EverydaySpy Podcast - A Secret CIA Leadership Tool

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

Elite spy agencies need leaders just like every other corporate organization. But the way they find and cultivate their leaders is very different than what you read about in leadership books and see advertised on your LinkedIn feed. In this episode, Andrew explains the simple secret to how CIA develops and trains their leaders to do what others can't and go where other's won't. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and this is everyday espionage. One of the corporate buzzwords that I hear the most often that really frustrates me is the word leadership, and everyone has an opinion about leadership, where what leadership is, what leadership isn't, how you know if you're a leader, and then, of course, everyone has some kind of book or some kind of training or some kind of TED talk suggestion so that you can learn more about leadership. When I went through training at the agency and even after I left the agency and saw what corporate life was like through the eyes of a spy, I realized very quickly that the world doesn't understand leadership for what it really is. Instead, it's turned into

this commodity for trade and for sale. So I wanted to just take a few minutes and share with you what I have seen through my agency experience and what the CIA trained in me as the understanding of what leadership is and what leadership isn't. Now, first, leadership is something everybody has. It's something that you're born with. It's intrinsic. It's not something that you have to develop. It's not something you have to grow. It's something you already have. It's like your eyes. Some people have green eyes. Some people have blue eyes. But by and large, we're all born with eyes. Some people have eyes that see really clearly. Some people have eyes that don't see it all. But all of us are born with eyes. And it doesn't really matter how much you look or how small or large the things are

that you look at. Your eyes work the way that your eyes work. That's it. It's just it's natural. It's nature. It's the way that you've been wired. Your actual neural pathways that control your optical nerves and your optical abilities. That's the same thing with your leadership. Leadership is not something that you can go out and buy. It's not something that you can go learn for two years, it's always going to be what it is. And if you become accustomed to a certain kind of leadership, it's because that's either what you're experiencing or what you prefer. It's the same just like when we're just like our example with our eyes. The people who are used to living in a place with cloudy overhead coverage become very accustomed to looking at the world

when it's a little bit dim and cloudy. And when it's bright, their eyes hurts. And similarly, the people who live in a bright place like Florida or Hawaii, when they have a cloudy day that comes in, it actually makes their eyes kind of hurt. It becomes difficult to see because they're used to an abundance of light. The point here is that the agency introduced us to the idea that leadership isn't something that needs to be cultivated or trained. Instead, it's something that you already have that you just need to understand. If you know that you are highly efficient in bright light, then the agency wants to put you in a place with bright light, like Hawaii or Florida or Southeast Asia. If you are highly inefficient and highly effective in a place with low light,

with dim overhead cloudy days, then the agency wants to put you someplace where you have low light days, like Norway or Sweden or Russia. That's the way that they work. They don't try to change who you are. They try to help you identify who you are and know where you fit best. So our, our training with leadership really all starts with the question of what type of leadership is natural to you. And they introduced this concept to us called builders and runners. So if you consider everyone a leader, everyone is a leader in some way, then there are two different kinds of leadership, builder leadership and runner leadership. Builder leadership are the leaders out there who like to build something new. the people who love a challenge, who love taking a problem, creating the solution, and then testing

the solution to see if it works. And if it does work, then they're very excited. If it doesn't work, then they're just as excited to try a new solution. These are your builders. Your people who they know that they need a shed in the backyard, so they get excited about planning one out, pulling out a blueprint, and building a shed. These are the people who when a new project pops up at work, they're the first ones to either raise their hand or want to raise their hand. Your builders are your people who are just super excited to get their hands dirty trying something new, trying something that's never been done before.

They want to bake a birthday cake that they've never baked before. They don't necessarily want a recipe that's exact. They want a recipe that they can choose how much to follow and how much to change. These are your builders, your builder leaders, but who I want you to start to identify as these are your builders. Now on the other side of the spectrum, you've got your runners. Runners are the people who want to run something that is already working. These are the people who thrive on continued predictable success. These are the folks that when a new shed is needed in the backyard, they go online and they find the best prefabricated shed on the market,

it and then they go buy it. And if for some reason they can't afford it, they find a way to be able to afford it because they want to run the most efficient, most successful operation possible. When birthday time comes around, they want to make the same cake they've made 150 times before for every other family member because everybody always gets the same chocolate cake for their birthday, because that's the cake they have a very high level of confidence will come out best. So they want that kind of cake. These are the same chocolate cake. your runners. You can see now how not everyone who's a runner is a builder and not everyone who's a builder is a runner. So what sense does it make in the world of corporate leadership training?

What sense does it make to try to train a builder to become a runner or turn a runner into a builder? It doesn't make any sense at all. This is why if you have been successful in your current role and your boss tries to tell you it's time to do something new, it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel good. it's not something you get excited about. You don't want to be a manager if you've been a specialist for the last five years. If you're a badass salesman, then you are a builder. That's what you do. You know how to build a relationship. You know how to build a sale. You know how to execute. You shouldn't be put in a manager position whose job is to run a team of salesperson. That doesn't make sense. That's not a natural use of your existing skills. Similarly, if you are a manager,

They shouldn't put you into a role where you have to build and launch a new department of your organization in some other country or some other city. You're not the right fit for that. And you know that. You want to keep doing what you do. You want to run a highly successful, high performing team right where you are. You don't want to have to go somewhere else. Hire new people. Build new policies.

Build new procedures. Introduce a whole new corporate culture in some other city. That's not what you're wired to do. You're wired to run. Not wired. to build. So when you think about the world through this lens of builders and runners, it becomes very simple. Every operation breaks down into two distinct steps. In the first step, you identify the builders and you let the builders build the operation. If you've ever come to any of my live

events, my Red Team certification event, my urban escape and evasion event, or even my streetcraft event, then you know what it's like to be overwhelmed with information and then put in charge of building your operation there are natural people in every one of my training courses who roll in and they love the idea of building their own operation they want to get messy with it they want to get experimental they want to test the boundaries to see if certain things work these are my builders awesome hard charging high achieving leadership people who want to be able to build. But as soon as it's built, the idea of actually executing it, let alone doing it more than one time, becomes very dull to them. They built it because the challenge, the reward, was in the

build. Now that they actually have to go and run it three, four, five, twelve times, that doesn't sound very exciting. This often happens to small business owners who get very excited about building a business, but then when the business is up and running and it turns into you sitting behind a desk, day after day just monitoring metrics or checking stats or or answering customer service complaints that becomes a very mundane existence to them because their their energy their joy comes from building in my operations in my exercises and my advanced courses i love watching the builders do what they're good at and they build and then the runners step in now when i have a group of say 10 students it just naturally works out that there are runners and builders in the group.

The builders will all help every one of the runners build their operation because not every runner feels comfortable building, but every builder feels comfortable building, and they'll build for themselves, they'll build for someone else. It's kind of like throwing kids into Lego Land. If they can touch a brick, they're going to build with it. It's a beautiful thing, I think, to watch builders build. But then when the time comes to take that operational plan and execute it in the field,

that's where the runners shine. Now the builders, they put their final touches on it, and it's all built, and they may not be that excited about actually going out and spending the next four hours, you know, running around, sweating it up, watching for surveillance or doing whatever else they have to do, because the adventure for them was in the build.

But now in my advanced courses, when they have to go back out and they have to actually execute on the plan, those builders start getting a little bit nervous. What if my build doesn't work? What if my build gets beaten? what if I did something wrong? Runners don't think that way at all. Runners say, this is what I have to execute. This is what I have to do. Let's go do it. So then these runners step in, they put the builder

on their back, and then they're off to the races. They're like a racehorse. They're like a chariot. The builder is unsure of what to do when the time comes to execute, but your runner is 100% clear on what needs to get done. And they follow the plan that was put in front of them. Now, if the plan falls apart, then the runner is left in the field with no idea what to do. And when something breaks, that's the perfect time for a builder to step in and build something new. So now I hope you're starting to see where I'm getting with this. The world is full of builders and runners. Right now, in leadership, in corporate America, in colleges all over the United States and all over the world, everyone's trying to turn people

into leaders. And somehow they think that a leader is maybe a mix of a builder and a runner kind of squashed together and pushed out into the world. But that's not ever going to be efficient. That's never going to be successful because the person's natural strength is always going to shine through. Even if you train a builder to be a runner and then label them a leader, when the shit hits the fan, pardon my language, they're still just going to be a builder at heart.

What we need to do is understand that there are builders or runners, and that instead of trying to turn one person into both things, we need to build teams that have both talents present. If you want success in your sales team or you want success in your corporate organization or you want success in your small business, you need to build a team of people where the natural instinct of one person is to build and the natural instinct of the other person is to run. When you do that, here's what happens. Your builder builds a new process or a new product, a new idea, a new marketing method or a new ad. They turn it over to the runner and the runner runs it. And anytime something doesn't work, anytime something breaks, anytime something needs to be improved or evolved, they give it right back to the builder who evolves it, builds it, improves it, and gives it back to the runner. And when things are working well, that runner executes every minute of every person. day with precision and consistency. And then the builder, during the same time that the runner is running

everything effectively, the builder goes on to build something new. And then when the builder has that new thing built, they turn it back over to the runner and the runner runs it again. And then you can see how this just continues. One of the places where I saw this really come through was whenever I worked in corporate America. I was a builder. I build. I build ideas. I turn them into reality. I take things that didn't exist and make things exist. It's exactly why I love my company everyday spy. Nothing like everyday spy ever existed before. I built it. It's not always pretty. It's not always functional. But then I can execute something that never existed before and I can spend my time building improvements, building ways to make it more efficient. My wife, Gihi, who's also a former CA officer,

is the runner in our family. So in our company, I build something. She runs it. She runs it perfectly until whatever I built breaks or if it just doesn't work. And then she gives it back to me. I fix it and she runs it again. And that's how our little two-man team worked at CIA when we operated together in the field. It's how we worked together at CVS. It's how we worked together right now as a husband-wife co-ownership team, a president, vice president, CEO, COO of our own current team. You are either a runner or a builder. And you know it. You can feel it. You can identify with a thousand examples even as I sit here and talk to you. And you've probably felt the pressure of being forced how to learn to build even though you're naturally good at running, or you've been forced to learn how to run even

though you're naturally good at building. I'm telling you right now, if you let other people dictate to you at some point in time, you were going to be bad at doing both. And those people are going to judge you as not a leader. But instead, if you put your foot down now, set your boundary now, and become the best leader or the best builder or the best runner that you can be, and that's going to turn you into an amazing leader. Now, the other people dictating expectations to you, they don't realize that because they're still drinking from the Kool-Aid of everyone needs to be everything all the time or else they're not really a leader. In reality, the proof is in the productivity. Proof is in the outcome.

Lean into your natural builder tendencies. Lean into your natural runner tendencies. Let yourself build off of your natural strengths. Grow in what you're good at. Evolve your existing skill set. And I promise you that when you are the best at what you do, everyone around you is going to call you a leader. And that is everyday espionage.

Everyday espionage is dedicated to one thing, educating everyday people. I know that not everyone will listen, but those who listen will learn. If you learned something new today, click subscribe, review, and share the podcast with a friend. Find me on social media at EverydaySpy or on my website, Everydayspy.com. If you are up for a special challenge, visit Everydayspy.com forward slash operations. and join me for an authentic spy training mission. And above all else, remember that knowledge is freedom.