The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Be the Unicorn: 12 Data-Driven Habits that Separate the Best Leaders from the Rest by William Vanderbloemen

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Be the Unicorn: 12 Data-Driven Habits that Separate the Best Leaders from the Rest by William Vanderbloemen https://amzn.to/467qTXS Want to stand out from the crowd? We have studied 30,000 top leaders and have discovered the 12 habits they share that make them as rare as a unicorn. Learn these habits, and you’ll be one of the best at whatever you do! How do I stand out? How do I become irreplaceable? With a crowded workforce, an unstable job landscape, and the rise of AI, these questions are the ones that everyone either is or should be asking. William Vanderbloemen has asked these questions over the past 15 years while running one of the world’s top executive search firms. Through extensive research of over 30,000 top leaders and proprietary data, Vanderbloemen has identified the 12 habits that the best of the best have in common. Traits such as authenticity, responsiveness, agility, and the ability to problem solve, among others. Each habit includes information on What We Know (the hard data behind why the habit is so transformative), What We’ve Seen (first-hand accounts by high-achieving professionals on how they live the habit), and What We Do (simple ways to build this habit into your daily routine). Be the Unicorn will help you: Discover the top twelve soft skills the most successful leaders, the top 1%, have. Understand how to develop these soft skills in your own life for better job success. Learn how to apply soft skills to interpersonal relationships outside of work. Understand how these soft skills can be applied in different work environments and job fields, especially with the rise of AI technology. About the author William Vanderbloemen is an entrepreneur, pastor, speaker, author, and CEO and Founder of Vanderbloemen Search Group, an executive search firm serving churches, ministries, and faith-based organizations. William has combined over 15 years of ministry experience as a Senior Pastor with the best practices of Executive Search to provide churches with a unique offering: a deep understanding of local church work with the very best knowledge and practices of professional executive search. Prior to his founding Vanderbloemen Search Group, William studied executive search under a mentor with over 25 years of executive search at the highest level. His learning taught him the very best corporate practices, including the search strategies used by the internationally known firm Russell Reynolds. William also has experience as a Manager in Human Resources in a Fortune 200 company, where he focused on integration of corporate culture and succession planning. All of these experiences have come together with his pastoral work to form a unique gift for helping churches and ministries build great teams by finding their key staff. Prior to executive search, William led growth and innovation in churches in North Carolina, Alabama, and Houston. During his time in Alabama, William had the chance to help rebuild and relocate an ailing congregation and lead them to new levels of growth. At 31, he was elected Senior Pastor for the First Presbyterian Church of Houston, a church of about 5000 adults and 1500 children strong. It is Houston’s oldest congregation. William is regularly invited to speak across the country in both church services and as a resource to churches and conferences on leadership. He is a regular contributor to several major publications including Forbes where he covers topics about having a strong faith and building a business, Fortune, and Outreach Magazine. He has also been published through Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and Inc. His book "Next: Pastoral Succession That Works" on effective pastoral leadership and succession was released through Baker Books in September 2014. His most recent book, "Search: The Pastoral Search Committee Handbook," the practical guide to the pastor search process, was released through B&H Publishing in June 2016.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the Chris Voss Show. Welcome to the big show, the Big Ten in the Sky, folks. The podcast where billionaires, newsmakers, CEOs, the hottest authors come to talk, shop, and sell their wares and tell you about how to be smarter and better and all that good stuff

so you don't grow up and be like Chris Voss. See what I did there? We're going to be talking about some amazing things some of my favorite subjects of course as always i wrote a book about it uh leadership we love leadership we're also going to talk about unicorns and leadership so right now you're probably sitting listening to the show going leadership and unicorns unicorns and leadership what is that about well we have just the gentleman who's come on the show to tell us about it and let you know that unicorns evidently do exist and you can be one too.

According to William Vanderblomen, he joins us on the show today to talk about his amazing book. November 14th, 2023, it comes out. Be the unicorn. 12 data-driven habits that separateits That Separate the Best Leaders from the Rest. And that makes me just want to be a unicorn. And if you want to be a unicorn too, by the way, let's guilt and shame you and do a friendly show to your family, friends, or relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4S Chris Voss, youtube.com, 4S Chris Voss, linkedin.com, 4S Chris Voss, and Chris Voss1 on the ticky-tockity or whatever those kids are doing these days.

William is the CEO and founder of Vanderbloomen Search Group, a top executive search firm. In his upcoming book that we aforementioned from HarperCollins Leadership, he reveals how job seekers, employees, hiring managers, and company leaders everywhere can stand out from their peers and become irreplaceable, building the careers that they've always wanted. He's been regularly retained to identify the best talent for teams, manage successful planning and consulting on all issues regarding business teams. And this year, he's going to complete his 3,000th executive search. Prior to founding his search group, he studied executive search under mentors with 25 plus years of executive search experience at the highest level. His learning taught him the very best corporate practices, including the search strategies used by internationally known firm Russell Reynolds. Prior to that, William served

as a senior pastor at one of the largest Presbyterian churches in the United States, and he joins us here today. Welcome to the show, William. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thanks for having me today. I've really been looking forward to our time together. I've been looking forward to it as well. Am I getting your last name correct? I don't know. Okay. I say Vanderbloomen, but people in the motherland might say it differently. Oh, there you go.

Where is the motherland, by the way? It'd be Dutch. Dutch. There you go. Down in Limburg, where the really stinky cheap is. Yeah. That's where our people were for a long, long time until they came over right before the civil war there you go there you go well welcome to america and uh all that good stuff give us your dot coms where do you want people to find you on the

interwebs yeah so it's pretty simple um i i really didn't want anything named after me but the search engine the seo guys all said after a big long study hey listen uh good news we found the right domain bad news it's your name like what and they said yeah no your last name is so screwed up that you can misspell it into google any way you want and it'll come back to your site so we went with that and uh if people are looking for me they can can spell Vanderbloom and however they like into Google. Or I guess some people use other search engines. And same in Amazon. Just however you want.

And it'll pop up. And it's a pretty cool site. If you're a business owner, like we spend our days helping great organizations find their top staff. And one of the ways we have tried to give back is to write content so they're probably 3,500 free resources on how you can build and run a great team at vanderbloom.com there you go so uh give us a reason why you wrote this book and why should we want to be a unicorn i mean this is kind of you know i mean i'm i'm a dirty old horse why do i want to be a unicorn? I mean, this is kind of, you know, I mean, I'm a dirty old horse. Why do I want to be a unicorn?

So two reasons. One, a longstanding question. And two, I kind of fell into this. So the first one is this question. I don't know, Chris, if you ever go to a party and there's somebody in the room that everyone's drawn to. They're just life of the party. Or you meet somebody for a coffee and within five minutes you're like this one's a winner oh know it i mean have you

ever had that happen you just know yeah yeah it's usually with me alone um but there's that so i've been wondering for a long long time like why is that what's the superpower that within it and can we figure out what it is and is there any way to learn it or is it sort of sorry it's like being able to run the 40 in a certain speed you can't you know i'm not going to win the nba slam dunk competition ever no matter how hard i train right yeah so so there's this question why why do some people come off as winners right away? Well, fast forward many, many years after starting to ask that question, we had a pandemic and a lot of most businesses shut down. Nearly all of our clients were shut down and on hiring freezes and nobody knew what

was going to happen with the world. So we did our own pivot and said said we've been careful financially. So this year we're going to spend our time serving our clients. And if we make money, fine, but serve, don't sell. Everybody's having a hard year. And in the rest of our time, we're going to spend working on the business and not in it. Right. So back around to this question, what makes these unicorn type people unicorns? We realized that when we were during the shutdown, when we do a search, maybe there are a thousand people interested in the job we're trying to fill. Maybe 150 of them we take a serious look at your phone interview and use Zoom interview and all that. And then when you get down to the very best of the best, which is not many for a search, we give a long format face-to-face interview.

It's pretty detailed. We track it. We do a very similar pattern for every one of them. When we were in the pandemic shutdown, we realized we've now done 30,000 of these interviews. Holy crap. So that's a lot. And we've tracked them all. I'd say that my team is OCD, but they'd get mad. They'd say, no, it's CDO because that's alphabetical. And we said,

all right, 30,000 face-to-face interviews. These are the top talent we've ever encountered. Could we identify the best of those 30 000 and and we were able to like who got the job who excelled and got promoted who stayed like who's this special unicorn of a person and uh we we identified them and then we said they have anything in common and the answer was yes. Ah. And it was not the things I expected. Really? Yeah. Wow. Not at all.

I thought IQ over 150. Nope. Nope. I thought six feet tall with great hair and bright teeth. Nope. Not that. All went to Ivy League schools or highly networked business societies. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,

none of those normal, not what I would have presumed, right? So what were these things? Hey, can I take a guess? Yeah. Bribery. You didn't check that one. That's probably a good one too. Bribery. That's what it was. Hey, tell the guy, here's $100, man. Let's go. That's funny. I'm not sure that works. What we realized was they all behaved in similar ways. They all had common habits. We narrowed it down to the 12 top habits that they shared.

And even more interesting, it's habits that are really common among the best of the best and super uncommon among normal regular rank and file population and and uh so now the quick way of answering this is for 15 years top organizations have hired me to find their next unicorn well now i know how to teach you to become one and that's that's pretty fun. So we're back to that. What makes these people that you see within five minutes who they are? Well, now I think we have a bit of the code for how you become that person. So I'm hoping it helps a lot of people.

There you go. And we should plug John C. Maxwell. We were talking before the show. He's one of my favorite authors on leadership. Wrote the foreword for your book, too, as well. That's right. John's been a mentor to me for a long, long time and was kind to take time to contribute. There you go.

So give us a little bit of background, your hero's journey. How did you get into the field you got into? We don't have to start back at the Civil War when your family first came here, but what's your origin story? Kind of your journey. It's a weird story, man man i don't know that you want the answer to this oh i mean keep it short man yeah so well now i you mentioned it briefly but i am uh in recovery i'm a i'm a recovering preacher so i go a long ramble sometimes i'll shorten it up uh I served in at a very young age, one of the largest Christian churches in the country. And boy, I was in way over my head. I was 31.

And I thought, you know, you know, the only thing I had going for me at 31, I knew everything. That was awesome. Most people do that in their teens. So you're a late bloomer. And I changed things a little too fast it was a great church great people i i uh was a little too entrepreneurial but they were kind and patient uh and then went through a divorce which i would not recommend not a super fun thing um and it wasn't you know oh poor me there was fault all over the place but uh

nothing the tabloids would have liked but it was what it was went to work i found myself a single dad with four kids and uh in no shape to be guiding someone spiritually at the moment i needed to do some work on myself right and uh went to work in an oil and gas company a rather large one i live here in houston and we had several of those so uh it was a fortune 200 company and they they put me in a management rotation program and they started me in hr figuring out you know people will start there right so while i was there the ceo said uh i've been here nine years as ceo which i didn't know then but now know that's a lifetime for a fortune 200 ceo that's way longer than the average. So he'd done a great job and said, it's time to find my successor.

I'm like, cool. How do they do that? And they hired this thing called an executive search firm. I had never in my life heard such a thing. I was the pastor at First Presbyterian Houston. It's where Sam. You thought you knew everything. Sam Houston went to church at our church.

Okay. That is back toward the Civil War. But, you know, the church is healthy and lovely, and they took three years to find me. Really? Wow. I was there six years. I left, and there was a three-year gap before the next guy. Wow.

Twelve years, six with a leader, six looking for a leader. Wow. So I'm back in my oil and gas and, okay, we need to hire an executive search firm. 90 days later, they had their next guy. And I'm like, wow. You know, oil and gas, 90 days. And for much of the population that doesn't live in Houston, is there a more evil empire than, you know, the oil and gas? Right.

90 days for a new CEO, Fortune 200, amazing church, doing good, been around forever, 12 years, half the time looking and half the time. That doesn't add up at all. And so I, uh, I said, I wonder, I mean, I've got all this training, I undergrad at Wake Forest and a seminary at Princeton, uh, that maybe there's a better use for my training than this oil and gas thing. And I went home and I thought, you know, why does the business world have a better solution than the church for this? And I went home.

Because God wants it that way. And Adrian and I had gotten married just a few months before. And so we blended our families with six kids. Oh, Brady Bunch. Brady Bunch time. Right. And new house. And I said, you know what, babe? I think I'm supposed to quit my job and start something new for churches.

And she looked at me and she said, that's because churches love new ideas, right? Was that being facetious? Just a little bit. Oh, okay. Churches and new ideas. They do a 2,000-year-old book. No, no, no, no. Churches and new ideas just don't get along very well.

And Anna, she should have said, go back to work. I love your visions and your dreams, but we've got to feed those people. Yeah, I thought she was going to say, how do I file an annulment? Yeah, exactly. You want to switch jobs? She should get the credit. Oh, and the kicker is it was the fall of 2008, which was a brilliant time to quit your job. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But she said, hey, let's give it a run. And it started with, let's see if we can help churches find their pastor. And now it's turned into any kind of values-based organization that's driven by their values and their culture, and they want help finding not just talent, but talent that matches their values and their culture. So the book before this one was one on culture. We did a massive study and research project. So you get hired for, like, how do you find the tissue match? The why behind our what, to use that Simon Sinek kind of thing. Like, can you find someone with match the the why behind our what to use that simon cynic kind of thing like can you find us someone with the same why and uh that that has led us to be in this little

very unique offering there's not another search firm out there like this and and we've been fortunate and had some clients that love telling other friends about us and is just kind of organically grown way more than I ever thought it would. There you go. Now you used the term tissue search. Tissue match. Tissue match. Yeah, that was it. Tell us what that is. I think I know what it is, but tell us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great question. I, you know, I tried to think of a good elevator pitch for why hire a search firm instead of just finding somebody on my own, right? We live here in Houston.

I live about two miles from the medical center. It's the largest gathering of doctors in the world. And then my little neighborhood is just specialist after specialist after specialist. Mercedes Benz's, yeah. Well, that too. But they're just wicked smart. So I thought, you you know when somebody needs a search for a new ceo or a new senior leader it's really like a heart transplant right i mean

you take you want to find someone outside the body or the company to come inside the body and run the major system of the place or maybe it's a kidney transplant if it's not a CEO, right? But it's an organ transplant. So I asked a couple doctors. I was like, hey, I like this image and this metaphor. What separates the best transplant docs from the rest? And they're like, all of them. We're like, you would think it's developing a donor list,

finding people who, you know, that's not it. The best transplant doctors are the ones that get the tissue match right. Because you can put a healthy heart into a healthy body. And if they don't match, there's rejection. And everybody has a bad ending. And we've all seen that in organizations that hire a CEO or a new leader, and they look great on paper, and they're healthy, and they're strong, but they don't fit the why of that organization and it blows up everywhere. And, uh, wow, that's more expensive than not doing anything. That's very true. That's very true. Uh, so this

makes sense. Uh, the tissue, the, the, the body of the organization, I love this concept. I never really thought of it that way. But the one thing we learned the hard way with all my companies back in the day was putting the time in to hire. And it takes extra time. You can't fill the position right away. But taking that extra time to hire and find the right people is everything because otherwise you can end up with just a nightmare on your hands of just the worst freaking people that you regret that cause your problems that there's legal issues with and everything else and then you and then you wait too long to fire them yeah exactly number one mistake i've seen in all the years i've been working with people and hr solutions and exec search number one mistake people hire too quickly and they fire

too slowly yeah and the nice way of saying it is hey let's do long hellos and short goodbyes that's on my dating that's on my tinder dating profile so there you go. I think I was going to use the joke. How can I use that to be on my Tinder checkmark? So you have basically, where you've outlined in the book, 12 habits that have the best in common towards building authenticity, responsiveness, agility, and different things. Let's tease out some of these habits that you have inside the book. Sure. Yeah. Well, you think, well, what are these habits? Do I have to learn the Pythagorean theorem?

Do I have to learn brain surgery? No. Hey, here's one that people are going to say, well, that doesn't make sense. That's just stupid. Get back to people. Responsiveness. It's so easy, Chris, to be the best at what you do if you just get back to people. Because we've studied and found that nearly everyone puts off getting back to people. And I remember a long time ago when I was a super young pastor and we were looking for a new location and I was

riding around with my board chair and he said, I think we could probably get that YMCA. I know the board chair of the YMCA and call him, tell him, you know, here's his number. I'm like, cool. And we were standing in my office and he's like, when are you going to call him? I'm like, well, you know, you gave me the number two minutes. What else have you got to do? I'll sit here and wait. I don't care. Call him. Like, huh.

And he said, listen, the first chance you get is almost always the best chance. It's like when you're sitting at a busy intersection and right when you pull up, there's a little way to pull out and then you wait. And then it's 15 minutes before you get all the time. You kick yourself all the time. You're things with responsiveness people don't get back like for instance i don't know if you know this term inbound marketing yeah yeah so like hubspot and fusion soft these companies whereas basically if you don't know the term it's but if you're on a website it's like would you like more information or someone to contact you fill out this form you fill out the form they They get back to you.

Right. So we were one of the very first early adopters for HubSpot years ago. In fact, the founder and CEO was one of the guys who was an endorser of the book. And they asked the question, you know, the point of a sales call is not to close the sale. That whole always be closing thing is over the point of a sales call is to get the next sales call to keep the conversation moving toward closing and it'll close when it needs to close right especially we're doing kind of consultative sales not transactional buy it right now and if you order now i'll throw in a salad shooter and like that's

not our that's not our deal you know different than hiring people it's a higher ticket i am so although i uh note to self uh offer hr people that are trying trying to hire me a free salad shooter if they do hire me that's right that's right put that right on the resume there so so hubspot asked the question um listen how does time response time correlate to the likelihood of another call? In other words, if you respond in this amount of time, how likely is it you're going to get the next conversation?

The study that was done revealed if somebody fills out a form, please contact me, and you respond to them personally, not AI, but something like if it's somebody that's in New York and you're like, well, I hope you weren't at MetLife last night. That was kind of a bummer, even though you want, right?

Like that, something personal and immediate. Within 60 seconds, you will get a 98% chance of talking to them again. Okay. You wait 20 minutes from when they fill up form it drops to 60 20 minutes you've lost so much if you wait more than 24 hours according to study you have a less than one percent chance of ever talking to that person again holy crap so then the question is Holy crap. I should do this with all my exes. So then what is the average response time of people that have inbound marketing and use it? Average response time, 42 hours.

Oh, wow. So, like, this is not hard. If you just get back to people within a minute, that's really all you have to do. We did it in the early days of our company because I had six kids and a wife that needed to be fed and if you reached out to me and said could we talk i'm like how's now but i kept getting uh comments over and over for people like we couldn't believe how quickly you got back to us yeah it's simple habits like that and you would think like we looked all across industries we looked on i didn't look at tinder but we looked on dating sites like what's the what's the average response time to people when it's you're talking about people that are looking for love right they don't respond quickly at all and and what we found, the unicorns, the people who are like,

that's the guy I want on my team, they're maniacal about getting back to people quickly. Yeah, yeah. I've even had people say to me over the years of business and stuff, how can you get back to me so quickly? Or they'll send me an email and I'll reply. And nine times out of ten, they kind of got the luck of the draw where they sent me an email where i'm just between something you know and and they're like is this an

autoresponder and i'm like no this is me you just caught me at the most opportune moment if you know if i if you email me during a podcast i'm not going to answer but you just caught me right right at the smack dab moment and i learned a long time ago i studied uh i think it was in harvard business review but they interviewed one of the early successful vice presidents for some of apple and he talked about how he handled uh his mail and this is the old days of everything was mail and there was an email back then but you know emails and calls and everything and he's like you know i have a process and everything. And he's like, you know, I have a process. And so, uh, someone edits the mail for me to see, you know, get rid of the junk

mail. And then they hand me the mail and, and, or any sort of task list or demand for task list. He goes, I don't put it off. I look at it and I read it and I make a decision. He goes, cause the dumbest thing you can do is waste your time by going, I'll get back to that. He's like, sometimes, you know, there's things you get back to,

but he goes, I don't, I don't, I, once I touch a piece of mail, I decide whether, you know, I'm replying to your keeping or whatever it is and moving on.

I, he goes, otherwise you're doubling up your time. That's right. And so that's kind of the process I use. And people will be like, man, you're really fast.

And I'm like, yeah, we got to get this shit out, man. We do the same thing with a podcast. My wife quotes a rule when it comes to stuff around the house, mail, that kind of thing. It's an old rule. I don't know if it was Oprah or somebody like OTIO, only touch it once. Exactly. That's the concept. Only touch it once.

And the unicorns find a way to triage in their mind, is this something that needs immediate attention or not? Because if somebody does reach out to you, you're in a world where you're going to grab your phone, you're going to check all the different social platforms and the LinkedIn's and the emails and the texts and all. And if you happen to be on reaching out, if I reach right back to you, you're still on.

The minute it goes down for dinner or whatever podcast or thing you're doing. So it's so easy to stand out. I've told, so we have seven kids now. And I've told every one of them as they've asked, gotten older and asked for career advice. What should I do? What should I do? Listen, I don't care. Well, I do care. It doesn't matter what you do here's the success formula do what you say you're going to do

when you say you're going to do it at the price that you promised and you will be in the top five percent of your industry and i don't care if that's dog catching or running a country. What's the old lines? 95% of success is showing up and stuff. People just don't get how. Something like that. It's simple habits, Chris. Basics.

Simple habits. It's just not rocket science. There you go. So in your book, you identify 12 skills. I'm going to run through them here real quick. The fast, the authentic, the agile, the solver, the anticipator, the prepared, the self-aware, the curious, the connected, the likable, the productive, the purpose-driven, the good, the bad, the ugly. Wait, those three aren't on there. That's a movie.

So those 12 that you have there, do we want to tease some of these out a little bit? Yeah. So we talked about the fast, the responsive, right? The other thing that I found, all 12 of them are super easy to implement, but it's kind of like, I don't know. Have you ever had a friend who says they're going to start running and they spend stupid money on a treadmill and all it does is gather dust? That's me. I'm talking about a friend. It's just not that hard. You just have to do it.

One of the habits that I have found is super true among the unicorns who or super talented is they're curious. And that means a lot of different things. One thing it means is I don't do many searches anymore. I've got a great team here, a whole lot of full-time folks that do that, and they're better at it than I am. Every now and then I need to get involved because, oh, your name's on the door kind of thing, right? Yeah, the damn door thing.

I know, right? The SEO guys, back to them. So if I'm involved, all the baseline stuff's already been done, and I'm spending time with you, Chris. You're interviewing for something, and I'm like, here's how I would say, hey, Chris, listen, man, I don't do many searches anymore, and you don't need to tell me your life story again i what i would what i think might be the best use of our time because i know the client is to let you ask me questions that you might not want to ask your future employer you're not

going to bother me just ask me what you want to ask me do you know how much I learn from what questions you ask me? Wow. I never thought about that. That's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. I learn way, way more, you know,

well, what's the pay? Well, that's a stupid question to lead with. I mean, you gotta get there sooner or later. What are the benefits? You know?

Well, I noticed that their, I noticed that their mission is to provide clean water for people in Africa, and they've drilled this many wells. How are they going to decide where to drill next, and what's the decision-making behind that? Like, oh, okay, you did homework. Yeah. Or, you know, man, this Chris Voss show that I want to go to work for them, it's hockey stick growth.

It's like this. And I'm just curious, why is it growing and why should I believe it's going to continue to grow? It's because we have an OnlyFans channel on the side. No, we don't. That's a joke, people. Or, you know, like tell me about Chris. I want to know what it's like to work for him.

He's an asshole. Well, what makes him happy and do backflips and what makes him just, you know, run. So there's a curiousness. And, you know, I noticed this first when I was running a pretty cool organization that I ended up in regular interaction with absolute world beaters. They were just the captains of whatever industry they were in. I noticed a correlation. The more successful a person was, the harder it was for me to get them to talk about themselves. They almost always wanted to talk about me

or they were asking me questions. One example of a long time ago, this First Presbyterian Church I was in, I don't know if you remember the name Lloyd Benson. Sounds familiar. So he was on the ticket as vice president running against Bush and Quayle. So that's a long time ago.

He's the one that looked at Quayle and said, I knew Jack Kennedy. You know Jack Kennedy. That's where that was. What a great line. Yeah, so when he died, I had to do the funeral. Ms. Benson calls me and says, do you mind if we have someone do a eulogy before you speak? I'm like,

sure, Ms. Benson, whatever you need. She said, okay, well, President Clintonulogy before you speak? I'm like, sure, Miss Benson, whatever you need. She said, okay, well, President Clinton's going to do that. I'm like, I just drew the shortest straw in public speaking possible. So long story short, there was going to be a burial first and the Senate sent a plane with everybody you can imagine. I mean, it was a big big old deal. We were going to have this outdoor thing at the cemetery before the funeral. Then it rained cats and dogs. They had to revamp.

The net-net was President Clinton and I ended up in my office for about two hours just one-on-one. I tried to get that man to talk about himself. He wouldn't do it. Did he offer you any cigars? He asked me questions. Oh, I see on your desk a brochure.

You're leading a trip to Turkey and Greece. You should call my friend, the guy who runs the Eastern Orthodox Church, basically the pope of the Eastern world. And I'm like, well, like well mr president i'll just you know i'll just uh you know get on the internet and try and figure out anything and he said no no no no no i'm gonna connect you wow so i tried to flip it i'm like he's wearing this little yarn bracelet and i'm like where'd you get the yarn bracelet he's like oh these kids in bolivia gave it to me they make it they're doing it i said oh you know what we do mission work there he's like you need to get in touch with the whatever consulate or ambassador who knows everybody

same same thing i'll just look no no no i'll take care of it and he asked me two more things and kept asking about me right and we spent two hours together i knew nothing about him but man it felt like i was the only person in the room i'm like yeah no matter what your political platform if you spend time with that guy one-on-one you're like okay i get why you won like that interesting yeah i'm always curious about people too because i'm sick of me i mean that's where i'm at that's why i do the podcast and i love talking to people asking questions because i'm more interested in them and their journey. I have 55 years with me, but that's interesting he was like that. If you want to know more about him, he was president for eight years.

He was reelected twice. Back when we were younger. We were much younger. The energy I used to have back then. That's interesting that people have that thing. Chris, it's not common common most people aren't curious they don't ask questions yeah just ask questions yeah they don't care is it they don't care they're apathetic or maybe they're just narcissistic and they love themselves too much maybe all of the above i don't know the why behind that but i do

know the best of the best are curious and they ask questions. But those are the people you want for business and innovation because when they come in, they're going to ask questions. They're going to be like, why do we do it this way? Everyone goes, and you're like, well, this is stupid. We should do something better. Yeah, several of these habits are kind of cousins. They cluster around each other. And one around

curiosity, the other one is the agile. That's the person that's always... You mean agile? Yeah. One of the two. Here's the thing. So years ago when our seventh, who's 13 now, she's probably, I don't know, three or four, I'd gotten to the age

we're pretty similar age and i got to the age where i do try and run regularly or jog and i needed to stretch because i was starting to get injured yeah so the stretching was harder than the run i mean like touching the toes was worse than six miles i couldn't and i was in my den stretching after a long run and the little one comes in sees me just dying to try and touch my toes she she walks up next to me sits down on the floor ties herself in a human pretzel as only little kids can right yeah stands up and looks at me and laughs and leaves the room and i'm, that's when you put them up for adoption or sending a military. you know what I did do?

I thought to myself, you know what, William, every day you're alive, you get less flexible. Yeah. Ah, I see that.

I see what you're up to there. See that. Yeah. It's true of organizations. They calcify with time is true of people. And, and my liver, it's a of organizations. They calcify with time. It's true of people. And my liver. It's a biological fact.

So when you run into somebody who's committed to stretching themselves and committed to agility, man, that's a special person. There you go. I love it. It comes out, you know, think about the people who really excelled during this shutdown of the pandemic. It's the ones who really did learn how to pivot and do something different. Even no matter what your job was, you had other duties as necessary come up. The people that rose to the top were the ones like seize the moment.

We've never done this before. Let's Hey, jump out of the plane and build the parachute on the way down. Let's do it. Yeah. That's how I like doing it well you know what it's how it's going to be that's true rise of ai over the next 10 years it if you aren't agile you're dead yeah it's moving way way faster we were talking about this this week with some

different authors that were on and you're right uh it's it's moving whipping fast like even as far as i'm used to moving fast i'm just like yeah man it's a ai thing man it's uh going well and the cool thing about the 12 habits in the unicorn is uh there aren't many of them that ai can do a lot of them are the soft skills the human skills which i think are going to become the premium over the next decade as AI really. I mean, the history of work is we invent something cool to make things efficient. It replaces human jobs and we got to go find a new way to use humans. It's just think to the Industrial Revolution. This is not a new song sheet, right? But the people that will do really well in the next 10 to 12 years are

people who will focus on things like the 12 habits, the soft skills of humans, the things that a computer cannot do. And I'm hopeful that that'll help people that are out there right now wondering, is my job going to be around in five years? Well, study these things, and I think you'll find it will be there. Definitely. I mean, you're preparing yourself to be the best machine that you possibly can. Number seven is the self-aware. Self-awareness, self-actualization, and self-accountability, I imagine, would fall into that chapter. This is really important because being a leader, we talked to somebody this week or last week about how a lot of leaders that they poll aren't self-aware. And that's where their weakness is.

Absolutely. Narcissism is a spectrum. Tell me about it. You know this. You've interviewed thousands of entrepreneurs, and you are one. A narcissist is someone who really thinks they can bend reality to their will. That's true. And people who start a company have to have a little bit of that,

or they'll just listen to the world and the world will tell them, that's dumb, don't do that. Okay, I won't try something. No, they're just believers in what they're doing. I've lived that that starting our company but within that spectrum there are very few people who can develop enough self-awareness to know how that is going to impact the crowd around them the people who are self-aware separate themselves like like you ever do a job interview uh you're interviewing for a job and they say so tell me about yourself i hate that question and it's pretty open-ended like where you want me to start prison my mom and my dad

felt really like they really loved each other a lot and then prom night well here's here's how a unicorn answers that oh chris i'm interviewing for work with you i i i'll tell you about myself look i was studying your company and I've seen you just grown crazy. You were on the front end. You're podcasting back in 2008, 2009. I mean, like that's at the beginning of everything. You guys a seven. You know, on the StrengthsFinder, I'm an innovator, right? I do well in situations where we don't really know what we're going to do next, but we're growing fast and we got to do it fast. And I can tell you, because in my last job, they had me start a marketing department. I didn't have any tools. I got them on the HubSpot. I got them onto this.

We saw 4% growth over the first year. Now, you see what happened there? Yeah, I do. I'm showing you self-awareness and then i'm going to say and that's chris why i'm super excited about the chance to interview with you because i think the way i'm wired matches the kind of person you need yeah and you and you're curious too you did the and stuff. You're not just like, hey, when do I get paid? And when's my first vacation day?

That's exactly right. I used to love people and I'd hire them. And you can take it a step further. You can say, you know what, Chris, if you were interviewing me to be like your controller or your compliance officer and teach you how to follow rules. And that's just not me. I would get fired from that really fast. And what you've done there is you prevented the question that nobody knows how to answer. And that is, tell me about your greatest weakness. Well, I never asked for a raise. I worked many hours, you know, no, you've just shown self-awareness i know where i'm most productive i

can see it in what i've done in the past and i think i'm going to fit your company because what you're doing is similar to my wiring yeah i thought of a good question i can ask when i'm hiring people to tell me about the times you're in prison i got some great stories about some people that tried to dodge around that with me they'd done some prison time and they left like a three-year hole in their in their timelines yeah and and they're and you're like so dumb like dude when i was 20 i knew to match that shit up uh and uh and then my favorite is when they go what what are the dates don't match? And I go, I don't know.

It's your resume. And I'm like, it says you're working for XYZ company. And they go, no, during that time I was working for that company. And they'll literally ask for the resume back. And I go, I'm not giving it to you back. This is your damn resume. You should know it's on it. So what have we invented here, buddy? Which part is the lie?

Which is the truth? And then they're all kerfuffled. And that's when you go, well, you know, whatever. But yeah, there's that. So there's a lot of great stuff in here. I love the 12 techniques, the 12 tips that people can use. The curious, the connected, the likable. These are all really great skills

the purpose driven uh person is the 12th as to uh driving your own purpose i think that's really good tell us a little bit about that if you would yeah so so i'm sure your listeners have uh heard the simon sinek talk the why behind the what know the why something like that you know it's got eight bajillion views um you know the the number one selling non-fiction book in history other than the bible is a book called the the purpose driven life it's like understanding what you're wired to do and what your why your thing that makes you do crazy stuff because you've got to get that task done the the unicorns know their why they know that they want to you know whatever it is end world hunger they want to make enough money to give to their great

grandchildren they want to doesn't have to be a giant purpose. It just needs to be a North Star that guides everything that they do. And the people who are clear on that are very rare, but it's not super hard to be one of those people. Yeah. Yeah. The people that have a purpose in life, they know what they're doing. They're not just aimless going, I mean, I always did what I did because of vodka, but I suppose that was a purpose in some sort of way for 20 years. So there was that. But, you know, vodka and money and chicks. I don't know. Whatever.

So there you go. I love the concept behind this. And then I can be a unicorn. Now, do I get a horn if I become a unicorn and fulfill the 12 things? I probably ought to develop something like that. Yeah, you should. I want one for my desk, eh? You know what we did develop that's super helpful,

and it's launching today as well, is a software tool where you can – so we identified the 12 things with the unicorns, and then we surveyed a quarter million people about those 12, giving a self-assessment. So we both hired a bunch-assessment and we so we both you know hired a bunch of applied math and council hired counselors and how do we build this thing out where you why don't you take this little inventory and it'll show you how you match up against the general uh norm and how you match up against the best of the best and what are your top three habits of the

12 and what are your bottom three so you you can have a coaching plan for how you can get but what should i work on first where should i go yeah well we're we're super excited about that i took the test and it said i'm a donkey so i'm not even a horse so i got some work to do said you said you're a dumb mule and i'm like well i mean you don't have to be rude about it but there you go everybody likes donkey and well yeah and the shek thing but uh i don't know you know i don't know whatever i got nothing with the rest of that joke uh so this has been really insightful william and it's been fun to have you on and uh hear about your brady bunch family are you are we going to keep adding to this uh is no no well if we do it it would be we're going to have to have a long conversation about how that happened yeah that's uh well you

know you never know with these things um but uh there's the story of a little lady i don't know how the hell i guess you think i'd know that story. But this is wonderful and I'm glad you put out the book because we need better leaders. We need better leaders who are self-aware. They're self-accountable. We just need better leaders. Damn it. Maybe we can send this to all the politicians and see if we can develop some.

Which is probably not ever going to work. So there you go. William, thank you for coming on the show. Give us your dot coms so we can find you on the internet. Vanderbloomen.com. That's all you need. Spell it however you want. William, thank you for coming on the show. Give us your dot coms so we can find you on the internet. Vanderbloomen.com. That's all you need. Spell it however you want. You'll get there.

There we go. That's so funny. Folks, order it up wherever fine books are sold. Be the unicorn. 12 data-driven habits to separate the best leaders from the rest. November 14th, 2023. It's out. They studied over 30,000 top

leaders and discovered the best 12 habits. So if that's not good enough for you, what more do you want? Jesus, 30,000 leaders, that's awesome. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas, youtube.com, 4chesschristmas. Watch for us on the big LinkedIn

newsletter and chrismas1 on the tickety-Tockety. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.