thing I can improve on? And she said, well, I don't really have. have anything. I was really thrilled with it. And, you know, I think the easy way out is just, just take the compliment. And that's the end of the conversation. Yeah, no kidding. I want to keep getting better. And I know she's someone I can learn from. And I said, come on, I thought you were more critical than that. You're not a Pollyanna. There must be some, I mean, you watch me for 45 minutes. There must be at least one thing that you thought I could do better. And she said, well, I'd have to think about it. I was just, you know, I was really absorbed in the talk. And finally, I said, all right, I've got to do something to get her to really tell me what she thought.

And so I actually gave her a piece of constructive criticism on her talk and said, you know, the thing I saw in your speech was I felt like you shied away from telling your personal story a little bit. And by the way, this is a tendency I've seen over and over again in women as opposed to men. You know, not surprisingly, empirically, men tend to score a little bit higher in narcissism and women a little bit higher in humility. when you look at how this plays out in the population. And I said, look, as a leader, people want to know who you are and why you care. You shouldn't be afraid of sharing that.

And after that, she gave me a suggestion. And I guess the lesson for me is, you know, again, asking is a first step. People won't always answer. And sometimes you actually have to create the norms that you want the interaction to follow. That's really powerful for the business owner because I think so often the people that they work with every day, the path of least resistance is to compliment you. And so they are surrounded by compliments, and it's not necessarily their fault. It's just kind of human nature. Why would I step into unnecessary conflict? So it sounds like the correct approach is what you did with that woman is I'm going

to press. I am going to make it my goal to get one sliver of criticism out of you because I know it's there. It was, I mean, it was actually a fun tug of war because for a while, it was clear that she had decided she was just really happy with the talk and she didn't want to criticize it. And at some point, I think I said to her, I think my exact words were, I promise, I'm more stubborn than you are. I promise. You can test me. I'm willing to play that game. I'm sure your time is valuable and you have other things you'd rather be doing. So just give me something here. I want to jump into humility in the workplace and how you create a team that values humility like what we're talking about. But before we get there, I'd like to just one more question on humility and

leadership. A couple of years ago, we had Alan Mollali speak at one of our summit events. He's the former CEO of Ford. And I was kind of wondering if he was going to be a good fit for our audience, because our audience is business owners of two to 200 team members. That's our core audience. We have people on both ends of that spectrum. And this guy is a multi-billion dollar CEO. And I just thought to myself, is he going to be relatable? And he got on stage. And I kid you not, it was one of the most impressive displays of relatability and humility I've ever seen. And everyone left the room that day, and people were talking about him all week. He was the highlight. And it wasn't because he was extremely impressive. It was just because he was a normal guy and he was relatable, but he had

done all these amazing things. And it changed, Adam, it changed the feeling of the room. And it changed. This guy's humility just, I mean, he reeked of it and everyone left that room smiling that day. And I've spent so much time trying to understand what happened there because I know that that has to be at the crux of what has made him one of the most effective leaders of modern America turnaround history. And I still don't know exactly what it was. So do you have any theories on what everyone was feeling in that room? So I want to know more about what he said and did that conveyed that impression. So, you know, I put on my social sciences hat. I walk into that room. What's the sentence or, you know, what's even the nonverbal that you first pick up that leads you to say, huh, this is a real regular human being? Oh, man. I think the first thing that stands out were his clothes. It was like he was well dressed, but it wasn't like super flashy by any means, right? His pants were plated and just. just nice button-down shirt, right? He dressed a lot like my dad would dress, and that's fine,

right? But he's on this big stage with 5,000 people, right? And he walks out and he gives the host, he doesn't shake the host's hand, he just gives the host a huge bear hug that brought him out. And then he comes out, and the first thing that I notice, and this maybe says more about me than it does about him, I care a lot about really effective, concise communication. And the first thing that I notice was he wasn't the world's most polished communicator, right? He had some ums and some us, and it was like he was kind of maybe, maybe rambling a little bit about his story, but his story was impressive. And then he even said, he said, I just want to let y'all know that everything I know is on one slide. And it was essentially his operating values and principles that he used to lead Boeing

and then turn around Ford. And he said, it's all on one slide. And then he put up the slide, He said, you think I'm joking. This is the slide. And he put it up. And the room was just smiling the whole time. So does that shed a little bit of light? I mean, that was my experience. Yeah, I think you actually just answered your own question in a very compelling way.

