The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Create Big Life-Changing Growth by Susan J. Ashford

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Create Big Life-Changing Growth by Susan J. Ashford A leadership and learning expert shows you how to change your behavior, develop soft skills, and achieve personal and professional growth through a series of small experiments she calls “Flexing.” A personnel shift at your organization puts you into a leadership role you don't feel prepared for. Your boss tells you that you seem aloof and unapproachable in client meetings. You need to win the support of the members of a local community group for a project you feel passionate about. Addressing these diverse issues depends on improving your soft skills—such as time management, team building, communication and listening, creative thinking, and problem-solving. But this isn’t as easy as it may seem. Sue Ashford, the chair of the Management and Organizations group at the Ross School of Business, has the solution. In this timely book, she introduces Flexing—a technique individuals, teams, and entire organizations can use to learn, grow, and develop their skills and knowledge with every new project, work assignment, and problem. Flexing empowers you to embrace any challenge and adapt to any change, yielding practical, valuable takeaways that ensure growth. Flexing helps you move ahead when you’re confronted with a new challenge, or simply want to develop a vital skill. It’s a journey that begins with setting a flex goal—stating explicitly what you want to learn and how you want to grow. Once that flex goal is set, you then begin to run experiments, solicit feedback from peers or colleagues, and monitor and tweak your progress on the way to achieving your goal. Flexing can be tailored to each person, allowing you to reflect on your own experiences and incorporate the lessons you learn in the next project you tackle. It’s a growth mindset that will help you become the best version of yourself. Flexing also works with teams and organizations. Ashford teaches small groups and large how to implement flexing to ensure their members are ready for new challenges. With more people moving to remote working full-time and developing new ways of collaborating in teams, this warm and practical guide will help every professional and any organization on the journey to greater effectiveness.

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. 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 roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with a great podcast other than my cracking voice thank you welcome welcome to another show chris voss show hey guys go to youtube.com for chest chris voss hit the bell notification button you see all the wonderful things we're doing over there all the wonderful

authors are reviewing things we're reviewing products all that good stuff you can see it all and it's free for an unlimited time as long as at least google or youtube's in business so go check it out because why not i'll give you something to do during the day. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrist. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all the places those crazy kids are at. I don't think we have a Snapchat, though.

I have a Snapchat, but the show doesn't. But I don't know. We're just not really into that whole thing. But go see all the other places. I think we just lost the Snap crowd. Oh, darn it. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out.

It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now

wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com.

So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing author. She is Susan J. Ashford. She is the author of the new book coming out October 5th, 2021. You're going to want to pre-order it so you can be the first one on your blog or book club to see you read it. The Power of Flexing. How to use small daily experiments to create big, life-changing, gross. This sounds like something we could all use, including me. She is the Michael and Susan Jandernoa Professor in the Management and

Organizations Group at University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business. She was previously on the faculty of the Tuck School of Business and College, and received her MS and PhD degrees from Northwestern University. Sue's passion is using her teaching and research work to help people to be maximally effective in their work lives with an emphasis on self-leadership, proactivity, change from below, and leadership in its development. She teaches across several programs at the Ross School in the Leading Women's,

I'm sorry, Leading Women Executives Program of the Corporate Leadership Center for various companies. She's an award-winning scholar and having published papers in fields, best journals in the areas of leadership development and leader effectiveness, middle management, voice, and issue-selling, job insecurity, and individual productivity. And what do you know? She's joined us here today. Welcome to the show, Sue.

