The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 350: Tom Rath - Answering Life's Great Question

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk For details, Text LEARNERS to 44222 Full show notes can be found at www.LearningLeader.com Episode #350: Tom Rath - Answering Life's Great Question Tom Rath is an author and researcher who has spent the past two decades studying how work can improve human health and well-being. His 10 books have sold more than 10 million copies and made hundreds of appearances on global bestseller lists. Tom's first book, How Full Is Your Bucket?, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller and led to a series of books that are used in classrooms around the world. His book StrengthsFinder 2.0 is Amazon's top selling non-fiction book of all time. Tom's other bestsellers include Strengths Based Leadership, Eat Move Sleep, and Are You Fully Charged? Notes: Commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence: "They are the single best people at asking good questions." "They are amazing listeners. They make you feel like you are the only person in the room." Ask insightful questions that help others identify something they had not previously thought of How does one develop that skill? Spend time alone learning... Have a genuine intellectual curiosity... Write caring, handwritten notes Make sure your teammates know you care about them and show your gratitude I shared the story of Doug Meyer calling me simply to say "thank you" and how much it meant to me.  Be a thoughtful leader who leads with gratitude. Use specifics when describing why you appreciate someone Why did StrengtsFinder catch on? "We should not fall back to a resume.  We don't have a good language to describe what we do and our talents."  Strengths Finder does that for people As leaders, we should always be on the lookout for the unique talent in others Tom's Top 5 Strengths: Futuristic Analytical Relater Significane Activator My Top 5 Strengths: Learner - People who are especially talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them. Input - People who are especially talented in the Input theme have a craving to know more. Often they like to collect and archive all kinds of information. Intellection - People who are especially talented in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions. Individualization - People who are especially talented in the Individualization theme are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person. They have a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively. Achiever - People who are especially talented in the Achiever theme have a great deal of stamina and work hard. They take great satisfaction from being busy and productive. Individualize -- Send articles to specific people each day -- Write: "Hey, I was reading this and thought you might find it helpful." What you can contribute is more important that your passions. "There's an enormous mismatch in what the world needs and what's out there." Three big influences on Tom: Dr. Martin Luther King - "Life's most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others?" Ben Horowitz's commencement speech His grandfather, Don Clifton -- "Our greatest contribution can be to teach others." There is a higher correlation in helpfulness when you can literally see the people you're helping (Tom shares the research to back this up).  This gives you motivation to see your impact.  We need a productive purpose. When feeling unfulfilled or unhappy at work? Instead of looking to leave the company, look for new ways to get to your intended outcome.  How could you re-write your job? Can you make the job you have today meaningful? The Peter Principle - The principle that members of a hierarchy are promoted until they reach the level at which they are no longer competent. Qualities Tom looks for in a leader: Desire to develop other people Vision Life's great question is: "What are you doing for others?" We need to align basic expectations: "How do each of us want to contribute?" Create - Have a challenger as part of your team.  Someone to push back and ask questions Relate - An energizer.  How do you get and stay charged up? What reminds you of the vision? Of the mission? How to have fun? Operate - Scaling... Reaching more people. Advice: Map what the world around you needs. Who are you? What are your talents? Interests? Motivators? --> Draw the connections.  Look where they intersect.

I think even with all the tools we have at our disposal today, one of the most valuable things a manager or leader can do is to always be on the lookout for unique talents that no one's spotted yet. So when I have people ask me, they've been to Strength, I say, what's the most important strength of the best one? My easy answer to that is the most valuable strength is finding a hidden talent in someone else that they haven't noticed yet. Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show presented by Brixie and Meyer. I am Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 44222 in order to join tens of thousands of learning leaders from all over the world. Received mindful Monday updates.

What I'm reading, writing, watching, thinking about. Also give you details about my book, Welcome to Management. Text learners to 4422. Now on tonight's featured leader to the great Tom Rath, an author and researcher who has spent the past two decades studying how work can improve human health and

well-being. His 10 books have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. His book Strengths Finder 2.0 is Amazon's top-selling non-fiction book of all time. His latest book is titled Life's Great Question.