So the first thing you pointed out is that he just exuded informality. The way he dressed. It made it clear that he, at a basic level, he didn't, maybe he took his work seriously, but he didn't take himself too seriously. I think that's huge. I think in the realm of not being too polished, there's a classic experiment in psychology where essentially you're listening to an audio recording

of somebody answering a bunch of trivia questions. So it's like a Jeopardy game. And in the middle of the recording, the guy stumbles and he spills coffee all over of himself and you can hear a dish crashing and he just kind of sounds like he's a little bit clumsy. And it turns out that if he's bad at trivia, So he comes across as incompetent.

That moment that what's called a pratfall in that work, it basically makes you like him even less. Like, okay, the guy didn't know anything, and he showed up for this trivia contest unprepared. And then he spilled coffee over himself. What an idiot. So if you're clumsy and incompetent, that's a horrible combination. Don't be clumsy.

It just confirmed all your negative views of him. But if he had aced the trivia questions, when he spilled the coffee on himself, people liked him more. That was basically this guy who seemed extremely impressive and larger than life, now bringing himself down to your level. And that was a humanizing moment. And it sounds like that you got from Alan Mullalley something very similar, which is he didn't try to give a perfect speech.

He didn't try to tell you he had all the answers. He tried to share what he'd learn, knowing that that knowledge is just like all knowledge, limited and incomplete. And there was no aura about him that he wanted to impress us. He was just there to connect with the audience. That's a huge deal. That's powerful. Thank you. That's helpful for me because I've spent so much, I mean, that was years ago and it made such an effect on me, but I haven't, and it did on the people in the room as well, but I haven't actually looked back and say, why did that occur? And I think a lot of what you just said in that study kind of explains that, Adam. That's also, the other thing that jumps to mind, it seems like when you said that he wasn't trying to impress anyone, I think there are so many communicators, and I see this with entrepreneurs and with leaders on a daily basis at this point,

they get on a stage or they stand up in a meeting, and their goal is to look smart. And I think the thing that I've noticed about humble leaders is they're more interested in making other people feel smart. I get a little bit of that sense from the everything I know is on one slide. And then, you know, I'll give you access to that in case you can use it, and I'm going to tell you a story, but it's up to you to figure out what you could take away from my experiences. I think that's a great way of engaging the audience and giving them a chance to develop their own conclusions, right?

To kind of be the, I guess, to be in the position of generating insights as opposed to just consuming them. That brings to mind another moment from that talk. He did Q&A, which also is another super kind of humble thing to do is to do Q&A, and it was just running around the mics in a room of 5,000 people or whatever. And it's just like, ask me whatever you want, right? Everything I know is on one slide. And I'll never forget, there was a woman that stood up and asked him the question. She said, you're so laid back.

You just seem so relaxed about everything. How do you deal with stress? And he sat there and he legitimately thought about it. He paused. And then he kind of looked at the ground. And then he just looked back at her and he said, I don't do stress. And what was. crazy as it wasn't like this, I hustle and I grind and I just get through it. It was, it was

authentic and it was real. Do you think that in any way, like the ability to not experience stress connects to his humility? Yeah, I wonder which is, which is potentially the cause and which might be the effect. Yeah. I do know there's, there's a lot of evidence that stress often happens when we're in a self-absorbed state. Right. We kind of, we turn inward, we focus on our own. anxiety. And when we focused on other people, we're much less likely to feel that. It seems, you know, one of the other things you're describing about Alan that I've seen in other humble leaders is it seems like he didn't think he was more important than anybody else. I mean, yeah, he had this big title and impressive set of accomplishments, but as a human being, he didn't

think he had more value than anyone else in the room. And I got a chance to see that a couple months ago actually when I hosted Bob Agar, the Disney CEO for an event. Wow. And Bob did something that I had never seen anybody on stage do before or since. We were waiting backstage to be introduced and come on. And he walked up and he introduced himself person by person to every single person backstage. He said, hi, I'm Bob, and then shook their hands. And that small moment of just showing that he cared about acknowledging other people.

