The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 319: Jim Clifton - How To Become A World-Class Manager (CEO of Gallup)

Episode Date: July 14, 2019

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk #319: Jim Clifton Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com  Personal Excellence 2.0 workshop: www.RyanHawk.me  Jim Clifton has served as CEO of Gallup, a global leader in consulting and public opinion research and analytics, since 1988. Under his leadership, Gallup has expanded from a predominantly U.S.-based company to a worldwide organization with 30 offices in 20 countries and regions.  Leaders who sustain excellence = They don't set out to get rich, they have a purpose that drives them The mission overpowers everything else They build advantages for themselves through compound learning -- Stack your learning Teach the "story of the day" Be part of really hard projects -- the front line war battles Advice to someone earlier in their career? Focus and double down on your strengths CEO of Gallup -- The beginning... Won a big account (Cargill) -- It was huge to create momentum for his new business Don Clifton (Jim's dad) built the StrengthsFinder -- And then bought Gallup in 1988 The StrengthsFinder was built from 34 themes Don was a scientist.  He went on bombing raids and was a war hero as a lead bomber.  A navigator. It's The Manager is the biggest discovery they've made When studying the truly great companies, the commonality is the management  How to create a high development culture? People want to be developed -- And then find the role that fits their unique strengths to maximize their potential What Jim looks for when making hiring decisions: Drive They love to practice... They like to work Where have your most talented people come from? "Stars were recruited by the managers themselves."  Great managers know great people.   "Presentations matter.  A manager must get good at it." Managers must be great coaches: "Coaching is sitting down and sharing purpose..." Shock and Awe visitors that meet at your office: "The entrance to your building show wow them."  Small details are very important.  Landscaping matters.  Pay attention to the feeling you get when you drive up to the building.  It helps with your internal employees as well. "People join because of the company and leave because of their boss." Currently, only 34% of works are engaged (according to Gallup poll) India/China are at 6% The issue with promoting the top performer at a role (Example: The #1 sales rep becomes the manager) The top individual contributor doesn't always make the best coach.  In fact, often times, they don't. Give superstar individual contributors bigger titles and more money as a way to promote them.  Don't force them to management when they don't show the desire or ability to lead others. "There must be two paths."  "Leaders need to see the future well, and excite others.  The good ones have an unusual relationship with risk." The Gender Gap Statistically, women run more engaged teams than men How to manage and nurture creativity? Need ideas from teams close to the action (have a front line obsession) You want intrapreneurship and foster an environment for that to pull out the great ideas The difference in two teams: The best negotiators are the ones who do their homework Present in a neutral way, calm, collected, ask questions, try to learn, better understand the other person's position When you work for a bad boss, you get cognitive contraction:  You lose levels of intelligence When you work for a great boss, you get cognitive expansion: You become smarter, innovate more, and do better work   A boss has incredible power.  And that power needs to be used for good.

There's a really famous CEO and they ask him how much time he spends recruiting and developing people. And you know, his answer was? What? 80%. The person interviewing him said, well, then how do you have any time for leadership? And he looked at him and he said, that is leadership. Real quick, before we get to this episode, I want to let you know that we have opened up tickets for our once a year personal excellence workshop. We did this last year and received incredible reviews, so we wanted to do it again.

this year, but make it even better. In addition to the topics that I personally teach on, I have reached out to the subject domain experts within my network to be with us in the room and share their expertise. Things like how to harness your personal and professional flywheel to build an incredible career. Secrets from a professional keynote speaking coach. How to become a learning machine. How to utilize the mindset of a professional athlete in the business world and so much more.

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For more details and to get your ticket, go to ryanhawk. Me. Welcome to the learning leader show. I am Ryan Hawk. Thanks so much for being here. Text learners to 44222 in order to join tens of thousands

of learning leaders from all over the world. Text learners to 4422. receive mindful Monday updates. Some of the latest on what I'm reading, writing, thinking about, help you be more effective at work and at home. You also get the opportunity to be a part of my book launch team, text learners to 4422. Now on tonight's featured leader, it's the legendary Jim Clifton, the CEO of Gallup. Gallup is a global leader in consulting and public opinion, research and analytics. A lot of you have probably taken the Strengths Finder exam.

Marcus Buckingham, previous guest, was a part of the early team that created it, along with the original idea behind it, came from none other than Jim's dad, Don Clifton. Jim is also a best-selling author. His latest work is titled, It's the Manager. A few of the topics we got into,

how to find the future superstars for your team. Jim shares an idea that is counterintuitive to most, yet highly effective. Then the biggest mistakes a new manager makes and how you can avoid them. And then how to nurture creativity in your organization. There is some fascinating documentation and research behind this that Jim and I discuss that I think you'll find to be very helpful. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Jim Clifton. All right, Jim Clifton, man. It's a big honor to have you here on the Learning Leader Show.

Welcome. It's great to be here. I am curious. So, Jim, you've spent a good portion of your career in life surrounded by leaders who sustain excellence. And I would love to gather what you've found to be the commonalities among those leaders who sustain excellence over an extended period of time. you know one thing is that my friends here in new york or in washington that have really made a lot of money and gotten themselves really rich you know when you sit and talk with them it's like not a single one of them was trying to get rich they really had some kind of purpose that just drove them

you know that drove them 24-7 you know they don't have even have many hobbies but but they get on a mission and that mission overpowers everything else that's one thing i want to add one other thing I was with a group of us talking. I'm not particularly smart, but I started doing interviewing and polling and all that when I was about, I don't know, I was an interviewer at 17, 18. But you really have an advantage over everybody else as a leader when you have compounded learning. So you get really good at some. There are a lot of people that have been smarter than me that I've competed against. But I'm still, I've always been pretty hard to be excited just because I'm,

I have, as I said, more learning doing the same thing over and over again. But see, if you bounce around a lot, you don't get that compounded learning. And I think that's a secret to a lot of these people. Interesting. Can you expand on what compounded learning means? Well, I think, Ryan, that it means that you just, that you stick with something, that you stick with something a long time, you know, whether it's teaching. You look at Dr. Gallup.