How are you? I'm doing great. Very happy to be here. Happy to talk about the book and other topics related to leadership. There you go. Congratulations on the book. Books are a lot of hard work, especially the editing part and picking out the covers and that stuff. So welcome to the show and give us your plug so people can find you on

the interwebs. Yeah, you can find me at susanashford.com, probably the best way. And that'll give you access to places where you can purchase the book. And there you go. There you go. What motivated you want to sit down and write this book? Yeah. So I've been teaching would-be leaders for years. And one of the things we know from leadership development is that a lot of people figure out how to lead through the experiences they're having. And if you talk to people at the very best and top leadership, they'll say a lot of what I learned, I just learned through the experiences I had along the way. And a co-author and I at the time said, that's really interesting, but there's nothing inherent in any experience that teaches anybody anything. It really matters how you walk through it and whether you're good at picking up the

lessons of experience or not. And so I developed this framework of a set of seven practices that if you engage in these, you're going to learn a lot more. Oh, wow. Yeah. And then in doing it, we started to think really what you're picking up is ways to be more personally effective and interpersonally effective, which is so important in leading, but it's also just important to people generally. So the book is written for anyone who wants to grow their personal effectiveness, whether you as a parent, community member, employee, team member, boss, leader, et cetera. These set of practices will be useful to anybody. That's awesome. So would a good analogy be like some people would say it's not what happens to you. It's your perception and how you react to it. Would that be what that means in the confines of what you defined of leadership or? Yeah, that's a good one. There's a quote I use

when I teach it is experience is not what happens to you. It's what you make of what happens. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what it's all about. Some people go through their experiences fairly mindlessly. Have you ever driven mindlessly from one place to another? You can't remember anything about getting there. I've had thousands of employees. We've all had that or eat mindlessly. I've had that problem. Yeah, I'm wearing that. And when we first talked about this book, we called it Mindful Engagement. How to be more mindfully engaged in what you're doing when you're doing it so you can take away more lessons for yourself. And in some ways, it's an efficiency argument. You're going to be doing stuff anyway.

You put on a show all the time. Other people run a management retreat or sit their kid down to have a difficult conversation or try to influence something in the community. You're going to be doing things. And what this perspective basically argues is you could also be learning more about you and your effectiveness while you're doing it if you just were more mindful about it i do but i usually put that off and until tomorrow to learn about my effectiveness yeah next week whatever i've got some gaming i gotta do and some stuff i gotta munch on what what else

is uh arcing in the book or should we get into seven touch on some of the seven uh steps there that you have or seven lessons or which are they? The seven practices. There you go. Let me just touch on a couple. So one that might be super useful. I'll talk about two. One is I've talked about setting a focus. What is that place where you need to grow? I call it, what do you need to do to be the person your dog already thinks you are? And I have a great picture of a dog when I teach that because they look at you like you hung the moon. And all of us over the last 18 months that were 2020 have developed a lot of bad habits. Maybe it's listening. Maybe it's multitasking when you're supposed to be listening. And now we're going to be more in each other's orbits, back more interpersonally.

And there are some places where we need to knock the rust off, places where we need to grow. So if you actually have a focus that you take into those experiences you're going to be doing anyway, you could potentially learn more from it. So that's one practice, set an intention, set a focus. And then another one is to try little experiments. We often keep doing the same thing and keep hoping for something different as an outcome. And it usually doesn't work that way. So sometimes they're just, what are two or three small things you can do that's different than what you've done in the past that might help you to make progress on that goal, that intention, being a better listener, being more influential, procrastinate less, whatever it is. And if you can start trying those out, you can begin to see different results, make some

changes. The idea is we've all been living in this period where everything seems so monolithic, climate change, politics, the pandemic, and we are feeling like I can't influence any of it. This book really says there's a lot you can influence about who you are as a person, how you show up in situations, how you lead others. And you can do it by just tweaking and making small changes and trying them out. See how it goes. I really like that. Here, let me make a note to self, overcome procrastination. Put that on like next week's schedule. Thanks. All right. So I like that. You talked about that. I was laughing really hard because I have two Huskies. And when you said procrastination put that on like next week's schedule thanks all right so i like that you

talked about that i was laughing really hard because i have two huskies and when you said be the person and we just got a shipment of bully sticks and and so today they were just like i think they see me as a giant bully stick or giant treat feeder but that's about it other than that i'm just as a basset hound she, Sue, my dog doesn't look at me like I hung the moon. My dog looks at me like, really? That's what you're going to do? I have both

pictures up there, both ways your dog is telling you you need to grow. My dog's looking at me like that wife who's sick of her husband looks at her husband like, Sue, how did I ever get stuck with you? That sort of thing. So this is really interesting. And I love this because I never really thought about it. And I believe you've written for HBR, Harvard Business Review, right? Yes.

