The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Max Martina on Mastering Adaptive Leadership for Complex Challenges in Modern Business

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Starting point is 00:00:23 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 roller. roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks, is Voss here from The Chris Voss Show. Duh! Ladies and gentlemen, maybe I should hold that note just as long as they possibly can.

Starting point is 00:00:45 Welcome to the big show. We'll let the offer a senior do all that. Folks, for 2,800, or for 2,800 episodes, we're growing so fast, 48 new shows a month. 28 episodes, 16 years who bring in the Chris Foss show, a lot of the most amazing minds on it that make you brilliant, smarter, improve the quality of your life. We don't bring people on the show that are here to ruin your life.

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Starting point is 00:01:30 We have an amazing young man on the show today. We're going to be talking about his insights. We're going to talk about one of my favorite subjects. I wrote a book on it called Beacons Leadership. And we're going to talk about leadership today. One of my favorite subjects because we need better quality leadership in this world. Today we are joined by an amazing young man, Max Martina. He is the president of Cambridge Leadership Associates, the leading consultancy on Change Leadership

Starting point is 00:01:55 founded at Harvard. I'm sorry, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is also a partner in the executive advisory firm Knopf Singer Group, where he works with C-suite and board-level executives. Max's leadership consulting spans public and private sectors. He's worked extensively with PE and VC groups with senior leaders at large companies and Fortune 500 companies including PepsiCo, IHG, Microsoft, Pfizer, Amgen, and Intel. And for various public sector organizations such as the United Nations and ComEd,

Starting point is 00:02:29 the largest utility district in North America. His work brings him to multiple continents speaking and working regularly with large groups and teams. He has been featured in the range of media outlets such as CNN, NPR, and MSNBC. And he brings two decades' worth of corporate management startup experience to his decades-long practice of working with his executives. And he reaches the pinnacle of his career in appearances on the Chris Foss Show. Welcome to your show. How are you, Max? Chris, pleasure and pleasure to be with you.

Starting point is 00:02:58 love your show and I have to say that you called me a young man, which is very flattering since I'm almost 50. A trick to learn from Carson. That's right. Carson taught me that trick. You always, always gas up your guest because you want to feel good and great. Brilliant.

Starting point is 00:03:11 Oh, it lights everyone up. So flattery will get me everywhere, basically, is how. I think that's the name of the podcast. And we've had lots of people from CNN, NPR, and MSNBC on, so you're joined by a wonderful crew of guests. So, Max, give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the internet?

Starting point is 00:03:27 Sure. Yeah, great. Our website is Cambridge-leadership.com. Cambridge, like Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Cambridge, UK is important. Leadership. Leadership. Let's get into it. Give us a 30,000 overview, what you do there. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:41 So Cambridge Leadership Associates was founded in the wake of 9-11, actually, when the world was turning upside down quite quickly. And the founders of adaptive leadership said, hey, these tools, ideas, and frameworks can help organizations scale, grow, and evolve live. time to make radical changes in the way we show up and move through the world. And fundamentally, that comes down to leadership. How do individuals and organizations facilitate the success of others? So we work with teams and organizations, large companies and small alike, private, private equity, venture capital, all the way to public companies and some nonprofits actually do the difficult work of helping them navigate complex issues. Why is leadership, we were talking before the show, you said leadership's kind of having a hot

Starting point is 00:04:26 moment right now. Why is it getting a new focus and maybe important in in 2026? Yeah, I think, Chris, probably as many of your guests will attest, you know, leadership is almost always a hot topic, but right now in the world with burgeoning AI, massive complexity in the marketplace of ideas, but even massive complexity in technological innovation, we are, I think humanity is outpacing its ability to respond systematically to the complexity that that exists. And so, The antidote to that in most cases is what we would think of as leadership. How do you facilitate the success of people to do that complex work? And so a lot of people have been calling and asking and say,

Starting point is 00:05:08 hey, give us your thumbnail on how you help organizations think about this. And, you know, unfortunately, a lot of the old ways of thinking about leadership really aren't particularly valid. Most of that is based on trade theory. Most of the books that are sold in the marketplace of ideas revolve around trade theory. and unfortunately it doesn't work. Yeah, trade theory is not particularly effective. Now, what is trade theory?

Starting point is 00:05:32 Give us some foundational definition on that, if you would. Well, it's a little bit like, look, if you study some of the great ambassadors of leadership, in the United States, we think of Abraham Lincoln as a paragon of leadership, right? And so therefore, to be an effective leader, you have to be honest. Right? So that would be trade theory, right? And you distill the essential characteristics or qualities of an individual.

Starting point is 00:05:53 And then you extrapolate and say, well, then that is what. makes a good leader. But unfortunately, it's not always true. There are times, I mean, if you're an HR executive in today's corporate environment and someone asks you for the truth, you can't always share the truth, right? So being honest is not necessarily requisite in the context of what is required in the moment. So unfortunately, traits are an insufficient way to evaluate and guide leadership conversations. Let me ask you about that to kind of, we'll drill that point home a little bit. You I've been guilty of lying to my employees to lead them and give them a vision. And a lot of times as the leader, you have a vision of going places and you set that goal and you try and set that and you set that course on your ship.