Dr. Gallup started out as, I'll say just a, I'll crudely say just a teacher, but he spent his whole life teaching. I didn't really know him. I was only with him three. He died in 84. I became CEO in 88. But I got to know his friends around the world. And I said, what is it about Dr. Gallup? You know, he's one of the 100 most famous Americans.

He makes that real good list with Jefferson and Lincoln and all that kind of a thing. But what they said was that he was the greatest teacher of his time. But Dr. Gallup just never quit teaching. You know when reporters would come in, they always anxious to get to Dr. Gallup because he knew what they wanted. They needed a story. They needed to get back to their deaths and write a story. So he'd really work at teaching them what the story of the day was. But, you know, there are so many things.

There's a guy in Washington that's, I'm going to crudely say, just a chef. His name's Jose. Oh, it's late in the afternoon. But, you know, he has like 30 restaurants around the world and he's become famous. He hangs with leaders. But what I mean is whether it's a teacher, whether it's a chef, whether it's a market researcher like me, if you stick with something, you get compounding growth. Rather than bouncing around, imagine me trying to be a teacher or me trying to be a chef.

You know, I could go try that a little bit, but I wouldn't get the continuous learning. Is part of it, though, the conversations you have with? other people as part of that focused work and then getting their viewpoints and mixing it in with yours. And over time, you kind of pause and reflect and look back and say, well, this is, this is, this is, this is kind of how it's worked. I've been, I've been in this pursuit, this quest to learn and learn and learn. And before you know, like I said, you pause and you realize, wow, I, I've made a lot of progress because I've been really following my curious. curiosity with great rigor, as my friend Brian Coppulman would say, is that what you feel like it is?

A little bit, but I think more of it is, is that you do real hard projects. And when you do, you know, it's almost like, it's almost like front line war experience. You know, you have so many battles. You start to see what they see what they look like. And I think that experience is what really piles on, piles up. When you, when you say that, I'm thinking of, Jim, before we started recording, we're talking about, like, who are the types of people listening. And there's a varying degree. And for this particular moment, I'm thinking somebody who may write you an email or write me an email saying, I'm 23. I'm early in my career. I don't have a lot of life repetitions. What advice do you give to that person? Well, I think first of all, it's better. This won't surprise you're me coming from Gallup. But if you know what your strengths are, I'd start with strengths. And I think that's more important.

If you're really sure what your strengths are, let's say that you're very good at managing a team. And so there's a Gallup estimates there's somewhere between one and three in people out of ten, they just have a natural gift to manage teams. But if you can start with that and say, I know I'm a very good manager. If you really work at being a manager, you can go all the way to being CEO or CFO. I mean, that's a wonderful one. But my point is, let's say that it has to do with, if you've chose agriculture and stick with agriculture, I think that your probability goes way up.

So what you want to do is you want to build your experience as a manager. Let's say that you're a rainmaker. And so at a very young age, you could tell that you were good at persuading and influencing people to buy something. Boy, what a gift, what a valuable gift that is. But see, if you can build it, it becomes more and more and more valuable. But if you can find an industry, maybe it's a good. aerospace and stick with it. Learn the words. But then you get a, you get a synergy along with the

compounding effect. And I think, I think it makes the chances of you having a great career much more probable. So, so when you, when you realize you have a strength area, then it's time to double and triple down in that, in that regard. Yeah, because if it's a strength, it'll develop your whole life. Let's think about, talk briefly about your life before we get into some recent work, Jim, fascinating. You're the CEO of Gallup. Probably everyone listening to this show has heard of Gallup, or we've heard of something like Strengths finder. We've probably taken the assessment. I've taken it multiple times, read the books. There's a lot that goes into Gallup. It's not just that. Can you share a little bit about your story? I know that's a very broad question, but I think learning

from the stories and the journeys of others helps us as we build our own. So could you share a little bit about how you've come to be the CEO of Gallup and maybe an inflection point or two along the way as you've been on this on this path well a real turning point I'll tell you about a few turning points a real turning point for me was when a friend of mine and I borrow five thousand dollars and started a market research company that that's a turning point and then but see then you got a struggle and you actually got to win you got to you got to go on a play a season schedule win some playoff games and all that. I think the single biggest turning point for me or for someone like me, I think I was 23 or 24 years old. This other guy's name was John. But we won a big account.

It was Cargill. I think it's the first or second biggest privately held company in the world if you don't count a Ramco. But you're really not somebody when you start a company or somebody when you get a client that values you. And it changes your self-perception and all that. kind of thing. But we made a, we were pretty successful. We built, we built me and a team, I don't want to say me, but, but a whole bunch of us built a pretty successful market research company. Alongside of me was a guy named Don Clifton, who was a psychologist. He's the guy that built over 40 years, Strengths finder in that hole. He's, he died about, I don't know, over 15 years ago, a highly celebrated psychologist. But we put those together and we bought Gallup

in 1988. It really fit us well. Dr. Gallup had a really cool. He was more of an academic than he was an entrepreneur. I've read everything that he's written, but his real-life mission, he loved democracy, and he said if democracy is about the will of the people, somebody should go find out what that will is. And what he was concerned about, Ryan, is that if there were leaders in Washington or anywhere, or at World Bank or United Nations or in the military, if they didn't know what.

what was on the minds of the people, and they were wrong about what was on the minds, they'd make policies and all kinds of decisions that would actually, the more they led, the more, they'd make things worse. So that was his mission. But my leadership team loved that mission, because that was one that really fit what we do. You know, then we built predominantly U.S. corporation to a worldwide one, so we have 30 offices around the world or world headquarters in Washington, D.C., see. And we built consistent sampling frames across 160 countries, but what we wanted and asked

people, because there's really not much math on it. And the question was, how's your life going? You know, we know how much you spend with your credit card if you're going to the dentist or if you're hungry or all kinds, but we don't know how your life is going. And as we looked into that, I mean, everybody wants to, needs safety. People need food and shelter and, you know, warm place to sleep. But once you get those, then we say, well, but what makes a life worth living? It turned out that what the world told us was, I'd really like to have a good job. And so when we learned that 10 years ago, we really amped everything up. And that's, you were talking about Strengths finder. We also have a whole bunch of workplace tools.