And Harvard Business Review, I didn't go to college, but one of the things that I knew I needed to study was not what college wanted me to do. And so I started reading Harvard Business Review, ordering the courses and different things and giving myself a little bit of my own personal MBA because I knew I wanted to be a CEO of my own companies at the time. And I had a small company. I started when I was 18. And I loved reading all the stuff and the formulas and all that sort of good stuff. And what was weird is I went through my experience of becoming a leader and my companies and being a CEO. And I learned lessons probably because I was

in that framework, like you mentioned at the beginning of the show, where I was like, how does this apply to leadership? How does this make me a better leader? And so that was my frame. But I didn't really think about how, yeah, some people can go through the same experiences. That may explain some of my frustration with my vice president, sometimes people on the board, where I'm just like ready to choke them because they're not learning the same sort of way. So I think it's brilliant what you've come up with and how people can set up that frame. Cause I, I didn't really think about it. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people don't, a lot of people they're in an experience, one experience, but they're thinking about where they need to go or they're thinking about where they just been.

That's one problem. Or another problem is people aren't very self-aware of the impact they're thinking about where they've just been. That's one problem. Or another problem is people aren't very self-aware of the impact they're having relative to the impact they wish they could have in an experience. So they're not learning. They may be learning coding and learning whatever the technology of the day is, but they're not learning about them and their own impact on others and how to shape and mold that to make it be better. And leadership is an interpersonal sport. And so you really need to be very aware of the impact you're having on others. And I think you should always be focused on improving that.

Yeah. Sometimes it's a contact sport based on my experience, but the HR department says they can't do that anymore. Let's see. You named the title of the book, The Power of Flexing. What is flexing to you? And help us understand that title. Okay. So there's two ways that the word resonates with the set of ideas. One is the way corporate America goes about leadership development seems very wrong-headed to me.

They usually pick a few people people and they hide them off. They call them high potential and they invest in them. But there's even been data, not by me, but other researchers to show that they don't even get the right people necessarily, but they pick some. And then basically what they're saying to the rest is, yeah, you're not leaders. And it's bad for the organization because in today's world, things are pretty complicated out there. I believe, and I think many organizations believe, we need a lot of leaders at a lot of levels in order to deal with the complexity of what's coming at us. But if you've just told 80% of the people, yeah, you're not a leader, chances are you're

not going to get that leadership that you might be looking for. And so if we do need more leaders at more levels and more informal leadership, that is not the school principal, but the science teacher down the hall who actually can talk to the other teachers and get them on board to one vision. If we need more of that, maybe we need a different way of going about leadership development than hiving off the few and doing stuff with them. And we need one that's more flexible. So flexing first comes in with respect to what organizations can do. We could have a very different, much more flexible approach to

leadership development. This is a kind of a set of ideas you could pick up and use sometimes when you're going into a major event and then put it down and not use it for a while and then pick it up again. You can take it with you to another organization. It's not simply learning the eight skills of a certain organization's leadership theory. And you can use it when it's useful for you and use it in a variety of ways. You can just follow one part of it. One of the practices will help you. Putting them all together will help you more. So that's the first. It's flexible as a way of learning to lead and a way of developing yourself. And then the second is it just has elements that are flexed. So the idea is try a small experiment.

And then, you know, that doesn't work, throw that one out, try another one. So it fits in that agile development, agile learning, where we're not going to start a major pathway. We're going to try something small, a little sprint with an experiment. If it works, great. If it doesn't, we'll throw that one out and try something else. So it's flexible in that way. It's not a major commitment. It's a dip in, try some things, but reflect and make sure you learn something from it. Yeah. That was one of the last lessons I learned from the last CEO I worked for was doing small experiments and figuring stuff out and innovating. I remember one time I was our entrepreneur for the company, and he sent me, he said, I want you to go knock on doors today. We saw a lot of different videos across.