Discover how you contribute to the world. A few of the topics that we discussed. We both shared our strengths finder assessment results and how they impact our leadership styles and then how it could impact yours. Then why we as leaders should think more about our contributions than our passions. And followed up by the one question we all should ask ourselves in leadership positions. This one was jam-packed. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Tom Rath. Let's go Tom Rath.

I've been looking forward to having you on the show for about five years, man. It's great to have you. Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show. Thanks so much. It's an honor to be with you. I am a big fan of Strengths Finder, so we're going to get to some of that work. But first, before we get going, I'm curious, Tom, from your perspective, you've lived a life of excellence and surrounded yourself with others who have as well.

From your perspective, what have you found to be the commonalities among leaders who sustain excellence. You know, it's interesting. I was just talking with a good friend of mine over the holidays about that. And one of the things that's jumped out at me in the last few years in particular is when I talked to the most successful and highest level leaders, and I just had a call in the past week here with a guy who was in the cabinet level at the White House for several years and one of the most accomplished military leaders of the last quarter century at least. And I spoke to him on a Saturday morning about some stuff he was working on bookwise. And all he wanted to do was ask me about what was going on in my life and my health and my

kids. And, you know, it's the same thing I see with the CEOs who I admire the most over the last 25 years is that they're the single best people that I spend time with in a given year at asking really good kids. questions of me and listening and helping me to think about my own growth. And boy, I mean, they're 10 times busier than I am and 10 times there in 10 times bigger demand. But they make you feel like you're the only person in the room. And boy, is that a gift. I mean, I've learned so much whenever I see a great leader do that because I think that's what leadership really gets down to.

It's asking good insightful questions and closing your own mouth and keeping your devices stowed away and really listening to what someone's saying, and then maybe to help them identify something they hadn't seen, give them a little bit insight, challenge them to do something new. And, I mean, the difference between leaders who do that and leaders I see who are kind of flailing and just want to talk at me nonstop. It's night and day. How can one develop that skill?

You know, I think some of it comes with, time and practice and a lot of repetition. And some of it comes, I suppose, from time alone learning and developing really genuine intellectual curiosity. I know it's just real genuine intellectual curiosity of learning about people's stories with some of these leaders who I admire so much. And I think there's also some discipline to it. Some of the leaders who I've interviewed, you know, they create habits of taking the time to walk around their workplace and just ask questions and listen and observe for several hours every week. And they take time at the end of every week to write very caring handwritten notes of

recognition and the like. And they create some discipline around it to be that good at it. It's interesting you say that just this morning. So Tom, I left corporate America about two and a half years ago to partner with an incredible firm called Bricksey and Meyer and one of the founding partners, Doug Meyer, has been become a very close friend as we've joined forces and worked together. And just this morning, he's out of town, but he sends me a text and says, hey, call me when you get a moment. It's not urgent, but just give me a call. And I called him and we had small talk for 10 minutes. And I said,

well, what was it that you wanted me to call you about? And he goes, oh, I just wanted to say thank you. And I'm so grateful for how hard you work and what you bring to our firm and how kind of your aggressive pursuits of learning and trying to help other people. So I don't have any other part of my agenda just to say thank you and to see if you need anything. And I've, you know, been working for a while now and I don't recall a phone call like that. And it meant so much to me. And it, you know, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal maybe to somebody outside. But for those leaders listening, sometimes just having the primary part of your agenda being to call somebody that you work with and thank them can be very powerful. And it feels in line with what you're talking about.

Yeah, and I think you brought up something that's important there, which is to do that kind of out of the blue for the sake of investing in relationships is so important. And it's more and more difficult to do as each year goes by. and there are more things clamoring for our attention from different directions and screens and noises and phones and people around us and all these things where to think about how do you proactively reach out and tell someone you appreciate what they're doing, just call and ask them how they're doing and listen, or to recognize something specific that you notice that they've worked on and to reach out just for that purpose. say. I mean, it's increasingly difficult to do, but I'm convinced that the leaders who make and take the time to do that will have exponentially more value and provide more development, growth, and meaning to followers' lives in the next decade. Tom, Strength Finder's 2.0 came out in 2007. I don't think it's come off the Wall Street Journal bestselling list, bestseller list since then. Is that accurate still? I check every week. there every week. Yeah, it's, you know, it's been really fun for me to see the growth of that over the years. And I mean, just, you know, we started off when I was, we're with my grandfather, Don Clifton, who created the Strengths Finder. Well, geez, it's been 20 plus years now. We started off

just working with college students and trying to help them figure out where to spend some of their time. And then we started including it in books and building more of a language and conversation about it. And when Don and I used to walk, watched that in the very early days in the late 90s, you know, we were all excited about 100 people taking Strang's Feiner and then a thousand. To see the way that's taken off, I think it's over 20 million now. That's, that's been one of the more fun and rewarding things for me to watch over the last few decades. Why do you think that was and remains such a popular assessment, book, term in general? Why did this catch on? Why did this catch on?