Our R&D has been pretty unbelievable over the last 25 years with the stuff they keep turning up. But we turned our best global analytic guns right to the workplace. And that's where I think that's why we're getting pretty famous. Our research and development group is for these discoveries. We put a whole bunch of them in that book. Thank you for having an interest in it. Yeah. So you mentioned Don.

Don is your dad, correct? It is, yes. What was that relationship like for you and your dad and now what he's brought to the world? Well, it's pretty awesome. You know, I was talking, this is kind of breathless, but I was talking to Andy, Ambassador Andy Young, who was Martin Luther King's best friend. We were just having breakfast, but he said something to me, he said, you know, when I was with Martin, and it just blows me away when he calls Dr. King Martin, but he says, Martin and I,

we'd wake up in jail, and he said, we'd get out, and we'd kind of lick our wounds. We'd go over to the office, and he said, we'd argue about the staff and who wanted raises what we were going to do with the garbage collectors union and how we could do this. And he said, but he says as we were going through it, he goes, I didn't, and neither did Martin, we didn't have any idea that we were changing America in the world because it didn't seem like it during the day. And he said there was only one I have, there was just one, I have a dream speech. And he said, but 99% of the time we were arguing with the staff and all those kind of things.

but what dad built over all that time and where he even came up with the idea and all the people that he pulled in I mean actual American geniuses to help him build the technology get some of the ideas to figure out the 34 themes but but when he was I remember walking into his office one time and he had some cards out and I said what are you doing he goes well he says I think I figured out the 34 themes that all the variation that you might have in with human potential so he tried a few of them on me. But those were the very themes that are in the, but I didn't think much about it until you look back on it. But he was a really good psychologist. He had that one defining moment when he kind of got it all to come together with a big meta-analysis. But he and I were great, great friends. He was more, Ryan, he's a scientist and I'm a businessman. So we really, a scientist and a business

man really get along well. Did you feel, I should ask, what type of pressure did you, did you or do you currently feel based on having a father with such, who brought something so extraordinary to the world? Well, I'm, I mean, you can't imagine how proud I am, my sister, all of us are of dad. But not just for that, but, you know, he did a lot of other really awesome things, too. So many philosophies about communities. And, you know, he was a super war hero, distinguished flying cross. He flew, I don't know, how many bombing sorters, and he was a captain at 20.

His biggest bombing raids were when he was, he would take out 100 planes and bomb hungry and, you know, bring back, I don't know, 10 or 20 of them. And he was the lead bombardier and lead navigator. And these guys were 20, they were 20 years old. But, I mean, he had a really awesome life. I've really been something different. I've been a, dad was a scientist and I'm more of a CEO. And so I don't, I don't think either one of us felt pressure from each other.

We, both of us always really cheered each other on. Yeah, that's really cool. I didn't, I didn't expect to get in that, but I'm glad we did. I think we're, we're all people at heart. We all, um, have families, or at least hopefully. And, uh, I think it can be helpful to understand the person behind all this great work. So I'd like to make a little bit of a left-hand turn, Jim, and now focus on your book. And it's funny.

So my dad came over, who's my number one mentor. And one day in your book, your team was graciously sent me an advanced copy. I appreciate it. And right sitting there on my coffee table, I was taking notes and getting ready for this conversation. It's about a month ago. And he said, wow, these guys got it. That's exactly it. My dad's led a thousand person sales forces.

So he understands the whole hierarchy and manager. He goes, the difference between the great businesses and the ones that were just okay that I've seen and been around is their front line managers, the people who are leading the individual contributors. You've got to do everything you can to help them, to train them, to develop them, to hire. Like, there's just a million different things. And so when your title of the book is, it's the manager. It just spoke to him. It certainly speaks to me as well. And so I'd love for you to explain this latest work that you have out.

It's the manager, why you wanted to write it, and some of the early learnings. And then I'm going to dive into some of my notes based on reading it. Well, I ask our chief scientist, I said, and Gallup is, we've discovered things over the 80 years. That starts with Dr. Gallup that I think we've made discoveries that have truly changed the world on so many different subjects. education, war and peace, workplace, customers, all kinds of things. But I said to our chief scientist one day, Ryan, I said, what's the biggest discovery that you've, and he's been at Gallup for, I don't know, 25 years or something. It's my co-author, Jim Harder.

But I said, what's the biggest discovery we've made about workplace? You know, if now your job is your life, what have we learned? Anyway, he looked and, you know, he thinks for a long time. And he said, the biggest one I've seen, he said, if you take all of the variation of outcomes, and he had done a gigantic, of course, meta-analysis, but he had over 100,000 work teams, millions of employees and all that. But he said, when you look at the variance of the good ones, highly engaged to the really lousy ones, he said 70% of the variance can be described by just one element,

the manager. And when we find something that has variance, or like in Six Sigma, or a lot of kind of engineering that goes along with lean management, if you can find variance of four, six percent, you've really got something. You can go in and there's some low-hanging fruit that you can find, and you'll find efficiencies, you'll make a little more money, you'll make a few more customers happy. But imagine finding something that has 70 percent variance. So he and I talk, but there's two things. One thing is, oh my gosh, what a great finding. There's a whole bunch of low-hanging fruit that any company or any team or any organization go fine. But at the same time, you go, oh, my gosh, something's really wrong because there shouldn't be that much variance. We've got a lot to fix.