They were censored videos or cleaned up videos for Christian households. So they took out the swearing and the gratuitous stuff and violence and things and sold it to him hollywood wasn't happy but that's what they did and so he's like i want you to go try going door to door in your suit and selling videos and i'm like no that's like not gonna work and he and that's what he paid me for so i went and did it for a day and it failed. And I came back to the office and I said, yeah, that failed miserably. No wonder we sell stuff over the phone and advertising and stuff. And he goes up. Yeah, that still doesn't work.

Okay, good. And I went, wait, what do you mean? It still doesn't work. What is that? Still? What still doesn't work? I just wore out a nice pair of leather shoes and he's like, yeah, we tried that a couple of years ago, but I figured if anybody could make it work, you could. And I was like, really upset. And I

said, what the hell is going on? And he explained to me, the principle that you're talking about is this small widget principle, he called it, where you could, you try and see if something works within the smallest amount of experiment that you can. And if it does, and you could make it profitable even at that level, you just need to expinate that, and there you go. I love that. And he did his experimenting through you, so he didn't have to work that hard. Every now and then he'd throw me out a window and see if I'd hit the ground. But I learned, and so did he, and actually it was the last thing I needed to learn.

But when I innovated for my companies, that's what I would always do. I'd do small experiments. You do tests. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes the machinery blows up in your face, and you're like, well, that didn't work out. Sometimes it's like the Manhattan experiment where you radiate yourself and die. But if you live through it, then you learn something. Yeah. In this case, you're trying to do experiments in order to be more effective in the setting you're in and with the other humans you work with.

A lot of times it just makes you feel more efficacious. Like I can make, I can grow. The line I don't like the most in life is old dog can't learn new tricks. I think we can grow across the entire lifespan. And I think we are happiest when we're feeling a sense of growing. And you're either growing towards something, fantasy of future you, that's whatever, healthier, more persuasive, etc. Or you're growing away from some pain in the present, the basset hound looking at you like, really? So there's some things in the present that you're doing that aren't creating the result you want to create with other people. And leaders especially have this because they're always trying to make something happen with their

team and in their team. And a lot of things aren't working. So if you can look at it from, I'm going to try some small experiments point of view, it just makes you feel like it's something you can do. And you need a whole new approach to leadership, which I'm not sure you do need. And sometimes that's safer too, because I've been guilty and I think I've seen a lot of corporations be guilty of, we're going to do something completely new

and throw out the model. I think classic Coke and New Coke might be a good example of that. And then the whole thing fails on a massive scale. And sometimes you survive it and stay in business. And sometimes you don't. Yeah. And it's interesting for leadership.

People haven't talked about this much. But there's actually a lot of people feel a lot of risks in leadership. And I would argue even people in positions where they're supposed to be the leaders of the organization. One of the questions I ask for every executive group I teach, have you ever had a leader, a boss who did not lead? And every hand goes up. So yeah, I know that person. And so there's something about leading that actually involves some risk. You could be wrong, for example, and then you could rub people the wrong way or you could maybe not do it as well as people might wish for. And people shy away from leading because they perceive

these risks and they don't do it. But if you give people this mindset of flexing, where, you know, just try some small things and see if you could lead better. Like I work with my executive students on what are some small things you could do to be perceived as more charismatic? Because charisma is this huge word that they think, not me. And yet people can do, we have data on it. Do these three things and you'll be seen as more charismatic. I think anybody can become a leader. Do you agree with me? Yes. Yeah, I can. I grew up as an introvert, as a watcher sort of person. I was the person in the

corner watching everyone do things. I hated people like me than I am now. I was like, what an egotistical, big-ass jerk, which is probably still true, actually, but I like myself a little bit better now. And so I had to go through that cathartic move from going from an introvert to being someone who never shuts up. And I hope I'm a good leader. I seem to have accomplished at least getting ice cream at Baskin Robbins or something. Clearly, I've had too much. So that's really interesting. What are some other aspects you want to touch out or tease out to the audience? Let me talk about the one that I think is important and every business person I've ever talked to literally hates, which is the need to reflect, the need to synthesize what just happened in an experience and extract lessons from that.