on. You know, one of the things I've been looking at recently is how we still have just such incredibly ineffective means of helping people to end up in the right jobs and to take on the right assignments in their existing jobs. And a part of it is, I mean, we kind of fall back to a resume, which couldn't be any less personal and more sterile if you crafted it to be really clinical and detached. And as a product of that, that, you know, even when we walk into a job interview, when we join a new team, we just don't have good language for describing what each of us can do and how we can add to that team. And so I think a part of it that I underestimated in the early days with Strengths finders,

I think people were just yearning for language to describe their own talents and a way to help identify that in a more efficient manner. And, you know, when you walked into a job interview, and I mentioned we were working with college students who were coming out of college and trying to figure out what to do, they'd walk into a job interview and everyone would say, oh, I'm hardworking. I'm a high achiever. And that doesn't differentiate any job applicant from another one. So to give those kids the ability to walk in and say, I'm actually more competitive and a different person walks in, they say, I'm empathetic and I know how to develop people. And boy, that's, I think that was

high opening in terms of just being able to have high quality descriptors about what you can do in the work world. How many times have you taken the Strengths Finder assessment? You know, I joked about that in the most recent book I was working on where I mean, literally, I think I'd been through it maybe 15 or 20 times in testing before. And that was, that was all back in the early 2000s. And I still thought I was a horrible writer and was always a numbers guy until Don, who I was working out with, pointed out that he kind of called out a specific piece of writing and said, I think you could do more of this. And so, I mean, not only had I taken strength trying it 15 times, but I'd grown up in a family psychologist who'd had me go through every Myers-Briggs and Roarshock and block stacking test.

And still, it took 25 years and Don noticed something specific to call out a talent that got me into that. So, you know, it's a good, it's a good less. to your question about what the best leaders do because I think even with all the tools we have at our disposal today, one of the most valuable things a manager or leader can do is to always be on the lookout for unique talents that no one spotted yet. So when I have people ask me, they've been to strength, I say, what's the most important strength of the best one? My easy answer to that is the most valuable strength is finding a hidden talent in someone else that they haven't noticed yet. When people ask me why coaches have impacted me the most or the contribution they

made to my life, I feel like that's something I seem to, without even thinking, it's just like they've seen something in me more than I even realized and helped get it out of me, whether it was a football coach or a boss, somebody I've worked with that talent. And that's I think the talent of leadership is being curious enough to learn about people, understanding their talents and helping them unleash those on the world to make a positive contribution, I think, is a good definition to how to be an excellent leader. I'm curious, Tom, what are your top five strengths? I'm happy to share mine first if you need to think about this for a second. No, I can start. I'd love to hear yours as well. I've always really led with futuristic. That's

the theme that's identified most to me and that I've spent most of my time thinking about over the years. And then analytical was second. The last time I took Strengths Finder and that's kind of, I'm always into the research and thinking things through and the statistics. And then the surprising one for me, the third is relator where I'm woo. Woo is at the bottom of my list. I wish I had who I don't, but I'm, I do pretty well and enjoy my handful of close relationships. And then the last two are significance. I'm always trying to think about how the work I am thinking about can reach more people. That's at the top of my mind every day.

And then Activator is the fifth one, which is just about how do you get things started and get stuff done. I have a lot more fun getting things started than getting things done sometimes. Interesting. What about you? Well, it's probably not a surprise to people listening. My number one strength is learner. And it's bizarre. I took this test.

I've taken it multiple times, but my most recent assessment of this was learner was one, and my podcast happens to be called The Learning Leaders Show. So that's interesting. In particular, the process of learning rather than the outcome excites learners. So that's one. Two is input. People, especially talented input theme, have a craving to know more, which makes sense, given that I'm constantly having these curiosity conversations with highly intelligent leaders like yourself.