So a lot of people listening are managers, or they strive to be, or maybe they have been for 10 plus years. And who knows, they need something to liven them up and get them re-energized. And so, Jim, I'll start going through now notes after reading. It's the manager. I remember vividly as a first-time manager, and I made probably two years' worth of mistakes. It's really, really, I feel for my team in that moment. I finally figured some things out, but it took a while. But one of the things I was pretty, I thought about a lot was my team culture and how to

create a place where people want to come in and work. They're excited. They feel energized by their peers, by their manager, by their boss, and the work they get to do. And so I'm curious from your perspective, what advice would you give to that newer manager of how to create a, high performance, high development culture. Let's start with what you're going for. If you take the individual and you say,

what do you really want out of the workplace? One of the big mistakes we've made is we thought they wanted satisfaction. And so let's say that there's a millennial and I say, hey, I want you to come to work at Gallup. And they say, well, why would I come to work there? And I said, well, we got ping pong tables. We got volleyball courts. and we've got and we and we give you, we give you free lunch.

I'm trying to, I'm trying to satisfy you. The reason that that falls on deaf ears is that's not what they're really going from for, especially millennials. They're coming to work saying, what can I become? How do you take me? Will you help me develop? They don't say it quite that clearly, but that's what all of our research picks up. But it means that it's, it's smarter to say to that person, here's the kind of job that really

fits your strengths and we're going to have you do these and then and then put a little bit of purpose in with that because one of the things that's most important to us is to just maximize your potential and get as much out of as you can that's actually what they want to hear but what I would say to a manager is when you look at your team start with this they have more things they have more differences and they do things in common don't manage them like troops that's first of all. Second of all, know them by their strengths. Don't know them by anything else. Some of them will even be funny-looking and some of them, first of all, just know them by their, know them by their strengths. The third thing is, here's the best question. There's only about a billion

full-time jobs in the world. But if you take that billion people and you just want to sort them into highly engaged or nasty people that hate their boss, hate the company, here's the best question at work, someone encourages my development. If you say yes and I say no, our outcomes have spectacular differences. But I think that for a manager to say your job is to go to work and develop these people, maximize our potential as much as it possibly can, do it individually, make sure that they win and get them really excited about the future. That's what I tell them to do. Oh, gotcha.

What about, okay, I'll bounce a bit. But what about the manager who has open positions? They're looking to hire people. And I think we've learned as a frontline manager, your ability to do well is obviously impacted by the caliber and the talent and the people you're able to hire, train, and develop on your team. But let's first start with what you're looking for. And I know it's job specific at times.

obviously, so there are certain skills you need for particular jobs. I understand that. But let's talk about just people in general. If you're a frontline manager, Jim, and you're looking to add people to the team, what are some of the ways to know what to look for and then how to find it? Because I find if you get that right, it could take care of so many other issues by getting it right in the hiring stage. Yeah, I think there's two things. I think the first, because remember, you and I are both applying, we're going to be really different. But what you want to find, first of all, is somebody that has drive. Yep.

I mean, so that's kind of a non-starter. You know, another one that there's some people that just really like to work. They just get a kick. You know, these great players, I don't know, from Michael Jordan to these great, the quarterback from New England, you know, they're practicing 24-7. You know, they're paying more attention to the games and the films, even than the coaches, which is pretty hard to do. do. But you start, you start with that. But I think more importantly is what the manager, the difference

between a good manager and a bad manager is a good manager knows how to leverage strengths. They know how to maximize potential. Then the manager's really got to go to work. But I want to answer, make sure I answer the one question is, where do I get good people? We just did a study for a really important American company. And they said, here is the profile of these people that we've hired. And man, they just, there are very best managers. Their teams always win. Everybody wants them to run the projects and all that. And so we asked that group, we had a contrast group of people that run really poor teams,

but the good teams, we said, where did you come from? How are you recruited? We were looking for the answer to be in HR, you know, or some kind of campus programs and all that. And the stars in this famous company were recruited. by the managers. The managers themselves went out and found them. Now, I don't know if that means that every company ought to do that. But if you're a manager, you ought to consider taking the responsibility yourself. Look around and maybe you can go recruit them. I'm not going to say names. There's a really famous CEO and they ask him how much time he spends recruiting and developing

people. And you know what his answer was? What? 80%. The person interviewing him said, well then how do you have any time for leadership? And he looked at him and he said, that is leadership. Yeah, buddy. Yeah. I was actually, I had probably the good force in my first management role that that was the only option. Each manager kind of had to go out and find and recruit for yourself. And so you leaned on some of the, you know, referrals and friends or friends. But it took a massive amount of time. But I found it to be worth it and learned a ton from making mistakes, obviously, like you'd hope one would. And then also got probably a little bit lucky in the beginning and found some good people and amazing people, no other amazing people I've learned. And that is how the building and development of a team over the course of years could

become excellent was, I would say, my successful teams were pretty much 100% because of the people on the team and what they're willing to do. And I like you talking about drive and just that straight up desire like Tom Brady or Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant to work. I think that makes so much sense when it comes to that. Now, let's talk about the managers and as coaches. So there are people listening and they're saying right now, Jim, like my job is so busy. I have to go to all these meetings.

I have to send reports up the chain to my boss. I got to prepare to present to them. I'm not sure what they're going to say. It takes forever to get ready for these types of meetings. I'm nervous. And they neglect probably one of the most, if not the most important thing they can do. And that's coach their team. What advice do you give to that person when it comes to how to be an excellent coach

when you're a frontline manager? Well, I think there's a couple of things. And it depends on what kind of company you're in. I was helping a well-known company. One of the things we figured out is that, boy, does your career turn on presentations. And I don't mean in an auditorium, I'm just talking about in a media when they say, Ryan, will you get up and please? I don't think people have any idea what a moment that is.

Boy, when Ryan gets up and just bombs, hell, you might as well quit the company. It's a good point. It's a good point. But here's the things. And so the same thing's true for Jim. But let's say that Ryan's very good on his feet, very entertaining. It's easy for him to do. He feels good and all that.

Don't tell Jim to become that. Just tell Jim, somehow you've got to pull it off. I've seen people, I'm pretty good on my feet. I'll have somebody get up that just picked out the right data, the right slides, the right PowerPoints, and boy, they'll blow you away with a whole different style. But I think coming off the game, the big national championship game last night, there's a few things that you have to master. You have to be able to play defense.