Of course, you could say, well, it's a really home. humble move, but it actually gave him more power. Yeah. Because people felt like they mattered in his eyes. Man, and that's the CEO of Disney. I mean, it's like if anyone doesn't need to do that, he's the guy, right? Because he could probably make a phone call that could make a lot of money in that moment, but he took the time to do it.

And I think people recognize that. And I think that's a lot of times what leaders fall susceptible to is they say, oh, Bob Iger needs to do that, but I don't need to do that. And it's like if you're in a leadership role, people are watching you. And it's those small things a lot of times that make a way larger difference than the big things. Agreed. And the thing that happens over and over again is if you didn't make those moves, you know, I think people wouldn't, they wouldn't expect anything different. I think the problem you face as a leader is people have very high expectations of you.

And it's extremely hard to exceed them, right? you're often struggling just to live up to them. And so those moments are a chance for him to defy expectations and surprise people in a way that they're going to remember that that really says something about his character. And of course, you know, it felt very clearly like he wasn't doing it with a goal or with an agenda. He did it because that's how he treats other human beings when he interacts with them.

Okay, so we've talked a little bit about humility and leadership. How do you then shift your perspective to creating an environment where humility is at value within a team? What are the actions that a leader can take to craft a culture around this virtue? The standard answer to this question in tech is, you've got to celebrate failure. For the record, I kind of hate that freight. Why would we celebrate failure?

Why would we do that? I don't know about you, Alex, but I have never wanted to throw a party after any kind of failure I've experienced. Yeah, no, it seems to me like most people that use the phrase celebrate failure have never actually failed. Either that or they've achieved so much success that failure is a blip. Yes, that's right. It just has no impact on them anymore. So I do think there's something there that's just being expressed the wrong way.

I don't think we need to celebrate failure. I do think we need to normalize failure and say, look, part of the way that you build humility in a team is you make it easy for people to learn from their mistakes. If they think mistakes are huge problems, if they know they're going to be punished severely anytime they screw up, then what do they do? They hide their mistakes. And then they don't learn from them, but no one else learns from them either because they've been covered up. There's evidence on this from hospitals, for example, that if you create a culture that lacks psychological safety where people are afraid of taking risks and trying new things and making errors, that those teams actually end up making more errors because of the loss of learning.

Whereas if you build psychological safety, people freely admit what went wrong, and then they and everyone else in their team are in a better position to try to learn from it. And so, you know, to me that's the first step is to just say, look, you know, if we never fail, we're not aiming high enough. If we never fail, we're not trying enough new ideas. We're not taking enough risks. And so, you know, it's going to be disappointing if we fall short of our goals. Of course, we're not excited to fail.

but when it happens, let's talk about what we can learn from it. There's a great example of this actually from Etsy, where when engineers make a mistake, they actually send an email to the entire company explaining what went wrong and what they learned from it. And they describe it at Etsy as, it's kind of like putting a slippery when wet sign on a floor so that no one else will slip and fall.

Look, you know, if somebody makes an error in coding or in building a website or anything like that, we want to put that sign up so that nobody else slips and falls in that same place in that same way. I think that's a powerful principle establishing the culture of we learn from our mistakes. And then also from a cultural perspective, one of the things that we talk about all the time around here is reward what you want repeated. And as I was thinking about what you were saying earlier with regard to kind of the dichotomy between Shane and LeBron, it seems like so often when we use that phrase, reward what you want repeated, the thing we were. reward is LeBron James. And sometimes it's LeBron James with a really bad attitude that isn't humble at all that we're rewarding, but it makes the company a lot of money. So we're just going to

keep rewarding it because we want that to be repeated. How do you create a culture in which the thing you are rewarding is Shane Batti. So I think there are two questions there. There's a culture question and then there's also a structure question. Okay. Can we start with the culture question? Yeah. So on the culture side, I think it's fundamentally, the question is, who do you hire and who do you promote? People don't read your values from what you say. They figure out what's important to you through what you do. And if you bring in and elevate people who are individual superstars but undermining the people around them, you're sending a pretty clear signal that how we collaborate, how we work with others, you know, whether we make a team

better or worse, is kind of irrelevant. So I think that, you know, that means when you do interviews, You want to screen on not just people's individual capabilities, but what the effect of their performance is on their colleagues. You could ask the same question in promotions, and we could talk through some examples of that if you want. Yeah, I'd love to hear some examples of the questions you would ask. So my new favorite example is from a company called Menlo. It's a small company, Menlo Innovations, in the Detroit area.