Starting point is 00:06:41 But you can't see the shore. And sometimes you're just kind of going on your business acumen of your toolkit and your experience and your intuition. And there are times when you're wrong, dead wrong. But you know, you look at like Steve Jobs when he set out to create the iPhone. I mean, they were trying to put, I know, 12 different physical devices into a flat, tiny phone, and then make it a touchscreen on top of it, which no one had never really done at that size. And, you know, he was telling people that it could be done. Well, I mean, even, you know, one of my friends was on that group who built the iPhone.

Starting point is 00:07:21 and even at the time of the presentation of the iPhone, it wasn't working properly. It was a miracle that it didn't crash on the third movement he used on it. He was supposed to switch phones and he didn't. I think people know that story from documentaries now. Yeah, that's great. But it was the one time that it worked beyond three apps being opened or two apps being opened. It hadn't ever worked before that.

Starting point is 00:07:45 And they were sitting in the, the crew was sitting in the audience going, we're all getting fired tomorrow. It's never going to work. But that's an example of, you know, setting this kind of, you know, Ted Kennedy sending the goal to go to the moon. That could have failed horribly. You know, there's one instance where the three astronauts died and the train down to go to the moon. Yep. So, you know, so sometimes you do got a, I don't know, white lies.

Starting point is 00:08:11 Is that maybe a better way? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the questions that you're actually asking is what is required to get us from point A to point B, right? If you're a boat in the ocean, you need, obviously you need a, you need ballast. You need something that holds you to the ocean so that the waves don't toss you and turn you sideways. So we think a lot about purpose and the orienting value and focus of purpose in organizational life. But I think one of the things that your question is really pointing us to is fundamentally, particularly like if you're walking or working with your own employees, fundamentally it's about behavior, isn't it? It's about what you do and what you execute to get from point A to point B. So we think of behavior really is the primary fuel for moving organizations and people along that course.

Starting point is 00:08:55 And obviously, that course is sometimes winding and not linear or not direct. And so the behavior needs to change. And I think this is the really interesting thing about leadership styles and approaches. It has to change. You talked about jobs. I heard this story firsthand from a guy named Panos Pan who was leading Microsoft's hardware division, or actually was doing peripherals. And then this was back in the bomber days.

Starting point is 00:09:18 Balmer asked him to create the first Microsoft Surface notebook. And we had this long conversation about how did that come to be? Well, this is back when Microsoft said, no, we're not going to, you know, we're not going to do hardware. We're software only until they change their tune. So Balmer hires him and says, look, I want you to, you got three, you got three targets. Number one, if you miss your schedule, you're fired. Number two, if you miss your budget, you're fired. And Panos Panis said, well, what's in it for me?

Starting point is 00:09:45 He said, well, number three, I won't say no. And if you look at the, if you look at the history books, that first year that the Microsoft tablet released, Microsoft lost almost a billion dollars, 998 million of revenue. So was that a failure? And then you fast forward to today. It's, you know, that product, I don't think they break out revenue. But, you know, that product is responsible for estimated $7 to $8 billion on an annual basis or more. Right. So the behavior that was required in that year span to convert a team of a thousand.

Starting point is 00:10:17 thousand people to orient around the critical vision and mission to accomplish something that hadn't been done. It's compelling. You talk about Kennedy and, you know, the man on the moon in 1969, and that, that's all the same. How do we set vision and course to move when the moving is tough? I think that's a thing that a lot of people don't think enough about. They're too tactical in their way. Yeah. Yeah. And now you guys talk about something on your website called adaptive leadership. Yeah. And is that your guys's specialty and what you bring to the table? Yeah, you got it. So adaptive leadership came out of Harvard, really in the early 80s, founded by a guy named Ron Haifitz, who was a psychologist, a medical doctor, and a musician. And one of the things that he began to realize when he was working with students is that leadership goes beyond academia into the pragmatic foundational behaviors necessary to solve complex problems. So he developed this idea, this complex set of ideas called adaptive leadership, which fundamentally spell out how and what, What are the behaviors necessary to move individuals and organizations through the complexities of difficult, disruptive environments?

Starting point is 00:11:24 The U.S. military calls that Vuka. Vucca moments, right? Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And so so much of what leadership is really requiring of us is to move in those spaces where volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity proliferate. at massive rates. So yeah, adaptive leadership is fundamentally the study of how humans, you could say single-celled organisms all the way up to humans or complex systems, do that work of adaptation, adaptation for real time. Awesome. And adaptive leadership, you've got a great breakdown of it on your website. So those who would like to read more about this, so you can do that or contact you guys. And we certainly have a lot of complex challenges, especially in the world of AI and politics and, you know, everything that's going on in our world, the challenges with, you know, we're starting to see the kind of,

Starting point is 00:12:12 I guess we're kind of in the AI layoff section of where this is going to go and there's concern if the AI thing's a little overblown and might, you know, be coming out one of those collapse. Yeah. But it's definitely affecting people. It seems like a lot of companies are doing this layoff for this thing. And, you know, people seek out great leadership. We talked about before the show about how people will leave a company, usually the number one reason people leave a company, poor leadership. So healthy, good quality leadership is something you want to employ to people.