And there's a lot of data out there. There's data that suggests, for example, that managers are way too busy to ever do any reflecting. Someone did a study long ago. He said to a bunch of researchers, go out into the business world and act like you came down from Mars and just want to report back of what do managers do? And there's some quote about they rush from meeting to meeting, answering countless emails and talking on the phone constantly. And the point is, we have no time to reflect. But there's a super interesting study that Tim Wilson did where he asked people, and I love this because it's like the kind of choice that only psychologists give to people. He said, would you rather sit alone with your thoughts and feelings for 15 minutes or shock yourself with a nine volt battery?

A reasonable choice. We call that Wednesdays around the house. So what he found was 54% of women and 65% of men, don't quote me on the numbers, but it's something like that, would rather shock themselves than sit alone with their thoughts and feelings. Average about three shocks in that period. One guy shocked himself 190 times. So these are people actually doing it, like they were testing their...

They're doing it to themselves. Wow. The point is, we don't really like the kind of reflecting, sitting back and synthesizing. But there's a really old quote that says, most of life is a series of happenings that pass through our system relatively undigested. And it is Saul Linsky quote. And the quote goes on to say, if happenings are going to become experiences, you need to reflect, extract lessons, synthesize in order to get the experience. And so when we started the conversation, I said, most of leadership learning comes from experience. It's actually 70% of these high quality,

high level leaders say 70% of what I learned from experience. And then Saul Alinsky says, most happenings, most life passes through our systems as a set of happenings, relatively undigested to become experiences you need to synthesize, etc. So basically, most of us are giving up 70 percent of our learning. You need to figure out a way to reflect. And there's a lot of different ways. So you may know the name Marshall Goldsmith. No, I don't. He's a very high level executive

coach. He now has a coaching academy. He's coached a lot of CEOs. And Marshall is the biggest extrovert I've ever met. Literally, when we have him come to Michigan, he said, Sue, don't just use me for the executive MBAs at night. I'll talk to the undergrads in the morning, the MBAs in the afternoon, the executives at night. Then he goes out to the bar with them and he's super happy. So he's super extroverted. He reflects by, he has a friend who he calls every night and they have a 10 minute conversation. A friend asks him three questions that Marshall has said he wants to be asked every day. I assume they relate to his goals. And then he asked the friend three questions. How did you do on this today? How did you do on that?

So he has a very extroverted way of reflecting. It's a conversation with a friend. Other people, journal Ari Weinswag, who is the CEO of Ziggerman's, which is a very famous deli organization here in Ann Arbor, but it's world famous. He says, I look at writing in a journal like other people look at working out their body. That's something I do every day. And he sits and writes and reflects on what's happening, why it's happening, what it means. So I guess that's another one I would call to people's attention that something you don't like to do, but if you could build it in as a practice in some way, we now have voice to text. You can just open up your notes function in your phone and talk for a couple of minutes and it'll have a typed record of what you said. There's a lot of different ways

of doing it. I think it's pretty super important. Why are you just giving me epiphany? Because I do a lot of this without even realizing it. I've got a small texting, close-knit group of friends. I call them my little focus group. And throughout the day, I'll just reflect on different things that are happening or feedback. And everybody sometimes will pitch in, but they're mostly entertained by the stupidity of my daily life. And then I do some journaling. There was some stuff I was doing with book accountability stuff that helped me write a book. I was doing a daily one-hour accountability group where everyone was competing. But I never really thought about it that way. One of the problems I've always had with people is I'll have people in my life.

I'll give you an experience. I would come home sometimes with one of my girlfriends and I would, and she worked for Delta. And so she would fly sometimes as an airline attendant, she would fly sometimes two or three different cities, coming in contact with hundreds of people. I had a hundred people at my office and I would come home with five stories every night. You won't believe what Bob did today. And I, of course, I take lessons from that. I learn, of course, we learned to fire Bob. We've all been there.