As a native Michigander, I was very excited when I came across this example. Michigan. I've never heard that word before, but I like it. You can also try Michiganian if that helps you. But anyway, this company of Menlo Innovations, they do a lot of collaborative work. They actually describe their mission as a company as curing all the misery in the world that's caused by software. Wow. Which I think is a hilarious mission. Yeah, no kidding.

A lot of the work they do is they have pairs of people work together on debugging code and putting programs together. And so in their initial hiring, the CEO, Rich Sheridan, had this big problem that he kept bringing in people who were great at the individual tasks, but were not working well in pairs. And he said, look, they're really smart, they're capable, but they're not very good at kindergarten skills. And so they actually revamped their job interview process so that now what they do is they run an audition. It's only three or four times a year. So instead of going in for an individual interview, you show up for this mass audition where there might be 50 to 100 candidates. And you're given a series of problems to work on in pairs. So you and another candidate have to collaborate.

And you're told that one of the conditions of your hiring is do you actually make the other person look good enough that they could get a job? Oh, wow. And you will see very quickly who's willing and able to do that and who is not interested. Yeah, no kidding. because I can think of people that I work with today that it's like in every scenario they are in, when they are in the meeting, the entire meeting is better, right? And it's not because they are just some superstar. It's because they have this gift of elevating others. Yes. What is it about those people that gives them the ability to elevate others? Like, what are you looking for to identify that quality in someone? So it's related to narcissism and humility. It's a dynamic. I've studied most of my career, the fundamental question is, you know, in terms of mindset, are you more of a giver or a taker? So, you know, takers are the people who are always asking,

what can you do for me? On the other extreme, a giver is the opposite. It's all about what can I do for you. And of course, you know, people are much more complex than that. I find that actually most of us in a new interaction professionally, whenever we're at work, we'll tend to default into this third category and say, I'll be not a giver or a taker, but a matcher, which is I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And that way, you know, I'm not too selfish or too generous. But when you study the people who really enhance their teams, they tend to be givers. And that means when they walk into a room, they're not asking, you know, how do I impress someone, right? They're asking, how do I add value? They're trying to figure out what the team needs.

And then, you know, if it's a small thing, they don't think it's beneath them. You know, that might be, in some cases, sharing a bit of knowledge. It could be showing up a little earlier, staying late. It might in other cases be saying, you know what, I actually know somebody who's better qualified that I am to help you. And instead of trying to be the expert here, I'm going to make that introduction so that you can benefit directly from their knowledge. And when I've studied givers, the most interesting thing about them is they have the opposite effect, you know, on cultures that takers do. When takers succeed, somebody else has to fail, right? Because it's all about win-lose zero-sum. When givers succeed, they actually make other people

successful too. And so, you know, I don't think that generosity is always the most efficient path to success, but in many ways it's the most sustainable one because it ends up, I think givers are often the rising tide that lifts all boats. That's so good. Is giver versus taker a black and white dichotomy or is it a spectrum, I mean, like everything else in life, it's a spectrum. The way I think about it, Alex, is I think about your style as how you treat most of the people most of the time. Okay. And so So if you add up your days or work weeks, the question is, you know, in the majority of your interactions, are you trying to help or are you trying to get ahead? Or are you doing a lot of this, you know, favor trading in a matching sense? And I think one of the misconceptions that a lot

of people have about givers is they're always nice people. And I find that how agreeable or disagreeable you are, you know, are you warm and friendly or more critical and challenging, has no bearing on your tendency to give and take. take because being agreeable is basically about creating social harmony, being a people pleaser. But that's kind of on the surface, right? How fun is it to interact with you? Are you a polite person? Whereas giving and taking are more of your motives deep down? What are your real values and intentions toward others? And so I think we make two big errors when we judge people. And I've seen this a lot in hiring. We get fooled a lot by the agreeable takers, also known as the fakers.