Number three for me is intellection, talented. People who are talented in the intellection are characterized by. their intellectual activity, introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions. Again, makes sense given for a living. I have conversations with leaders. Number four is individualization. People who are especially talented in this are intrigued with the unique qualities of each person. They have a gift for figuring out how people who are different can work together productively

makes sense again. And then five is Achiever, Achiever theme of great deal of stamina and work hard, take great satisfaction on being productive. And so those are my five, which as I think about it, make a lot of sense. If I'm living in my strengths, it's learner, input, intellect, individualization, and achiever. That's cool. You know, one of the things I've seen you do really well in talking about this and studying some of your work is it's the, and this is I think there's an important strategy back to our topic of what leaders can do is when you're bringing in all that input and you're the kind of learning pieces and the thinking. themes that you talk about, to be able to individualize, as you mentioned, and one of the things I try

and do because I'm more introverted is send people articles every morning. I send kind of an individualized article, whether it's about health or a specific condition or leadership or well-being or whatever might be. I send a specific article to someone who I think might like it that's tailored. And I think there are little things we can do like that to help people around us keep learning as well that I've seen you do well and fits into that profile. Huh, I like that. Yeah, I think this made me think of you type of an email, and it has to be genuine and real, and I read this and thought of you.

I love that practice. So Tom, I could talk to you about Strengths Finder all day, but the one interesting aspect of you, or there's many, but one of them is the fact that I don't think you rest on your laurels. You have a bestselling book, basically for life. It's been 13 years plus, and it never leaves the list. By the way, I look at the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list every week because it gives me new ideas of books to buy and people to talk to. So that's the reason why I'm constantly looking at it. But Strength Fenders is there, but you've done so much since then, including which I think is incredibly significant and important work.

Your latest work is called Life's Great Question, Discover how you contribute to the world. And one of the quotes I want to start to talk about this work that I want to poll. from it is you write real growth is following your contributions more than your passions simply asking what can I contribute leads to a better path and result than starting with yourself so can you expand and explain a little bit more about what that specific quote means yeah you know that's the more I've studied this topic I think you know we've done a pretty good job as we've been discussing of finding ways to learn more about ourselves and self-discovery and kind of looking inward. And I've heard so much conversation in recent years about, you know,

how do you find your purpose or explore your passion, all those topics, which are good, good things to think about over time and how you develop that over decades, let's say. But the challenge I see is that right now there's just an enormous mismatch between what the world needs and what jobs are out there and how each of us as individuals end up in those jobs and the things that we're doing each day. There's just a big kind of missing arbitrage there between those two elements. And so what I decided to do as a part of this most recent book I was working on is to go back and look at what are all the things people actually do and they get paid to do in our society today. And I went through all these Bureau Labor Statistics job codes and tried to

map it all out and sort it into bigger buckets and categories and figure out what is it that the communities around us need and the world needs today. And as I started to do that, what I realized is that if you're going to start in either one place, you might even be better off starting with what you can contribute and what the world needs and then mapping back to how can you match who you are and your talents and your interests and what motivates you to meet some of those outcomes and those dependent variables that people value and people need in our society today. So that's why, you know, and I've been influenced by, there are three big influences there in my thinking about contribution.

The first one that's really anchored my thought is, you know, every morning I go back to that Dr. King quote of the exact quote, I believe, is life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others? And to me, that's just an, it's sound, you know, I know it sounds like a kind of a big picture quote, but to me, it anchors my daily work. And I'm always thinking, if I orient what I'm going to do today around how it will serve others in the future, I'll have more motivation, I'll get more done, and I'll be focused on other people instead of on myself. And it's less stressful, it's more enjoyable, and I end up doing more meaningful work.