Freaking Bob. Anyway. And so I'd come home and at dinner home and at dinner i'd be like yeah here's this story and this story and i have all these stories and i look at her and i'd be like so what do you got what do you got what you got because i'm a story collector and uh and maybe i'm a story collector because i'm a reflector and i want those lessons learned so you've really gave me an epiphany here this is brilliant but i would say to her i say so what happened to you today? She'd be like, none. None. Yeah. And I'd be like, how is that possible?

In fact, I used to joke one time. I said, you know what? I'm going to have someone kidnap. I'm going to pay somebody to kidnap you and just hold you hostage for a couple days just so you can come back and have a story for me. And so I'm just kidding, of course, and telling jokes. But seriously, it got to that point. But I've always wondered how people can go through life and they don't

capture anything. And you just nailed it. For decades, this has been my thing going, what the hell's going on? And now I understand why from what you've identified, people aren't reflecting. Life just goes by and woohoo. Yeah. Your gender role

reversed. Usually it's the men who are like nothing. Yeah. The other thing I would say is you have a very extroverted style for an introvert. I used to be an introvert. I see. You just switched over. Yeah. It just took me several years. I just realized when you start your own company, you really can't be an introvert anymore. At least you've got to sell to everybody. So investors, board, vendors, customers, employees, you've got to constantly pitching the vision and going,

here's what idiot boy wants to do today with you guys. And so I just, it just came out of me and now I can't shut up. So there's that. Which is why I have a podcast. There you go. This has been amazing. Anything else you want to touch on, Sue, before we go out to tease out? Of course, we can't read the whole book to people. They got to go buy the darn thing. Buying would be good. Yeah. I guess the other thing I'd call out, since that was an epiphany, I don't know, is the mindset with which you go into experiences.

I work a lot with 28-year-olds, MBA students, but really people of all ages. You know, we've been so steeped in a particular mindset about achievement situations, which is our life. We want to do well in our life. And the mindset we've been steeped in is perform. Prove you're great. Always prove you're great. Always be great. And especially its cousin, which is never show failure, uncertainty, anxiety, etc. And I don't know if you know of the work of Carol Dweck. I don't. Famous psychologist. And basically what Carol Dweck said, there is another

mindset out there, which she called at first a learning orientation. And then when she wrote her book, she called it a growth mindset. And if you have this mindset, you still want to perform. Everybody wants to do well, but you go at it with the idea that I'm going to do the best I can. There may be things for me to learn here. I may screw up and I need to recover and that's going to be fine. So it's a get better mindset as opposed to the first one is a be better. I want to be better than you and you and everybody, any CEO they've ever met. And that mindset, it turns problems, because it feels devastating to you. Whereas if you have this sort of a more learning orientation or a growth mindset, when you experience a setback, you're able to story it for yourself and keep going in a way that helps you to stay in the game of learning. And I always point this out to my students

because they miss it. And you do perform better than the person who has the performance-proof mindset and especially better than the person who goes into every achievement situation worried about failing. So it's really ironic. If you are worried about failing to a high degree,

you actually participate in bringing about the very thing you're afraid of. It's not going to happen because of that worry you have. So watching your mindset, just being aware of it and watching, especially when you're going into a challenging situation, watching your mindset is another important thing people can do. I can attest to the combination of what you're talking about. Learning from fast failures, experimenting, learning from fast failures, not being afraid to fail is a really big deal because people can sense when you're afraid to fail or when you have fear as a leader and they go, whoa, I don't know about this guy. He thinks he knows what he's doing. He says he knows what he's doing, but I can smell fear. And if people know that you have that authenticity,

that transparency, that you're okay with failing, you're okay with learning. And sometimes you're going to learn stuff with your crew, but you're at the head of the ship. So you're going to take a couple of hits or lick of the waves, but hopefully you get through it. So I think that's brilliant. Yeah. There's one study we did where we showed that people worry about seeking feedback, especially if they're in the boss role. But then we went out and actually looked at it. And people who sought more feedback, especially seemed open to negative feedback, were rated as more affected by everybody, their boss, their subordinates, their peers, because it came across as if they cared. I care about your view. I got to make this good for you. Yeah. I once had a employee who she was having a lot of home problems and she was costing us a lot of money. And it got to the point where her mistakes were costing us