They're super nice to your face, but then they stab you in the the back. Yeah, that's right. And they are so good at kissing up and kicking down because they know that the best way to get a job or get ahead is to impress powerful people. But then they figure out, you know, it's kind of a lot of work to pretend to care about everybody. And so they let their guard down with their peers and subordinates who get to see their true colors. And that means for me, it's often a red flag when somebody has a great reputation upward, but it's more mixed, lateral and downward, it also means the more powerful you become as a leader, the worse your judgment of other people gets because you've got those takers who are more motivated to flatter

you and impress you. And so that's one kind of error that we make. There's another kind as well, but let me pause there. Yeah, that's really good. I know Pat Lynch-Yoney describes the person that is, he uses the kind of trifold of humble, hungry, smart, and he says when someone is hungry and smart, but not humble, he calls him the skillful politician. And he says that that person is the most dangerous person because they will skillfully climb the ladder and they will beat everyone below them in the process. What was the phrase you use?

They are great at kissing up but kicking down. Yeah, apparently there's a common phrase for that in Dutch, which I obviously did not translate perfectly. But I mean, that is the mark of an agreeable taker. That's right. And that's what people need to be looking at for in the interview process is not just can this person kiss up because anyone can kiss up in an interview, but how does this person relate to their peers and people that are below them? I know I read something you wrote about a person's interactions with the receptionist at the interview before they go into the interview. And that's what that's looking for, I would assume, is, okay, sure, you can kiss up, but what do you do to your peers? Yes. Another fun example of that is Tony Shea told me once that when he was hiring people at Zappos, he would often decide that the first interview was going to be done by your driver who picked you up at the airport. But of course you didn't know it. And so the question was, did you treat that person with respect or, you know, did you dismiss them like they didn't count? And if you didn't ace that part, you're just going right back to the airport. We don't need to bother interviewing you. That's right. And we know where Zappos is. And it's because they, hired not just for performance but for character. Okay, I want to get to the second one because you

said there were two. So the first one was noticing that difference, but then what's the second one? So those are kind of the, those are the false positives, right? The people that we hire that we ended up regretting who often do a lot of cultural damage. There's also, though, a false negative problem. There are people we reject who we should have brought in, and those are the disagreeable givers. I think about disagreeable givers is basically like Dr. House, if you ever watch the show. I haven't watched it, but I've heard it's amazing. Yeah, no, I mean, just just really gruff and tough and, you know, almost like a, like a grizzly football coach, but they're hard on people because they care and they're dishing out tough love. And I think we,

we often misjudge them because on the surface they come across as, you know, maybe a little bit difficult and grumpy, sometimes too skeptical. And we misread that as not caring when in fact That's their way of caring, right? They believe in your potential. They care about your success so much that they want to make you better. And so I think you have to watch out for that error, too. On this giver and taker spectrum, if you have someone that is probably acting like a taker, but maybe is willing to be coached, what are the actions you would give leaders for coaching

individuals towards the more giving side of the spectrum? I think you hit on the first step, which is willingness. Yeah. There's a football coach who went on to become the most trusted coach to Steve Jobs and also to Larry Page and Sergey Brinette Apple. His name is Bill Campbell. The first question that Bill would ask people when they sat down wanting to work with him was, are you coachable? And he would just ask them right to their faces. Except it wasn't a gentle question.

It was more like, are you coachable? And he would do that to Steve Jobs. Yes. and everyone else he worked with. He wouldn't work with you until he asked you that question. And I think it's such a clever question to ask because you know that you can't say no to it. And otherwise, you know, the opportunity is gone.

And so, yeah, of course I'm coachable is the answer. And now you've got to, you're accountable for that. You have to follow through and live up to that commitment. And so it was a great opportunity, I think, to both gauge how people reacted, but then to put them in a mindset where they were more likely to become coachable. And I think that's the beginning. I think if you've got someone who's willing to change their style, the next thing you have to do is help them see the consequences of their behavior.

One of the most effective sort of conversations with reforming a taker I've ever seen was a few years ago, I met a woman named Kathy. She was working at a financial services company, and she got a promotion. She was told she was going to lead a new team with this guy that today I'll call Colin, because that's his name. And four different people came up to Kathy and said, Kathy, watch your back, don't trust Colin,

basically saying, look, he's a huge taker. And Kathy sat down with him in their first one-on-one and said, hey, Colin, I understand we're going to lead this new team together, and I just wanted you to know, this is what I've heard about you. And she shared all the reputational feedback. Oh, my word. Colin's response was priceless. He's like, I don't know who you've been talking to,

but clearly all these people are jealous of me. Thank you, Colin, for confirming that you're a narcissistic taker. That's right. But, you know, Kathy just said, look, I don't know whether it's true or not. I don't know you. But I hope it's not true. Because I don't work well with people who operate that way. And if this is who you are, you are not going to like working with me.

And I think what she did for Colin was she gave him a sense of, she basically held up a mirror and said, look, this is your reputation and made it clear that if he continued acting that way with her, he was not going to be successful. And I think that that's one of the most helpful steps you can take if you're trying to coach a take her

in the more giving direction is to say, look, here are the behaviors that I've seen or heard about, here's why they've been counterproductive, and here's what effectiveness would look like instead. And sure enough, Colin changed his stripes for the next year and a half that he was working with Kathy. He shared credit. He volunteered for unpopular studies.

he mentored junior people. And I think, you know, very often when we engage in a behavior, it makes sense in that moment. What we don't have access to is the full picture of all those moments collected together. What do we look like to other people? Gosh, and the great coach is the person that holds up the mirror, but they're responsible to hold up the mirror, but you are responsible for changing with regard to what you see. Man, Adam, that's so good. I'll tell you, I could listen to you talk about this stuff forever. This is just so rich with actionable takeaways. Before we get to the final question, I know you just release season three of work life, which I'm pumped about because I absolutely love your podcast, Adam. That's very kind of you, especially coming from somebody

whose show I listen to. Oh, well, we're honored. Thank you for listening to us. I'd like to know what is something that you learned that you are most excited about sharing with your audience? Oh, there's so many. It's very hard to pinpoint just one. But I think if I had to zero in on one, let me think about this for a second. We have episodes coming out on how to procrastinate less, how to fight burnout, how to be authentic without being ineffective or unprofessional. Oh, that's good. Which I think, I hope that's going to be useful.

Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's going to be necessary because I feel like the whole authenticity thing right now, it's like sometimes people go so far on the authenticity spectrum that they sacrifice all effectiveness. I've seen that a lot. And actually, I would love to hear some of your examples because we found some, really? You think it's authentic to be a jerk? That's right. What is that all about? This is just my personality style, in quotes, right? It's like, no, it's not. You're just being a jerk. Okay, so stop doing that doofus. How about you find some more authentically appropriate and productive values and then try to bring those into your personality? That's right. So I think actually the takeaway that stuck with me, which was totally surprising to me, probably came in the burnout episode.

So one of the places I went to try to figure out how to fight burnout was the Cleveland Clinic. They have doctors and nurses who deal with some of the most. most difficult situations that you can imagine in a job. And burnout rates for the medical profession are among the highest of any occupation on the planet. And when I looked at the strategies that they used to fight burnout, one of the things they did was they trained their caregivers in empathy. And I just thought that was so weird because, you know, last time I checked, sometimes we burn out because we feel too much empathy for the people that we can't help. Right. You have a patient diagnosed with a horrible disease. You know, it's not something you can treat and you feel awful.

And yeah, that becomes a burden. It's like a cloud over your whole life. And yet, what I learned from a series of conversations and some observation that our producers did is the reason they trained empathy was they were burning out in part because they lack control over interactions with patients. And they lacked a sense that they could do anything to help patients. And, you know, oftentimes there's some research suggesting that what's true for doctors, I bet this is true for managers too, that when a patient comes into their office, it often only takes 15 or 20 seconds before they've interrupted them for the first time. And there's this tug of war where, you know, the doctors are trying to diagnose and solve, but the patients are trying to be understood

and heard, and they're just talking past each other, and you have these really difficult, unpleasant, ineffective interactions. And when they train caregivers in empathy, the doctors and nurses, came out and said, okay, I can ask a question, I can listen a little bit longer. And it turned out if you even just listened for 30 or 40 seconds, you were in a much better position to help the patient resolve their problems. And I thought that was such an interesting aha. It's really changed the way that I think about giving advice now, which is, you know, I used to have entrepreneurs and leaders and students in office hours, asked me a question, and then I'd want to jump to figure out what's the best solution for them. And now, as I try to do, when you asked for,

for some perspective earlier, I try to ask some follow-up questions about, well, what's really going on in that situation? And what's difficult about that to try to put myself in a better position to be able to help? And that seems to benefit both sides. So that's been an aha for me.