And the second quote, which I think you just spoke to a little bit, was there's an amazing commencement speech by a guy named Ben Horowitz, who was one of the founders of Andresen Horowitz, the venture capital firm. And he's written a few books recently as well. But he gave a commencement speech at Columbia, if you search for it on YouTube. And it was all about how we need to kind of follow and search for contribution more than just looking at passion, a really good talk. And then the third element, which I just recently wrote about in a short book I published with Amazon recently, is all that I learned from my grandfather, Don Clifton, where, you know, originally when we were working on some of this stuff, he always had a big picture hanging in his office and in his home that was

all about our greatest contribution that was kind of specific to teachers, but talked about how the biggest contribution is there's a teacher in every classroom that learns and grows and feels like a real human being. And so I've had all these anchors around the topic of contributing to others. And I feel like that's been missing from a lot of the conversation in the workplace today. Yet there's a lot of good evidence emerging that the more we orient our efforts outwards, the more we can get done. What about for the person listening who is currently a high performing individual contributor who has the desire to get promoted within their big company to lead their own team? What way, because I think some of those listeners can say,

Tom, it's a little bit easier for you to say now that you've had 10 bestselling books. They stay on the bestsellers list. The money, I would imagine, flows from there. So it might be easier to have that mentality. I'm not saying they're right. I'm saying this could be the devil's advocate, which I think is part of my role in what I'm doing here. What do you say to that person who may be saying, I don't know about that? Maybe I can worry about that when I'm a little bit older.

but right now I have to aggressively take the hill. What advice to that person? Yeah, you know, most of the evidence I've seen about the importance of seeing your contribution in real time has been at more frontline levels and jobs, not with people who are in kind of creative careers or places like I'm at right now. And so, for example, if there's someone working in food service and preparing meals, if they're segmented off and cornered in the back of a kitchen where they can't see people eating the food they're making, they make poor quality food and they enjoy it less.

If they can see people, they actually prepare better meals that are more nutritious on average. And you see this with radiologists who are reading scans throughout the day where if you append a simple picture of the patient to the radiographic record, it improves. their diagnostic accuracy, and they write longer and more detailed reports for people because they can see the face of the human being their serving. And so I think a part of it is really not about some existential pursuit later in life. It's just about giving you the motivation to see that you're doing something that matters each day. And most of us are. I mean, I'll be blunt. And unless you're manufacturing cigarettes in a plant today, most jobs do have a pretty productive purpose that makes people healthier and improves their well-being.

But yet more serially bad at helping people to connect their daily efforts with reminders of how it serves the world. I mean, if you're coding as an entry-level software developer today, you need to have a manager who brings in a, people and reminds you of why the scripts that you're writing and the programs that you're working on make a difference for people down the road. Or if you're in an environment where you're serving internal customers, for example, how can you see the way you've made someone else's life a little better or a little easier before you go home each day? If you can see that impact at any level, you're more likely to go home and feel good about your work and be a better spouse and be a better parent.

Speaking of that, you go home to a wife and two kids every day. After all, everything that you've learned, I'm curious, how has that impacted your behavior at home with your wife and kids? Oh, I think it's impacted it dramatically where, you know, a lot of times, and I think this is something that's gotten better over generations and over the last few days. decades, there was kind of this mentality that you just go work as hard as you can to provide as much financial means as you can. And people make a lot of sacrifices for that. They don't often think about the impact that coming home stressed out every night has on family members

and friends and your social life and the like. And I think that a notion of working primarily for a paycheck is starting to grow and evolve. There's still a lot of cases where a lot of us have had to work in jobs that we know aren't as good as they could be for our family members or for our situation sometimes. And I think that's important to do when you need the means to provide for shelter and food and minimize stress of worrying about paying bills and the like at some point in your career. But I think people are starting to realize that you get to a point where you need to look at the whole picture and the whole equation and say, is my life better off? Am I healthier? Am I more financially secure? Am I a better spouse and parent? Am I a better member of my community because of the

job that I'm in the organization that I work for? And to be really honest, I've spent a lot of time over the last 10 years trying to get companies to help employees see if their overall well-being's better off because of the job during the day. But I'm not sure that that's going to work. I think each of us as individuals are going to have to take ownership for that and say, do I come home with as much energy as when I got to work in the morning or am I coming home and spreading secondhand stress that's damaging for me and my family? And we've got to start to ask some of those questions so that we have a more sustainable trajectory for our careers. For those listening who may feel unfulfilled or unhappy at work,

the natural instinct I've seen can be just to look for another job, probably somewhere else. But you've made some arguments that we can make changes in our current role. How would one who may be dealing with that right now do that? Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I think in most cases, is kind of the easy thing to do cognitively is to say, oh, I just need a different job. I'm going to change jobs sometime. And by the time I hear friends in my social circles around here talking about that, it's

often too late because they've already written off their current job. And what I've seen and learned from a great team of researchers at the University of Michigan and Yale and from my late friend, Shane Lopez, is that in most cases, good. jobs are kind of crafted and made over time in your current environment versus being kind of found in the lottery or resumes out there. So I think it's important for people to think in a stepwise, more sequential way about can you make the job you have today into one that is meaningful that you do find enjoyment and satisfaction from that's question number one because usually people have a job that where you're held accountable for certain outcomes, but the way that you get, you.