Starting point is 00:12:44 You guys talk about 10 distinctions of adaptive leadership. Do we want to get into some of these? Yeah, we can cover a couple of them. Sure. What are some of your favorites? Well, maybe, maybe if I could just pull back for just a second, one of the things I'd like to say from a data point is, and you're right, I think AI is just beginning to showcase the amount of rapid scale change that's going to happen to all of us, particularly over the next several months. and call it a year and a half. But if you look at S&P listed companies on that index, S&P 500 index companies in 1966, the 10 year of companies was 33 years. So you'd be on that index for about 33 years. Today, it's 14 years. Oh, wow. So why is that? It's because companies

Starting point is 00:13:29 are not doing what they do, what they need to do to stay relevant and to adapt and respond to the critical changes, right? And I think it was Einstein who, and I'll paraphrase, he said, problems can't be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. So when we think, yeah, so when we think about, you know, what is leadership, fundamentally, what is adaptive leadership, I think that there is probably three or four core distinctions that are worth talking about. And it's, from my perspective, leadership is so misunderstood and that understanding these distinctions actually helps us begin to orient towards the changes necessary to move. So one of the biggest hurdles that we encounter, is that people often refer to others as leaders.

Starting point is 00:14:12 So I'll be a little provocative and say that no one is a leader. And what I mean by that is that effectively, most of us are referring to leaders as people in positions of authority. Right. And so the number one, one of the primary distinctions in leadership is that leadership is not authority. And if we understand what this means, it means that you can have a title or be high up in an organization and actually

Starting point is 00:14:37 never do anything called leading. And likewise, right, you might be further down the ladder in the food chain of organizations and do incredible work that looks like leading. I mean, think about Rosa Parks, who I got to meet years ago. You know, she had no positional authority. She had no title. And yet she did enormous work to provide leadership and move that cost forward, the civil rights movement in the 1957 Alabama bus boycott. So leadership is not authority. And then you say, well, if it's not authority, what is it? Fundamentally, it has to be about behavior. It has to be a practice. And so we often think about individuals practicing leadership, either with authority or without authority.

Starting point is 00:15:16 And so if we make these distinctions, then all of a sudden it opens this realm around understanding, hey, despite your role in the organization, what kind of agency do you have to make progress on a critical issue? And what often happens is that folks without authority, they say, well, not my job, not my problem. missed opportunity, right, missed opportunity, missed agency to make complex movement in difficult environments. So those would be, I think, I think two fundamental distinctions. One, that leadership has nothing to do with your authority and number two, well, has something to do it, but not directly.

Starting point is 00:15:51 And number two, leadership's a practice, right? And so oftentimes we think and work with our clients about going into the leadership gem. How do you train inside out and outside in to do the work of leadership, to build, the capacity to actually lead. That's complex. That's complex work, behavioral work. Why do you think adaptive leadership is the best form of leadership? What other forms are there out there? And why do you feel this adaptive thing works the best? Well, when we think about leadership more broadly, I think we talked a little bit about trait theory. We talked, we haven't talked about servant models of

Starting point is 00:16:27 leadership. All good, all good. Fundamentally, when we think about making a difference in the world, of making progress on complex issues, it fundamentally requires change. So how do we change our behavior? I gave you a silly metaphor before the show, right? If you brush your teeth with your right hand, chances are you'll normally brush your teeth with your right hand. Are you right-handed or left-handed?

Starting point is 00:16:49 Right. Right. So from a predictive lens, chances are tomorrow night you're going to brush your teeth with your right hand. Same is true for leadership, right? It's actually not that complex. But what happens if the organization, whether it's the UN, right, or the U.S. government or a large conglomerate or a corporation,

Starting point is 00:17:07 what if brushing your teeth with your right hand no longer works? Well, then we have to adapt. We have to change our behavior fundamentally, right? So how easy is it to change our behavior? I mean, I think that's a fundamental question that we help executives think through. You know, if you say, well, no problem. I'll brush my teeth with my left hand. You know, I challenge you to do that.

Starting point is 00:17:28 Really complex, really difficult. Yeah. Without purpose, we typically give up after a couple tries, right? That's true. So purpose is as a real thing to keep us driving and moving towards then. Yeah, absolutely. It's so critical as an anchoring foundation for focus. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:45 I was going to add that one of the things that detracts us from purpose, we talk a lot about change, you know, well, change is hard. But actually, change isn't really that hard. You know, like if I hand you a lottery ticket worth a couple million, And you know, do you take the ticket? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think most people do, right?

Starting point is 00:18:04 Yeah. But the reality is statistically, particularly if it's worth 300 million, statistically you have greater likelihood of, you know, premature death, of divorce, of bankruptcy, ironically, right? And so you say, well, would you still take the ticket? Yeah. Because the lottery ticket represents gain. Right.

Starting point is 00:18:22 So the thing that we think about in organizational life and change is change that brings with it a sense of loss. And so a lot of people, they're not so much responding or reacting to change. They're reacting to the loss that comes from change. Now, this sounds like a heady intellectual distinction, but it's really profound. Because if executives and leaders and organizations, I use that word, even though I just, you know, teased about using that word, if individuals who have authority in organizations that are attempting to lead, you know, if they're not understanding what the losses are incurred in the organization, then no one moves forward.