Well, one of them, I don't know if that's a good example or not, but presentations matter. So if you were on my team, Ryan, one of the things I would say to you is this is something that you've got to get very good at here at this big global company or it's going to be hard for your career. But let you and I really go to work on how you can pull it off. plus do some style that just fits you. You're not as good as Jim is on his feet, but boy, you better at research than he is. You can go deeper into the material. You can learn more.

Then what I would say to Ryan is I'm going to really coach you on this. And anybody that's played any kind of sports, little kid sports, tennis, bad, boy, you get a good coach that says to you, the reason that you're falling down is you've got to drop that left leg first. It's just a complete game changer. Somebody that says when you shoot a three ball, watch the rim, not the, the ball. I mean, you start hitting about three times as many shots on those kind of coaching things. But what I say to you is that I'm going to really coach your run. I'm going to tell you when you're no good and all that. But you and I are fine because what you know is I really care

about your development. That's why you don't hate your coach when they're out there telling you, you know, they'll stop practice and they'll say, Jim, you got to get your butt lower. And when you move, you got to be able to drop the, I don't know, whatever. But so you got to establish that kind relationship because coaching can coaching can be really fun what are some of the the common mistakes or pitfalls newer or inexperienced managers make that really good managers manage and leaders do this too but i mean and i'm talking about any level that they all manage with a higher higher purpose it's fun we have a really big campus in omaha right on the missouri river it's 50 acres. And we have groundskeepers out there that are really proud. So we have big lawns and

neat trees and water that comes out of a wall and all that kind of thing. But see what a low level person would manage them by saying, here's the pictures. Here's how I want these hedges done. And I want it to look like whatever the master's tournament looks like. Then I would come out and I would say, you're not doing it right. You're this corner's wrong and all that. That's not really what coaching is. Coaching is sitting down saying, what's the absolute purpose? Why do we even care if you do your job right as groundskeeper? Well, the right answer to that, which our managers do with our groundskeepers, is that there's a winding road that comes in. We train tens of thousands of managers out there. When they come in, they've never seen, I haven't seen many properties in the world like this campus,

like the Gallup campus in Omaha. But we want to shock and awe of the visitor. That's the job of the groundskeeper, it's not to get the hedges like I told them to or to come over and complain and say, cut this, mow this farther here. What can you do to create shock and awe to the Gallup visitor? You can even intimidate them a little bit. But when they walk in, what we want them to feel like is, gee, this place must be well run, because it's that very first impression that none of the rest of us can make. But start your coaching from there. Start your coaching from the high purpose. And people are really smart. That's what they want to do. And I don't know if the story's true, but you hear it so many times.

I really believe in this kind of thing, but it was when John Kennedy was down at NASA on that guy. And that guy's sweeping the halls. And Kennedy said to him, what's your job here? And he said, Mr. President, I'm helping put a man on the moon. But I think that the mistake people make is that they try to coach the groundskeeper or the janitor. on saying you missed the spot. You mean more micromanagement as opposed to high level? Yeah, they're managing the functions.

They're managing the functions. Because what you're saying is like, let's think about what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And then it feels to me like you're empowering the person sweeping the floors, empowering the person who's wowing and shocking and awing your guests. You're saying, look, here is what we're here to do. Shock and awe, I trust and empower you because you, you're a pro at what you do and then and then you trust them to do it. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. And you, honest to God, meaning that higher purpose. If you can shock an awe on when they're coming in, it changes them medically and psychologically when they walk in to have their training because they feel good and they look around. They go, boy, this place, what if the entrance to our Gallup Riverfront campus was junkie? Think about that. But the fix to it begins with managing to why those people want to be there. And they want to have a rich mission, rich mission and purpose. But I think the point is, Ryan, also back to the coaching,

because I know our grounds, guys, but if I go and go, hey, that tree, that tree doesn't look right. They don't say that the old man's in cranking on the grounds. They know that I really care about. And they'll go, yeah, you're right. You think we should do this. I think we should do this.

But I don't even think it feels like coaching to them because we've identified a purpose that's really important to the firm, and they want to be a part of that. On their good days, they're as important as anybody in the company. It feels to me like you lead with trust, and that creates speed, as you've probably seen from the covies, they've written about that, that trust can, if you lead with that, you empower your team, you start with the vision and the mission, that then you trust them to do the work so that when you make a, a, a small comment like that, it's not micromanaging. It's like we're collaboratively working to make things better here. Am I hearing you right? Yeah.

If you do it, if you do it right, it's almost, hey, Ryan, I got a really good idea for you. When you open your show, you ought to do this, this, this. Have you ever thought of that? Do this, this, this. But if you think I'm being critical, then you think, what is Jim not like me? But you see, if you and I have a trusted relationship, you go, hey, thanks, I'm going to try. That's really a good idea. But we're in a whole different context then.

But the great manager, if they get in that wrong context, everything they do doesn't work. And everybody listening here has had a bad boss, unfortunately, and sometimes many, depending on the amount of time they've worked. And that has led to high numbers. And I know some of your research, you guys have done the original research on this, high numbers of an unlawful, high numbers of an unlawful. unhappy workforce. And I, I, I, I sense this too from just text messages from friends and emails saying, like, have you seen anything else out there? You know, my boss is the worst.

They're not good. They don't know anything. They don't help me, you know, on and on and on. And so that seems like to be a regular thing that happens. Why do you think, for the most part, there seems to be a higher number of people who are not happy with their current job? I think you just, I think you just answered it. You know, the old axiom, I don't know if it came from Gallup or where, but you, but you join a company, you know, so you're excited to join Gallup, but then you quit your boss or you, you join Apple, but then you quit your boss.

And then, you know, we, I want to say this quickly. The United States isn't doing this well enough, but we're better than anybody else in the world at it. But if you look at the United States, we have up to about 34% of 125 million full-time employees that say they're engaged at work. They are in really good shape. They're really well-managed, 34% of them. You go to India or China, and the number is like single digits, 6%. I had a group of leaders in India said, we've got to get to the bottom of what is it? The answer is, for some reason, you systematically name the wrong person manager.