get to those outcomes should be able to vary greatly from one person and next. You should be able to do the same job as five other people in your own way and do it successfully, in my opinion. So can you do that in your current job? If not, can you do that within your current organization if you believe in and care about that organization without having to look for a whole new company and a whole new job? And then sure, there are times after you've exhausted some of those options and tried to reconfigure and reframe your current role that you need to look around because I don't, I mean, I think one of the things I've talked about in this most recent book is that there are a lot of, there are people in jobs now where it's clear that those jobs are damaging for their health and well-being over time.

And eventually you do need to get out of those jobs, but I think that's more of a last resort instead of the first place to look. One of the areas, Tom, that I'm fascinated with is when people make that first-leased, in their career, when they go from overachieving individual contributor to now managing and leading their own team, mainly because I remember when I made this jump, and this is one of the primary topics of my book, which is called Welcome to Management. When I made this jump, I was very bad at it. Unfortunately, for too long. So I was that bad boss for a number of people for probably 12 to 18 months before I started, I think, figuring a few things.

out. And there's a, it's some, some Harvard business review evidence that you've cited and talked about in the past that that says the star individual performer doesn't necessarily lead to great management. Yet that often, those, those people are often the ones who are given the opportunity to interview for those roles. How can we, how can we get better about this? How can we give a career track for those star individual contributors so they don't feel like they have to get promoted into management, as well as how can we get better at hiring leaders so that they can be good from the beginning as opposed to taking two years for them to be even average like it was in my case. Yeah, you know, I think I've learned as much from that classic.

I think it was a book published back in the 60s or 70s called The Peter Principle on this topic. I mean, we essentially the thesis there is that we essentially promote people to their maximum level of incompetence. Right. And then, and I saw an interesting study done by a couple of mathematicians showing that, you know, if you're picking who to make manager in some cases, you're better off just flipping a coin instead of promoting people who did well in unrelated roles. So it's something we've got to think carefully about.

And as you mentioned, I think the answer is to build tracks of growth and success and achievement and compensation and reward that allow people to continue to grow in a great teacher. rules, continue to grow into great sales roles, continue to grow into great programming roles or individual achiever roles without feeling like they need to go into management. If that's not something that they have a desire to do and they might not be naturally good at, because if you do that, you're essentially ensuring you're going to burn somebody out and they'll leave the organization. And I think a lot of the research that Gallops published that I've been a part of and followed over the years

would suggest that maybe most of us aren't suited with our natural talents to be managers for the rest of our lives. And so to have that be the default path of achievement for everyone's probably a big mistake. You worked at Gallup for many years in your time there. I would imagine you're making hiring decisions. I'm curious from your hiring perspective, when somebody was interviewing for a leadership position, And what were some of the behaviors, characteristics, and qualities you looked for and someone to promote to a leadership role? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I'm not sure if you're listeners or if you're familiar with this, but the strengths finder itself stems from a lot of hundreds of very specific interviews that were about what are the talents you need to be a really successful leader.

and what are the talents you need to be a successful salesperson, a successful teacher. And those talents are night and day different, role by role by role. And so what I've learned to do some of that work is that leaders do have, I mean, if you're hiring for leadership roles, they do have a very unique set of talents that you can look for very early on. I mean, as we talked about in the opening of this interview, leaders are very good. developers of other people. They're good at challenging people with new ideas and experiences. They've got some of that visioning and the creative and thinking naturally built in. I mean, leaders of larger teams and organizations, you've got to look for do they know how to scale things and do some

of those elements that require you to grow into size. So those are a few of the things I look for. And now, as I've had more time to study some of the highest level leaders, their roles, I've seen even more of the talent of listening and great questions pop out, as I mentioned. Yeah. How does one, and I know I'm drilling down because I think it's important. My goal, Tom, on the show is for leaders who are listening to be able to implement something they've learned immediately.