Starting point is 00:18:58 Yeah. Yeah. Well, if everyone's going, la, la, la, la, see no evil, hear no evil, you know, we're ignoring the failures, then, I mean, it's just really going to crash, right? Yeah, we, we, I think it's, I think it's really risky, actually, to ignore the losses that come from complex change. So you think a lot about, we think a lot about organizations. We worked with one organization that is a quasi-government, public sector, private sector

Starting point is 00:19:25 organization that was sponsored by the largest U.S. banks, federal government said to the banks, look, we have cybersecurity issues, right? If you don't solve this, we're going to create a government entity to do this. And they said, no, no, no, we'll do it ourselves. We'll figure it out. So they created this agency to effectively take all of the cybersecurity threat data from the banks, interface it with the cyber risk data from NSA, FBI, CIA, anonymize the data. And that's and then feed it back to the banks to actually prevent cyber threat. Can you imagine the complexity of that level of work of integration across agencies, across competing banks to share the data, the risks associated with data?

Starting point is 00:20:07 So, you know, that's an interesting experience for us because complexity drove the need to adapt across trade role in private agencies. That would be an example of how we sometimes work with organizations to bridge that gap on the losses that are. Oh, wow. You know, leadership is so important. Servant leadership seems to have been something to determine this to become popular. Do you think that adaptive leadership is very different? But what are your thoughts comparatively between adaptive leadership and service?

Starting point is 00:20:38 Yeah, I mean, I think servant leadership became pretty popular in the 60s and 70s. And even now, today, you know, a lot of folks think and orient towards this idea of service as a critical element of leadership. But fundamentally, when we think about the problems that our world is facing and faced with, sometimes being of service is insufficient to solve complex problems. And I think this is where maybe a critical third distinction of adaptive leadership comes in. And that is this idea that not all problems are created equal. Right. So if you're driving down the road, here's a metaphor, right?

Starting point is 00:21:15 You're driving down the road and you get a flat tire. You know, you don't need a leadership guru or a consultant, right? you need a mechanic or you need someone with the specialized knowledge to repair a flat tire, right? So that's what we would call a technical problem. And most problems have at their core a foundation of technical problems. And for all you need, in those cases, is an expert. You need someone with a technical competence to solve the problem. But what happens if the problem is much more complex, right?

Starting point is 00:21:45 What happens if the very people who need to solve the problem are part of the problem? I've seen some leaders like that. Yeah. Well, leaders and followers and people in systems whereby, you know, you simply can't make progress because, you know, I have a lot to lose. And so I'm not engaged on that topic, right? Yeah. I'm thinking about what we call complex adaptive problems, right?

Starting point is 00:22:09 And adaptive problems require fundamentally a change in how we show up to the problem. They require a change in the way we think about the problem. And what's at stake of the problem? And so, for example, you know, for those that adhere to global warming and the science that comes out about that, if you've ever flown on an airplane, right, then you're part of the problem of global warming or at least CO2 emissions, right? Yeah. So how do you change? How do you change your own behavior to become part of the solution? How do enterprises and organizations and societies, civil societies do that complex work? It's multi-scaler, it's multi-dimensional and it's frankly not for the faint of heart. Yeah. A lot of people would rather just, you know, put a patch on it.

Starting point is 00:22:52 Fix the tire. Doesn't work like that, though. It doesn't really work like that. We seem to do that with a lot of things in life these days. Wow. Isn't it great? Keep on going going. It's great when we can do it too.

Starting point is 00:23:04 Yeah. It's a great one. That simple technical fix. They're like that, that spare little wheel that you get. I'm sure that'll hold up. Let's go back to 120 miles an hour. Spot on.

Starting point is 00:23:13 Easy, right? As long as it gets us from point A to point B. Now, I remember, I remember where we were when I was asked the question, You were talking about the gym and how we need to think of leadership maybe as going back to the gym. I was making a joke. Oh, wow, cool. That's what I need is a second gym that I have to go over.

Starting point is 00:23:31 But, I mean, really, I mean, you're doing mental. How would we phrase this in the gym? You're doing mental workouts or leadership development. How many of these weights do I got to lift to be a good leader? Yeah, great question. Great question. Yeah. And I think it comes down to not just the types of weights that we ask people to lift,

Starting point is 00:23:52 but fundamentally over time, how consistent are you in this, right? So if you're training for a marathon and day one on the track, your coach says, hey, let's go out, Chris, and run a 76-mile ultra. And you never train before. You'd say, well, you tear your Achilles, you'd be out of lock, right? And likewise, if you're if your trainer said, well, Chris, we're going to train for the marathon, first thing I want you to do every day this week, once a day, just walk around your house once. But also insufficient to train for a marathon.

Starting point is 00:24:24 So fundamentally, what are you actually stretching? To develop leadership capacity, what are you actually doing? And I think there's a few things that we're talking about. In other words, what are the equivalent leadership weights that we have to lift in order to develop our capacity to lead, right? To practice leadership. You know, one of those is what we call a diagnostic mindset. A diagnostic mindset. So can you actually understand the source of the problem, the complexity of the problem, the multiple stakeholders that are involved at a problem? Can you diagnose and think deeply about the scale of the problem, the resources required, the constraints that exist, right? A lot of people who, particularly at the executive levels, are thinking this way, are able to do that diagnostic work. Because when we do that work, we understand the problem. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:12 You understand, right, more deeply, the nature of what needs to be solved. And so that would be one example where how do we help individuals practice that? We help them become diagnostic through direct practice and work. You know, another would be the power of experimentation. So if you want to practice leadership, you have to try new things. The reason you have to try new things is because complex problems don't have a solution. Right. And so in order to find the solution, we have to become experimental in our approach to solving the problem.

Starting point is 00:25:44 Unfortunately, for most of our professional lives, we're rewarded and compensated for getting the right answer. But when you deal with a complex, wicked, or adaptive problem, there is no answer. Or the answer is not clear. So in order to solve that problem, we have to experiment. So executives that practice leadership, any of us, that practice leadership, could stand a benefit by becoming more experience. in our approach. You can't fix the problem unless you know what the problem is and you can't, you know, come up with a remedy, at least the correct remedy. You know, if you think you assume you know what the problem is, you're going to go off on the thing. And the next step is taking the steps that you've talked about there.

Starting point is 00:26:24 Yeah. And, you know, do a lot of leaders have this as a natural format? I mean, one of the things I'm always shocked about and tell me what you find in your interaction with leaders is I'm just amazed at how many of them don't have a conscious awareness of what their leadership style is. or how they're applying their leadership or sometimes whether it's effective or not. I mean, you know, some leaders are like, well, everyone tells me how great I am is the leader, so I'm sure it's working fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I think you're pointing to something that's often in short supply, which is what we would call self-awareness.

Starting point is 00:26:59 So in this realm of leadership development, right, there's both inside outwork, meaning, you got to understand your limits if you're going to train of the gym. You're not going to go in and bench press 400 pounds unless you know you have that capacity, right? I know that I had two hernies from the chair. Well, that's right. It's painful, right? That wasn't the hard way. It's painful, yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:18 So you got to have that self-awareness. I think, you know, at the senior executive level, certainly in public companies, there's an expectation that leaders, people practicing leadership, have that awareness. But there's also the critical piece of doing what's required for the system for the organization, not what, not what they want to do, right? Meaning what is the, what is the entity or the company or the organism actually need to move to the next stage of growth, right? Not, not what is it within my wheelhouse to do or what is my skill set or ability to provide, but what is the entity need to move us forward?

Starting point is 00:27:55 And sometimes those don't match, right? If you don't have the self-awareness and you know you can't lift 400 pounds, but someone's got to lift 400 pounds to get us there, cross the bridge, well, my gosh, we have a, we have a disconnect, right? And so filling that gap becomes really important. Yeah. Now, when you say that, when you say, what is the entity need? Is that a whole, is that a definition of the whole of the organization, like the employees, the company itself? Like some people might go, what is the entity? Well, we need to increase returns on shareholders. So, yeah, employees and let's go. Yeah, yeah, spot on. So when we think about leadership, we think about, well, a technical term

Starting point is 00:28:33 would be units of analysis. So are you thinking about an individual deploying leadership or a team within an organization deploying leadership or the organization itself leading in an industry or field? And so you can look at any of those interchangeably, actually, and think about them across the spectrum of what necessary behavior is required, right? How does the individual need to act? How does the team need to act? How does the organization need to act? And that is a really powerful question. right? Because if what's required to get us to point B from point A goes beyond the current capacity, right? If it's an individual and you're at the gym, maybe you don't have the muscular capacity or endurance. If you're the team, maybe you don't have the competence or expertise. If you're an organization,

Starting point is 00:29:19 maybe you don't have the innovation or bandwidth or market focus or market penetration, then somehow something has to change to get us there. Yeah. And that becomes the missing link for a lot of organizations, particularly as I think about, innovation, scale, and disruption, which increasingly is faster and more complex. Yeah. And it just keeps getting faster, too, which is much faster. Yeah, the rate of change is actually accelerating. Yeah, especially with AI.

Starting point is 00:29:48 Like, I was keeping up until AI and now I just feel like I'm just being whipped. Yeah. Along. You and me both. And so so much of what we need to do, particularly to stay relevant in the 21st century, is adapt our own skill sets. to the tremendous extraordinary opportunities that AI presents, but also to the massive commoditization of data that's going to happen, right?

Starting point is 00:30:14 And so, you know, I think AI is bringing us into a future where, you know, while data is commoditized, you know, human interaction will be prioritized. You know, the arts, entertainment become even more important. Human connection and community become more important. So in that sense, you know, I think AI, accelerates the need for additional leadership. It doesn't diminish it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:38 I mean, it's, do you find a lot of leaders are self-aware? Like, it's kind of, it's kind of interesting because you do get stuck in modes of being a leader where you're like, hey, I know my toolbox.