So it's not just companies are that way, but whole countries can be that way, too. And I think if you said, how can I fix my company? How can I take my company the next level? How can I grow organically rather than having to acquire my competitor? Or how can I make my country have higher well-being and not have Arab Springs or Brexit or whatever? else, I'd say name the right person manager. I think that would change the world more than almost any other easy change. A lot of the changes I think we need in the world's workplace, they're not impossible. It's not, I mean, global warming looks pretty, looks pretty deadly to me.

I mean, the fix isn't easy. This one's very fixable. A lot of people, and this is how I actually got my first management interview, the people who are the top performing individual contributors. I worked in sales growing up, so it was pretty black and white, right? You look at the stack rankings, and they just take the three or four top people and say, you're all going to interview for the management role, and that's how it worked. But it's, as you know, it's just because you were a top performing individual contributor that doesn't mean you're worthy or you will be a great manager. So what suggestions, what would you say to, let's say, a VP level who, they're, they're an active learner. They want to get better. They don't just want to.

want to take the top performing person and make them the manager because they know that that doesn't necessarily always work. It can work sometimes. I like to think it worked for me, but I guess you'd have to ask other people. But what advice do you give to them? What should they do instead of just saying, well, these are the top three or four people at the job? We're going to have them just now be the coaches, be the managers of the team.

I think, Ryan, I think right there is kind of the crux of the biggest problem in the United States. You fix that. And I think we can. I think America could just explode, you know, like we did 50 years ago economically and just dominate the world economically. I mean, dominate it in a good way, lead it in a good way. But I think the answer is that the road to leadership doesn't have to go through being a great manager. It's got to be that either an individual achiever or a great manager, the individual achiever doesn't have to become a

manager to go higher in the organization or to make more money. There has to be two paths in there. This is kind of personal, but I'm not a very, I'm not a great manager. I'm more of a outside guy. So our company is more, is basically run. The real general manager of our company is, is our C-O. And so she's, she's real good at doing all of that. But, but so I have a path. I'm, I'm chairman and CEO, but I'm chairman and CEO because I'm especially good on the outside. If I would have had to have just been a hardworking manager, I probably wouldn't have gotten here. I don't know my good days. I'm a good days.

I'm pretty good. What do you mean an outsider? What does that mean? So I spend almost my whole week making client calls. Gotcha. So you're almost like a big time sales rep. Exactly. Gotcha.

Okay. So when you say outside, you're out there making it, making deals, selling and building relationships with clients, I assume. Yeah, showing up, trying to get ideas with them. And, yeah. And no, no, that's. But you can imagine, I think, I think it makes, that makes sense. You can imagine, as most people, because I'm remembering this, I knew, like, people get excited about titles, right? Oh, I'm a, I'm a rep and I have a chance to be a manager.

I have a chance to be a director. I have a chance to be a vice president. I mean, it's almost human nature. And I obviously don't think anyone should chase titles. But the reality is people do. And a lot of times money follows and prestige. And that's the path. If you do want to become, I remember when I was 25, I was like, I want to be, I worked

in a multi-billion dollar company. I said, I want to be the CEO of this company. And I wasn't going to be there staying as an individual sales rep. I had to go be a manager and a director and a vice president to be on that path. Now, my mind kind of changed as I. matured and got older. But that was certainly in my mind, and a lot of other individual contributors' minds was that's what I want to do.

And that was really the only way to do it. So are you saying we have to find a way to create other avenues there? Yeah. And it might be easier said than done, but I don't think so. There should have been a direct path for you to CEO as a rainmaker. Interesting. How would you do that? I mean, how would that because, I don't know, I guess I'm curious, how would, how would, what's something you would do?

If you were a billion dollar company brought you in and said, Jim, we, we agree. We want to do this. What are some of the first things you would do? One of the things I do is I would figure out who my superstars are that are individual achievers. And many times they're very difficult to manage. You know, so, I mean, you can't, if you try to have a company, you're just kind of happy, go lucky, hardworking, people. people. Boy, companies stop unless they have stars on, unless they have stars on the court. But I'd figure out who my managers were, and I'd organize my worldwide company from points

of management. And then with the individual achievers, I'd give them good titles. I'd give them a chance to make more than the CEO. But then I'd focus on them as individual achievers. It's easier now than it was when I was a lot younger, too. We have, we have people. people at Gallup that are very, very senior and don't actually have reports. So you can't go, people don't come in, say they want a different office, get a raise or something like that. But they themselves direct very large teams. And if you and I are just somebody in Gallup, you really want to get to know a senior partner at Gallup because they've got the coolest project. You know, you'll be on a plane to Nairobi or to Istanbul or some kind of a thing like that.

And that senior partner is not necessarily your boss, but the senior partner doesn't care because he or she, they do want you to have a great experience, but they're just trying to win. A senior partner like that is more like the quarterback of a professional team. They're not the head coach or they're not coach of the offense or coach of the quarterbacks or coach of the running backs. But they make all the difference in people really want to play for them. So you have them direct teams, not manage them. Oh, okay. So they're leaders, but not managers. Absolutely. That's a good, yeah, absolutely. How do you define the difference? This gets brought up all the time. What do you say? And it's not always easy.

You have guys like Tom Peters who says you shouldn't delineate or differentiate between a manager and a leader and others who say like Jim Carter. Of course you should. There are two completely different things. And I admire both those guys. So what do you think from manager and leader and the differences or the similarities? I agree 100% with the second guy. Tom Peters is wrong, and the second guy is right, but they do overlap a little bit. But having the ability to run a team of 10 people where that whole team takes pride, and Gallup has some of these, I mean, if the assignment at hand is really, really hard, they want it. If it's impossible, they want it even more.

The person managing that team is a really rare manager. One of the things about leadership is you need to be able to see the future real well. You also need to get people really excited about the future. You also have to have kind of an unusual relationship to risk where you'll just bet the whole company on something. But the demands of the leader at one point are very different. than the demands of the manager, and they're both really, really valuable. I do think that managers also can become leaders. That's a good path for leaders.

But if you look at Cleveland Clinic, Toby Cosgrove, I believe, was the best heart surgeon in the world. And they made him CEO. I don't know how they did it there, but he was really successful at his job. but it's very rare that you make the heart surgeon, the head of a famous hospital like that. But he was gangbusters. I know Toby a little bit. My hunch is that on a 1 to 10 as a leader, he's a 10.

He may not be that as a manager. I think that's a really interesting way to think about it and to bring it up. And it's probably why you guys have had success is because you deeply study that and understand the differences and don't just say, well, the only path is to, is to become a manager because there are some leaders I've been around that are phenomenal. They excite people. But then there are some of the detail part of managing where they were terrible. And that hurt them and maybe even cost them their job when they could have been an asset if they

were focusing on. Let's get back to it. Their strengths as you guys do. So, okay, Jim, there's a couple more notes I want to get to before we take off. So chapter 37, you talk about the gender gap. This is interesting to me because as we progress, we're building good companies. I've studied this a lot and why we need to think about this more, particularly with women and minority and leadership positions. Can you share what some of the research you found about the gender gap and why we need to think about this more?

Well, one reason is that we need more. naturally talented managers. And when Gallup looks through 20 million strength finders that we've done and all kinds of assessments, the difference between women and men as manager is negligible. If anything, women might be like 100th of a point better than men, but the easy thing is they're the same. And companies really need better managers. If you just want a business reason, we need to get more women into the workplace because we need their man. Because you max out the men and you got to get the women in because you'll have a lot better workplace. When you look at productivity of teams across one of projects that we did, women, although they have about the same amount of talent,

for some reason in companies in this right now, they run more engaged teams than men do. So that's just kind of the business angle. You should do it because it's the right thing, but you ought to also do it because you'll win, you'll win more. I, Ryan, this is my own testimony, hired all men when I first started building a company. And then people would say, you got to find some women, so I did. And, I mean, I can only say this because I'm old. The women kind of ended up being token. And that I would try and somebody'd say, well, you've got to get a percent, and that didn't work for, I don't know, that didn't work very well. And then we made our president and COO a woman, and we just had women managers everywhere. There's kind of a, there's a story around Gallup.

I walked in into one of our big conference rooms in Omaha, and there's about 12 people around the table. It's all women. Our president's CEO was sitting at the end, and there were just one guy in there. I'm in from out of town. I put my head in and say hi to everybody. And I say, what's going on in here? The president and CEO, she says, these are the people that run Gallup. And I said, what do I do?

And she said, you're now the token. But the point of the story is that until one of those three, until the position of CEO, C-O-O-O- or C-F-O is a woman. my theory is you'll never get it fixed. But if you do make one of them a woman, it gets fixed overnight. And that's been good for business. Just from a strictly dollars and cents perspective, not token or not anything else. It's been good for business. We have literally no tokens in our male to female executive managers is, I think it's 50-50.

It might be 50, it might even be 55, 45, 45 toward 1. women, but it's, yeah, that really worked. Yeah. Okay. Good to know. Chapter 45, this is my last note here. Chapter 45, well, one of them. How to manage and nurture creativity.

So when you talk about, everyone says they want to innovate. Our company wants to be innovative and grow and be dynamic on the cutting edge and kind of futuristic and get ahead of things. and so I'm curious, how can a company, how can a leader within a company manage and nurture creativity? Well, first of all, if I would ask you, what exactly do you want to do with your creativity? Well, they'll say, well, the answer is we want to build our customers out. We want to the current customers. We want to do more business.

We want to get ideas. We've got disruptions coming all the time. We want to be agile and you've got to be innovative and all that. okay that's what that is but this but the but you got to pull out of innovation entrepreneurship or entrepreneurship and those are the people that really go out and ask and get and get commitments from businesses so you got to pull them apart right now you and I are talking about innovation and boy businesses need ideas more than ever before but we need good ideas but the first thing I would say is that

we need ideas from teams that are close to the action where they act where they get breakthroughs. Don't put me in something out on a camp on the side of a hill to get ideas. That's bad innovation. But innovation, especially when there's a customer present, is the right setting. But the next thing is, and now the last thing is, is that there's two kinds of teams. One is a miserable team and the other one's an inspired team. And this is something that this famous psychologist, Mihali, Chixin Mihai, the flow guy, I bet you know, who that is. But it's not just because that you're miserable, you can't get ideas or because, let's say that I'm inspired and I'm getting a whole bunch of them. They're saying, look at Jim's

getting them all. Ryan isn't. Because Ryan has a horrible boss. It always tells him he's no good. And when that happens, you get a cognitive contraction, which actually means you lose IQ points. but but my manager saying Jim we need your help you're always so good at these moments here's the big win you had you remember that um I get cognitive expansion and so you can't get any ideas at all and it's honest of God because of your boss and I'm getting way more ideas and right but but the innovation uh is it's really important that I mean there's innovation and big ideas never occur in the absence of high spirit It's amazing. I think back to a couple of conversations I had with my wife when I had a horrible boss and I'd come home from a trip and I would say, I feel like I'm going backwards. And now thinking of your science, I probably was.

I probably was seriously going backwards. Like I'm getting dumber by being around somebody like that who treated me poorly. And fortunately, I was able to get out of there. But I think that is a telling message for those who have the incredible responsibility of leading others, this difference between cognitive, cognitive, what was it again? Can you read? The miserable ones and the inspired ones. Yeah, go through that again.