And so that's why I will zoom out to the 30,000 foot view and we'll zoom all the way into getting practical to make a difference for, uh, immediately after they get done listening this episode. So we identify some of the qualities people look that you think great leaders have, right, that ability to develop and unleash the talents of people they're leading, being great listeners. How do you identify those skills through the interview process? Well, some of this depends on whether you're looking for someone to kind of be an organizational leader

in a traditional business type role. You know, the word leader has so many different connotations and meanings that you actually have to get into the semantics of it in order to answer and unpack that question a little bit. Because when, and it's also, it's important to note, and I think I shared this caveat in the opening of strength-based leadership that leadership is a lot like the ability to drive. and when you survey 1,000 Americans, 970 think they're good at it. So literally, 97% of people think they're good leaders, and I think it's similar for driving. And we all know that 97% of people out there are not good drivers, and I suspect that's true for leaders as well. So leadership has a lot of different meanings, and I do think that there are certain types of artistic leadership and innovative leadership where they might, people in those roles that build incredible inventions or works of art and so forth

may they may qualify as amazing leaders that had a big influence on the world, but they wouldn't fit into that organizational leader basket that we're talking about. So I think it's important to start by saying, what does leadership mean to you and what are you trying to do? If it's about really developing other people and growing organizations, then some of the things that we talked about are applicable. And it's about really being a good listener and observing the growth of your people and challenging people to try new experiences and making sure that people are on the same page and some of the things that I've written about in books on leadership topics in the past. But it's an interesting conversation though because I think you really have to qualify what someone's trying to do as a quote leader.

Yeah. So the title of your book, Life's Great Question, the natural question before anyone even cracks it open or buys it is, well, what's Life's Great Question, Tom? And Life's Great Question, kind of a straw man, is what are you doing for others? And how can you best contribute to the focus of the book and website is how can you best contribute to the world and get real specific around that? because right now what I've seen when I join teams or when any of us form new teams to do something is we often form those teams and bring people together because they're like us or they have similar interests and so forth, which is a problem in itself. And then we all start to head off. I mean, if you or I who have a lot of talent in those kind of thinking areas, let's say, if we, if we shoot off and we bring a team together, we're all going to head off in that direction of a bunch of big ideas. and we might forget to bring people in who are good at building and maintaining relationships.

We might forget to bring people in who do a lot of the operational pieces and think about how we scale over time and so forth. So what I've learned from some of this most recent work is that we need to ensure that when we form teams or when we bring together new project teams, we all sit around and align basic expectations and say, how does each of us want to contribute? And boy, I've still been guilty of this in even the last five years of just getting a team together. And it's a few years down the road when we realize that we've been kind of misaligned where we have that conversation and say how each of us wants to make a meaningful contribution to the team and how we think we can based on what we've learned about our strengths and everything else. So there are 12 contributions that you write about. And there's three sections of it and there's four in each one. So those three are create, relate, and operate.

I like, as we finish up here, Tom, I'd like to maybe share what those are and then have you unpack one of them. We're not doing a full book report here. So you unpack one of them and then people can dive more deeper into life's great question to get into it. Would you be cool with that? Great. Okay. So let's start with create. Then we'll get to relate and operate.

Create. So the four are initiating, which the question, and there's questions with each topic. initiating is how do we get started. Challenging is, are we doing the right things, teaching what do people need to know, envisioning, what should we do next? All right, which one of those do you want to tackle? You know, I'm going to take challenging because I've observed over the last years that ideas are kind of a dime a dozen and it's easy for a lot of us to come up with a lot of ideas, but boy, what I've learned to value in others, I'm not necessarily the one's the best out of, but I've learned a value having somebody there to push back and challenge and say,

are we doing the right thing? Should we even embark on this in the first place? Do we have the right people on the team to get started here? And so that's a little bit about how I think it's important that as you get into moving forward, someone has spoken up and said, I'm going to be the one to help challenge us on what we're doing. And you may not like me for it at times, but there is value in it. I think Adam Grant would call them a disagreeable giver. We need that person who has the guts to disagree, and that is their best way to give. Okay, second one is relate. Here are the four.

Connecting. How do we connect people to our mission? Energizing. How do we get and stay charged? Perceiving, what does each person need? Influencing, how can we grow our client base? Yeah, and I'm going to pick on energizing here because I've learned that people, who do that really well. It's another one I have the most admiration for. Probably don't do myself,

but it's so easy to get on a conference call in particular or a regular meeting. And we all show up in the room and no one's thinking about how do we make sure that we all stay energized and amped up. And what are little reminders of our mission? What are little reminders of our relationship? How do we have some fun in the process of all this to make sure that we can get more done and go home with a lot of of that energy as well. And so I think that's something where you need people to say, here's how I want to contribute by doing that. And just to acknowledge that energizing the team is a contribution is important, I think. It reminds you so much of Jesse Cole, the owner of the Savannah Banana's minor league baseball team, where's a yellow tuxedo. He was a

guest on my show. And that, he said, when I show up, that's one of my number one responsibilities is to bring the energy and they're going to look to me. And I know, Scott Belski told me on the show that you are the emotional thermostat of your team as the leader. And think of it that way. It is a good reminder for what our role is as a leader. Okay. Third, operate. Here are the four.

Organizing. How do we make things run smoothly? Achieving, how can we get more done? Adapting. How can we adapt quickly to changes or scaling? How can we reach more people? Yeah, and I'll take scaling on that because that's one of the things that I've learned from spending time with startups and small project teams is that, you know, we get in this mode of how do we get things done and check the boxes off in our projects and go away our systems and big companies and small companies alike are set up to do that and encourage that and encourage us to stick to the process and the format. but there's usually not someone who is formally taking responsibility and saying, I'm going to make sure that we keep an eye on how we're scaling, how we're looking at new areas and new markets, how do we reach new people?

And just the conversation about reaching more people, I think too many outcomes and arrows and efforts in organizations are pointed at strictly financial metrics. And we need more and more that are pointed at how do we have a substantive reach? to more people. Love it. One more question, Tom. You're sitting in front of a 23-year-old recent college graduate who says, I want to make a positive contribution on the world. What are some general pieces of life advice you could give to me to help?

First thing I would say is start by mapping out what the world around you need. It may be what your friends and peer network needs, what your local community needs, what the people in your organization around you need. And then see if you can literally just take that as point B. And then on the other side of a piece of paper, right out, here's point A, which is who you are, and say, based on who you are from a talent standpoint, like we've talked about, based on what your interests are, you can bring your passions and interests and whatever, what motivates you and makes you tick. How do you start to draw some direct connections with how you might be able to leverage who you uniquely are to meet some of those needs in the circles,

around you. And I think where those two things intersect, who you are and what the world needs, at the intersection is where real meaning and substantive influence are created in a career. Contribution happens. Definitely. Tom, thank you so much for joining me here on The Learning Leader Show. This one was packed with good stuff. Where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Yeah, I'd send them to tomrath.org, and specific to this new project, to Contribify.com. Gotcha. Well, thanks again for being here,

and I would absolutely love to continue our dialogue as we both progress, man. Sounds great. It was a wonderful conversation. Thanks, Tom. Thank you. What a thoughtful and intelligent guy and very kind. I really enjoyed that conversation with Tom.

A few of the notes I'm reviewing. Life's great question is, what are you doing for others, simplistic yet really powerful to think about and to reflect on. Then one of the key qualities and excellent leaders, right, the ones who are sustaining excellence, Tom mentioned this at the very beginning, but it became a theme throughout our conversation that they ask really thoughtful questions, follow their intellectual curiosity.

Most important, they are great listeners. They make the other person feel like they're the only one in the room. Their phone is not on the table. It's not buzzing constantly. it's completely out of sight. They are locked in with that person. I absolutely love that part. And then if you're feeling unfulfilled at work or unhappy,

first try to remake your role before hitting the ejection button. I think that is very useful advice. And perhaps it could set your career on a better path. As I mentioned, I absolutely love this conversation with Tom. I hope you did as well. If so, I love it. if you would tell a friend or two, perhaps one who has never listened to the Learning Leaders Show and why this could be so helpful.

Because that you do that, it continues to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so much. Talk with you next week. Can't wait.