Starting point is 00:30:49 This thing always works. You know, I do this, that, the other. But self-awareness, I mean, like I said,

Starting point is 00:30:55 I talked to a lot of leaders. I'm like, how do you lead? And what is, do you have a conscious awareness of whether it's effective and your feedback and yada, yada, yada. And it seems like a lot of people don't. They just kind of lead. Yeah. We talk a lot of on the show about how it seems like whenever a company wants to throw someone into leadership, you know, from maybe the employees coming up the ranks,

Starting point is 00:31:15 they don't really give them leadership training. They just go, ah, you have leadership abilities. We saw the abilities in your performance and how you are. So go do that leadership thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. We use a model called the ship from one to many, which I think identifies exactly what you're talking about, right? The shift from one to many. You got it. The idea that, you know, particularly early on in our careers, whether we're a pizza delivery guy, right, or a specialist at a lab or delivering newspapers back in the day, you know, you're rewarded

Starting point is 00:31:49 and incentivized based on your output, based on your expertise, right? And so typically companies would say, wow, Chris, great job, you know, back there on the chef's line cooking. now we want to make you the head chef, right? Well, that's a different skill set. Yeah. Than a sous chef or a prep chef, right? Very different skill sets. So inevitably what happens is, you know, you're promoted and elevated,

Starting point is 00:32:11 but you may not have the relational skill set required to actually do this thing called leader, leading, right? And so there's often a disconnect for executives. The other side of the coin, though, is that we're really fortunate and privileged to work with really exceptional people. And I think by and large, you know, exceptional people continue to rank up. People understand that their capacity to lead, you know, transcends their ability to execute. In fact, execution is now measured by their ability to galvanize others around, you know,

Starting point is 00:32:41 purpose and vision and outcome and deliverables. So instead of managing execution, they're managing teams of teams executing, right? And that is a different skill set. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. It's like I found that when I was trying to, you know, one of the first big promotional mistakes I made was I tried to make one of my best salesmen, a sales manager. He thought he could try too. And it bombed horribly. I mean, why did it bomb? Tell me why. I mean, he had the skills to be great at sales. And it's a very selfish sort of mindset, right? You know, you're focused on you and your performance and your numbers and your commissions and yada, yada. But when you have to be a manager, you're not so much focused on yourself. And you're not trying to convince people. Well, I mean, You're still trying to convince people and sell to them. But a lot of people have a hard time with it because, you know, they really are, like you said, two different skill sets.

Starting point is 00:33:37 You got it. Well, you just articulated the baseline understanding of the shift from one of many. And so we talk about that first stage of development really being the me phase, right? And there's nothing wrong with it. It's really admirable. It's about execution and performance and output. But as you say, there comes a point where me has to transition. to us, right? And us has to transition to letting go. We have to actually do the difficult work

Starting point is 00:34:03 of building capacity within teams. So when you promote a sales guy to a management role, you've got to make sure that, you know, that they can transcend the sales function and actually lead people do the work of building their capacity. So in many ways, right, leadership has more to do with when we say building capacity. We're really talking about institutionalizing learning, institutionalizing knowledge, right? And so people, that can almost democratize learning, support curiosity, engage in institutional change, those are the folks that tend to gravitate towards higher and higher levels of deployed leadership, at least in context where it's really, really impactful, right?

Starting point is 00:34:43 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, a learning organization is really important. I kind of learned that from Peter Senge in the fifth of the last one. And that's one of my favorite books. And when I started creating my companies, I, you know, I sat down right. immediately with culture.

Starting point is 00:35:00 And I was like, okay, what culture do you want to build? What rules do we want to have that help try and create a learning organization? And much like he's spouse to the fifth discipline. And so we had different rules like the only, the stupid, the only stupid question is the unasked question. And that was one of the rules, one of our, I don't know, our little axioms to keep us in a learning organization to let people know that it was safe to ask questions if they didn't understand something because, you know, that guy who kind of dozed away or fell asleep was

Starting point is 00:35:32 looking at his phone in training who breaks the $30,000 machine, you know, if he's not sure about the training he got or his questions, you want him to ask him before he breaks the $30,000 machine. And so, and I've been in organizations when I was very young where you didn't want to raise your hand and go, I don't fully understand something because you would get mocked, you get, you know, flogged and people put you on the like, you know, we don't need to promote this guy. He's a moron. He doesn't get it. And, you know, everyone has different types of learning and education, visual, auditory, tactile or whatever. And so, you know, we wanted everybody to feel it was safe to ask.

Starting point is 00:36:11 You know, so if somebody asked me a question, now, if you're asking me the same question five times in a row, then you're not learning, right? Yeah. Then we got to look at you. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably on my communications program. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:24 Well, Chris, even your show, right, which is really about learning is, and I always think of, you know, psychologists call that psychological safety. That's been the big thing lately. How do we create environments, holding environments where there are the conditions where the seeds can grow? And I think that's absolutely true and requisite to support, you know, effective learning in organizations. But it's also risky, actually, to integrate knowledge and to learn, to learn. because to learn means that we actually have to change behavior.

Starting point is 00:36:53 Learning means that you've demonstrated the integration of knowledge into behavior from my perspective. So what we expect in organizational life is for executives and senior leadership teams to actually do the work of learning, which is to say take the insight, leverage it into a behavior, and then use the behavior to experiment in new ways that create new results. If we don't have that, if we don't have real results, new results, then the effort, the effort is wasted. And there's a lot of conversation in corporate circles around the difference between, you know, effort and results. You got to have results. You got to have, you got to have results. And if the results aren't there, then no amount of effort matters.

Starting point is 00:37:34 If it's just effort with no results, you know, there's a problem too. Definitely problem. Yeah. What are some of the things we should talk about before we round out the show? How can people onboard with you? What do your clients look like? Do they need to have a net worth? Do they have a certain position in organizations?

Starting point is 00:37:53 Tell us about how clients are on board with you. Yeah, great. Thanks. So the interesting thing about leadership is that, you know, you can be like we are based in the city of Seattle. We started in Harvard out of Harvard and then moved to New York City, but we're based in Seattle now. That doesn't seem to matter who we work with.

Starting point is 00:38:11 But the interesting thing about leadership is that, you know, you can be running a large nonprofit or head up a UN agency or be a Fortune 100 company, leadership is still required. Right. Leadership is still required. So typically, we work with organizations that can afford us, for starters. So that usually rules out the really small organizations, unless there's a nonprofit support effort that we try to try to give out pro bono work. But typically, people engage with us often through the site, through the platform conversations

Starting point is 00:38:40 that we have across different media, including social media as well. And oftentimes the inbound just filters through because there's a complex problem that an organization is faced with. They're thinking about scale. They're thinking about growth at scale. They're thinking about the massive disruption that they're not able to navigate and they're thinking about growth. And so those conversations almost always revolve around leadership. How can senior executives, typically those at the peak of the organization, create the conditions by which their entity can move forward? and grow and learn. And so we get a lot of, we get a lot of work through word of mouth and through the efficacy and impact of our work with, you know, public sector clients and some private

Starting point is 00:39:22 sector clients. But, you know, it's, it's really a privilege to do this work. Every, every journey, every experience is different. Every market is different, you know, and we've been lucky enough to work across, you know, arts and entertainment, to tech, like I said, Microsoft, to pharmaceuticals. All of those, even though the operating environment might be slightly different. leadership is leadership is leadership, right? Yeah. We still need that and the behaviors relate to core tenants of what we can practice. So yeah, I encourage anyone who has an interest to reach out through our website.

Starting point is 00:39:55 We actually got a new website coming up here pretty soon. It's going to be right. Yeah, every next week or so. So we're going forward to it. And there's different resources you have on the website, continue learning case study, videos, blog. You can read about adaptive leadership, it's principles, it's metrics. And there's lots of different stuff you have on here.

Starting point is 00:40:12 You've got adaptive consulting. online learning, keynote, leadership training, assessments, executive coaching, I think I may have said that, and certifications. Tell us about the certifications. What do they do? Yeah, we actually have, well, maybe I'll speak to the diagnostics section. So you talk about self-awareness as being so important. A lot of our work is really in helping executives, mid-level, but also senior executives, understand where they operate and the location, sort of geolocate their own abilities and capacities. It'd be like having a personal trainer do a fitness test, right? Hey, let's lift a few things.

Starting point is 00:40:46 Let's put you on the treadmill, see how far you can go so we can get a baseline of where you're at. So we do a little bit of diagnostic work in the world of psychology. Those are called psychometric assessments. We have a couple of our own. And then we offer certifications for folks in adaptive leadership, both on the assessment side, as well as in the training. One of the ways that we think about teaching and education and work with senior executives

Starting point is 00:41:09 that's different is that it has to be experiential. It has to be lived and experienced. And so a lot of what our work concludes is what we call case in point teaching. And so that's actually leveraging the fundamental challenges that an executive team might be dealing with to showcase the critical elements of what we know and think about in terms of leadership. So we use a lot of that case and point teaching and we certify folks in that methodology. Get your certifications, folks, and all that good stuff. So give us your dot coms as we go out so people can find you guys on the interwebs. Yeah, thanks, Chris. It's Cambridge-Hifen Leadership.com. C-A-M-B-R-I-D-G-E-Hifen Leadership.com.

Starting point is 00:41:50 Well, thank you very much for coming to the show. Very insightful. And I'm going to do more reading on your website here about this adaptive leadership and all this stuff. And, you know, being conscious and aware of how you are as a leader, self-aware, it's really important. Self-accountability, self-awareness. If you're not, you're just kind of operating your own little. private bubble, your own Iowa. Yeah, agreed, Chris. Well, thanks for having me. And as we think about, you know, folks moving forward in their leadership journey, you know, I'd encourage them to do the

Starting point is 00:42:18 difficult work of changing some of their own behavior. Yeah. I mean, changing behavior is hard, but if you can learn to do it, you know, I've had to do that throughout my career where I've had to go, you know, I could be a better boss. And I mean, you know, working on some of these things here. And, you know, I am the problem. Maybe that's the thing, you know. extent. Time to brush our teeth with our non-downant hand, right? Yeah, maybe I should learn to do that. You know, I'm constantly learning new skills. What was the new skill I learned recently? Oh, I started, I've been on TRT, testosterone placement theory for two years.

Starting point is 00:42:51 And I just started doing my own self-injecting and doing it at home instead of going to the clinic. And boy, I had to learn needlework and basically had to be a nurse, I guess, technically. Not really, but, but, you know, doing the needlework and self-injecting. And I'm like, this is not the skill I wanted to learn. I still don't want to learn it. But it's either that or else I get up extra 400 to. Well, but think about, I mean, having learned that, it's like learning a language. You build new capacity.

Starting point is 00:43:18 Yeah. And that's, you know, I was telling my nephew this the other day. He was getting any of playing some video games. And I told him, I said, here's something that I didn't figure out until I was my age. So I'm going to share it with you since you're in your 20s. All life is, from the moment you wake up. to the moment you go to sleep is problem solving. Everything is a problem.