A cognitive contraction. Contraction, yeah. And cognitive expansion. Wow, that's amazing. Okay. And the science behind that. Jim, that's really good. It almost caught me off guard to think about that.

that this the power that you have. And I mean power in a good way because you can use it for good to help lift people to levels that maybe they previously didn't think they could go to or. And this is scary. You have the power to really crush somebody and force them to go backwards. And that's that is a huge responsibility. And so we all as leaders who are striving to grow and improving it better and build a place, a culture where people want to work, we need to be very. thoughtful and intentional about that because it could change lives for the better. And certainly it will impact your company. So Jim, this is this is really good stuff. I very much appreciate

you investing your time with me. Is there anything I may have missed or any other piece of advice that I didn't get out of you that you want to share before we take off? Well, Ryan, I think your interview has been has been really, really thorough. The Gallup organization, we've got all of our, the Gallup Trives got quite a mission because, you know, we wonder about the future of America. We don't have enough economic dynamism and energy to really produce the kind of middle class. We got a lot of jobs, but we don't have the good middle class jobs where you can have a living wage. And we think that the answer lies within booming companies, getting real organic growth. But you only get that when you have teams that are growing and when you have individuals are

growing. But if you said, how could America rise up? What can we do? I wouldn't look to Washington. I wouldn't look to who's president or governor or anything else. I think that free enterprise and organizations, even nonprofits, I think we can boom America ourselves. But if you said, how do we rise up and financially economically dominate the world? And I mean that in a very helpful way. But it would be to take the current engagement of the United States, which is about 34 percent, and just take it to 50 or 60 percent. And this country would absolutely explode in a good way. But the way you do that is by getting early identification of managers and then really going to work on developing them and it'll change America and it'll truly change the world.

Man, such good stuff, Jim. I really appreciate the investment of your time here on the Learning Leader Show. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you and Gallup online? Well, if you just go to gallop.com and look around on there, you can find, I mean, more than you need on anything from workplace, world's workplace, to all kinds of well-being. Then, of course, we track current events across 160 countries. So, yeah, there's a heck of a lot of information there. Just Google Gallup. Love it. Well, Jim, thanks again, like I said, for investing your time with me.

and I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Thanks again for having an interest in us. All right, love it. Thanks, Jim. Okay, bye. What a treat it is to have conversations with somebody like Jim Clifton. I feel honored and at times it's surreal to be able to talk with someone like him who's got so much wisdom and he's willing to share and give and do whatever he can to

help other people. And the amount of thought and care he put into each and every answer means a lot to me. I hope you found it useful and entertaining. I know I certainly did. And if so, I love it. If you would spread the word, tell a friend, perhaps one that has never listened to a podcast. Say this episode of The Learning Leader Show, when Jim Clifton, CEO of Gallup is the feature leader, could really help you. I would greatly appreciate it.

And I have said it before, and I'll continue to say it. I am forever grateful to all of you, long time, loyal listeners of the Learning Leaders Show, for giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Talk with you next week. Can't wait. Real quick, I want to let you know that we have opened up tickets for our once-a-year personal excellence workshop. We did this last year and received incredible reviews,

so we wanted to do it again this year, but make it even better. In addition to the topics that I personally teach on, I have reached out to the subject domain experts within my network to be with us in the room and share their expertise, things like how to harness your personal and professional flywheel to build an incredible career.

Secrets from a professional keynote speaking coach. How to become a learning machine. to utilize the mindset of a professional athlete in the business world and so much more. This workshop is ideal for you if you want to interact with intellectually curious and interesting people. If you want to accelerate your personal and professional growth, if you have an open mind and are not afraid to be challenged, and if you are currently leading a team or have a desire to at some point in your future. For more details, go to ryanhawk.me. This event is intentionally kept small so the experience is intimate, engaging, and interactive.

For more details and to get your ticket, go to ryanhawk.me. Perfect. That was perfect. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And that was a lot of fun. I learned a ton from you and glad we were able to connect and talk through everything. Yeah, well, I hope you're, I was thinking about that some of it was kind of like

Don Clifton and personal about my side. I hope that's interesting to your I think it is. I mean, it's one point to hear all of the great wisdom and knowledge and kind of what that's about and how it's helpful, but you're also a person, you know, and I think I like learning if possible about both who Jim is as a guy, what he's about, especially when you talk about family and you have a successful father. I mean, that's interesting to me.

And I think it is to listeners as well where you can get a little bit of both, not just the material. And it's the manager of the book, but also who is the guy behind the book and what's he all about? I think getting that combo is a combination of entertaining and educational. And that's what people seem to be looking for. That's what I look for. One of the things I've noticed with audiences, I was down at, they did some kind of a thing for me down in Austin, Texas. I do some stuff on macroeconomics and all that. So it's a room full of people.

And the president of university said, I want you to talk about macroeconomics. I have a thing on increasing or decreasing rate and we're not starting enough business and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, the first question was, what are your top five strengths? And then the whole conversation that occurred to me. Everybody had shown up to talk about strengths, not about macroeconomics. Because I hear Gallup here in my last name of Clifton. And I had nothing to do with making Strength Finder, by the way, but they still see Clifton and they show up. But I was wondering about with your audience.

If they see Gallup and they see, there might be a whole bunch of people that come to your show because, I mean, we have so many millions of strengths enthusiasts out there. I mean, they are strengths crazy. They'll do anything that says strengths. They're just right there. But I was wondering it might attract people to the show too. Yeah, I certainly, I could see that. And I hope so. That would be great.

That would be fantastic. I want them to hear your story and to hear kind of this mission, too, that I'm on. I would be fantastic. And obviously, once we get this put all together, I'm happy to send out a link. You guys can share wherever you'd like to spread your message and this message as a whole, because I think people need to hear it. Yeah, we'll send it out to it. send it out to the whole Gallup, all our associates and stuff.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, and at some point I'd love to meet you in person. I hope we find ourselves in the same city at some point and we could connect. I could buy lunch or something along those lines. It would be a lot of fun. You must come to Washington. You're out in Oregon?

I'm in Dayton, Ohio. Ohio, yeah, that's right. But when you get to Washington, the Gallup buildings, should be right down at 9th and F. Oh, nice. So it's really easy. We're right down here. but come on by and we'll go have a sandwich or something. We'll love it.

We'll love it. And I'll be sure, like I said, to let you guys know when this thing is put together and we're going to shoot it out live. Okay, here I go. Go get him. See you later. All right. Thanks, Jim. Okay.

Okay. Bye.