Start With A Win - Why Your Leadership Style Is Doomed to Fail with Anne Morriss

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

⚡️FREE RESOURCE: 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘞𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱?  ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/myleadershipWant weekly leadership content? Go here ➡︎ https://adamcontos.comIf you're looking to unlock your potential as a leader, push beyond conventional approaches, and inspire meaningful action, this part one episode is a must-listen. It’s a thought-provoking conversation that will leave you rethinking how to approach leadership, not just in business, but in life.Start With a Win, host Adam Contos dives deep into the true essence of leadership with the insightful and dynamic Anne Morriss, co-host of the podcast, Fixable and a thought leader in building inclusive executive teams. The conversation tackles critical aspects of leadership that are often overlooked in formal education, including the 'soft skills'—or 'human skills' as Adam prefers to call them—that play a pivotal role in guiding organizations towards success. Anne draws from her experience in public health and entrepreneurship to explore how trust, storytelling, and inclusive leadership are foundational to achieving impactful change. Together, Adam and Anne challenge the traditional notion of leadership training, questioning why such essential skills are not emphasized early on in education. Anne Morriss is an entrepreneur, leadership coach, and founder of The Leadership Consortium (TLC), a leadership accelerator focused on building inclusive executive teams and preparing emerging leaders for senior roles. With over 20 years of experience guiding entrepreneurs, companies, and government leaders on strategy and organizational change, Anne is committed to helping individuals realize their full potential as leaders and changemakers. She also founded GenePeeks, a computational genomics company that developed breakthrough methods for identifying disease risk.Anne is the best-selling coauthor of Uncommon Service, Unleashed, and Move Fast & Fix Things, a guide on trust, leadership, and business. She also co-hosts the leadership podcast Fixable with Frances Frei, where they offer quick, actionable coaching to help solve workplace challenges. Anne serves on the board of IGNITE, which promotes political engagement among young women, and has been recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s most influential business thinkers.===========================Subscribe and Listen to the Start With a Win Podcast HERE:📱 ===========================YT ➡︎ https://www.youtube.com/@AdamContosCEOApple ➡︎ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/start-with-a-win/id1438598347Spotify ➡︎ https://open.spotify.com/show/4w1qmb90KZOKoisbwj6cqT===========================Connect with Adam:===========================Website ➡︎ https://adamcontos.com/Facebook  ➡︎ https://facebook.com/AdamContosCEOTwitter  ➡︎ https://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOInstagram  ➡︎ https://instagram.com/adamcontosceo/#adamcontos #startwithawin #leadershipfactory

I worked with a company once, Adam, who referred to their employees as RPUs, Revenue Producing Units. All right, everybody write that down. Things were not going well. Welcome to Start With a Win, where we unpack leadership, personal growth and development, and how to build a better business. Let's go. Ever wondered what it takes to unlock your potential as a leader and make meaningful changes in the world? Today, we talk about that on Start With A Win.

Coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start With A Win headquarters, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. We're thrilled to have Anne Morris with us, someone who's not just passionate about leadership, but has an infectious drive to help others achieve their best. Anne is an entrepreneur, leadership coach, and the powerhouse behind the Leadership Consortium, an innovative program that's transforming leaders across the globe.

With a track record of advising top executives and building groundbreaking companies, Anne's insights are truly invaluable. She's also a best-selling author and the co-host of Fixable, where she tackles workplace challenges in just 30 minutes. So if you're eager to learn how to lead with impact and accelerate change, you're in for a treat with Ann Morris. Ann, welcome to Start With A Win.

Oh, thank you, Adam. I'm really delighted to be here and have my favorite conversation with you today. Oh, this is about leadership, folks. I'm super excited about this because we've had a great deal of people on the show talking about business growth and things like that. But ultimately, it's about leadership. So we've brought on an amazing expert today to really dig deep into leadership. And Anne and I have had some conversation before the show talking about some of our favorite leadership points. And I want to really get into those. But Anne, please take us back a little bit.

How did you get into being a leadership expert and writing about leadership? Yeah, you know, I actually, Adam, I started out in an unexpected, I was actually in the public health world at the beginning of my career. And one of the things that was clear to me, I was working in a bunch of nonprofits. I was drawn to the mission. That was always something that's deeply energizing to me, this idea of working towards something bigger than myself. And what became clear to me was a huge variable in this world. And then as I came to discover in almost every sector, I'm going to round it off to every sector, is that these, what call soft skills and we'll round it off to leadership as the topic of our conversation today.

It was such a big factor in whether teams and organizations were able to achieve this ambitious mission. And so I just became captivated by that question. I ended up in business school where people seem to take that question seriously. And then I built my own company. It wasn't a particular success, but it was an extraordinary education in my own strengths and limitations as a leader. And I was just very motivated to figure out how to get the word out that this is the thing that matters. You said something there that was really interesting to me, and that's finding the soft skills of leadership. And we've been talking about the soft skills for a while.

Can you give us a little bit of a definition of what you think the soft skills are in leadership? Yeah, well, we just gave ourselves the challenge to try to write it down in kind of a playbook format. We just published a book called Move Fast and Fix Things. And we tried to summarize, okay, particularly when you're a change leader, which is why bother being a leader if you're not trying to change things. But what are the things you really need to be good at? And where we landed was, you know, you have to be good at diagnosing the problem. So step number one, you really have to be able to pause and look with clear eyes at what the real issue is. And that's really

counterintuitive for a lot of leaders because we want to be in action. We want to jump in there. And we're often, if we're pretty good at this, at risk of falling into overconfidence that the way we're seeing the issue is, you know, what we're seeing is necessarily reality. And so we push people on this one to really slow down, to bias inquiry over advocacy, to figure out how to ask the right questions. And so I would say that would be soft skill number one that often gets overlooked. Relational practice, the foundation of any relationship or network of relationships, and that's the way to think about an organization in a simple way, is trust. So you have to be able to do that well. You have to do it as an individual. You have to do it with your team. You have to do it with your key stakeholders.

If you're an enterprise leader, I would say that's number two. Number three is what we would call inclusive leadership. So you have to really be able to lead across boundaries of difference. Often the information and capability that you need most lives inside someone who's very different from you. And so you really have to learn how to enable people, not just people who are like you, but the people who are not like you. And so that's number three. Number four is storytelling. So you have to be able to tell a story that enables people to act with urgency in your absence. So there's other tools of what we call absence leadership, great strategy, building a great culture. These are all things that enable people to go out and achieve the mission when you're not in the room. And increasingly as leaders, as you move up the hierarchy, as we work in a remote work environment, we're not in the room, but storytelling, we would

summarize that all in this storytelling challenge. And then you got to be able to go fast. I like that. And so that's number five. You got to be able to, you know, set the metabolic rate, the battle rhythm, if you will, Adam, of the team, you have to be able to set that pace and keep it going. The battle rhythm. Those are my top five soft skills. What would you add to it? Well, I would say, just to put a bow on it, I would say be able to accept and deliver accountability. But I think all of these things need to be in place in order for accountability to actually happen. So you can't roll in. A lot of people roll in with accountability first.

It doesn't happen that way. Right. Without setting people up to succeed or handle that accountability. Exactly. Or, or having that, um, that, you know, that clarity and that transparency. And you said it best, um, you know, in number two is trust because you can't trust accountability without trust is management. Yes. So, I mean, you've got to kind of break that barrier there. And these, I've heard these called soft skills. I've also heard them called human skills, which I love. I think that's kind of the new trend that we're trying to define them as, as human skills. Because, and you talk,

you talk about your MBA. Um, you know, I, I got, got in mind also, also guilty, also guilty. And I was scratching my head during that process going, when do I learn leadership? Because, you know, we, I think the, the closest thing we got to that was this course called Human Capital Management, which really takes away- Deceptively technical title. Totally, yeah. That's like the whole ballgame, human capital management. Right. Yeah, and I mean, doesn't it depersonalize it quite a bit?

Yeah. I mean, so I- We worked with a company once, Adam, who referred to their employees as RPUs, revenue producing units. All right. Everybody write that down. We're not going well. Things were not going well, as you can imagine. Right. Let's, let's not call our people units. Okay. Folks. Um, you know, they are, they're human beings and, and they wake up in the morning the same as we do. And we have to, you know, drop some inspiration and help them achieve things to feel the accomplishment. So that's fascinating. But the one thing that I noticed, and maybe you noticed this also, maybe you went to a better business school than I did.

But why don't we teach these soft skills of leadership more? Going all the way back to, you know, call it high school, for instance, when we're really in this formative process of team building and such, or you could go even back to elementary school for that matter. But why are we missing this key component in society, in your opinion? Oh, this is a very deep question, I think. I mean, if we go all the way back to high school, I do think sports and team sports in particular are a really powerful leadership laboratory. There was just some interesting research that came out on women leaders and the percentage of them that had played team sports in high school or college,

and it's an astonishingly high number. I do think that that's one place where we get it right of really, even for kids who are not particularly interested in athletics or born out, I mean, most schools will really encourage most people to participate. But I do think after that moment, you know, there, there in the, in the school environment, I think there is this industrial burden where at one point we were really using, you know, elementary and high school to train, you know, laborers, you know, to go do very routine work inside factories.

So I do think there's an interesting story there that we were, you know, this was an anti-leadership curriculum for a reason, because this was a time where we thought we didn't need very many leaders and we needed a a whole bunch of, of workers to go and do what they were told. We live in a very different world now. And I think arguably, our education system is still keeping up. I have two teenager boys, we argue about this all the time. So yes, I do think there's probably ways to go. But what becomes what's really interesting, and what we think about all the time in our work is that then when you get inside organizations, you know, MBAs are, you know, explicitly training grounds for leadership. And, you know, I'm sure you can argue some schools are better at it than others.

But then when we get inside organizations, often they don't gracefully catch that ball in terms of leadership development. And it doesn't rise to the very top of the priority list of, this is the way I'm going to invest in my people, because we need a really deep bench if we are going to achieve the, not just achieve the short-term mission, but build a really enduring enterprise. And when we sample on the organizations that are really successful in an enduring way, you know, that achieve real excellence over time, and that excellence continues to accelerate, let's say a company like Microsoft, it's not an accident that they are being very explicit about their investment and leadership development.

And even in these turbulent times, that's my favorite academic euphemism for bad shit, crazy, you know, like economic environment, you know, these organizations are continuing to invest because they understand that that's the future. Right. Well, and it's the opportunity also, you know, those, I truly think that those that are wound up with the strength of leadership throughout truly think that those that are wound up with the strength of leadership throughout the organization are those that are going to propel themselves past their peers in true competition. You know, and it goes back to the sports days. And, you know,

we talk about sports and I agree with you. It's an amazing laboratory for the, um, the practical application of leadership. We have team captains, we have, um, you know, different coaching levels, things like that. But the ultimate, um, the ultimate question is, can we say that we are training leadership like actively and, um, knowingly, you know, intentionally training on, call it a weekly basis. And I truly think that that is one of the current challenges that we face. Do you know of many organizations or active, whoever, institutions of any sort that spend time each week delivering leadership development to their people. And I'm sure you do. What impact does that have over the peers? Yeah. So I didn't pay you to

ask me that question, but I will answer it in the following way that, you know, my co-conspirator in all the work that I do, Francis Fry, who's on the faculty at Harvard Business School, also happens to be my co-parent, my wife, my co-author. We started our own company to deal with this gap called the Leadership Consortium. Yes. Which is essentially companies can outsource this challenge to us. It seemed like such a big need. And it's also our observation that it does not take a ton of time or a ton of resources. And so, you know, we have a program that's just a couple months long that's really

training people to prepare for higher levels of leadership. And when we measure outputs from the program, one of the key metrics we're looking at is confidence. Like, do, do I have the confidence to raise my hand and say, yes, I want to take the ball and go do this hard thing. And I know how to solve problems and I know how to access that support I need. And I know how to, you know, navigate uncertainty now. So, you know, navigate uncertainty. Now, so, you know, we started that company because it was our observation that it was hard for organizations in their existing form to solve this problem on their own. Now, there are companies out there that are doing this well in-house. And I think Microsoft is one. I think, you know, ServiceNow is another one that's thinking deeply about this.

You know, we, we spend a lot of time in the tech world, so we have a bias for that. I think the, the pattern, one of the patterns when we look at organizations that are really getting this right that we see is that there's a deep partnership between the CEO and the chief people officer or the chief human resources officer. And I do think, Adam, that that's a real tell, you know, because sometimes, particularly in younger organizations, HR will be this kind of afterthought, right? It's like luxury, you know, service that we're really not allowed to invest in. But when both, you know, these mature organizations, but also these younger organizations that are in that they, they're really using that those people functions, not just as a compliance, you know, arm of the

company, but as a way to really invest in the leadership capabilities of their team, not just the current leaders, but the future leaders of the organization. Wow. And what you just said does not get missed by me because you said something very important to me. You mentioned the company ServiceNow. So if you look at this sign, for those of you on video, stay hungry, stay humble. So Bill McDermott, who was the CEO of SAP and now is the CEO of ServiceNow. I was at a very small mastermind and he came in to speak with us. And Bill McDermott, you know, SAP is the largest software company in the world. ServiceNow is another juggernaut in business. One of the best companies on the planet. And what you just said was that

they have regular leadership development, which is core to Bill McDermott's fundamentals. I mean, he is, I'm a, I'm a, I mean, he's a legend, right? But, and this is a great example. He is partners deeply with the chief people officer there, Jackie Canney, to bring that vision to life. Because you interact with Bill and you're like values, you know, into an entire organization. And you can't get there without a very smart and strategic investment in training and leadership development. So he and Jackie partner really deeply to, to bring that commitment to life. I think it's the first thing that they think of in the morning. I mean, it's, they're not thinking about the business. They're thinking about the people and their growth. 100%. 100%. That's true. So a quick little story. It was, it was interesting. I was a brand new CEO,

brand new public company CEO. And Bill said, do you have any questions for me? I said, Mr. McDermott, I have a question for you. As a brand new CEO, what advice do you have for me in order to build the best company possible? And he talked about building leaders in the organization, but he ended with, so Adam, I want you to remember this. And that's why I have this hanging here. He said, it's your job as the CEO to stay hungry and stay humble, meaning you're always learning leadership and delivering leadership to help people grow. It's so good. It's so good. You talk about, you know, leadership through stories. That's one of my stories. And that's why it's hanging on the wall behind me is it's so funny that you close the loop on that

ServiceNow connection and Bill McDermott, because as soon as you said that, I's so funny that you, you close the loop on that service now connection and Bill McDermott, because as soon as you said that, I'm going, no way, this is incredible small world, but truly leaders notice leaders. And it's, it's a fun thing to be part of on this planet when you're, you're helping people grow and get better. So, um, I want, I want to talk a little bit about your book, Move Fast and Fix Things. What's the premise behind this? I mean, there's rapid change, taking care of the stakeholders, things of fast and break things. It wasn't that we were breaking so many things and everyone was okay with it. I think the world has really pushed back on that ethos, which really did define the innovation economy for so long. rehabilitate Speed's bad reputation. Because when we looked at the leaders who were most successful, both in and beyond tech, they were solving problems at an accelerated pace while also taking responsibility for the success and well-being of their customers, shareholders, and employees. They weren't moving fast and breaking things. They were moving fast and fixing things. And so we wanted to get the word out. And then we wanted to really push ourselves on this idea of, of could we distill down the

choices that these leaders were making and the lessons from the last 20 years of, you know, very disruptive time in, in American business and global business. And could we pull out the patterns of how to do this right in your own organization at whatever size or, or, or, you know, level of maturity. And, and that's where we ended up with this, these kinds of five steps. We, we give them, you know, we assign them to days of the week. We think that sequence matters. And in particular, you have to build trust first and then earn the right to go fast on top of that foundation of trust. Oh, OK. So that's why there's five of those and five work days during the week, typically.

Those of us that are entrepreneurs know that Friday means we have two more work days before Monday. Although we push you to take a break. Cause if you look at all of the peak performance literature, and I'm sure you've had some of these researchers on your show, Adam, you know, the, the power of really giving yourself room to recover is the difference between, you know, winning the race and burning out as you go. Totally, totally. And, and to Ann's point, um, you know, my, like my workout program, five days a week, and I have to take my two days off. You have to take your two days off. That's really clear. That's really clear. And all of the data, it doesn't work. You don't get stronger otherwise.

Correct. Yeah. It's, um, and you know, it's, it's fascinating. My, my workout app even tells me that it's like, you have to have time for recovery. Take the day off. I love this. Somebody's giving me permission because as, as a leader, a lot of times there's no one there to give us permission, but ourselves, we have to give ourselves permission in order to, um, to rest and recuperate, uh, and recharge for that matter. Wow, we have so much amazing leadership conversation going on that Ann and I decided to make this a two part. So this is the end of the first part. Make sure you go back and listen to it. There's a lot of great information on leadership here.

I love the move fast to fix things piece and be good at diagnosing the problem. Take a look at the notes that you have from this one and we will see you on the next episode of Start With a Win with Ken Morris and more leadership conversation.