Starting point is 00:43:39 You have to solve it. And some people, they see certain problems and they just see them as really big and they're like, oh, God, this problem. It's like, no, you're solving problems all day long,

Starting point is 00:43:48 you know? The alarm clock rings and I have to solve a problem that I got to go impressing people and say hello and talk to people. Yeah. Some mornings I don't want to. Yeah. I'd rather just lay in bed and it's nice and warm cozy here. But you got to solve problems.

Starting point is 00:44:01 Because if you don't, laying in bed creates new problems you're going to have to solve, right? Yeah, you got it. At the risk of going too long here, I have a friend who's a cardiovascular surgeon, and she called me up one day depressed. And she said, you know, I want to give this up because after I operate on a patient, I go into their room and I say, Mr. Ms. Patient, to live a long, healthy life, you got to quit smoking, get exercise, reduce stress and change your diet. And she said, how many Max do you think can actually make that wholesale change? I said, I don't know, 70%. She said, no, no, on all four accounts, 15%.

Starting point is 00:44:34 15%. She said about 50% will make two of those changes. But it's hard. It's really hard. Losing weight change, it's hard. It's really helped me to accept the fact that change is inevitable. One of my favorite lines from the Rush album, I believe it's Tom Sawyer, the song,

Starting point is 00:44:54 He knows change is inevitable or changes constant, something out of effect. I think there's some wordplay in there. somewhere. But that's one of the axioms I've always raised on. But once I discovered this thing where you're always problem solving, I mean, I've joked about, this kind of was epiphany eye on the show one day where I realized that being a CEO or an entrepreneur, especially an entrepreneur, you're just problem solving all day long. That's all you're doing. You're just putting out fires, problem solving, trying to make sure if you fire is so okay. That's all you're doing. And I think I got it from the guy. There was a guy who's in his 60s, probably almost 70.

Starting point is 00:45:27 he does a TikTok channel where he sells high-end jets, private jets to really high-end individuals. He's been doing all of his life since he was very young. And he goes, you know, the funny thing is, as I go through my day, he goes, that's all I'm doing is solving problems. And he goes, the interesting thing is you would think after like 40 years of doing this, you know, you'd just be like, okay, well, here's how you solve that, you just do it, whatever. He goes, but there's always new problems. There's new technology. There's new this. There's new issues.

Starting point is 00:45:59 The client's payment thing go through. There's all sorts of complexities that can happen. And that's all you do all day long is just solve problems. And he goes, it's amazing that after 40 years, there's new ones. That's amazing. Yeah. So I just think of it that way. It's like there's always going to be problems.

Starting point is 00:46:14 You're always going to have to solve problems. Get used to it. Don't cry. He's crying. Love it. Yeah. And what does it take to build the capacity to solve ever increasingly complex problems, right? It's a muscle.

Starting point is 00:46:26 It's a muscle. And a lot of us say, too heavy a lift, I don't want it. Yeah. Well, I'm a changer and a lifter because I've learned if you don't grow and you don't change, you know, that you die. So that's an old adage in business. If you're not, business isn't growing. Same thing for leadership. If you're not growing, that's where you see people like Bill Gates, some of the people that read books all the time.

Starting point is 00:46:47 Like Bill Gates, like I don't think there's, you can catch a photo of him where he doesn't have a book in his hand. Like I've seen him on a boat, like a sailboat on a beautiful, He's got a book he's reading. And I'm like, you're in a beautiful harbor on a sailboat, right? But, you know, I mean, that's the axiom of some of the most successful people in the world. They're always journaling. They're always writing. They're always reading.

Starting point is 00:47:09 They're always educating because you just can never know everything. Well, as Darwin coined the phrase, although he didn't actually say it, adapt or die, right? Yeah, adapt or die. It's a survival game. That's all life is. Survival, and you just dodge the incoming meteors. Well, hopefully we can move to thriving and not just surviving, but I get your point. Yeah, I agree.

Starting point is 00:47:29 Now I'm just going to dodge the AI Terminator box as I run around my little oozy. Good luck. It's going to be hard to do. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll be underground. I saw the movie Terminator. That was a documentary, evidently. So I'm learning how to do that.

Starting point is 00:47:45 If anybody naked ever shows up, it appears in a bright, white, light run. That's the other Terminator lesson. Yeah, nonfiction. Unless it's me. I tend to shine since I'm so white and pasty. Anyway, thank you very much, Max, for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it. Great, Chris. Thanks a lot.

Starting point is 00:48:01 Thank you. And thanks for honest for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, foreshest, Christchristch, Christvost, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, YouTube.com, Fortresschchris Foss, be good to each other or else. Don't maybe pull the car over in there and come back there. We'll see you guys next time. Or else?

Starting point is 00:48:18 You've been listening to the most amazing, intelligent podcast ever made to improve your brain and your life. Warning. Consuming too much of the Chris Walsh Show podcast can lead to people thinking you're smarter, younger, and irresistible sexy. Consume in regularly moderated amounts. Consult a doctor for any resulting brain bleed. There we go, Max.

Starting point is 00:48:41 Great show.

The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Max Martina on Mastering Adaptive Leadership for Complex Challenges in Modern Business

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