That's awesome. I would recommend that anyone listens as this podcast would go check out WorkLife, Adam and the team from Ted do such a remarkable job of creating, I mean, the production quality is unbelievable and the content, I mean, you just heard some of it.

It's absolutely outstanding. So thank you for that preview. My final question for you, we've been talking about this topic of humility. And it's so interesting because a lot of the topics that we talk about on this podcast, you can draw a direct line to visible results. And this topic of humility is really interesting because a lot of times, the more effective you become at this, the less visible the actual results are going to be. And so this can be really hard work that you don't always experience the visible, tangible reward of. So my question to you would be, why is this work still so important for the leader? There's a researcher named Brad Owens who's answered that beautifully.

He studies humility and top management teams and finds that humble leaders actually bring in better returns. You know, you can contrast that with what we talked about earlier with narcissists, right, where they failed to learn. They ended up making bad bets. They often undermine their team's ability to learn. We see the exact opposite with humble leaders. And, you know, I think it's fair to say, though, that humility is about playing the long game. You're not always going to get a return on your investment tomorrow in saying, you know what, there are things that I'm really terrible at that I need to get better at. There are ways that my team needs to acknowledge their weaknesses more frankly.

that work is not always fun. It's not always going to produce the result you want tomorrow. But I think over the course of a year, over the course of a decade, and especially over the course of a career, humble leaders are the ones who end up doing great things. Well, Adam, this entire message has been incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for the way that you think intentionally and for your consistent effort to communicate a message that really makes a difference in the workplace. We really appreciate you, Adam. No, thank you. You asked a whole bunch of questions that I have not heard before. You got me thinking about things I haven't had a chance to think about before. I especially love this challenge, which I'm going to take up now, to go and observe humble leaders and ask,

what are those moves that they make that establish their willingness to keep learning and improving? I feel like that's a little bit of detective work that we could all do, and I'm adding it to my observation list. I'm such a fan of Adam's work, and I'll tell you, I'm just as big of a fan of him as a person. He works so hard to live in alignment with the message that he talks about every single day. And one just practical example of that is after we recorded that conversation, the first thing that he asked me was, Hey, Alex, can you make sure you send me just one specific critique about this interview? Well, there you go.

He's doing what he said he would do. He's living with humility, always trying to grow. always trying to improve, never thinking that he's quite figured it out. I think that should be an inspiration for all of us. We are big fans of Adam Grant's books here. Give and take is one of our favorites at Entree Leadership. That's why it's part of our Entree Leadership reading guide. This is a list of 100 books that we think every business owner and leader should be reading. These are books that have been transformational for our leadership team here and for our business. And so if you want to get this free resource, this PDF that lays out all 100,

books, text the phrase 100 books to 33444. Again, that's one zero, zero books, all one word, no spaces to 3344, or just click the length that's in the show notes. Hey, real quick, before you turn off the podcast, one of the things that we are really striving to do is make sure that we create an episode every single Monday that meets you where you are at as a business leader and as a business owner. And the way that we know we're doing that is your feedback. Seriously, we appreciate all of you that filled a survey out after every episode because that lets us know how we're doing and how we can improve and how we can do better. I read them every single week. So if you haven't taken that survey in a while or you want to take it for

this episode, go ahead and click the length that's in the show notes. It helps us out a lot. Also, you're going to be entered to win a $25 Amazon gift card. Thanks so much for your feedback. We appreciate it so much. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entrate Leadership Podcast. If you did, please give it a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. Also, be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull and was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm Alex Judd and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.

If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like Borrowed Future. Not so fun fact, America has a $1.6 trillion student loan crisis, and it's out of control. I'm George Camel, host of the Borrowed Future podcast where we uncover the underbelly of the student loan industry

and show you what you can do about it. It'll inspire you to see that it is possible to avoid student loans and graduate college debt-free. Listen to Borrowed Future wherever you listen to podcasts.