and multiple warnings. And part of it was to the point where her mistakes were costing us multiple warnings. And part of it was her home life and her husband at home not taking care of her kids. But even then, she was just not getting things under control. And it reached a point where she basically cost us more money than her monthly wage, where you have to start going, look, we've done too many warnings. And she knew she was at the brink of the next thing was going to be firing. I remember she came in my office one time and she just unloaded on me with my door open for my whole

sales office to hear and called me every name in the book and said what a horrible person I was because we'd been fairly strict with her on the thing. And as she was just screaming at me in my large living room sized office, I turned to my bar and poured myself a scotch and then sat and listened to her. And then when I got done, I said, do you feel better? And she said, and I go, okay, are you quitting or are you going back to your desk and finishing working? Because we need to quit losing money for us. And she was like stunned. She came and slumped in the chair in front of me.

And she says, you're not going to fire me after i just did that and i go no i go do you just did something that no one else in my office will do you had the nads to come in here and tell me what you thought of me and that's great but i also got some news for you every boss i've ever worked for at one time or another because of the authoritarian principle narrative of it, I thought was an asshole too. So if by you coming here and telling me I'm an asshole, I fulfilled my job description. So what I want to know is, are you going back to work right now or are you quitting? Because I'm not firing you. She had to quit, but she was just stunned that I would not fire her after that.

And I was actually willing to keep her on. I think my office was too. They were just, my office was a moment. Because they heard it all. Yeah. They're like, yeah, he's going to lop her head off. And usually I'm a lopper of heads. But no, I was like, you've actually done something.

And I wish more of my employees would do. Come tell me what they think. And maybe we can work on it if it's applicable. So there you go. And if you have that learning orientation, you're more open because somebody's going to have something that's useful in that tirade and failure, failing a little bit and failing fast doesn't scare you because your goal is to learn. Yeah. I learned that I really was enjoying the scotch that day while I was being yelled at. And sometimes being yelled at and drinking scotch is a very nice position.

It's a good combination, yes. Yeah, it's like the Steely Dan. What's that Steely Dan Black Friday? Is it Black Friday? Drink scotch whiskey all night long and dive behind the wheel? Anyway, thank you, Sue, for coming on the show and sharing your wonderful thoughts. And book on us. You've given me an epiphany that I'm going to realize.

I realize now you've solved the riddle of 20 years or 30 years of me trying to figure out why some people just go through life and they're just like and they're just zombieing through the thing and you're just like hey did you know i used to drag down the road with my friends when i was in a teenager and i'd be like hey did you see that did you see that they'd be like what and i'm like how do you go through life and not see this stuff but and i'm reflective which is probably the reason everyone thinks i'm halfway insane. And we were talking after a faculty party goes a lot more goes on for you at a party than goes on for me. I think women are brilliant in that sense. Maybe I have a woman's brain, like you mentioned earlier, which might explain some other things, but you know, you guys see everything you guys take in everything you guys have real to ity to

nuances. And so you guys are much smarter than men. I've seen some of us. We're not that bright. I'll take that. We're good at lifting stuff or opening jars or something. I don't know. Anyway, Sue, give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, you can find me pretty simply at SusanAshford.com right now. And the book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, your independent

bookstore, starting October 5th, but you can pre-order now. There you go. And thank you very much for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it. My pleasure. I enjoyed it. There you go. Guys, order up the book. October 5th, 2021. You want to pre-order it so you get that copy hot and

fresh right off the presses. But only where fine books are sold. Don't go to those alleyway bookstores. You can step on things, glass and needles in the alleyways. Stay out of those places. Go to where the fine books are sold. The power of flexing. How to use small daily experiments to create big, life-changing growth,

which always sounds good to me. Growth is good. Thanks to my audience for being here. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those places the crazy kids are at.

Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and innovation. It's going to be coming on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO entrepreneurial toolbox that

I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon,

you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold.